The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN 978-1-5261-7320-1 paperback
Published by Louder Than War Books 2023
Produced by ArtCircus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Editors: Kate Cherrell, Naomi Dryden-Smith, Jennifer Barber. Paul Woods
Additional content: Paul Woods
Back Cover Illustration: Iman Kazai-Hazell from a photograph by John Middleham
Cover Design: Richard Baldwin
Photos Courtesy of: Mick Mercer – mickmercer.com
Transcriptions: Nadine Large
Thanks to Maria Cosgrove
john robb is a multi-faceted creature of the night and day. He runs the Louder Than War website, is the founder and bassist of UK post-punk band Membranes, has written the best selling book, ‘Punk Rock – An Oral History’, has created the eco-education scheme Green Britain Academy and runs the Louder Than Words literary festival.
Website: johnrobbofficial.com
Twitter: johnrobb77
Instagram: johnrobb77
Facebook: johnrobbofficial.
23. ‘i am not avant-garde i am a deserter’ blixa bargeld, einstürzende neubauten & the reinvention of berlin
24. voodoo idols the ballad of lux & ivy
25. first, last and always how post-punk leeds created goth & the sisters of mercy
26. vagabonds bradford new model army & joolz
27. flowers in the forest southern death cult
28. wanted dead or alive how liverpool opened the doors to a new (north) west coast sound
29. do you believe in the westworld? theatre of hate
30. a new form of beauty: virgin prunes, dublin how lypton village changed a nation
31. ‘good poetry can still resonate louder than a thousand guns’ rammstein for grown-ups – laibach
32. at the gates of silent memory fields of the nephilim
33. darklands how the dark energy infected indie
34. ‘we sing to the gods to be free’ american gothic & the dark art of the american dream
35. trans europe express
36. in the flat field, suburbs & satellite towns the second coming of goth
37. apocalypse now! goth’s end days
Introduction
the doors are open…
Mad, bad and dangerous to know, The art of darkness has been with us for centuries because every generation has got to deal with its blues. What was once expressed in art, architecture, Romantic literature and painting was, in the post-punk wars, a cimmerian alternative culture creating its own dark narrative whilst accelerating away from the Big Bang of punk. It was a thrilling time when music soundtracked the style, and a culture coalesced from a bricolage of black.
What was then called ‘goth’, after the fact, was defined by those unholy twin trinities of British pop culture: music, clothes and the dance floor with an added twist of stygian sex, style and subversion.
Of course, none of the bands were ‘goth’, and of course, everyone hated the term because it compressed a nuanced and fascinating journey full of groundbreaking musical and stylistic ideas into a simple cliché that this book will unpack.
Yet, there was a definable culture with a shadowy sartorial style, and a soundtrack to match that was reacting to those dystopian post industrial times. The disparate bands that were painting it black had a melancholy, a sense of theatre, and an artful sensuality to their styles. They somehow married those moods to a post-punk skreegh and to the pulsating dance floor, embracing funk, disco and dub. They were the true answer to punk’s questions, and many have become 21st century legends whilst others are highly influential footnotes. We celebrate them all, here, in their own chapters like they are a playlist from a trad goth club dance floor from the scene’s glorious tenebrous birth.
The book also goes further back, starting with the fall of Rome which was sacked by the original Goths. Then it threads its way through shadowy folk tales, ghost stories, Gothic architecture and the literature of ‘turn the centuries turn’ and finally settles down, deep in the dark heart of the forest of pop culture, with the first band to be called gothic, The Doors.
It then cavorts like Pan and his wild eyed followers to the life-changing adventures of glam and punk’s culture war, and arrives at the crucial post-punk period in a scene that was loosely called ‘alternative’ and was then retrospectively termed ‘goth’ which annoyed everyone.
What was once underground is now mainstream. In the 21st century, culture/ dystopia is everywhere, from the news to Instagram influencers, goth gaming, gothinfluenced novels, films and music. TV series Wednesday is just the latest populist cathode ray incarnation of all things goth, opening up the doors, yet again, to the attractive melancholy lurking all around us.
The book looks at why goth happened, and where, and when, and how, before dancing the dystopian dance with a soundtrack to an idiosyncratic and crucial culture that risked life and limb to dress to thrill and then somehow becoming allpervading in the modern world.
Join me for a deep dive into the dark matter. Let me take you down to the gothic hinterland where we can submerge ourselves in the delicious dark energy and take a walk on the dark side, and dance, dance, dance to the diablo darkness...
Chapter 1
floorshow: a night out
In a forgotten town on a long-lost evening of melancholic weather, pointed shoe heels and combat boots clacked the damp pavement as the cobbles were transformed into catwalks. Defiant hair was piled high above the fifty shades of black gothic garments covered by huge coats hiding the exotic, erotic, clothes beneath. Sheltered from the damp night time cold and the scavenging beer-stained bullies, the goth couple clattered through the post-industrial backdrop. Fortified by the pre-club ritual of bedsit booze and their empowering sartorial armour, they jangled with jewellery and expectation.
Arriving at their subterranean lair, they descended the stairs and submerged into the dark decibels. A couple of beauteous freaks sat behind a table and collected the 50p door tax from them before they entered the smoky, pulsating labyrinth. The club’s name was daubed in cheap red and black paint on a wall that was stained with nicotine and an encroaching damp. There were dole office strip lights on the ceiling, and a pulsating death disco was cranked through the PA enveloping a room full of walking works of art, sex beat cadavers and goth pioneers.
It was the late seventies/early eighties, in what was then called an ‘alternative club’1 and across Britain’s towns and cities, a murder of gothic crows would flock to these interzones for the weekend adventure.
The room stank of snakebite,2 stale cigarettes and mould, and the hatchet-faced bar staff looked as though they would rather be anywhere else. Punters sipped vodka, or Pernod and black (black for goth!) and the stench of poppers hung in the air and set the heart racing.3 There was also some speed, which made you drink twice as much as usual, and dance even more. It also drove spittle-flecked conversations about music, clothes, post-punk politics, the occult or sex.
The atmosphere was dusky, dark, dangerous and fun.
