S Tosoni & E Zuccala, 'Italian Goth Subculture: Kindred Creatures and other dark enactments in Milan, 1982-1991 (Palgrave, 2020)

The authors’ earlier Creature Simili came out as long ago as 2013; the newer book covers the same ground, but has been considerably reworked – so they say, as I don’t read Italian that fluently I will have to take their word for it! This is a thorough sociological examination of Italian first-wave Goth, at least in the vicinity of Milan, a very precise context. The Creature Simili (Kindred Creatures) of the title were an absolutely specific, and in fact self-named, group, the editors and originators of a fanzine called Amen. They had been taking part in the radical punk-based squatting movement in the city, a response, Tosoni & Zuccala’s interviewees felt, to the eclipse of the sort of political hopes engendered in the 1970s. The punks were desperate, nihilistic, and made their point by rejecting everything from the surrounding society. The Creature Simili collective felt the same, but found the punk template restricting and unimaginative and, while maintaining sympathetic links with the world of the squats, wanted to branch out musically and socially, activist but not so extreme: they were the punks’ ‘Kindred Creatures’. They and the black-clad folk they drew in didn’t refer to themselves as Goths for several years, when the word made its way over from London, and instead became known as ‘darks’, and their subculture, simply ‘Dark’. Tosoni & Zuccala describe the different groupings within Milanese Dark, the loners and the club-goers, the hangers-around in public squares, the mutual scorn between the fancy-dressers who changed in the safety of the toilets at clubs like the Hysterika, and the hardliners who crimped their hair and wore black every day and risked the wrath of families, teachers, and other young people. The interviewees describe how music, clothing, and the wider Gothic tradition (including aspects of it very few people outside Italy would be aware of) fed into their sense of self and helped them navigate a way forward. They describe how violent the streets of Milan could be for darks, and how often they had to run away from skinheads and paninari.

Tosoni & Zuccala’s approach concentrates on what they call the ‘enactments of dark’, as a way of trying to escape from previous analyses of subculture based on thinking about subcultural practices. An ‘enactment’ is a particular social context within which a subculture is experienced, and individual practices can have different significance and weight in different enactments. Once you’ve grasped that you can put aside the sociological theorising; you also need, to an extent, to cope with the translation which seems to have been done by someone who isn’t completely fluent in English. There is one particular phrase which kept catching me out: ‘breaking someone’s balls’ in Italian seems to mean ‘giving someone grief’, but the literal translation reads very oddly in English.

What this book does is show clearly how Goth evolved in a particular social, geographical, and historical context, and how the Gothic tradition enabled groups of young people to explore their sense of self and the world in that context. I imagine parallel studies in other countries would reveal illuminating differences and similarities, so I hope someone is writing them!