Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  The accompanying album Cupid & Psyche 85 finally fulfilled Green’s grandiose talk of the past several years. Not only was it immensely successful, but it was true pop deconstruction to bring a smile to Jacques Derrida’s lips. The new Scritti sound (all those dazzling surfaces) paralleled the way Green’s oddly depthless lyrics worked (the lover’s discourse as a lexical maze, a chain of foolishness along which desire traverses endlessly, hopelessly looking to heal the primal wound of lack at the heart of being). Inspired by Michael Jackson, Green had developed an eerie falsetto that sounded freakishly ethereal, beyond gender. It suited Cupid’s hall-of-mirrors sound, all perfect reflective surfaces for Green’s narcissism. It’s no coincidence that the inner sleeve to Cupid shows the immaculately groomed Green and his two cohorts in a deluxe men’s bathroom, staring into a mirror. Gamson and Maher are looking at Green’s reflection, but the singer only has admiring eyes for himself.

  “When I met Derrida, he told me what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in,” Green boasted in a 1988 interview, referring to a dinner with the philosopher arranged by French radio. Yet it’s doubtful that the subtle subversions woven into Scritti’s superslick sound were picked up on by most listeners. This was especially true of the American audience, which wasn’t familiar with the backstory of the band’s tortuous journey toward pop and, seeing the video for “Perfect Way,” most likely took Green to be just another fey, fair-haired pretty boy from England. On U.S. radio, surrounded by what Green called “the bright, brittle, endless barrage” of mideighties pop funk, it was hard to distinguish “Perfect Way” from any of the other cosmetically perfected, ultracommercial records of that era. Outside the context of indieland’s frugal means, the expensiveness of the sound didn’t carry any real resonance. Green angrily dismissed “any attempts to tie it to Thatcherism” as “nonsense,” but it was hard to see how Cupid could be read in any other terms than straightforward upward mobility, especially when you factored in things such as the beautiful models used in “The Word Girl” video or the fact that Green himself did a modeling assignment for Vogue. Buying in or selling out, was there really a difference in the end?

  CHAPTER 21

  DARK THINGS AND GLORY BOYS:

  THE RETURN OF ROCK WITH GOTH AND THE NEW PSYCHEDELIA

  THE GENEALOGY OF THE WORD “Gothic” encompasses medieval churches, Gothic literature and art, with their themes of death and the uncanny, and the original Goths, those Germanic barbarians who swarmed over the dying Roman Empire. When applied to postpunk, however, “Gothic” initially described a certain doomy atmosphere in music. In 1979, Martin Hannett described Joy Division as “dancing music with Gothic overtones.” Quite rapidly, though, “Gothic” became a term of abuse applied to bands such as Bauhaus that had emerged in the wake of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. It remained an insult until the latter months of 1982, when the word was reclaimed as a tribal rallying cry. Darkness suddenly looked like an alluring alternative to New Pop’s squeaky-clean, overground brightness.

  And yet Goth and New Pop actually had something in common. Both had roots in glam. ABC and the Human League loved Roxy and Bowie, but so did Goth groups such as Bauhaus and Sex Gang Children. New Pop and Goth both represented a return to glamour and stardom and a backlash against postpunk’s antimystique. Whether it was the Human League’s celebration of romance or Goth’s patchouli-scented romanticism, 1982 saw the return of that old (black) magic.

  The vortex of the early Goth scene was the Batcave, a Soho nightclub that started in July 1982 as an “absolutely no funk” alternative to the New Romantic and imported black dance fare offered at other London clubs. Founded by the campy group Specimen, the Batcave favored a leather-and-lace decor and thirties monster movie references. As the club took off, it went on tour to the provinces, inspired imitators, and franchised Batcave nights in cities all over the U.K., as well as a one-off night at Danceteria in New York.

  Goth came to prominence in the winter of 1982–83, just at the point when New Pop was getting fat and bland. Virtually unknown outside the U.K. live circuit, Southern Death Cult abruptly materialized on NME’s front cover in October ’82. Early in the new year, another NME cover story proclaimed the arrival of “Positive Punk.” Loosely tied to two rising Goth groups, Brigandage and Blood and Roses, the piece essentially celebrated the victory of imagination and individuality against a vaguely conjured mediocrity. The article’s epigram, stolen from The Rocky Horror Show’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, was “Don’t dream it, be it.”