The boys were in the girls’ toilets doing their hair, while the girls were in the boys’ toilets trying to avoid the cubicle queue. The air was thick with the acrid scent of singed hair, crimper-burnt at the root, sticky with the toxic support of Elnett, Aqua Net and Insette hairspray (extra hold, of course) or, simpler still, just soap rubbed in over layers of black hair dye and coaxed sky-high with frantic follicle-splitting backcombing.
1 The term ‘goth’ had yet to be coined, either in cultural salute or mockery.
2 Snakebite was almost de rigueur. It was a mixture of lager and cider, sometimes dashed off with blackcurrant cordial for sweetness or even a shot of Pernod. It was a quixotic mix that tasted sweet and quickly degraded the senses, and because of its potency was often rumoured to be illegal.
3 ‘Poppers’ is a slang term for amyl nitrate. When sniffed, it induces a throbbing rush of dizziness, warm sensations and, if you’re lucky, euphoria. The drug also has a relaxing effect on the smooth muscles of the throat and anus, making it a popular sexual enhancer, particularly in gay clubs.
Once truly ready, they then exploded onto the dance floor in a monochromatic blur of black clothes and pallid flesh. The pre-club bedsit ritual had already prepared the gothic gladiators well with a loud crowd crammed into the small flat, exchanging styles and clothes along to a cranked Dansette of post-punk and alternative music crackling through the cheap speakers. This was the weekly warm up of swigging vodka and teasing hair whilst swapping tops, makeup and catty catwalk comments as they stained fingers and towels with hair dye and hope.
The preparations were wild and noisy. Hair and hair gunge products were burned onto crimpers that were then cooled down and pushed back into black handbags. The sides of skulls were shaved with Bic razors or handheld hair clippers as post-punk Mohicans and Mohawks prepared to dance the tribal dance.
As Shakespeare had once observed, the soul of a person comes in their clothes, and the apparel often proclaims that person whilst the appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony – of course, the proto-goths knew this. Instinctively. The sartorial code of trad goth4 was set to ‘dress to kill/dressed to thrill’ with a dark sensibility spectacular.
Once in the club, the parliament of gothic rooks resonated and flapped in the smoky room in their trench coats, long macs, paisley shirts, leather jackets and the tangled layers of black clothing that hung over pointed winkle-pickers, ubiquitous Dr. Martens, army boots, pixie boots, multi buckled pike boots, all manner of army and navy store footwear, and even some clogs.
In the cheap dry ice and the gender blur, there was a mix of DIY clothes tailored and personalised that combined with accessorises. Detail was everything, with multiple chains, intricate jewels, layered clothing, chunky rings, heavy studded belts and wristbands and sometimes even ornate Indian jewellery.
There were fingerless gloves, army pants, fishnet tights and fishnet tops that were often carefully ripped. There was velvet, satin, leather, abundant lace and a hint of PVC and latex, in a nod to the overlap with punk and BDSM styles.
This was all topped off with a smattering of bleached hair, dyed hair, occasional tattoos, foundation-enhanced white skin with an elaborate makeup of delicious dark lips smeared with purple or black lipstick. There was thick eyeliner and lurid blusher to highlight and sharpen cheekbones, Siouxsie/Cleopatra-kohl eyes and, everywhere, the rattle of crucifixes, beads, and bone necklaces could be heard. There were many variations on many themes – sub-genres within genres, styles within styles. There were punks, goths and even a few of the long Mac/raincoat brigade still looking for their alternative fix, and a furtive clutch of Oxfam second-hand suits crowned with Eraserhead hair. Some wore black skinny jeans, if they could be found in the all too rare alternative clothes shops.
At a time when jewellers often refused to pierce men’s ears, earlobes were selfpunctured with a compass ‘sterilised’ in boiling water and pushed through the lobe onto a piece of waiting cork. This was typical of the element of DIY or die of the
4 21st century term for the goth pioneers.
style, as the goth shops, like the X Clothes chain across the north of England, were yet to open, and trips to London’s exotic markets were rare.
Clothes mattered, with sartorial styles as extreme as the music. This was androgyny and angst on the dole with an added walk on the dark side. A new aesthetic was being forged that married the sensuality of the dance floor to an embrace of sex and death – the twin peaks of goth fascination.
Voluptuous, voluminous and vibrant in black the vampires were vamping it up. Dressed up or dressed down, there was a confusion of styles from road warrior chicken dancers to the frozen Ice Queens with their antique, mystery wardrobes and exotica hair... It could be dressed up or dressed down, unisex, polysex or middlesex, as anything goes in the sex and death show. It was sometimes genderless, sometimes gender-full and sometimes the gender was pumped to the max and always with the borders as blurred as their mascara.
All this black peacocking was now exposed, finally free from the enormous coats now clogging up the cloakroom. Coats that provided protection against the non-stop rain and the cold last bus journey home. They were also armour and a disguise from the accompanying catcalls, beatings and abuse from disbelieving strangers or the fistclenching Tetley Bittermen on those journeys in and out of town.
After punk’s amphetamine psychosis, sex was now back on the agenda. The speeddriven squelch of punk sex was now far more erotic. Taking its lead from the more fetish-clad punks, goth took sex out of the closet and into the suburbs. More overtly, it paraded its fetishism in the clubs and took it back home to the boudoir for a shivering bedsit shag next to the whirring fan heater. Gothic sexuality was fluid by definition and also in practice. The borders were often as blurred as the genders, and visual fetishes were a staple. Rubber wear was normalised, with some costumes handmade and others obtained from backstreet London shops or niche mail-order catalogues.
Goth introduced new alternatives to traditional propriety. Parts of the new scene became a celebration of non-traditional sex and gender blur, both in look and in practice, with S&M and fetish aesthetics becoming another strand.
Goth, the scene that ‘oft dare not speak its name’, was not only defined by the music but also by its style and there were many disparate elements in that volatile mix: The ‘wham bam thank you, ma’am’, of prime time glam, B movies, kitsch and camp art; the trash aesthetic; sixties psychedelia; the Romantic poets of the early 19th century; the decadent iconoclasts of the fin de siecle. There were artful takes on Dada, fine art and period haute couture; a fascination with Neo-Victorianism and funerals, decadent 1920s Berlin and the contemporary urban hell of New York –and, of course, a large dose of punk aesthetic and the dandyish androgyny inspired by Bowie, Bolan and the whole glam rock canon.
