My hot goth summers

1. Summer 2023

A friend had a spare ticket to see the Sisters of Mercy at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. His date had flaked. Did I want to go? I was never a goth—the Sisters are core-curriculum goth—but many of the subculture’s touchstones were meaningful to me. Weimar cabaret and ’60s psychedelia. Scott Walker, David Bowie, and Roxy Music. J. G. Ballard, Expressionist cinema, Surrealist literature. Goth picked from a buffet of past styles, plating Pre-Raphaelite with punk, the art deco with the art brut. Like goths, I enjoyed the romance of medieval architecture and dusty museums, owned a few books about the supernatural. I thought black suede boots with a leather jacket looked good. Though I never wore makeup or crimped my hair, I remember teenage friends discussing which mixtures of egg white and mousse worked best for spiking their hair like Robert Smith of the Cure. I was a lifelong fan of that band. The Sisters left me indifferent.

Their songs sounded the same to me. Parade-ground drum machine, mid-tempo chug-chug guitars, stentorian baritone vocals. It reminded me of the music that Hollywood filmmakers used to put in cop movies when the hero goes to an “underground” nightclub in search of clues and finds behind an unmarked door a silly confusion of mohawked punks and mustachioed leather men watching women dancing in cages. But this was a sticky August and the Kings Theatre—built in 1929, originally a movie palace, with over-the-top interiors inspired by the palace of Versailles—was only a short walk from my apartment. The gig promised air-conditioned spectacle. Sure, I said, why not, it’d be a laugh.

At every cinema in New York that summer, audiences for Barbie were turning up in pink. Outside the Kings, the sidewalks filled with black. Unbelievably—comically—a sudden, violent thunderstorm hit, and in the strobe of lightning I saw delegations arriving from every goth tribe. Die-hard Sisters fans in mirrored aviator shades and leather gloves imitating the band’s front man, Andrew Eldritch. Vampire goths wearing stilettos and floor-duster trench coats, hair teased high, chalky makeup. Cowboy goths in black Stetsons and Cuban heels. Dreamy, consumptive-Victorian-poet goths wrapped in crimson tulle and purple paisley, jangling silver talismans and bracelets. Steampunk goths in flying goggles and top hats. Sex-positive fetish goths in not-very-much. Industrial goths with shaved heads and black camo pants cut from high-tech fabrics. Biker goths grimy with engine grease. Anarcho goths in combat boots taking a night off from the class war. Creepy lone male goths in neat black shirts who possibly moderated incel Reddits. Most of the crowd were decades into maintaining their corner of the subculture. Younger ones were mixing the signals, establishing new branches of the family. In the 1980s you would see the phrase “Punk’s Not Dead” stenciled on the back of studded leather jackets. “Goth’s Undead” would have been a good rejoinder because it never went away, it kept on mutating. This parade reminded me how much commitment goth demanded.

The Sisters delivered. Mid-tempo chug-chug. Bossy baritone. Parade-ground drum machine. (They named it Doktor Avalanche and aside from Eldritch, it was the only original member of the band remaining.) Two young gym-bunny guitarists pouted and posed, one foot on the stage monitor, reveling in rock priapism. Eldritch prowled the stage in his aviators, Instagram-aware of how he was silhouetted by towering columns of spotlights. He marched around like a small-town demagogue, pointing at the sky, pointing at the crowd, puffing his chest, an ambitious scoutmaster trying to muster his Cubs for a military coup.

Eldritch’s basso had been quietened by age and it sank low in the muddy sound-mix. The occasional word pushed forward: “prayer,” “flood,” “blood,” “night.” A lot of “night.” I looked at the crowd singing along, swept up by the show’s theatrical seriousness. How many wanted to believe in the Sisters’ lyrical universe? To imagine themselves as agents of darkness—leather raincoats billowing in the wind like characters in a Neil Gaiman comic—inhabiting a world of fallen empires, heat and shadows, women named Lucretia and Marian, biblical destruction imminent. Behind the parody strongman act, Eldritch had been a vocal anticonservative; in interviews he used to talk about anarcho-syndicalism. But Goth always had a problem with fringe fascists and literalists who couldn’t separate fact from satire. I wondered about the politics of a few in the audience. Wondered if some took the panto machismo at face value, if some even connected this to politics.