  By 1983, bands such as Danse Society, the March Violets, Flesh for Lulu, and scores more swarmed across the independent charts. Soon almost every independent label had a Goth band on its roster. Goth’s tentacles stretched from the Los Angeles “death rock” scene centered around Christian Death and 45 Grave to Iceland’s Kukl (the name translated as “sorcery”), who sang about the country’s pagan mythology and whose lineup included Björk.

  As with other successful subcultures, Goth style created plenty of scope for individual expression while simultaneously marshaling a potent tribal identity. Its palette of sonic and sartorial hallmarks meant you could recognize a Goth group within seconds of seeing and hearing them. Standard musical fixtures included scything guitar patterns, high-pitched post–Joy Division basslines that usurped the melodic role, beats that were either hypnotically dirgelike or “tribal” in some ethnically indeterminate Burundi-meets-Apache way, and vocals that were either near operatic and Teutonic or deep, droning alloys of Jim Morrison and Ian Curtis. The Goth image entailed some combination of deathly pallor, teased or ratted black hair, ruffled Regency shirts, stovepipe hats, leather garments, and spiked dog collars, accessorized with religious, magical, or macabre silver jewelry. The clothing color scheme was funereal, the sense of glamour literally sepulchral.

  Connecting everything was the romance of old things. The original Gothic movement in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century literature had been antimodernist. It represented the return of the re-pressed: all the medieval superstitions and primordial longings allegedly banished by the Industrial Revolution, all those shadowy regions of the soul supposedly illuminated by the Enlightenment. The new Goth was likewise based on the idea that the most profound emotions you’ll ever feel are the same ones felt by people thousands of years ago, the fundamental, eternal experiences of love, death, despair, awe, and dread.

  Goth’s interest in the timeless could be seen as precisely that, a refusal of the timely, an apolitical flight from the urgent topical issues of the day. In its early days, Goth was shaped in reaction to the two other strands that came directly out of U.K. punk, Oi! and anarcho-punk, both of which addressed exploitation and injustice. The Oi! or “real punk” contingent (bands such as the Exploited and Cockney Rejects) defined punk as rabble-rousing protest grounded in working-class experience. The anarcho-punk movement, focused around the band Crass and their label of the same name, was more ideological, spewing out vinyl tracts denouncing the unholy trinity of state, church, and military while extolling pacifism and self-government.

  Up to a point, the proto-Goths enjoyed the energy at Oi! and anarcho-punk gigs. But ultimately, says Goth historian Mick Mercer, “A lot of the people who became Goths wanted the excitement of punk but not the mundane element.” Redefining punk rebellion as deviance from norms, these proto-Goths proposed an escape from the crushing commonplaceness of everyday English life, into ritual and ceremony, magic and mystery. They latched on to any groups they could find “who offered something a bit more intelligent and twisted, Romantic and tortured,” says Mercer, groups such as the Birthday Party and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

  The intersection point between Goth and New Pop was Adam Ant. The original Antz were proto-Goth. Their songs tweaked taboos and unveiled kinky desires, and the “sex music for antpeople” concept was overtly tribal. Goth put a high premium on physical beauty, be it natural or aided by self-adornment and makeup, and Adam
was the first in a long line of hunky Goth singers that included Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and Southern Death Cult’s Ian Astbury. The other Goth hallmark Adam possessed was the charismatic aura of the cult leader, mingling various aspects of warrior chieftain, shaman, and savior.

  But when Adam, impatient to become a big star, “sold out” and went pop, his original fan base defected. The ambitious Adam declared that “cult” was just a euphemism for “failure,” but the Goth groups, in contrast, cultivated cultishness, understanding that their audience wanted bands they could cling to as private property. “Bauhaus picked up a lot of disaffected Antz fans,” says Mercer. Bauhaus’ debut, In a Flat Field, came out on November 5, 1980, the day before Kings of the Wild Frontier. Antz fans who didn’t care for Adam’s new storybook imagery of pirates and Indians turned instead to Bauhaus’ hammy glam theater of blasphemy and idolatry.

  Curiously, it was Malcolm McLaren, the person who’d given Adam the image makeover, who best understood this impulse. Predicting the return of rock’s underground spirit as a backlash against New Pop, McLaren celebrated the die-hard loyalty of metal fans. “Led Zeppelin never appeared on television or radio, yet they sold more records at that time than any other group!” he told Sounds in December 1982. “They made sure their music was outside the area of manufactured pop product.”