Early role models like Siouxsie Sioux – with her teased hair, fishnets and fiercely indomitable spirit – influenced a whole generation of Medusa-like young women and some more daring men. Other early sartorial inspirations would soon include The Cramps’ freakishly exotic guitar player Bryan Gregory, with his animal-bone
necklaces, Dave Vanian’s gravedigger cool, Southern Death Cult’s homespun ethnic exotica, Bauhaus’ dark glam and the raggedy Struwwelpeter bohemian Byron that was Nick Cave of The Birthday Party plus a whole plethora of individual looks.
There was a power to the dressing.
The women could be voluptuous but very much in control, giving off the powerful aura of look but don’t touch.
Most goth women’s experiences suggest that they derived a sense of empowerment from their clothing, and it isn’t for me to suggest otherwise. I think it’s really complex. There’s an article in Goth: Undead Subculture, by Joshua Gunn, which looks at how androgyny is often practised by men, but seldom by women, on the scene. This also intersects with the LGBTQ+ scene. But if we are talking gender-bending, the models of womanhood aren’t always that challenging –fetish wear (PVC, latex, big dom boots etc) equals the stereotype of the femme fatale – sexualised, objectified, male fantasy etc. The evolution of the Victorianinfluenced goth – big skirts, long hair, narrow waist, big bust, is often a very passive image. I think the challenging aspect was always how far these stereotypes could be adapted and reconfigured.5
Perhaps it’s the corsets dotted around the club that somehow defined all the inherent yet thrilling contradictions in the style.
The corset was always an unstable signifier and meant different things at different times. Historically, it was all about regulating women’s unruly bodies, and yes, men wore corsets too, but this was less common, and the most prominent examples relate to fetish. The adverts from the 19th century for corsetry are hilarious – they have a rhetoric of ‘health’ attached to them. But they were basically about constricting women’s bodies and shaping them for the male gaze. That said, Victorian women also used them in challenging ways – they had been used to induce miscarriage for unwanted pregnancies, and performers, like the British Blondes burlesque troupe, used corsets on stage – which meant they were exposing in public what would only be conventionally for the sight of one’s husband in the marital bedroom. Similarly, the fetish/punk appropriation of corsets does something slightly different to its original history – underwear as outerwear, and constriction as a fetish experience. However, this can also be co-opted back around to normative ideas of femininity.6
Whilst the women were playing with style and giving off their own complex messages and codes, the men were also blurring their own borders.
I suppose it always depended on the type of male goth – there were always loads of different sartorial styles. Certainly, the scene always espoused non-normative ideas about masculinity – the eyeliner and nail polish, the long hair, the ability to wear skirts as club wear, There was always an element of gender-bending, but there was also the model of the edgy Byronic hero who is actually quite masculine, despite his obvious emotional sensitivity – dark, moody, mysterious, a man with a secret, a bit dangerous, liable to break your heart or turn into a vampire! Obviously, this has a long tradition in literature (Heathcliff, Byron, Shelley, Werther, Manfred),
5 Prof Claire Nally (Northumbria University) to John Robb.
6 Prof Claire Nally (Northumbria University) to John Robb.
but it also maps onto a sartorial code of excess – the frilly shirts and frock coats, the impracticality of this as everyday wear. It’s also interesting in class terms –historically, these are the clothes of the gentleman, although in this case, it’s clearly more of the dark gentleman than anything else! I think Anne Rice has a lot to answer for here! Dave Vanian would be a good example on the scene of this look. Then there’s Eldritch and his biker jacket, or Carl McCoy with the cowboy hat and the rock n roll scene.7
Wardrobe/drink/drugs sorted?
To the dance floor! The music was pounding. The new bands embraced by the scene were moving beyond punk, all armed with strangely saturnine names like Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Bauhaus, and The Sisters of Mercy. The goth sound was truly a mix of dark aesthetics, early electronica, new tech, post-punk experimentalism and a dark disco with an industrial groove. The incoming tech was moving music beyond punk’s obsession with the rudimentary and the Year Zero. It was time to fast forward to the future, and new production techniques, new guitar pedals, drum machines8 and keyboards were added to the palette of possibilities.
Black music was a key influence as goth embraced the rhythms and the nuance of the sensuality and space of black dance music. Soul and disco had been seen by some punks as an antithesis to ‘real music’, but many goth musicians assimilated disco’s feline, flexible beat and funk’s groin exchange groove into their music. Scene forerunners such as Siouxsie Sioux were fans of disco, while The Sisters of Mercy would cover Hot Chocolate’s mournful soul-pop ballad ‘Emma’ in a deadpan celebration. Black music was entwined with a dark energy that filled the dance floor with a curious mixture of darkness and delight, feeling the beat and the bite9.
There was a funk and disco undercarriage to Killing Joke, whose tribal beat was inflected with occultic lyrics and intense warnings about the end of times. Their ‘Follow the Leaders’ was an avalanche of sound, a punk disco anthem and electrochant that mashed Donna Summer with the apocalypse. The Sisters of Mercy’s glacial ‘Alice’ was a regular addition to a great dance floor soundtrack that shackled the clipped neo-disco grooves of the drum machine with a melancholic surge.
Bauhaus were scene favourites who had appropriated a dark form of dub on their genre-defining debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead.’ Adam and the Ants’ ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, with its Burundi drumming, was a gateway release for many future goths with those tribal beats and glam rock dark thunder. The track was already a club favourite after a rogue pressing was played weeks before it was commercially released. Everyone had heard that Adam had ‘gone pop’, but no one had expected
7 Prof Claire Nally (Northumbria University) to John Robb.
8 Drum machines had been around since 1930 in one form or another. The first pop hit to use one was Robin Gibb’s ‘Saved By The Bell’ and also Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ in 1971.
9 From The Sisters of Mercy’s classic track ‘Floorshow’ – musically and lyrically the perfect summation of dancing to the new dark beats.
this: a magnificently mad mesh of tribal drums and glam rock power chords. The early Adam had been a music press untouchable with baffled writers backing off from his black and white face paint intensity, acting out his darkly decadent fantasies. The original ‘Ant music for sex people’ was made up of catchy songs of pain and perversion, set to clanging punk guitar shackled to the off-kilter disco drumming of a young Dave Barbe.
