Well, ah tied on…percht on mah bed ah was
Sticken a needle in mah arm
Ah tied off! Fucken wings burst out mah back!10
The positivists would have you choose life. Cave — as Mark Renton puts it in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting — has chosen something else.
Siouxsie Sioux: A hostile and valueless reality.
The Degraded Present
BECAUSE HE FEELS that society should be destroyed, Nick Cave is also a lover of horror — note the appearance of Count Dracula in his list of favourite things. For Cave, death and darkness — being closer to the truth of the human condition — are sublime. Luckily, his baby feels the same way:
My baby is all right
She doesn’t mind a bit of dirt
She says ‘horror vampire bat bite’153She says ‘horror vampire
How I wish those bats would bite’1
‘Release the Bats’ was a certified Batcave floor-filler — for obvious reasons. It would also become The Birthday Party’s most important contribution to the goth aesthetic. As Simon Reynolds shows in Rip it Up and Start Again, Goth first emerged as an alternative to two recent developments in post-punk — the rabble-rousing Oi! movement, and the anarchopunk scene centred around Crass.2 Goth became a home for kids who liked the energy of these bands, but were bored by the politics. Anything with a whiff of romance, darkness and mystery was bound to appeal to them — and ‘Release the Bats’ had plenty of all three.
When the singer in ‘Mutiny in Heaven’, sprouts his ungodly wings and flies out of the twentieth century, he’s offering his listener something no amount of agit-prop or personal politics can provide — an escape route from the world as it is. Siouxsie and the Banshees embodied this same quality. ‘[Juju] was released at the height of the Thatcherite years,’ remarked music writer Keith Cameron, talking to Siouxsie in 2008, ‘yet you seemed to be inhabiting your alternative reality, a horror-show phantasmagoria: Halloween, Voodoo Dolly, Arabian Knights…’
‘Right!’ the singer replied. ‘You’re saying “Thatcherite years”, and I’m going: “Really?!” I wasn’t even aware! We were in our own universe.’3
The flight to this alternative reality is what links together the motley collection of bands who came to be embraced by the ‘white faces’ in the early ’80s, and has been central to the appeal of goth through the decades. The Cure, for example, are not really goth. But to Geoff Rickly of Thursday, growing up in the ’90s, they were of a piece with the other goth bands he liked because they seemed to offer an escape route from the present day.
‘The goth and British bands I liked had the same visceral kick as regular punk but it seemed more like a place for me, a space you could inhabit. Something far away from reality.’4
Similarly, for Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and Davey Havok of AFI, the appeal of goth is precisely this escape from the present day, an escape that punk with a capital ‘p’ can never allow. In Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult, The Damned, Alien Sex Fiend, The Virgin Prunes and The Sisters of Mercy, the Britain of 1979–84 is only suggested by its absence. All these bands made the leap out of what Alex de Jonge calls ‘the degraded present’ and into something out-of-time, something eternal and unchanging.5 Siouxsie and The Banshees’ ‘Spellbound’ invokes the world of the irrational, dreams, magic and madness. Siouxsie asks us to cast our minds back to childhood and the ‘beckoning voice’ that seemed to call us through the cradle bars. These deep-seated urges, she insists, cannot be ignored — they define us for all time, and all our efforts to civilise ourselves, from pre-school onwards, are reduced to nothing when we hear this siren-sound again.
You hear laughter
Cracking through the walls
it sends you spinning
you have no choice6
The contrast with the Leeds positivists couldn’t be more complete. In ‘Love like Anthrax’, Andy Gill scoffs at the idea that, deep in the human soul, there are permanent emotions that everyone can relate to because they have not changed in thousands of years. If this is true, what hope do we have of perfecting society? None at all, says the goth. We can’t change, because we’re not lumps of dough, but unfathomable mysteries, full of primitive urges and recurring nightmares. These timeless and tragic emotions have haunted humanity for thousands of years, and will continue to haunt us for thousands of years to come.
This, for the punk activist and pop deconstructivist alike, is almost unforgivably backward. That’s why, when they went looking for a name for this unwelcome eruption of romantic gloom in their new pop universe, critics of the day settled on ‘gothic’. The word had almost the identical connotations it had for the reviewer of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto — ‘gothic’ meant superstitious, irrational and unhealthily obsessed with love, religion and death. The implication was — haven’t we grown out of all that stuff?
But these criticisms ignore the fact that the goth’s attachment to the timeless and the tragic is the result of the very same ‘Enlightenment’ that the pop optimist claims to advocate. Nick Cave, like Wordsworth, would eventually find his God, but for the majority of the romantics — including Shelley, Keats, Byron and Goethe — such simple faith was impossible. Romanticism, as Norman Davies has observed, is characterised by a profoundly religious temperament — a longing to believe.7 But more often than not, when the romantics, having found no satisfaction in the modern world, went looking for God, they found him gone. The blame, as usual, lay with Newton and his followers, who in the rush to rid Christianity of its mystery, had rationalised God into a corner, and finally out of existence.