  Banshees’ singer Siouxsie Sioux crystallized the emerging Goth movement’s spirit when she declared her desire to be “a thorn in the side of mediocrity.” In the very beginning, though, the Banshees were exemplary postpunk vanguardists, spouting the rock-is-dead rhetoric of the time. Bassist Steve Severin saw rock as “flaccid and perverted,” and in interviews cited influences—Velvets, Roxy, Can, Beefheart—similar to those of their postpunk contemporaries. The Banshees’ sound took shape through a process of reduction and rejection. “It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché,” says Severin. “Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash.”

  Siouxsie wanted a guitar sound like “a cross between the Velvet Underground and the shower scene in Psycho,” says Severin. Early on, the Banshees were often lumped in with Wire, kindred spirits in angularity and emaciated minimalism. Both groups were big fans of flange—a glassy, brittle guitar sound created by a device that doubles the musical signal and then puts the “shadow” guitar slightly out of phase with the main signal. The Banshees used its cold swirl to draw a sharp line separating what they were doing from seventies rock. Heard on their 1978 debut, The Scream, the result was stark and serrated, a mortification of rock, a new cruel geometry achieved within and against the orthodox guitar/bass/drums format.

  Siouxsie’s ice queen voice was equally forbidding, piercing the listener’s flesh like a lance, and it suited the songs. Jagged and jarring, the Banshees’ tunes could be catchy (“Hong Kong Garden,” their debut single, reached number seven in the U.K.), but they didn’t feel melodic. The lyrics, alternately penned by Severin and Siouxsie, espoused a brutally unsentimental view of the world (“Love in a void/It’s so numb/Avoid in love/It’s so dumb”) relieved only by macabre humor. “Carcass,” for instance, concerned a butcher’s assistant who falls in love with a lump of meat and amputates his own limbs on the meat grinder to more closely resemble his beloved.

  Siouxsie defined punk not in political terms but as “disrupting yourself, questioning yourself,” which generally translated as a morbid preoccupation with the dark side of human nature, obsession, unreason, and extreme mental states. Severin’s “Jigsaw Feeling” imagined what it felt like to be autistic, while Siouxsie’s “Suburban Relapse” is a darkly witty sketch of a housewife having a breakdown: “Whilst finishing a chore/I asked myself ‘What for?’” Siouxsie observed, “You look at these homes and realize how many of the women are out of their minds within these pruned rose gardens. There’s something about the containment of emotion within suburbia.”

  Severin and Siouxsie knew suburbia intimately. They grew up in neighboring towns on the southernmost fringe of London. But the pair actually met on the other side of the city, at a Roxy Music concert at Wembley Arena in 1974. Glam fans, they had no truck with punk’s do-it-yourself egalitarianism. “Anyone can’t do it,” quips Severin. The Banshees believed in maintaining an enigmatic distance from the audience, both offstage (“That whole concept of the Clash letting their fans stay in their hotel rooms,” chuckles Severin, “I mean, no, we’d let them stay out in the rain!”) and in performance. “There’s something magical about a stage,” muses Severin. “You think of all your favorite people, such as the Doors, and you can’t imagine them being the blokes next door. The stage is their church. That’s what appealed about the intelligent side of glam, the fact that there was some kind of theater going on, a drama was being presented.”

  This side of the Banshees emerged on 1979’s Join Hands with “Icon” and the protracted “cover version” of “The Lord’s Prayer,” songs that set the template for Goth as a modern pagan cult tapping into atavistic pre-Christian urges. “With ‘Icon’ we were trying to create music that you could get lost in, an intensity of sound that was hypnotic, ritualistic,” says Severin. The song is loosely inspired by the story of a Polish priest who set fire to himself, but sounds more like a hymn to Siouxsie, an “icon in the fire” of Goth desire.

  After an early personnel upheaval—the defection of drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay—the Banshees recruited the more conventionally skilled John McGeoch (formerly the guitarist in Magazine) and drummer Budgie for Kaleidoscope. As the title suggests, Kaleidoscope shifted from the monochrome severity of the first two albums to a more vivid palette of textures. The Banshees even sounded pretty on U.K. hit singles “Christine” and “Happy House.” But 1981’s Juju was the Banshees’ most perfect statement, every song a chip off the same lustrous jet-black block. The album blueprinted an absurdly large proportion of Goth’s musical and lyrical themes. With “Sin in My Heart,” “Voodoo Dolly,” “Halloween,” “Spellbound,” and “Night Shift,” the Banshees explored ideas of magic and the supernatural for the first time.