As the night progressed, a speaker oozed out the proto-techno goth of Alien Sex Fiend’s 12-inch ‘Ignore the Machine’, a devilish slice of pre-techno electronica disco wonk throb that went on to become an influence on future goth and alternative artists. There was also an eclectic bunch of sounds that embraced Spear of Destiny’s ‘Liberator’, a thrilling post-punk anthem that encouraged chicken-dancing flattop boys to thrash their elbows into each other.10 It would be swiftly followed by a cascade of dirty feedback and primitive drums from rockabilly grave keepers The Cramps and their spooked ‘Human Fly’.
‘A Forest’ by The Cure was a hypnotic journey into the shadows that felt like it could last forever whilst The Birthday Party’s ‘Release the Bats’, with its florid poetry and kinetic guitar skreegh, sounded so perfect for this brave new world that it seemed like it had been written for these very dance floors, while the imperious Siouxsie swooned and preened like the ice queen of the scene with one of her many anthems of post-psychedelic kaleidoscope sound. Next up was Southern Death Cult’s ‘Fatman’, a mystical pounding, Native American-inspired mantra from a new northern band.
Added to the mix were non-gothic curveballs like the odd Fall track or Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. Bolan, Bowie, Iggy and Roxy were perennially popular, an unspoken nod to the glam gods that were precursors to goth, whilst Gary Numan, the Bowie replica in black, went down well with the couple of Numanoids in the room.
For the more daring, there were also the outré left-field sounds from exotic names like Laibach, an industrial band from Slovenia, who later layered their harshness with neoclassical passages and a controversial thought-provoking artfulness.11 Then there was Virgin Prunes, a brilliant auditory freak show from Dublin, challenging the stuffy morality of their home country with material ranging from the French chansonnier tradition to sequenced drones. A daring DJ could triumph by adding maverick tracks like Grace Jones’ icy pop pioneering sprechgesang over her dub funk minimalist take on Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’ – or, at the other end of the spectrum, Xmal Deutschland‘s ‘Incubus Succubus’, if the mood was right.
If German industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten or Australian mavericks SPK didn’t quite fill the floor, they induced head-nodding with their metal percussion and clattering, claustrophobic sound. Neubauten took the found sound metallic
10 ‘Chicken dancing’ was flapping your elbows up and down like chicken wings. It inevitably led to the occasional fight.
11 Were they serious? Who knew? Their intellectual incitement played with images and fire to make their anti-totalitarian statements. A series of Laibach covers, starting with the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, made them into paradoxically unique pasticheurs
textures and added human elements like Blixa Bargeld’s sinister baritone whisper and terrifying inward scream.
The music was intense, powerful, and sometimes melancholic but never dour. Most importantly, you could move to it. Amid the dole culture of Thatcher’s Britain and the broken post-industrial cityscapes, the clubs and the dressing up black enabled good times on a shoestring budget with an attractive dark aesthetic.
Defying the broken heartland of the post-industrial cities, the semi-forgotten satellite towns and the grim real politic of the Thatcher years, there was a network of clubs full of the dark dance, a brand new beat spreading across the country with their latenight floorshows. Nightclubbing was the beating heart of goth. It defied its graveyard ethos of being a darkly subversive strand of pop culture by dancing.
The audience was now the dark star!
In the post-Warhol age, flamboyance could make anyone a player, and in this alternative future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes12 or, at least, four songs in a goth club, dancing in the ‘violent hour to the violent sound’.
Post-war pop culture had always had an enticing cimmerian13 flavour, and goth seemed to arrive by symbiosis as a logical escape from punk. North v South. Leeds v London. It was a convergent evolution. Much of the scene, as we know it, evolved in places like Bradford, Northampton, Wakefield or Crawley: satellite towns, mill towns, dead towns. It was in these unlikely landscapes that the goth aesthetic began to thrive.
These towns took their cues from the patchwork of mid-seventies Bowie/Roxy nights in the big cities and the pioneering alternative/goth clubs like the Phono in Leeds and The Batcave in London.14 Soon everywhere would have its own goth night. Every town and city would have at least one ‘alternative’ club years before they were called ‘goth’ clubs. Safe havens where the freaks could come out to play. All over the UK, in the most unlikely nooks and crannies, a whole new network of clubs emerged, driving the culture forward.
Liverpool’s sartorial scene flamboyance was initially celebrated in Eric’s and in gay clubs such as Jody’s, providing a safe space for the proto-goth scene. The city then had its own goth club, the legendary Planet X, which was named by Paul Rutherford from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and was opened in 1993 by the indefatigable Doreen Allen, who’d been a central player in Liverpool’s alternative culture since the ’60s. ‘Planet X was truly subterranean – you went downstairs into this lair which played dark, electronic, cold music,’ remembers DJ Marc Jones, adding, ‘It was
12 Andy Warhol’s original quotation was ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’
13 ‘Cimmerian’ not in any geohistorical sense, but in the sense of those mythical people dwelled in fog and shadow.
14 The first goth club in London was Beasts, opening Feb 14th, 1981 on Carnaby Street.
mixing the hard edge attitude of punk but with the key technology of electronica, early synthesisers and also tribal drum beats to create a whole new atmosphere.’
Manchester already had Pips, which was open from 1972 to 1978, with its most influential DJ being the late Dave Booth.
It was a subterranean set of cellars, where each scene had its own room. Before punk, in the mid-’70s, the Roxy room played Bowie and Roxy Music and those nights were where it all started. By post-punk, it had become the main alternative club in town that birthed the local goth culture. Unfortunately, Pips closed just before all these other clubs opened, but it was where all the early bands that influenced the goth scene played. Joy Division did their debut gig there.15 They were actually billed as Warsaw, but they changed their name on the night. There should be a blue plaque for that gig alone!’16
Post-punk Manchester was full of new nights. Across town, Devilles was filled with big hair that twitched along to the likes of The Cure’s ‘A Forest’, while Cloud 9’s postpunk fusion mixed early psychobilly with Adam and the Ants before they became pirates. The 1980–85 period saw The Berlin Club, famed for its camo netting, dry ice and constant playing of The Sisters, Sex Gang Children, The Birthday Party and Southern Death Cult. There was also Placemate 7, Blood Club, Monday night at The Ritz, Legend – with its alternative Thursday nights. The Playpen, The Banshee – all were key to the new cultural frontier.
