Marx Was Right

Lady SteamThreader alerted me to the strange circumstance that my blog post from last year about Slimelight and the death of its founder Mak MaYuan has, as she said, ‘been screen shot to prove something in the feud over Slimelight’. I wasn’t aware there was a ‘feud’, and I can’t see that anything I wrote can possibly be of use to anyone as all my information came from a modicum of Googling, but angry people clutch at straws, perhaps.

There’s little to be gained by delving deep into what seems to have been happening, but in brief Mak MaYuan ran Slimelight (the Goth club), Electrowerkz (the music venue) and the Islington Metal Works (the ground floor of the same property, 7 Torrens Street, a broader events location) as businesses with his wife, even after they separated and he found a new partner with whom, as the newspapers reported at the time of his sudden death, he’d recently had a baby. Whatever may have been said or not, he doesn’t seem to have updated his will or maybe had one at all, so said partner has no rights over anything other than what said wife chooses to concede, except perhaps the baby. As said wife was a bit older than Mak, she would be very unwise indeed not to have a will, and said baby might stand to inherit a profitable business and chunk of real estate in the middle of London. Even though Mak, wife and partner rubbed along relatively amicably while he was still alive, you can see how this had the potential to get very grubby now he’s gone. Given that so much of London Goth life has now retracted itself into Electrowerkz, whatever happens to that site and business also has an impact on the entire community.

Part of the point of my earlier blog post was to argue that Goth is now an accepted part of British cultural life, recognised by the Arts Council grant to keep Slimelight afloat during the pandemic. The current Slimes situation proves that Goth is normal in a different way: as much as the Goth world thinks of itself as alternative, once personal rivalries get overlaid by money and property, it turns out to be subject to the same strains and conflicts as mainstream society. You can read the longstanding frictions afflicting Whitby Goth Weekend in the same way. It takes more than a bit of black leather and lace to deflect the iron laws of capital, it seems.