Gothic Rock

‘The bats have left the bell tower / The victims have been bled’. Brrrr. In 1979, using the backdrop of a horror film for their first single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” the British band Bauhaus pretty much marked the official beginning of gothic rock. Black make-up on pale skin, invasive bass lines, minimal but piercing electric guitars, distortion, voices from beyond the grave, and macabre stories. For a few years all of these sinister yet amusing (for those who could read a little deeper into the trend) ingredients melded together.

The punk movement of 1976 that had wanted to sweep everything away and start again had reached an impasse. In England, which was sinking into economic crisis, some parts of youth culture dove into darkness, the exaggeration of which gave birth to this tribe with its look and its music. To put it simply, the goths were the punks of punk, who dared to take on the glam-rock eccentricity of David Bowie and T.Rex (whom they secretly loved) whilst pretending to be terrifying hard rock freaks (Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne) and carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

I don't know if it’s something every teenager goes through but my friends had so many existential problems that the goth scene seemed like the perfect place to indulge in melancholy. In keeping with the musical evolutions of the ‘80s, gothic music took several different routes: the dark new-wave of The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees; the shoegazing of the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance; via theatrical rock with Sisters of Mercy, The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim; and then tribal rock from Play Dead and Alien Sex Fiend – but the less said about this last one the better… Synths also found their way into the sound with bands like The Danse Society because yes, goths also like to dance whilst wearing big black coats.

The stark violence of Killing Joke would lay the foundations for the success of ‘90s artists like Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails, whilst the emo-rock wave of the 2000’s would bring mascara and angry hair to new generations of American teenagers in the middle of an existential crisis. For that alone, the goth friends of my youth are sincerely sorry. Luckily, the genre has also been the occasion for a return to original rock sounds such as with the Cramps, a great bunch of Los Angeles B-movie horror freaks, whose singer thought he was Frankenstein and sang that he was a ‘human fly’ and a ‘teenage werewolf’.

The movement also remains one of the first to put women equally in the spotlight, whether as singers, musicians or all-female groups such as Malaria! and X-Mal Deutschland – a liberation which today's artists like Zola Jesus still benefit from. Far from just being escaped extras from The Addams Family, this murder of crows helped to liberate women in rock (at least a little) and unwittingly lent a bit of a sense of humour to the ‘80s. These crows will be remembered fondly.