15 January 25th, 1978.
16 Dave Booth to John Robb.
At eighteen years old, future Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr was a junior freak experiencing the power of these new club nights in Manchester – Legend in particular. As well as being a lifelong expert on music culture, Johnny used to manage Aladdin’s Cave, a goth/alternative clothes shop in Manchester, from 1981–82 until The Smiths got signed.17
Legend was a good place to go and to derail your senses. They had the most amazing lights and a great sound system. Thursday nights was the new music night and after drinking vodka and orange, and loads of beer – by half one in the morning, you would dance to Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’ and then sing along to The Cure, PiL and Adam Ant.
And there was always Bowie.
No Bowie – no scene.
In the clubs, we were free of the music press, and it was amazing. The music was under the radar and out of the understanding of a lot of the rock writers at the time. Music journalists like Nick Kent would have had no idea about what these kids were dancing to. It was not just goth but the new pop in the clubs. For me and my friends, this new club world was not just personally throwing off the shackles of classic rock but also punk rock, which had been rammed down your throat by an older generation.18
As ever, it was in the United Kingdom, driven by its innate dandy nature and the vacuum of post-industrial cities, that a powerhouse of post-punk culture tribes had
17 If The Phono in Leeds and The Batcave in London were the instigators (more on this in Chapter 19) then they had willing displays across the nation. In Blackpool, The 007 Club (owned by ex-boxer Brian London, who fought Muhammad Ali in 1966) had a goth and post-punk Saturday night, until it moved to the grotty but much-loved Your Father’s Moustache club near the bus station. Deeper into Lancashire there was Colne Franks, where floor-fillers ranged from The Velvet Underground to Bauhaus’ ‘Lagartija Nick’ – which, according to locals, went down a storm after a massive sniff of poppers. Preston had its famous Warehouse, with regular alternative club nights at weekends, where Joy Division had played a legendary early gig. There was also a goth night at Clouds and at Park Hall on Sundays. Further up the road was The Sugar House in Lancaster and The Peppermint Lounge in Warrington. Blackburn had The Castle, Oldham had The Hurricane Club, while Wigan Pier went goth on Wednesdays and Southport Sandbaggers likewise on Fridays. Burnley had goth nights at Angels and Whiskers and there was even one in Accrington at The Miners WMC. Back in Yorkshire which had started the whole thing with Le Phono in Leeds, it was now in the satellite towns with the arrival of Huddersfield’s Charlies, Keighley’s Funhouse, and Wakefield’s Raffles and Xlusiv. In Hull, there was Spiders and Silhouette; York had The Roxy; in Sheffield, there was The Limit on Thursdays, the monthly SinBin at Turnups, Astral Flight Embassy club, Batfink and Romeo And Juliet’s (where New Order had played a very early gig).
Further north there was the small room at the Mayfair in Newcastle and Blaises in Middlesbrough. Even a place like Redcar could boast two goth nights, at The Sandpiper and The Bulldog. Also in Carlisle, there was the gothically damp and dingy Twisted Wheel.
In Birmingham, there was Steptoes, Zigzag and The Tin Can, where Southern Death Cult, Play Dead, Alien Sex Fiend, Shakin’ Pyramids, Xmal Deutschland, Balaam and the Angel, Theatre of Hate and The March Violets all played live. Chesterfield had Gotham City; downstairs at The Garage in Nottingham with noisier left-field sounds like Big Black. Just up the road was the Retford Porterhouse, while Stoke had Chicos and Cannock had Stamps. Further south was Juicy Lucies in Corby, while nearby Luton had The Switch Club – named after the Banshees song.
The deep south had The Crypt in Hastings, The Basement and Sister Ray in Brighton and Weston-Super-Mare had the legendary Hobbits. The Underground/Nightline rolled along in Bath, while Bristol boasted The Whip and Cardiff, The Square Club. Post-Batcave, London had seen the dawn of many new goth nights, including The Kit-Kat Club in Westbourne Grove, Full Tilt at The Electric Ballroom, Catacombs at Manor House, The Underground in Croydon and eventually Slimelight in Islington. They all operated in a city where, at one time, you could find a goth night seven nights a week.
Beyond England, there was The Bistro in Rhyl, North Wales; in Scotland, Nightmoves ran in Glasgow from 1980 to 1984, while Madisons and The Banshee thrived amid the Gothic atmosphere of Edinburgh.
Thanks to a pre-internet spider’s web of information, the culture was everywhere. Every small town had its goth outpost, its subterranean lair, and its safe house for outsiders.
18 Johnny Marr to John Robb.
emerged, including a distinctly dark subculture. The British streets had always been a breeding ground for international style creating an English civil style war that saw the other youth tribes – Teddy Boys, skinheads, punks, metal heads, rockabillies and psychobillies – fighting pitched battles. Goths though, preferred to dress up, read, think, fuck and dance; these new creatures of the night came alive on the dance floor. And yet this was no modern dance.
The embrace of the dark and the gothic had been with us for millennia.
For an eternity, humans have loved the dark, shivery tales, melancholic music and a walk on the dark side. Over the centuries, gothic had meant so many different things to so many different people. From the mad, bad and dangerous to know poets to visionary painters and medieval architects bucking the classical trend.
Goth had imbued dark art, music and ideas for an eternity, from when the original goths – a fierce Germanic tribe had sacked Rome in 410…and this is where our story starts.
Chapter 2
the fall of rome
On August 24, 410 AD, the heart of the Roman Empire was fatally breached. On that late summer night, the eastern Germanic tribes massed outside Rome, the self-styled eternal citadel of 800,000 people. Their mighty leader, Alaric – an imposing, fierce and dark-clad overlord – led his Visigoth army into the breaches. The Goths had arrived.19
The collapse of the Empire’s most iconic city was met with unbridled horror. ‘In one city,’ wrote theologian and Catholic priest St. Jerome, ‘the whole world perished.’20 By the end of the 5th century, the Roman Empire in the west was no more. The Goths had brought down Europe’s largest bloc. They had destroyed the indestructible – and indelibly etched their name into the continental consciousness.
