'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.

Abundance and Lack

Forget-me-not is clustered all round the bonsai-ed rowan tree, so much that you can't see its pot. There is a lot of forget-me-not in the garden this year; clouds throughout the beds, in the grass, under the trees. It looks stringy and insubstantial, but brave. Vetch is a wildflower I'm particularly fond of, and that's exploded this season, its lustrous purple flowers held aloft on spiralling tendrils above the grass. 

On Thursday I cleared out the pond, discovering sadly that there were only four remaining fish: one of the adult females had gone. That explains why they have been hiding despite the warm weather, though it still leaves me bewildered as to how a heron or some other predator can get at the fish despite the two layers of mesh, one string and one aluminium, over the surface of the pond. The blighters are, I know, persistent, but they would have to be preternaturally lucky as well to be around when a fish strays into the tiny unprotected portion of the pool. The water was full of clinging algae, but very little other life indeed apart from two frogs and a couple of pondskaters: not a single snail to be seen. I wonder how it has got so barren.

Raise the Red Lanterns

One of my resolutions was to have more paper lanterns to decorate the church for Pentecost, and so I bought another couple of dozen. They will now march along the aisles and across the chancel arch in a near-continuous red line.

Pentecost is still the great feast day that gets left out no matter how we clergy try to get people interested. Once upon a time the following Monday was a Bank Holiday until 1971 when it was stripped of that status and the break was transferred to the last Monday in May, and long before that the succeeding week - the octave, really - was a time when everyone downed tools who could. Church and Chapel Sunday Schools would traditionally hold some kind of festivity in Whitsuntide, even if (as I found when I looked into the history of High Wycombe many years ago) it was just a walk to the river meadows half a mile away and a picnic. But now Pentecost slips into the background even for people who might often find themselves in church.

The loss of the Pentecost observance to the secular 'late May Bank Holiday' at least shows that the State now accepts that people should have statutory time away from paid labour and in that sense the Church has done its work in that respect. And I'm not convinced if we had a Pentecost holiday now it would have any effect on the numbers who turned up to make their communion!

Blessings Done and Missed

In the far distant past now, Peter the former manager of Widelake House care home not far away used to like me (or the Roman Catholic parish priest) to come and bless the house before he went on holiday. He used to claim that it made the place calmer and had a completely unsubstantiated suspicion that the place was built on an Anglo-Saxon burial ground which I think may have arisen from the tall tales told by a local author with a penchant for turning his surroundings into an alternate reality. But I have never been asked to do the same at Southmere, the other care home where people I know from Swanvale Halt mostly tend to go. However the manager of Southmere did ask me to call by and perform this ceremony a couple of weeks ago, and it was my great privilege to oblige. Unlike Peter, Lizzie at Southmere didn't require me to enter every bedroom except where there was a danger the occupant might actually throw something at us in wrath. Instead, from the full-scale rite of house blessing, I used only the prayers at the entrance, for a living room in the main lounge, and the kitchen, plus some general topping-and-tailing. I thought I probably rushed it a little out of a sense of self-consciousness, but they were all very appreciative. 

Members of the congregation do frequently finish their days in Southmere and Widelake, and for yesterday's ritual we were accompanied by Susan and Sheila. Sheila is a relatively recent arrival, as is her husband who came here and was almost at once taken to hospital, before returning in a very shaky state. I'd been in to see Sheila last Monday but Dermot had been asleep, and, as his son told me in the evening, at almost the same time as I was marking Southmere's door lintel with oil and spraying holy water around, Dermot had been slipping out of this earthly realm. It would have been better had I gone to say a prayer for him, but (not for the first time) I am left hoping that they work in retrospect.

The Anchoress, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 20.5.23

Given the excitement of the Spring Fair that I knew was going to occupy so much of Saturday, responding to The Anchoress's email on Friday evening alerting me to the late availability of a handful of tickets for her concert on the South Bank would have been foolish in the extreme, so naturally I did. I cooked a dinner I could take with me, and calculated that if everything worked out I would be able to catch a train that would get me into London well in time (rather than just in time). So it proved, and I was able to take part in an evening of energetic and passionate music, without the slight fragility that sometimes characterises The Anchoress's recorded work. I didn't know about her until relatively recently, thanks as usual to Radio 4, though she's been about for ten years or more. Despite all the seats being sold according to the South Bank website, there were nine seats around me vacant; two rows ahead were a couple I know from Swanvale Halt.

Spring Fair 2023

It looks as though the church's Spring Fair may have taken in excess of £4000 this year, which is at the upper end of what we used to make when it was at the big field on the edge of Hornington, for a lot more outlay and effort. We've been assisted by fine weather and a variety of entertainers drawn from the local community including a couple of choirs, the Hornington Youth Band, and a dance class. I knew several of the young members from the Infants School and their teacher got married in the church (as she reminded me) ten whole years ago. I took the opportunity to book in a baptism with the parents of another dancer for their new daughter. This encapsulates the community feel of the whole event, something like a celebration of what it means to be Swanvale Halt. And our church treasurer safely gave birth (in hospital, not on-site) in the middle of the afternoon, so four thousand quid and a baby is not a bad profit on the day.

Laying Groundwork

The last time Swanvale Halt church did a round of Mission Planning was several years ago. We loyally got everyone involved in it, and took the PCC to a nearby church to talk through it all and narrow our mass of ideas down to a few achievable, measurable examples. I suspected at the time that we'd gone for the ones that were slightly too easy to achieve, and as a result had ended up with not a lot to show for all our efforts. We were beginning another round when the pandemic intervened and put a stop to everything apart from keeping going. Now we are off again! 

I, Grant the churchwarden and Ceri from the congregation (a relatively new member, who volunteered) met with the lady from the Mission Enabling section at the Diocese a few weeks ago, an encounter which genuinely helped (sometimes I think despite itself) to clarify the way forward in my mind: previous meetings had left me somewhat bewildered as to how exactly the process was supposed to work. Now I had a clear steer, to focus on putting in place some of the conditions for moving forward rather than picking on grand schemes, and to keep it small-scale but open-ended, as opposed to the very 'closed' tasks that emerged the last time we went through this exercise: so, for instance, rather than trying to find the money to pay a musical director (an ambitious scheme which may not work), setting up a group to pray for the mission of the church (which may bring some insight as to whether that's what God would have us do). 

The PCC liked the single-page document I came up with. Not surprisingly, as my initials are next to most of the action points. But those action points are, initially, to find laypeople to do the actual work. They don't get off that easily!