Ziggy Stardust has endured as a rock and roll myth because it has its basis in something terrifyingly real. Bowie had already lived through the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, ‘strong’ romantic heroes who — quite self-consciously in Morrison’s case — pushed at the limits of life and paid the price. He knew better than most that the message of these stories is not a moral one. And Ziggy is prophetic, too. When Bowie first unveiled the album in 1973, the world had yet to witness the likes of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain. These were singers who, in a very real sense, died because of their audience’s emotional expectations. They expressed suffering on behalf of their fans, and their deaths came to be understood as the logical end point of that suffering. The moment of panic Billy Corgan experienced at Lollapalooza, as recorded in ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ was a result of his realisation that he’d been cast as the lead in a Ziggy-like tragedy, in which his own fans demanded his head so that the show they’d come to see would have a proper ending.
Back in the days of the Ancient Greeks, the first tragedies were performed to accompany the ritual sacrifice of a goat. The name itself comes from the word tragodia, meaning ‘goat song’.2 So when Gerard Way invites us along to witness a tragic affair in the opening moments of The Black Parade, two thousand years of tradition say that blood will have to be spilled. And by insisting that the suffering we are about to witness must be his own, the romantic artist has put himself forward as the most likely candidate. By the end of the album Way has come to understand this. Like Ziggy Stardust, The Black Parade ends with an amoral conclusion. After the smoke has cleared, the Patient is wheeled back onstage on his hospital gurney to perform a jaunty cabaret number called ‘Blood’:
Blood, blood, gallons of the stuff,
give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough3
Earlier in the album, Gerard had promised blood — he just had no idea the kids would want so much of it. Here, the tragic hero resigns himself to his fate; his fans want blood, and he’ll give it until his veins run dry. He is, he explains, their favourite dish. Billy Corgan felt the same way, and expressed the feeling in similar terms — though without Gerard’s weary resignation. ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ contains a dizzying mix of metaphors, which is part of its charm. The singer’s terror and paranoia will not allow him the peace of mind needed to choose his images carefully — they tumble out of him in a great flood. When he compares himself with Jesus, he’s evoking the image of the sacrament, the idea that he gave up his body and his blood so that his fans might mosh. But this is a thought that’s grown out of an earlier one — the great statement Corgan delivers, a cappella, at the beginning of the song: ‘The world is a vampire’.4
Corgan evokes the sexualised threat of the vampire to describe the way the music industry, the media, and even his own fans seem to be slowly draining him, body and soul. It’s an image Gerard Way has returned to again and again. The horror hospital scenario of ‘Blood’ and the nocturnal cannibalism described in ‘The Sharpest Lives’ are the last drops of a great tide of vampire imagery that flowed through My Chemical Romance’s early work. They became so well known for it, in fact, that Gerard swore no more for The Black Parade. But somehow, a couple of those pesky bloodsuckers crawled in there. They are, as Way explained in an online interview with X V Scott, almost unavoidable in his line of work:
…there’s just something about the bloodsucking walking dead that can say so much to people. There are really so many people trying to get control over you on a daily basis and…take a part of you.5
Count Dracula: ‘He stood a stranger in this breathing world’.
The Vampyre
CONSIDERING HOW LITTLE time he had for romanticism of any stripe, it seems odd at first to learn that Goethe admired Lord Byron. This, after all, was the same Goethe who wrote off the flood of gloomy sentimental prose that appeared in the wake of The Sorrows of Young Werther as ‘the literature of despair’, and who blasted the French romantics of Delacroix’s generation for perpetrating ‘aesthetics of the grotesque’.1 For Goethe ‘romantic’ usually meant ‘deranged’, if not merely ‘badly done’. If he was so down on despair and derangement, what could he possibly find to admire in the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage?