  In 1982 the Banshees recorded two songs that were virtual Goth manifestos. On “Fireworks,” Siouxsie chants, “We are fireworks,” an exultant image of self-beautification as a glam gesture flashing against the murk of mundanity. “Painted Bird,” from A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, paid homage to the Banshees’ audience, inciting them to “Confound that dowdy flock with a sharp-honed nerve/Because we’re painted birds by our own design.” Its inspiration was Jerzy Kozinski’s novel of the same title, the protagonist of which collects birds. “When he was feeling really aggressive or frustrated,” Siouxsie explained, “he’d paint this bird with different colors, and then throw it to its flock. And it would recognize its flock, but because it was a different color, they would attack it.”

  From its bejeweled, Klimt-inspired cover imagery to its exquisite textures, 1982’s Dreamhouse marked the Banshees’ plunge into fin de siècle decadence. Musically, the influences were English psychedelia: the Beatles, Syd Barrett, Traffic, and the Gothic-bucolic Donovan of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season of the Witch.” “Dreamhouse really started with the words for ‘Cascade,’” says Severin. The imagery of “liquid falling” seemed to demand the melting of Siouxsie the ice queen and the unveiling of a hitherto suppressed side to the Banshees: deliquescent, sensuous, and on “Melt!” (their first-ever ballad) languidly erotic. Circa The Scream, the Banshees’ music was “sexy” like J. G. Ballard’s Crash. But now, inspired partly by Severin’s reading of Ballard’s latest book, The Unlimited Dream Company—“where the imagery is very lush, sensual, exotic,” he says—the Banshees were making the perfect seduction soundtrack.

  Their most adventurous and varied album, Dreamhouse nonetheless signaled that the Banshees had outgrown the Goth audience they’d helped to create. They closed out 1983 with Nocturne, a live double album recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. The Banshees had become too popular in a mainstream sense to
remain the focus of cult love, the essence of Goth. Around this point, Robert Smith became the Banshees’ guitarist. His own group, the Cure, was closer to Goth lite, steeped in existentialist sources similar to Joy Division (the early Cure single “Killing an Arab” was inspired by Camus’s The Stranger), but replacing Ian Curtis’s barely disguised death wish with Smith’s despondency and doubt. Attractive on 1979’s translucent-sounding Seventeen Seconds, the Cure’s sound became a dolorous fog on Faith and Pornography. Smith’s withdrawn vocals, the listless beat, and the gray-haze guitars made for some of the most neurasthenic rock music ever committed to vinyl. These oppressively dispirited albums cemented the Cure’s Goth stature and laid the foundation for their megacult following among suburbia’s lost dreamers.

  At the furthest extreme from the Cure’s mild version of Gothic despair lay the Dionysian conflagration of the Birthday Party. Prayers on Fire, released in 1981, opened with the tribal bedlam of “Zoo-Music Girl.” The punk-funk love song oscillates violently between devotion and devouring, sacred and profane, offering a vision of “romance” that’s less Nelson Riddle and more Antonin Artaud: “I murder her dress till it hurts…Oh! God! Please let me die beneath her fists.”

  The Birthday Party originally moved to London from Melbourne, Australia, expecting the U.K. to be ablaze with tempestuously innovative groups such as the Pop Group, only to be bitterly disappointed by the cooler direction postpunk had taken. Shelving their well-thumbed copies of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, they veered in a deliberately American direction. When singer Nick Cave and guitarist Rowland S. Howard listed their “consumer faves” in NME, the list included Wise-blood, Johnny Cash, Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, Morticia from The Addams Family, and Lee Hazelwood. Cave was one of the first songwriters to reject postpunk’s ultrarational, antireligious tenor and use Old Testament imagery of sin, retribution, and damnation. Birthday Party’s 1982 release, Junkyard, teemed with American Gothic imagery of Kewpie dolls and evangelist’s murdered daughters. Comic artist Ed Roth did the album cover, a drooling monster at the wheel of a fire-spewing dragster. Howard said the band liked Roth’s work because it “conjures sort of an inarticulacy…and that’s one of the great things about rock music. You don’t have to be thrusting your intelligence into people’s faces all the time. If you’re really smart you know when it’s appropriate to be dumb.”