Then I clocked those standing nearby who had gotten the giggles. They knew that one definition of goth was comedy.

2. Summer 1986

I was ten. My brother had a cassette tape by the Cramps called Off the Bone (1983). The first track on the album was “Human Fly” and it was the funniest song I’d ever heard. “Human Fly” began with a descending chromatic guitar note sauced in reverb and tremolo, which then crashed into a loud, mean, primitive strut, a fuzzed-up stomp round-and-round the basic blues. The singer, Lux Interior, sounded like a hyperventilating Elvis. He moaned in agony about being a mutant insect, with “96 tears and 96 eyes” and “a garbage brain that’s driving me insane.” “Bzzzzzzz—rock tonight!” went the chorus, “and I say bzzzzzzz—rocket ride!” The song had me in stitches. Further into the tape was “Surfin’ Bird,” a psycho fit of surf-themed onomatopoeia, and the ballad “Lonesome Town,” in which Lux pretended to break down in tears in the studio.

When I later turned into a music-nerd pumpkin, I learned that half the tracks on Off the Bone were covers of lost rockabilly numbers from the 1950s. “Surfin’ Bird” was the Trashmen, “Lonesome Town” was Ricky Nelson. The “96 tears” were an allusion to an old 1960s garage song by ? & The Mysterians. (They’d beaten Prince to having a symbol for a name by thirty years.) Founding Cramps members Lux and Poison Ivy Rorschach—inspired noms de punk—had met in early-’70s California. They fell in love through a shared interest in early rock ’n’ roll, monster-movie kitsch, horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. They loved groaning puns: Gravest Hits (1979) was the title of one of their EPs. Notoriously, in 1978 they played a gig for patients at the Napa State mental hospital. “Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be all right to me,” Lux told their audience. According to Cathi Unsworth’s goth history Season of the Witch (2023), the band developed a rabid following soon after their first UK shows, in 1979. Among their fans was Siouxsie Sioux. “The Cramps should be bigger than Blondie,” she declared.

Their emergence roughly tracked that of the Gun Club, from Los Angeles, and the Birthday Party, from Melbourne. The image constructed by these bands suggested that they had risen from an Australian-American Styx, channeling Manichean roots music about murder, religion, and sex. It was Grand Guignol, confrontational, often dumbly macho. (The Cramps were inoculated to some degree by camp.) The sound was dissonant scrapyard blues, with heavy tom-toms, twangy guitars in shrouds of reverb, vocals styled after Elvis and Johnny Cash. (A similar sound would be echoed a few short years later in the films of David Lynch. Another film director, Wim Wenders, would become a big fan of the Birthday Party and their spin-offs, the Bad Seeds and Crime & the City Solution, including both in his 1987 movie Wings of Desire.) These groups were hypnotized by ’50s America, transfigured and abraded by the Stooges and the violent experimentalism of post-punk, possessed by a dark humor worthy of the Surrealists.

Those bands—and my early childhood—came on the tailwinds of a ’70s revival of the ’50s. American Graffiti (1973), Happy Days (1974), The Rocky Horror Show (1975), Grease (1978). A retro taste for science-fiction B movies, roadside diner design, chrome tail fins on cars, vintage American clothes. In the UK this provided escapism from the grim mood of the country at the time, sunk low by industrial action, a tanking economy, and the shadow of geopolitical Armageddon. The look was partly disseminated through glam rock and partly fed by the influence of London clothes shops such as Flip, Johnson’s, and Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die. American television shows from the early ’60s were imported cheaply by British networks that broadcast The Twilight Zone, The Invaders, The Addams Family, and The Munsters. Critic Peter York called this “slime time” TV, “untouched by higher values.” “It is the sheer confident tackiness of a time of chrome brightwork and bolt-on accessories,” he wrote. “The best of it is full of clues to a Mythic Age, pre-1963 America.” My brother helped tune me in to the tongue-in-cheek pleasures of American trash but I was still too young to have anything but the most inchoate pop-culture literacy.

My response to the Cramps was visceral. I loved their mischief—the comedy voices and noises, the caveman stomp-stomp. I took a boyish delight in the macabre, in the way the band’s logo dripped with slime and blood. The heavy-line comic-book artwork: ghoulish Lux clutching a femur-handled knife, a skull with its cranium turned into a candle tended by rats. It was sheer fun. I also sensed it was about sex and death, whatever I conceived those to be at age ten. Was that a working definition of goth? A comedy that prefigured your own fate?