Goethe, as Gerhart Hoffmeister has shown, did not renounce any of his convictions for Byron’s sake — but he did make an exception for him.2 To Goethe, Byron was a special case, for the simple reason that he was a natural genius, to whom no rule could apply. He belonged, not with other poets, but with Napoleon. Creatures such as these, Goethe believed, could not be judged by society’s laws, because their very purpose in life is to break free of those laws — and any others they might find along the way — forever. It’s this highly idealised Byron — spontaneous genius and rebel angel — that Goethe paid tribute to by including him as a character in the second book of his epic drama, Faust — completed just before Goethe died in 1832. Here, the poet Goethe claimed to love like a son has become Faust’s son, Euphorion.
Euphorion: let me be springing,
Let me be leaping,
Pressing on, mounting,
Through the clouds sweeping,
Strong these desires
In my thoughts run
Faust: gently, ah gently,
Be not too daring,
Lest in disaster
All of us sharing…3
True to life, Euphorion does not do as he’s told — he’s a force of nature. When he dies, it’s as a flaming ember shooting up to the stars. White light, white heat; Euphorion appears in Faust only briefly, but burns very brightly.
In 1819 Goethe got hold of a new prose work of Byron’s called The Vampyre. The story, published in The New Monthly Magazine, had all the elements Byron’s fans had come to love. Brooding, black-clad anti-hero of noble birth? Check. Secret sorrow? Check. But The Vampyre had a new twist, the gloomy protagonist was not just deathly pale in the approved Byronic mould, he was actually dead. Or rather, he was undead, a ghoulish parasite feeding on the blood of the living. Like Byron himself, The Vampyre seemed to present a distorted mirror image of ourselves — a creature loosed from moral restraints for whom the only good is what brings pleasure. And as always with Byron, the protagonist was scandalously identified with the author himself. It was a dead giveaway, really — the vampire’s name, Lord Ruthven, was the same as the one given to the Byron character in Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon. This, even for Byron, was daring stuff. Putting the story down, Goethe proclaimed it the poet’s best work yet. But here Goethe was wrong on at least one count. The Vampyre wasn’t Byron’s. Well, not exactly.
After leaving England in 1816, Byron had paid a visit to the field of Waterloo before stopping in Switzerland at the Villa Diodati by the shores of Lake Geneva. Here, he’d settled in to write the last two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He later described his circumstances, with typical understatement, to the poet Tom Moore:
I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law…4
At Lake Geneva Byron was plagued by a horde of celebrity spotters, clamouring for a glimpse of the scandalous poet. There was also the usual parade of not-so-secret admirers, including the highly resourceful Claire Clairmont, who’d enjoyed a fling with the poet in London and had now, it seemed, journeyed eight hundred miles to ‘unphilosophize’ him, as Byron put it.5
The good news in all of this was that Claire had come with her stepsister Mary Godwin (daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) and Mary’s husband-to-be, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Theirs was a whirlwind romance — only two weeks earlier the couple had been courting by Mary’s mother’s gravestone. Now, following a bizarre honeymoon in war-torn rural France, they were staying at a house
at the base of the hill below Byron’s villa. Byron, bored out of his skull by the company of his physician, John Polidori, welcomed the more stimulating conversation of the Shelleys.