Blasphemous Rumours
THEY MIGHT HAVE been signed to the same label as Nick Cave, but in the musical world of the mid ’80s Depeche Mode were clearly aligned with the pop positivists — those who would analyse the clichés and conventions of our behaviour with a view to creating new relations between people. And like their philosophical forebears, Depeche Mode were fearless in their quest to expose dogma and nonsense to the cold hard light of reason, even if it led them — as it had Newton — perilously close to Blasphemy. On side two of their 1984 album, Some Great Reward, Gahan tries to unravel the greatest mystery of all: why, if God is good, do bad things happen to good people?
Girl of 18
Fell in love with everything
Found new life in Jesus Christ
Hit by a car
Ended up
On a life support machine.1
Gahan and Gore wrote ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ after noticing something odd about the church services they’d attended. At the end, the priest would read out a list of those in the congregation suffering from serious illness, ‘and the one at the top always died. But still everyone went right ahead thanking God for carrying out his will. It just seemed so strange.’2 The conclusion was inescapable. In the song’s insanely catchy chorus, Gahan sings:
I don’t want to start any Blasphemous rumours
But I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find him laughing.3
Gahan’s accusations were so bitter, and the song struck such a chord, that eventually, God’s representatives on earth were moved to speak up in his defence. A priest from Depeche Mode’s home town of Basildon spoke to the press, saying, ‘If we can say God so loved the world that He sent His only son…if he did that, he cannot have a sick sense of humour.’4 Which is all very well, but Depeche Mode’s questions still nag. Why create us with the capacity for happiness and deny it? Why bring us into the world and then visit us with every kind of horror? Here Gahan, as Nick Cave would later put it, calls upon the author to explain.
Edward Scissorhands: Did I solicit thee, from darkness to promote me?’
Paradise Lost
In Edward Scissorhands, Edward never gets to confront his inventor, never has the chance to accuse him of leaving him stranded in the world, half-finished, with a burning desire for love and hands that prevent him from to
uching anybody. But Frankenstein’s monster does. What’s more, his recent reading material, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, gives him a powerful language with which to present his accusations:
I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.1
When God created Adam, the monster asserts, he provided for him, gave him guidance, direction and a companion. But Frankenstein sees his own man of clay not as a son, but as a mistake made at work — a botched job he threw in the bin and hoped no more would be said of it. Now the botched job has learned to talk back, and is demanding justice:
You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you thus sport with life?2
It’s all right for you, he seems to be saying to Frankenstein — you have a creator who loves and accepts you. The only thing is, we’re not sure the monster is right. By comparing himself to Adam and Frankenstein to God, the monster is inviting a comparison that made Mary Shelley’s readers realise how little difference there was between the two cases. This is the sting in Shelley’s tale; Frankenstein invites us not so much to imagine Frankenstein as God, but to imagine God as Frankenstein — creating a man on a whim, and then kicking him out of doors on another, leaving him to fend for himself, like a failed experiment. The quotation from Adam in Paradise Lost on the title page of Frankenstein makes the point even clearer:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?3
Milton was a towering figure for the romantics. From 1658, the exiled poet spent seven years writing Paradise Lost, a Christian epic that tells the story of the creation of the world, of Lucifer’s fall from heaven and of Adam and Eve’s sin and expulsion from Paradise. Milton was deeply religious, yet as Karen Armstrong points out in her fascinating book A History of God the most likeable character in Milton’s epic is not God or Christ but Satan. ‘Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe,’ she writes, ‘he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown.’4 In fact, it’s Milton’s Satan, the rebel angel, who would later become enshrined as a romantic hero — the prototype of Napoleon and Byron. When Frankenstein’s monster tells his maker that he feels he has been cast out of heaven, he is, once again, being very romantic.
But if Satan is the hero of Milton’s epic, where does that leave God? There is, as Armstrong points out, something truly horrible about the God of Paradise Lost.5 It’s not that there’s anything radically out of the ordinary in Milton’s portrayal of the deity. He displays the traits that have been attributed to him since the Old Testament — omniscience, omnipotence and all the rest of it. But it’s precisely these traits that make him so unlovable. Milton’s admirable desire to explain his religion to himself forces him to reconcile God’s all-powerfulness with the suffering the human race has had to endure, and this pushes his God into some awkward postures.