 3. Summer 1989

You heard the band names on John Peel’s BBC radio show: Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Fields of the Nephilim, Gene Loves Jezebel, Alien Sex Fiend, the Mission, UK Decay, Miranda Sex Garden. (“Sex” cropped up often in goth band names.) Sometimes the name overpromised occult/erotic revelations but the music would sound laughably cock-rock or vaporous and anemic. Sometimes name and noise would collide and explode in heaven-sent indie sublimity. (Cocteau Twins spring to mind.) On a Saturday afternoon on Cornmarket Street, the main shopping drag of my hometown, Oxford, England, you’d spot the names again on band T-shirts and observe the clothes they paired with, what effects were being generated. The basic palette was black, purple, and silver. There was usually leather in the mix, often something frayed or wafty too. Patchouli scent, men in makeup—at least on those willing to brazen the lagered Saturday football crowds. Category distinction lay in the details. Cowboy boots or army boots. Leather biker jacket or trench coat. Buzz cut or bird’s nest.

It’s unclear where the subcultural application of the word “goth” originated. One early sighting is in a write-up of the Doors in the 1960s. A decade later, producer Martin Hannett used it to describe Joy Division. “Goth” had circulated as a put-down for post-punk bands such as Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, who hated the label. Insult turned to celebration, and club nights such as the Batcave in London’s Soho leaned into the references. Horror movies, Cabaret (1972), Rocky Horror, Aleister Crowley, Romantic poetry, psych rock. The game was doomed-youth dress-up, theatricalized refinement. (The Batcave was run from a townhouse that had originally housed the Gargoyle, during the interwar years the most fashionable nightspot for the Bright Young Things generation. The original interior was designed by Edwin Lutyens and Henri Matisse.)

Goth became lazy shorthand for wearing the color black and being interested in vampires. From a certain perspective it looked profoundly silly, and was easily dismissed as undergraduate romanticism. Yet this was also what made it fascinating. Goth was indeed romantic. Unusually for a pop subculture, it responded to the world with historically minded references. In practice the term was capacious. Oxford had long attracted people interested in alternative lifestyles, given its medieval beauty and transient international population, a place where progressive and conservative attitudes met. By the 1980s it had plentiful book and record stores, two small art house cinemas, and clubs that were established stops on the band gig circuit. Oxford had its share of small-city violence but there were also enough places where a goth could go and not feel out of place. In the city center throughout that decade, you could observe how goth and post-punk connected a range of attitudes. You’d see left-wing political pamphlets handed out by someone in a New Model Army T-shirt and army fatigues, a thrift-store and lived-in look aligning with music for the free-festival circuit. (New Model Army took their name from Oliver Cromwell’s military organization during the English Civil War—another instance of history inflecting goth.) You could spot fans of Adam Ant, interested in dress-up and escapism, rummaging for old-fashioned evening wear in secondhand-clothing stores. Coil were goth. Echo and the Bunnymen were goth. Marc Almond was goth. Hell, if George Michael could say he liked Joy Division on BBC TV, then Wham! were probably goth too. Goth was glamour and grime. It was enamored of the past. It was futuristic and primed for the collapse of society. Behind all these fantasies were ordinary people named Mike or Susan who were studying French at the polytechnic and serving behind the bar at the local pub.

Acid house was the sound of the summer of 1989. The look was baggy jeans and bright yellow smiley tees. I was thirteen and acid house scared and fascinated me. History now suggests it was the music I should tell people I was into at the time, but the record that blew my mind in 1989 was Disintegration by the Cure. It was stately, melancholy, cathedral, cut to the proportions of big emotions. With schoolfriends that year I played in a band called the Jennifers and the first song we learned was a cover of “Catch,” a gentle three-chord cupcake from the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album (1987). I found the Cure companionable, a band whose integrity seemed to derive from the permission they afforded themselves to play across styles. They wrote sad yearners about unrequited love—every teenager needs a stockpile of these—and playful pop. They had swaggering rock-outs, clubby tracks to dance to, and funereal compositions for brooding about sex and death—whatever those things I’d heard in the Cramps now meant to me as I entered adolescence.