Byron and Shelley took walks in the surrounding countryside visiting places they knew from Rousseau’s books, and discussed Wordsworth’s latest poem, ‘The Excursion’. But the weather soon turned nasty, which not only kept the literary conversation indoors, but seemed to demand literature of a type better suited to thunderstorms. Byron suggested that the holiday-makers should each try their hand at writing a ghost story. But according to Mary, the great poet’s enthusiasm for the project quickly ran out.6 He wrote only a small fragment of a story about a vampire. In his biography of Byron, Frederic Raphael makes the interesting suggestion that, in producing a story in which the victim is ‘drained of blood by battening predators’, Byron may have been inspired by his own situation — besieged by celebrity spotters and groupies who all wanted a piece of him. Raphael wonders whether it was ‘this aggrieved sense of being constantly drained’, which led Byron ‘to concoct a little fragment which added a fanged twist to the Gothick repertoire…’7
Polidori’s contribution to the contest — concerning a woman with a skull for a head, was by Mary’s account, laughably bad. But he made up for it later. The temperamental doctor took up the idea Byron had laid aside and expanded it, over the next year or so, into a novella called The Vampyre — the very same one Goethe enjoyed so thoroughly. Goethe can be excused for his confusion over the story’s authorship. The New Monthly, without Polidori’s permission, published The Vampyre as a new work by Byron.8
Although he didn’t write it, Byron’s hand is all over The Vampyre — and not just because the original idea was his. Polidori’s tale effectively updated the old folkloric version of the vampire for nineteenth-century tastes by ‘Byronising’ him. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven is exceedingly pale, is burdened by a secret sorrow, and preys on society ladies and young girls. All of this gives him an irresistible allure — he’s always being invited to parties ‘in spite of the deadly hue of his face’, and once he gets there he ‘gaze[s] on the mirth around him as if he could not participate therein’. Ruthven is both a very thinly veiled portrait of Polidori’s former master, and an attempt to capitalise on Byron’s notoriety and the perceived threat of romanticism to the stability of bourgeois society. The Vampyre invites the reader to imagine the damage that could be done to a well-ordered world by a creature with an insatiable passion and no moral qualms to speak of.
Polidori’s modifications to the vampire would survive intact in his most famous appearance, in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. And since it’s Dracula that’s won over in the popular imagination as the definitive version of the monster, the Byronic traits that Polidori introduced to his character are now fixtures. For this, we have Hollywood to thank. F W Murnau’s expressionist classic Nosferatu (1922) was an unofficial adaptation of Stoker’s novel. But the real breakthrough for the Byronic vampire was Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s exotic, cape-wearing aristocrat defined the look and the manner of movie vampires for decades to come, and Browning’s Dracula was to become the foundation stone of an entire vampire film industry, which flourishes to this day
In June 1983 a film by Tony Scott called The Hunger opened in cinemas, starring David Bowie as Blaylock — a pale, aloof, aristocratic vampire living in 1980s Manhattan. The Hunger received terrible reviews, (‘incoherent and foolish,’ said the Observer),9 but it did contain a few striking set pieces, including the opening sequence set in a nightclub and cut to the rhythm of Bauhaus’s 1979 single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’. The band appeared on screen, performing the song inside a cage under stark expressionist lighting, while singer Peter Murphy — frequently criticised for being a Bowie copyist — did nothing to shake off the comparison. The song, like the movie it appeared in, was brilliant nonsense. Over skittering rhythms and disorienting dub effects, Murphy paid tribute to the world’s most famous movie vampire in a voice as deep as the hollows under his cheekbones. Meanwhile Bowie, as Blaylock, surveyed the club’s clientele with a mixture of predatory lust and superior disdain.
Casting Bowie as Blaylock was an inspired choice. The vampire is an easy role for a rock singer to play, for the same reason that ‘rock singer’ makes a good disguise for a vampire. Both are a threat to society because of their voracious sexual appetites and their indifference to conventional morality. It would already have been assumed that Bowie — as a rock and roll star — came out at night, preyed on young women, and shrank in terror from crucifixes and holy water — all that was missing was the teeth and the cape (and Bowie wore a few of those in the ’70s too). Peter Murphy, as the singer in a darkly glamorous post-punk band, would have been perceived in much the same way, and his pale skin and skull-like features only added to the ‘creature of the night’ effect. And of course, it went without saying that neither had any time for bourgeois morality. Bowie had spent the last decade demolishing taboos with the disdain of an alien aristocrat, and Bauhaus were already (much to their dismay) seen as standard bearers for a musical movement that dressed in black, came out only at night, and despised nothing so much as middle-class suburban conformity. Over the next ten years, the adherents of this new post-punk religion would turn The Hunger from a box-office turkey into an object of worship. The scene in the nightclub would be endlessly rewound and replayed in teenage bedrooms across Britain: ‘undead, undead, undead…’
Goths
WHILE The Hunger was playing in cinemas, an unusual nightclub tour was making its way around Britain. The Batcave promised to bring unsavoury sounding entertainment from the likes of Alien Sex Fiend, Flesh for Lulu and Specimen to Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, and any other English town foolish enough not to have stocked up on garlic and crucifixes in advance. This Batcave had begun as a Wednesday night happening in a Soho club called, appropriately, The Gargoyle. The flyers promised something ‘thoroughly nasty’1 and guaranteed ‘absolutely no funk’.2 Not that there wasn’t dancing — here, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ had become a certified floor filler along with other nocturnal odes such as The Birthday Party’s ‘Release the Bats’ and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Spellbound’. The regulars were described by David Johnson in The Face magazine as looking like ‘Dracula meets the Muppets’.3 The décor was Victorian romance gone to seed, with posters from classic 1930s horror movies on the walls. Very quickly, the denizens of the Batcave came to resemble their surroundings — here you could see make-up by the living dead, clothes by Count Dracula, and hair by the Bride of Frankenstein.