God explains to his son, for instance, that he has given Adam and Eve their own free will and the power to resist the temptations of Satan. But he knows they won’t, because he’s God and he knows everything in advance. What’s the point of allowing them free choice if he already knows they’re bound to fall? God’s answer to this amounts to his saying that this way, he gets to have his cake and eat it too. He can keep being all-powerful, but Adam and Eve can’t blame him for the bad things that happen to them because they have free will. Thanks a lot, God.
It gets worse too. Later the archangel Michael is sent by God to reassure Adam that his descendants will find their way to redemption by discovering the true religion, Christianity. Michael treats Adam to a sneak preview of the next few thousand years of exile and suffering, culminating in God’s sending his only son down to earth to redeem humankind. At this point, Armstrong writes, ‘It occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this torturous plan with its constant failures and false starts, is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its author.’6
This God, who appears to be either hopelessly incompetent (he can’t prevent suffering) or monstrously cruel (he can, but he won’t) was a particular problem of the Enlightenment. It was, Armstrong insists, the attempt to rationalise God’s existence which had made him so unbearable.
The Disappearing God
BY SPREADING THEIR blasphemous rumours on Top of the Pops in 1984, Depeche Mode incurred the wrath of The Sun newspaper and Britain’s self-appointed moral guardian, Mary Whitehouse. But if Martin Gore had published his verses in 1750, he would have found himself in far worse trouble — atheists were routinely locked up during the eighteenth century.
And yet many Enlightenment thinkers found that they were inexorably drawn to deny the existence of God. By looking to science for the answers religion had formerly provided, the Age of Reason had already relegated God to a less conspicuous role. Newton’s scientific view of the universe held that nature and the physical world operated by a kind of clockwork. The machine was vast and complex, but essentially logical, meaning that its secrets would, given time, be discovered and understood. But the very existence of this clockwork implied for Newton that there must have been, or still be a clockmaker — and this is where God fits into the scheme.
Gravity may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine power it could never put them into such a circulating motion as they have about ye Sun, and therefore for this as well as other reasons, I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this systeme to an intelligent Agent.1
Newton’s ‘Rolls Royce’ universe dominated the Western imagination until long after his death, but for Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in 1750, it wasn’t nearly good enough. Hume objected to Newton’s argument for God from design. If the universe is the work of a supremely intelligent overseer, he asked, then how does Newton account for the existence of evil? Does God make mistakes, or does he mean to see us suffer?2
Hume, as Karen Armstrong notes, chose to leave his refutations of Newton — which implied his atheism without ever stating it — unpublished, but Denis Diderot was not so cautious.3 The French Philosophe was imprisoned in 1749 for publishing ‘A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’ — the strongest dose of atheism yet administered to his century. The letter presents an argument between a Newtonian called Mr Holmes and Nicholas Saunderson, a blind professor. ‘Diderot’, writes Armstrong, ‘makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such “monsters” and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning.’4
They could lock Diderot up, but by this point, the horse had well and truly bolted. The rational enquiries of the Enlightenment philosophers had left humanity with a God who resembled the one in Depeche Mode’s song to an extraordinary degree — a deity who was incompetent at best, malicious at worst. Diderot, for one, declared that he could do without such a being, and many more would come to the same conclusion.
The romantics inherited this unlovable and useless God, which was a shame, because with an alienating industrial future rising in front of them, and the bitter disappointments of the Revolution still lingering behind, they could really have used a ‘loving father’ of the kind imagined by Schiller in his ‘Ode to Joy’. The great sense of crisis in romantic literature comes to a large extent from a feeling of having been shot by both sides — betrayed by the cult of reason on the one hand, and by a disappearing God on the other. Keats, in 1819, found himself in exactly this position, as his biographer Robert Gittings describes:
He did not believe…in the perfectibility of earthly life; indeed, perfect happiness in life, he saw, would make death intolerable… Yet the Christian idea that the common hardships of this world were only a miserable interlude before the blessed state of anot
her struck him as ‘a little circumscribed, straightened notion’.5
Keats admired Voltaire. At a dinner with Wordsworth and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, he had raised his glass in the direction of Voltaire’s likeness and drunk his good health. For Keats, Voltaire’s determination to do away with the ‘pious frauds of religion’ made him a hero. Some time later, back at Haydon’s and standing before the same painting, he placed his hand over his heart, lowered his head and said of Voltaire, ‘There is the being I will bow to.’6
But while he admired Voltaire’s intellectual bravery, the thorough-going rationalism of the Philosophes did not square with Keats’s feeling for mystery — a quality he believed to be essential to poetry. ‘He could not be satisfied with a complete and negative scepticism,’ writes Robert Gittings in his biography of the poet. ‘Somewhere, he must find a faith.’7
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 16