The Shadows Lengthen

In other news, and continuing our occasional series about the travails of the Goth world, I note that another club night is hoping to find a new home having been ejected from its existing one. I never made it to Shadows of the Crypt, though its organiser Dr Trenchpose kept inviting me, and now it’s been set wandering from the basement of 30 Prescot Street near London Bridge. Had I ever attended, I would have found it was beneath a church, the Roman Catholic Church of the English Martyrs, and using the premises of a private members’ club called Vout-o-Reenees.

The background is a bit obscure, and all Dr Trenchpose will say is that Vout-o-Reenees is being taken to court by an organisation called Flame of Love and has thrown Shadows of the Crypt to the lions in order to appease its landlords, the church. There are all sorts of things going on here. Flame of Love is a Roman Catholic devotional society inspired by the writings of a Hungarian mystic called Elisabeth Kindelmann, who died in 1985. A very ordinary and humble person, Mrs Kindelmann recorded a series of conversations with Jesus and the Virgin Mary in her Spiritual Diaries, a set of revelations she never attempted to publicise, and nobody seems to explain how they came to their current prominence. The Church officially has a very ambiguous attitude to the Kindelmann revelations, as it does to those of Fatima, Medjugorje, or lots of other places and occasions when Our Lady has allegedly expressed her opinion; Flame of Love has a cell based at English Martyrs, in the same way that Anglican parishes might have one of Our Lady of Walsingham, but the relationship between official church and mystical/campaigning cell is not clear, and, who knows, perhaps a bit uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Vout-o-Reenees is a surrealist art club which has been going since 2014, and is run by Sophie Parkin, the great Mollie Parkin’s daughter. It looks rather fun, but at a membership fee of £375 per annum, I won’t be joining, and neither will a lot of artists starving in garrets.

When churches let out their property, they need to do due diligence, and I’ve got little sympathy if they don’t. Years ago the Tiger Lillies played the Union Chapel in London and, unsurprisingly, a huge stink ensued about elements of their act, after the event. Even I find it very hard to listen to ‘Banging in the Nails’, and if you are in any slight way aware of the Tiger Lillies you will know to expect blasphemy, sex and violence in considerable quantities if you go to a concert of theirs. It wouldn’t have been hard to work out that they might not be the most appropriate band to play in a church.

At Swanvale Halt we have quite a thorough hiring policy, which we drew up after a request to let space to a yoga class: aware that at the higher end yoga enters Hindu mysticism, I was a bit wary, until the teacher assured me there was nothing of that sort ‘apart from an Omm at the end’ which I thought was acceptable. I wanted to have something to guide our practice rather than taking arbitrary decisions case-by-case, and was quite pleased with what we came up with. Most of the time, it just needs a conversation, for instance with Justin who runs the regular concerts and booked an act who used a pentagram in their publicity, or with Harry, our office manager’s son, about what he intended to include in his Dungeons & Dragons group in the church hall. Looking at the art events Vout-o-Reenees hosts, there’s a certain amount of challenging material, a bit of nudity and folk wearing SLUT t-shirts, and so on. If English Martyrs decides they don’t want this kind of thing operating out of their basement, they should have been paying more attention, really.

‘I hope this isn’t just about hating the Goths’, said my friend Ms DarkMorte, and so do I, but then I know a bit more about it than most. I also know that Goths like playing around with challenging imagery in a slightly camp and burlesque way, and some of that imagery I don’t like very much either. Ultimately a church is under no obligation to promote anything other than its own ideals: the rest of secular society can happily get on with anything else. Part of me would love to have a Goth night operating out of our crypt, if we had one other than a five-foot high cellar room where put the gardening tools, but the trouble is that, even if you have someone running it you trust and can work with, their own 'external contractors' – DJs and acts – might be less easy to keep tabs on. It’s all quite hazardous, and, looking at Shadows of the Crypt’s Halloween event last year, I would have found it very hard to accommodate ‘Miss Fortune’s Midnight Blood Burlesque’ …