‘You had to take a lift up to the top floor, which used to be a hostess club’, recalled Soft Cell singer Marc Almond. ‘There was a little theatre where stripteases used to take place and they used it to watch gothic movies, or bands would perform there, and you could see people like Robert Smith hanging out at the bar.’4 In 1983 the makers of a BBC documentary on The Batcave lamented the lack of any proper celebrities to film — but they may have turned up on a bad night — or maybe it was just too dark. ‘The usual tykes were spotted flaunting their disease-wracked bodies at the Batcave last Wednesday night’, wrote a Sounds reporter in 1983, ‘Including (yawn)…a fat Siouxsie Sioux, a dazed Nick Cave’.5
No-one will ever know exactly who first used the word ‘Gothic’ to describe the scene that moved into the Batcave and soon became synonymous with it. But the best story comes from The Cult’s Ian Astbury. Long before he started fronting the resurrected Doors, Astbury was playing Jim Morrison to Peter Murphy’s Bowie in the early goth scene with his first band, Southern Death Cult. Astbury remembers giving Andi from Sex Gang Children a nickname:
I used to call him the Gothic Goblin because he was a little guy…and he lived in a building in Brixton called Visigoth Towers.6
This is an unusual name for a block of flats. The Visigoths were one of a number of Germanic tribes whose migrations across Europe led to the weakening and finally the co
llapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Inspired by the success of the Ostrogoths at Hadrianopolis in 378, the Visigoth’s king, Alaric, successfully sacked Athens in 396, and then Rome itself in 410. This, in turn, put a strain on the Empire’s resources, making it easier for the Burgundians to push back the Romans and establish their own Kingdom in the Rhone valley. From here, occasional victories notwithstanding, the Roman Empire went into decline, and Europe as we know it began to take shape.7
The ensuing historical period — which lasted from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance around the fourteenth century — was considered by most Enlightenment historians to be a sort of temporary interruption in the course of Western civilisation — a lapse into primitivism from which Europe had, thankfully, begun to recover. By the eighteenth century, it was far enough away to seem like a bad dream. Sanity had been restored, and the arts and sciences could begin to reconnect with the knowledge of the ancients, to pick up where the Romans had left off before their glorious civilisation had been overrun by Goths and the world had been plunged into darkness.
That’s why in the Age of Reason the worst thing you could say about a building, a painting or a poem was that it was Gothic. This was, unsurprisingly, an Italian put-down, coined during the Renaissance to describe the spooky, mystical and (to the refined fifteenth-century mind) not very well-drawn art of the Middle Ages — as well as the suspiciously pagan-looking architecture of the period. The term has its origins in a misunderstanding, whereby the makers of these artefacts were assumed to be Goths. But the word stuck because, as art critic John Ruskin points out in The Stones of Venice, medieval building styles ‘appeared like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman in their first encounter’.8 In other words, the Gothic style was an affront to civilisation. In the midst of the great triumph of science, reason and the classical ideal, Gothic buildings, by their very presence, made an unwelcome reproach — at best, they were like family members you’d rather forget you had but found yourself obliged to invite to Christmas dinner.
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 12