THEY ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT

The 80s was the decade when musically anything went. From the preening poseurs of the New Romantic movement to the sonic extremists of the grindcore scene, it was a kaleidoscope of sounds and styles.

Few genres were as celebrated and reviled at the same time as goth. Crawling from the suburbs and provincial cities of the UK, this was the poker-faced antidote to the yuppie decade. The media mocked it relentlessly, although its most famous bands – The Cure, The Cult, the Sisters Of Mercy, The Mission, Bauhaus, Siouxsie And The Banshees – made the leap to become household names. There also was a generation of bands who never got the recognition they deserved, among them The March Violets, Flesh For Lulu, UK Decay, Alien Sex Fiend and Balaam And The Angel. Today, goth’s tentacles have crept into mainstream culture, influencing everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Tim Burton. Forty years after its birth, it’s time to give this ultimate outsider scene the respect it deserves.

Goth eventually became an amalgam of unlikely influences: the theatrical glam of Bowie and Bolan, the unhinged garage rock of The Stooges, the nihilistic electro-noise of Suicide, even the cavernous echo of dub reggae. But, like so many other subcultures, it all initially sprang from punk.

Roger Nowell (Skeletal Family bassist): Like everybody else, I got into music in 1977 cos we all thought we could be in punk bands. But punk burned itself out pretty quickly.

Nik Fiend (Alien Sex Fiend): After the punk thing, there was a three-or-four-year period where you had Bauhuas, the Birthday Party, The Cramps, Killing Joke. My mind was wide open, just soaking it up like a sponge.

Wayne Hussey (the Sisters Of Mercy guitarist/The Mission frontman): I can’t remember the first time I heard the word ‘goth’. It might have been a word that had been bandied around about Joy Division or the Banshees or The Cure.

Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Cure had formed in 1976, in the throes of punk. But by 1979, both bands had moved beyond their scrappy beginnings to unknowingly help usher in this new movement with their respective second albums: The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds and the Banshees’ Join Hands.

Siouxsie Sioux (Siouxsie And The Banshees singer): My first love affair with a record was with John Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me [1961]. It had these amazing, ghostly backing vocals, a great melody, and it was about a dead girlfriend, basically.

Steven Severin (Siouxsie And The Banshees bassist): We’d described Join Hands as ‘gothic’ at the time of its release, but journalists hadn’t picked up on it. Certainly, at that time we were reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe and writers like that. A song like Premature Burial from that album is certainly gothic in its proper sense.

“With Seventeen Seconds, we honestly felt that we were creating something that no one else had done.”
Robert Smith, The Cure

With , we honestly felt that we were creating something that no one else hadt, I wanted to do something that was really atmospheric.