Ever since then, the term ‘gothic’ has been associated with that walk on the dark side.
The Gothic cathedrals of the late medieval era from the 12th to 16th centuries defied the highbrow longing for the classical.21 The controversial new style with the flying buttress, the ribbed vault and the immediately recognisable pointed arch and stained glass windows was seen by those still in thrall to the classical as distasteful and Germanic in style. The move away from classical lines was seen as, at best gauche, and at worst, sacrilegious. These were imposing edifices that pointed towards the heavens, bedecked with stone gargoyles – close cousins of the hellions seen in paintings of the infernal pit. The most celebrated of these structures, Notre Dame de Paris, was a devotional world of darkness flooded by pits of light from its huge stained glass windows.22
The term ‘Gothic’ was first applied to bricks and mortar in the 16th century in a 1518 letter from Raphael to Pope Leo X. The Italian painter and architect derisively claimed the pointed arches of the new churches looked like the primitive huts of the Rome-sacking Goths of yore. Florentine Renaissance master Giorgio Vasari then described the ‘barbarous German style’ in his Lives Of The Artists and
19 Not quite Germanic – the original Gothic tribes were perhaps the Gutones of South Scandinavia or Poland and their traces are celebrated in city names like Gothenburg. Like the later Vikings, they moved from their colder climes and across Europe, coming into conflict with the Romans whom they eventually defeated. In time the Visigothic Empire was defeated by first the Eastern Roman Empire in the 6th century, and then the Umayyad Caliphate in the 8th Century, leaving only an isolated community of Crimean Goths to eke out the centuries until they too died out.
20 St. Jerome translated the Old Testament of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin in 382 AD.
21 Like an ancient ELO to The Beatles, perhaps it’s more fitting to use the term Romanesque rather than Classical as Gothic’s precursor. As in Romanesque relating to a style of architecture which prevailed in Europe c. 900–1200, although sometimes dated back to the end of the Roman Empire (5th century).
22 It was also the fictional setting for Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, a lovelorn gargoyle made flesh.
attributed the new architectural features to the Goths, who he held responsible for destroying the ancient buildings after they had conquered Rome, and erecting new ones in this style. He labelled this new style a ‘Gothic art’ and ‘monstrous and barbarous’, signalling the debut of the G-word as a pejorative.
Later appropriated in the Gothic revival of the 18th and 19th centuries, the term then described a crudity of style in architecture. Its in your face ornamentation, redolent of medieval fortresses, created a kind of sub-classical vulgarity much pooh-poohed by the sophisticates of the time. Of course, what invites the disdain of culture’s arbiters is sure to create its own appreciative cliques and a new style that harked to a north European rather than a classical aesthetic emerged.23 Despite this, many of Europe’s new landmark Gothic edifices like Amiens Cathedral – the tallest completed cathedral in France, Notre-Dame de Reims, Basilica of Saint-Denis, Chartres Cathedral in France, Santa Maria del Fiore and Milan Cathedral in Italy, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury cathedral in the UK, are now celebrated.
In the eyes of the critics, ‘Gothic’ was seen as the uncultured realm of a barbaric tribe and yet the styles of the later Gothic revival also became an inspiration to a whole host of architects and artists much despised by sophisticates that would slowly spread across Europe. So it was with Gothic literature. The ‘romances’24 that valued atmosphere above plot or dialogue came with what we now think of as the trappings of the Gothic: windswept moors, old dark mansions or ruined castles. Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s respective 1847 novels of doomed love, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, in hindsight, seem to share a strange kinship with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which recounts an altogether more demonic form of loneliness.
Folklore was already filled with myths, bogeymen and strange creatures, but the Gothic imagination placed its central focus on the alienated or inhuman outsider. After such imaginings came to the silver screen in the early 20th century, the form was further vulgarised (or made more exciting, according to your taste) by the 1930s coining of the term ‘horror movie’.
In a sudden retrospective shift, the classic Gothic romances of the 19th century – The Monk, The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, Dracula, to name a few of the most obvious – were rechristened ‘Gothic horror’, often in response to their Hollywood adaptations. To many, it was the most wonderfully ugly flowering of the Gothic imagination; as the debauched Romantic poet Baudelaire had once written, the flowers of evil were in bloom. It gave rise to an aesthetic that would extend all the way to the ‘monster culture’ of 1950s adolescents (exemplified by
23 Centuries later, the goth bands being sniffed at by serious music critics, in the same way, is an interesting cultural parallel! 24 Imaginative fiction – the term didn’t denote (though neither did it exclude) sentimental love stories.
Stephen King, who’d bring Gothic to Small Town USA25) and, later, to the socalled ‘elevated horror’ of the 21st century.
In the late 20th century, the electricity of pop culture galvanised a new Frankenstein’s Monster that became known as goth. While few performers or bands accepted the backhanded term, the darker aesthetics that had infiltrated rock music for years began to coalesce.
25 Kate Cherrell, PhD in Nineteenth Century Gothic: ‘Terror is mainly attributed to Victorian Gothic works as a creeping, unseen, uncertain threat. Horror is a graphic, visual threat and its consequences.’ Stephen King, horror fiction’s most successful exponent said ‘Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm… Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there...’
Chapter 3 deep in the forest
Europe’s Gothic History
From prehistory to the 21st century, frissons of fear provided inspiration for artists and storytellers alike. Cultural taboos have infected literature and art for centuries – even the Bible is full of visions of apocalyptic violence; folk tales are filled with horror; classical music chimes with crepuscular scales. The Gothic has always been with us.
Pre-Christianity, the ancient Greeks presented theatrical tragedies where bloody events and the fateful interplay of humans and gods, were commented on by a chorus26 rather than shown in their full gory glory. They were full of the dark stuff. In the 5th century BC, the playwright Aeschylus fashioned The Oresteia, a trilogy which recounted the atrocities begat by King Agamemnon, including sacrificing his daughter to the gods in return for victory in the Trojan War. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus would provide Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, with a namesake syndrome after its hero, the King of Thebes unwittingly killed his estranged father and bedded his mother – before gouging his own eyes out. All the horrors in the world were turned loose, albeit as theatrical artifice rather than explicit images.
