Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Goth: A History' by Lol Tolhurst (Quercus, 2023)

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought him meaning.

You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble, conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977, when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.