'Art of Darkness', by John Robb (Louder Than War, 2023)

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular artist, album or track, even if you feel it yourself. You’re tempted to grandiloquise, or you find yourself falling back on clichés and, if you have even the remotest degree of self-awareness, you then try to avoid those clichés and end up producing text that reads like a thesaurus. What you write stands in constant danger of collapse into meaningless sentences, pretentious metaphors, and, if you don’t check back properly, repetition.

Art of Darkness drops straight into all these traps and rarely clambers out, to the extent that I find a lot of it actually hard to read. The Blogging Goth has already given this long-awaited and much-heralded book a detailed and dreadful review, so I won’t dwell on the typos, maladroit expressions and strange lacunae which scatter almost every page, mainly because a reader can also easily appreciate the colossal work and commitment the author has put into it. Instead, there are deeper problems which relate to Art of Darkness’s aims and methods, and I will talk about them.

The Blogging Goth takes Mr Robb to task for, to all appearances, having no awareness of the extensive academic work on Goth culture and subculture, and he is right: the early chapters of the book unnecessarily rehearse what is now a very familiar story of Gothic art across the centuries. But it is a different book which haunts Art of Darkness, one more directly relevant to the subject: Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, the 2005 history of post-punk which, for all its controversies, still stands as the baseline for anyone wanting to tackle the topic. Reynolds’s chapter on early Goth in Rip It Up tells the same story in twenty pages that John Robb covers in 530; it’s an account with plenty to contest or at least expand on, so the point must be whether Art of Darkness answers any of the questions Reynolds skates past in his breezy and vigorous prose. I would expect any ‘history of Goth’, especially one claiming to be ‘The history of Goth’, to have a go; but a passing reference in an interview with Andrew Eldritch is the only sign that Rip It Up or the questions it begs features at all in Mr Robb’s mental landscape. The biggest of those questions is how is it that we recognise as ‘Goth’ all these completely disparate forms of music?

Chapters 6 to 12 are intended to highlight the ‘dark’ elements of glam, mainstream rock, and the like which helped to produce what we know think of as ‘Goth’, but only occasionally do we get any insight into how this happened. Interviewees in the book repeatedly state that the importance of David Bowie, for instance, to the post-punks who started bands lay less in anything he wrote as such, but in his presentation of possibility, of non-mainstream models of sexuality, of drama and pretence; and that the role of punk was to open up a space in which young musicians felt they could create with minimal resources. We don’t actually need lots of information about Bowie, glam, or punk, to make any of these points. Once we pass beyond the early Goth bands whose members Mr Robb has interviewed so diligently we are promised an account of ‘How dark energy infected Indie’ (chapter 33), but what we get is a list of Goth-ish artists, not an examination of how this came about. Incidentally, you would expect me to look for a mention of PJ Harvey, and here she is, featured in three paragraphs across which Mr Robb manages to get wrong the year when she got going as an independent artist, mangles the title of her breakthrough album, and adapts his most striking statement, unacknowledged, from Andrew Collins’s famous NME review of Dry in 1992. If that’s the case with an artist I know something about, what reliance can I place on the rest?

The substantial worth of Art of Darkness lies in its interviews with musicians, but even more with the accounts of clubs, retailers and Goth experience beyond the membership of bands. The first chapter begins with a nice re-imagining of a night at an alternative club; there’s a breathless list of regional clubs on p.11, any and each of which could do with a write-up of its own; and the descriptions of venues across the country in chapters 19, 25 and 28, of the way they focused musical life, of what it was like to attend them and the risks you took to do so – club manager Doreen Allen eventually provided a bus so her clientele at Planet X in Liverpool could get home without being beaten up – are easily the most valuable elements of the book. They’re also some of the easier to read: the description of Pete Burns holding court at Probe Records in Liverpool during the late ‘70s is a hoot (p.399).

And it’s in the experience of these early Goth clubbers that we might find the beginnings of an answer to the question of how all this stuff comes to be thought of as Goth at all: that certainly can’t come from the interviewees, who, almost to a soul, scorn the word. There’s a ‘history of Goth’ to be told that wrests itself free from bands and is instead organised around the consumers of Goth culture: it’s their active filtering and processing of the fare offered to them that actually settles what is or is not Goth. John Robb continually approaches this idea and then backs away from it, but his book does provide lots of material for anyone who might want to pursue it in the future.

Art of Darkness’s last few pages enter very interesting territory, though it’s mainly through the words of the Goth academics Mr Robb has asked for help, Claire Nally of Northumbria University and freelancer Kate Cherrell, and the passionate paragraph by Kai Asmaa from Morocco describing being a Gothic person in a conservative Muslim culture. There are books waiting to be written around Nally and Cherrell’s suggestions about the interaction between Goth online and in real life: perhaps they will do so. It’s on the very penultimate page that John Robb suggests he might actually understand more than he seems to, with the statement that ‘Goth itself had no manifesto. It was … a retrospective term for something already happening’. That’s the key to its history which, for the most part, he has left unused.