The Cure formed in 1976, the year I was born. Led by singer Robert Smith, they initially wrote in bleak, wintry tones, catchy music but styled by the austere astringency of new wave. By the early 1980s, the Cure’s punk sound had grown sepulchral and sparse. Albums Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981) contemplated belief, mental illness, and death. They soundtracked a 1981 short film called Carnage Visors, made by the brother of the band’s bass player; whatever that title meant I don’t know but it suggested things literary and modernist. Their look was Oxfam utilitarian, with short hair, black jeans, scruffy leathers. You didn’t need a degree to appreciate their lyrics. They seemed relatable to the average kid and to Albert Camus–carrying autodidacts. The Cure’s music largely ignored American rock ’n’ roll originalism. It inherited the mood of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy: Low, Heroes (both 1977), Lodger (1979). They embodied a thinking person’s despair, the kind of thing that any serious, intellectual person living in Thatcher’s Britain and tormented by the fear of nuclear conflict should be listening to. Their gloom provided an attachment object for the all-or-nothing drama that every adolescent and twentysomething feels they are at the center of.

This markedly bleak phase of the Cure’s music ended in 1982 with their album Pornography. That record distilled the goth sound. Galloping Burundi-style drums, guitars chromed with chorus effects and melodic bass lines. Anything within earshot of the studio was slathered in reverb. Smith had wanted to make an album so desperate the band would self-destruct. Pornography’s nihilism was exemplified by the track “One Hundred Years,” which opened with a line so melodramatic it was borderline comical: “It doesn’t matter if we all die.”

But the Cure possessed an appealingly perverse streak. Pornography led to a brief hiatus during which Smith joined Siouxsie and the Banshees on guitar and, with the Banshees’ Steven Severin, released an album of fizzy psychedelia as the Glove. Winter turned into summer. The Cure put out Japanese Whispers (1983), a compilation of synth pop songs, and The Top (1984), comprising ambitious, strident rock tracks. The Cure began to have hits, playing to their talent for hooky melodies. They proved able to pivot from charming whimsy to anthems of stadium-size heartbreak. Smith developed a mannered singing style, using wordless vocalizations and yelps. Their delightfully madcap pop videos, directed by Tim Pope, caught the public’s imagination. With his badly applied makeup, baggy sweaters, oversize trainers, and a huge tangle of unkempt hair, Smith became an unlikely cult figure. By the time of their late-1980s albums The Head on the Door, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, and Disintegration, the Cure had become a globally successful touring band. They had grown bigger than goth and become a subculture in their own right. “It doesn’t matter if we all die” was now part of the concert sing-along.

That summer I saw The Cure in Orange, a concert film shot at the beautifully preserved Roman amphitheater in Orange, France, in the August of 1986. The band appears confident. Their look is part goth, part Armani, with Smith wearing a crisp white button-down under an oversize blazer. Partway into the show there is a shot across the audience, taken from a camera positioned at the top of the packed amphitheater. There must be thousands watching the concert. The ancient stone glows. In the distance you can see the French countryside as it begins to blue in the August dusk. The heat of the day is almost palpable.

I’d never been to France, I’d never been to a rock concert. But that single shot intimated what was possible if you decided to make your own scene: that there was a culture of people who were arty, intellectual, and broad-minded, who took the best ideals from hippies and punks and built their lives around alternative values and principles in opposition to those of Tory England. A world in which a concert picnic on a warm summer night in the countryside didn’t mean opera at Glyndebourne, it meant post-punk in Orange.

4. Summer 2004

I hadn’t listened to the Cure in years. My interests had drifted. But now an old friend, a musician, was rekindling my love for them. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979) by Bauhaus would get spun at his parties. I got back into the Banshees. He was listening to Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, the Birthday Party. My friend enjoyed the collision of camp and absurd seriousness that goth offered. His interest was self-aware, using it as a conceptual frame for writing music. We joked that he had invented a new genre called meta-goth.

He started attending Slimelight, a monthly goth club at the Electrowerkz in Islington, North London. One night my friend rounded up a group of us to go. It was approaching midnight when we arrived. The crowd leaned toward fans of cold dark techno. There was a lot of fetish wear, rubber, the look more Matrix than Bela Lugosi goth. Representatives of the old guard were catered for during the first hour of the night, when the DJ played old bangers from the Batcave years: Joy Division, Siouxsie, Soft Cell.