Sometimes lasting up to a day in their presentation, some historians believe Greek tragedies were an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honour of Dionysus.27 In Greek mythology, Dionysus was the God of the grape harvest and its intoxicating offspring, as well as ritual madness, the wilderness, vegetation, fertility and religious ecstasy. Portrayed as an outsider, a beautiful foreigner and the last of the gods to arrive, a version of Dionysus is thought to have been first mentioned way back in Minoan Crete.
Always placed beyond the borders of the known world, he would arrive dancing in his chariot drawn by exotic beasts and his drunken attendant with his procession of wild female followers28 and bearded satyrs with erect penises. Dionysus was also the protector of those who do not belong to conventional society and symbolised everything that is chaotic, dangerous and unexpected, which escapes human reason and can only be attributed to the unforeseeable action of the gods.
Dionysus’s wine, music, and ecstatic dance freed his followers from self-conscious fear and care and subverted the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Those who partook of his mysteries were possessed and empowered by the God himself, whose
26 What would you give to hear this chorus now? The chorus consisted of between 12 and 50 players, who variously danced, sang or spoke their lines in unison, and sometimes wore masks. It would be a splendid piece of unnerving theatre.
27 Otherwise known as Pan or Bacchus.
28 Maenads.
mystical role was a divine communicant between the living and the dead – surely the aim of any high-decibel modern dancer?
The first rock star!
A hero for the suppressed for his anti-authoritarian stance and his free and easy lifestyle, he was the Robin Hood of the gods and has remained an inspiration to artists, philosophers and writers into the modern era. It’s for these reasons that Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century’s iconoclastic philosopher, appropriated Dionysus in much the same way as he did the ancient Iranian keeper of the flame, Zoroaster.29 ‘He who is richest in the abundance of life, the Dionysian God and man,’ he wrote in The Gay Science, ‘can allow himself, not only the sight of the fearsome and questionable but even the fearsome deed and every luxury of destruction, disintegration, denial…’
For Nietzsche, the self-styled Antichrist, the sensuous Dionysus was the God of the dance, mocking Christianity’s piety and restraint – as well as its charity and compassion. ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus against the crucified,’ wrote the iconoclast, as much Romantic poet as a philosopher, in his final work Ecce Homo, before suffering a complete mental collapse in 1889.
Jim Morrison understood all right.
By far the most erudite personage on LA’s 1960s psychedelic rock scene, Nietzsche was a major influence30 – to the extent that Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger could claim, ‘Nietzsche killed Jim,’31 rather than his frontman’s recklessness with drugs and booze.
Jimbo provided the template for the modern goth rock star, emulating the Nietzschean conception of Dionysus on and off stage. The self-styled Lizard King drowned himself in alcohol, eroticism and the ecstatic experiences of a Greek God who, as articulated by another literary influence, William Blake, believed that ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’
The Doors’ own Dionysian parade moved riotously, dancing to ancient melodies.
The recorded version of ‘The End’ erupts into a non-verbal scream.
‘Father?’
‘Yes, son?’
‘I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…’
Legend has it that in the live version performed at LA’s Whisky A Go Go, in 1967, Jim would scream out, ‘I want to fuck you!’ And via the Dionysian aesthetic and LSD, he was transported back to the original Oedipal tragedy.
Little wonder that when Jim Morrison died in 1971, his self-destructive disciple, Iggy Pop, dyed his hair dark in anticipation of leaving his disintegrating garage band, The Stooges, to replace Jim in The Doors. It never happened, but a big part of Morrison’s chaotic ethic stayed with Iggy.
29 Who became the Nietzschean ubermensch, Zarathustra.
30 Morrison’s 1968 improvisation ‘Ode To Friedrich Nietzsche’ can be found on YouTube. Accompanying himself on staccato piano, he celebrates the German philosopher’s sudden descent into insanity.
31 In his memoir of The Doors, Set The Night On Fire, co-written with Jeff Alulis (Little, Brown, 2021).
‘Dionysiac’ in Greek times was when a bunch of people would get together, and they would erect a paper phallus 50 feet long and carry it around and chant to some God they believed in, right? It ushers in the creation of an event, it’s an eventful art. ‘Apollonian’ is when you make a statue, it’s there forever, and it’s set out very clearly. There’s a Dionysiac element to my art, therefore, I suppose a lot of people might be quite frightened to be me, but I’m quite happy to be that.32
In some ways, Dionysus was a shaman. A shapeshifting magician who indulged in mind-altering substances and assumed animal form, bringing back word from the gods whilst wearing animal furs and taking psychedelic soups to shift into this transitory state.33 Jim Morrison again toyed with this – a Sunset Strip shamanistic presence – entering the beyond via lab-produced Owsley acid, rather than natural psychotropics.
Of all The Doors-influenced performers that followed, it was goth icon Ian Curtis of Joy Division who like the title character in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, seemed to glimpse infinity during his seizures.34 As for drug-induced transmogrification, Britain’s mystical pagan past seemed to just add another layer to the creative imagination and the embrace of timeless ritual for Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke.
I think that if you look at the old stone circles in Great Britain, and indeed some of the burial mounds, they have a line of stones, which is a line to the circle of burial mounds, there is a line to the autumn equinox, which is, of course, All Hallows Eve. This is when they would call on their ancestors to help them through the difficulties of the coming winter – and of course, if you listen to the old Anglican prayer book of the Church of England, on this same day, we say a prayer for the deceased, this old pagan tradition that has survived in modern prayer, to this day.35
The imperial interlopers of Rome who suppressed the pagan also understood stadium spectacle and gore as entertainment, the Colosseum making latter-day shock-rockfigures Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson seem lightweight. Aside from the slaughter of humans and beasts in amphitheatres, the Romans also held a deep fascination with ghost stories and dark fables. Ironically perhaps, many such tales were preserved by the Goths, Visigoths and Vandals, who, after sacking Rome, disseminated its tales, along with Christianity, across Europe.
The fall of Rome heralded the Dark Ages of superstition, witchcraft and strange imagined beasts. The European continent cultivated a rich culture of sinister tales and mythical creatures: from French werewolves to Norwegian gjenganger (ghosts) and trolls, from Irish banshees to the Romanian Strigoi (undead) and the Portuguese
32 Interview with Tom Snyder, The Tomorrow Show, 12-02-81.
33 Shamanism in its original form is an Asian tradition. However, the equivalent among indigenous peoples of the Americas also consumed psychedelic substances like peyote, a cactus containing natural mescaline, and ayahuasca, derived from a root found in the Amazonian basin.