I remember ordering a pint at the crowded bar. Shortly after, I noticed that my perception of time was becoming erratic. It seemed to be getting sliced and randomized by an invisible strobe. I remember the dance floor telescoping into a cylinder of fog, trying not to panic, instinctively knowing that I needed to get home. I made it to my bus on nearby Upper Street but quickly became anxious that I had been on the bus too long and that I had overshot the stop near my flat. I got off and saw that the bus had traveled only a few hundred yards down the road. Did I walk the rest of the way back? Find a cab? My memory is blank. The next thing I can picture is my street expanding to the width of a Paris boulevard. My roommate said he woke up to me standing over his bed, tugging his T-shirt sleeve, whispering “I’ve been spiked,” over and over. The effects dragged long into the next morning.

Goth aesthetics—pallid skin, sunken cheeks, sunglasses at night—suggested that heroin was the subculture’s drug of choice. But most goths I knew had interests in self-obliteration as mundane as anyone else’s. Dope, pints of snakebite (part cider, part Guinness) with added blackcurrant to make it look like blood. Mushrooms occasionally. These goths were kids looking for a decent job, hoping to save up a bit of money, go on a nice holiday, get pissed at the weekend. I never found bats-and-witchcraft goth sinister. True malevolence rarely dresses for the job. (“He always kept himself to himself,” as the shocked next-door neighbor would tell the media after the serial killer’s victims were found in the garden.) But creeps are everywhere. What happened to me at Slimelight was like a scene from a kitsch exploitation movie, perhaps something from the studio of Roger Corman involving a young runaway who loses their sanity at the hands of a psychedelic Svengali. “Slime time” TV. Years later, the fact that something so psychologically distressing should have happened at a goth night seems almost funny. Almost.

5. Summer 2017

Life felt miserable and stuck. I felt stuck writing the book I was supposed to be writing about feeling stuck. On a whim I bought a pair of tickets to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. Songs of murder and retribution might cheer me up.

The Beacon opened in 1929, the same year as the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Like the Kings, it was originally designed as a palatial cinema, and its interior was a wild confection of classical and rococo opulence. It seemed like the right place to see the Bad Seeds. They had risen from the ashes of the Birthday Party in the 1980s. Years on they had aged into post-punk/post-goth icons in tailored suits recounting battle stories of rock ’n’ roll excess for the Sunday papers. The old confrontational attitudes had been softened by personal loss and the old surreal humor of the Birthday Party had given way to big ballads of grief. The band still drew on mythic Americana, on the junkyard blues and the Manichean themes, but their sound was now more orchestral in texture, cinematic, as if custom-made for an old American movie house like the Beacon. Cave’s lyrics occasionally leaned macho for my taste, but that summer I wasn’t in much mood for critical sanctimony. I liked the Bad Seeds well-enough for a humid night out.

The audience didn’t resemble the gathered goth tribes I’d later see at the Sisters show. The Bad Seeds’ appeal was broader. I took a friend who pushed us to the front where we could lean on the stage apron, squished between old Birthday Party diehards and people who looked as if they’d come straight from the office or were rounding off a day of sightseeing. For two hours straight the band played, fan favorites, new songs. Cave crooned at the piano, he menaced the stage, he came to the front, looked us in the eye, and sang inches from our faces. He swam out into the audience, drawing energy from their adulation, then whipping that electricity back around the room. His right-hand man, Warren Ellis, tore at his fiddle with furious intent, while the rest of the Bad Seeds maintained a steady watch at the perimeter of the drama.

I’d been ready to be sniffy about the Bad Seeds and now I was transfixed, overwhelmed by the power, volume, and virtuosity. It winked with that Cramps bzzz-bzzz-bzzz energy. It had the capacious generosity of the old Cornmarket Street–style parade. Cave played the roles demanded by his old songs: outlaw, hellfire preacher, penitent lover. But he also sang somber new tracks colored by the recent tragic death of his teenage son. And then it struck me: I knew why I was enjoying this. This was great showbiz. All-or-nothing, show-must-go-on stagecraft. And that commitment to performance—the let’s-pretend of goth—was a way for the band to express something from the heart. For days after the show I couldn’t stop grinning, dragged from the crypt into another hot goth summer.