34 For Curtis, unlike the innocent Prince Myshkin, infinity seemed to confirm only the bleakness of existence.
35 Jaz Coleman to The Quietus.
Bicho-papão (a bogeyman or Krampus-type figure) Europe was full of fertile figures of fear.
The ensuing Middle Ages was full of the dread of the lingering terror of what lay in the great beyond, enflamed by biblical warnings, and aggravated by the horrors of ergot poisoning.36 In the theatre, Shakespeare and his Elizabethan or Jacobean contemporaries created their own darkly imagined vistas.
In Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe pre-dated Goethe by warning of the dangers of a pact with the Devil; Thomas Middleton made bloody revenge synonymous with Jacobean tragedy; in The Duchess Of Malfi, John Webster introduced what we’d now recognise as Gothic horror (complete with a character who believes himself a werewolf). The Bard himself left a Gothic imprint with the bloody occult tragedy Macbeth; ghosts also appeared in his Hamlet and history plays – while Titus Andronicus was like a Roman splatter movie, its atrocities including cannibalism.
Europe was full of macabre and shamanic dread.
No wonder the more modern poets would have so much to draw from in the Gothic and dark.
36
Caused by infected rye in bread, Ergot Rye led to nightmarish hallucinations, the painfully compulsive St Vitus Dance and gangrenous limbs. It’s surmised that ergot may have produced the apocalyptic visions of St John the Divine in the Book of Revelations. When the psychoactive ingredient was separated and synthesised in the 20th century, it became known as LSD-25.
Chapter 4
‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’
The Romantics and the Gothic Imagination
Comprised of a loose coalition of poets, painters, authors and thinkers who earnestly and perhaps beautifully felt that creativity could change the world, the Romantic era believed in the intensity of emotions played out in art. They were lyrical alchemists making gold from lead and a Gothic magic from language, sound or vision. Perhaps sparked by the initial idealism that drove the 1789 French Revolution and the violent chaos that resulted from it, the Romantic movement produced its own century-long artistic revolution.37
Often fuelled by alcohol or laudanum,38 wild visions were accompanied by radical political ideas and a reinvigorated sense of connection with pre-industrial times. It ranged from Wordsworth, invoking a gentle nature mysticism, and a warm glow of nostalgia, to more hardcore Romantics like John Keats, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, invoking the pre-industrial revolution and critiquing child labour, industry and the destruction of nature and the green and ghostly land. They embraced the power of nature in all its forms and the endless cycle of life and death. Their poems fought back against the clank and grind of the new industry, whilst the more rakish Romantics introduced elements of irrationality and horror in their work. As the Industrial Revolution gave rise to machinery and mass production, Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who initially found fame etching classical ruins and palaces in the late 18th Century, was drawing scenes of dystopian factories and prisons. It had an influence on the landscape and psyche, with London’s Newgate Prison renovated in the style of Piranesi’s utilitarian nightmare. This, to the Romantics, was the shape of an undesirable future. They were idealists. Romantics.
Proto-goths.
The immediate precursors to the Romantics were the 18th century ‘Graveyard Poets’ like Thomas Gray, who instilled a sense of the unearthly and supernatural into his poems, while Thomas Parnell was more stoically religious: ‘Death’s but a path that must be trod / If man would ever pass to God.’ Robert Blair wrote of ghosts, while Edward Young was existentially fixated on the isolation of the departed soul. All had a fascination with the physical finality of death and their elegiac meditations on mortality – all within the backdrop of the churchyard – were perfectly Gothic in essence.
37
‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’
They were, like much early Gothic fiction, often dismissed by contemporary critics, but they cast their shadow over both the incoming Romantics and the future Gothic novelists. As did Thomas Chatterton. Born in 1752, his prodigious talent and brief life ended in suicide at the age of seventeen. A precocious polymath whose leanings extended beyond poetry to music, radical politics and the occult, he was an undisputed influence on the big four Romantic poets – Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge who were awed by his brief journey and wrote poems in his honour.
The German Sturm und Drang39 movement was of equal resonance in its attempts to reset the modern world through art. The polymath Goethe’s 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, became a key text via its protagonist’s lovelorn and ultimately despairing musings – its influence would extend to the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.40 Goethe’s defining work is felt by many to be the two-part play Faust, written over several decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. An update of the classic Faustian pact with the Devil, it deals with a distinctly Frankensteinian form of forbidden knowledge.
Like their British counterparts, German Romantics redrew their past to create a new literary psyche. The tragic and troubling author Heinrich von Kleist has been called an antecedent of Kafka, but his 1811 story Earthquake In Chile’ foreshadows the 20th-century group hysteria of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.41 By the time of his death in 1822, the prolific ETA Hoffmann was synonymous with what Freud later called the unheimlich.42 Short masterworks like ‘Der Sandmann’ epitomised the German ‘fantastic’, much as his disciple Poe would do in the USA.
Central to this new myth-making was the ideal of childhood innocence, which sparked a wider fascination with folk tales and children’s stories. Significant literary figures Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–08. Five years later, the first collection of Grimms’ Fairy Tales by brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm was published, a collection of edited folklore from the German hinterland.
The Brothers Grimms had partially simplified the original folklore into these strange and baroque stories filled with headless corpses and strange magic, set in a haze between fantasy and reality. Filled with violence and slightly skewed moral undertones, they still make for compelling reading: love and greed battle it out in a gnarled old forest, with axes close to hand; a strange old man, who may be the Devil in disguise, appears from behind bushes and cuts off someone’s foot.
Lewis Carroll’s 1856 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, are both laced with a genuine childlike strangeness and sinister undertow that has made them standalone classics that have infused pop culture.
39 ‘Storm and stress.’ It would become associated in the 19th century with Richard Wagner and his proto-nationalist operatic fantasies.
40 Werther is one of the contemporary texts read by the novel’s alienated monster. This creature is a very different character to the ‘poor dumb brute’ of the classic monster movies.
41 1948 dystopian short story in which a member of the community is selected by chance and stoned.
