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 Smith’s withdrawn vocals, the listless beat, and the gray-haze guitars made for some of the most neurasthenic rock music ever committed to vinyl.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.”
Between the decrepit blues of “She’s Hit,” the death rattle ’n’ roll of “Big Jesus Trashcan,” and the roiling quagmire of the title track, 1982’s
Junkyard
sounded like the living end of rock music, its final testament. Amazingly, the Birthday Party retched up two more brilliant EPs,
The Bad Seed
and
Mutiny
. High points included the Disney-noir talking trees of “Deep in the Woods,” the Faulkner-meets-
Deliverance
horror of “Swampland,” and “Mutiny in Heaven,” Cave’s blasphemous vision of a corrupt and derelict heaven riddled with trash and rats, which the group matched with their most three-dimensionally vivid music, a soundscape teeming with gargoyles and bubbling with putrescence. In Goth terms, though, the Birthday Party’s most influential song was the 1981 single “Release the Bats,” an almost campy stampede of vampire sex that topped the U.K. independent charts. The advertisement for “Release” declared, “Dirtiness is next to antigodliness.”
Bauhaus’ own vampire anthem, 1979’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” is generally identified as the ground zero of Goth proper. Singer Peter Murphy’s striking looks—teeteringly tall, gaunt, with a bruised pout and perfect cheekbones—made him a Goth pinup, the ultimate erotic enigma. But what came out of those luscious lips was portentous and preposterous, an overblown farrago of sex and death, religion and blasphemy, uttered in a voice that virtually cloned David Bowie’s. Raised Catholic, Murphy kicked back against his upbringing with sacrilegious ditties such as “Stigmata Martyr,” which featured him reciting, “In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit” in Latin, accompanied in concert by simulated crucifixion postures.
With their shock rock gestures and Grand Guignol grotesquerie, Bauhaus were actually far closer to Alice Cooper than Bowie—exciting, but difficult to take seriously. They had a superb grasp of rock as theater, using stark white lighting to cast dramatic shadows. “It’s important to go to the theatre and escape from the street, use the space, find another element,” Murphy declared. Although their albums tended to sag under the weight of pretension, Bauhaus made flashy, thrilling singles, such as the dark, twisted art funk of “A Kick in the Eye” and the swirling vaporous mystery of “Spirit.” Daniel Ash’s guitar sound bore comparison with Gang of Four or Joy Division at their most harsh and hacking, especially on Bauhaus’ early postpunk-aligned efforts such as “Terror Couple Kill Colonel” and “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” with its fret-scraping guitar scree and metallic dub effects.
If Bauhaus, the Banshees, and the Birthday Party were the crucial groups that bridged postpunk and Goth, Killing Joke was the fourth cornerstone of the Goth sound and sensibility. Like the other three bands, they started out as postpunk experimentalists. In Killing Joke’s case, that meant following PiL’s lead. In 1980, singer/keyboardist Jaz Coleman talked of wanting to keep the funk but strip away disco’s “sugarshit” sheen, replacing it “with mangled, distorted, searing noise.” This element came from guitarist Geordie, who transformed Keith Levene’s sound into something sulphuric, inhumane, practically inhuman. Coleman added jabs of atonal synth and electronic hums, along with the barked menace of his vocals, which sounded like he was choking on his own fury. “Tension music,” the group called it.
Initially, Killing Joke seemed vaguely political. Their striking seven-inch sleeves and micro-ads in the U.K. music press grabbed the eye with images of the pope receiving a Nazi salute from German troops or a top-hatted Fred Astaire tap dancing over a trench full of World War I corpses. The name Killing Joke, explained Coleman, condensed their whole worldview into a single phrase, “the feeling of a guy in the First World War who’s just about to run out the trenches…and he knows his life is going to be gone in ten minutes and he thinks of that fucker back in Westminster who put him in that position. That’s the feeling that we’re trying to project—the Killing Joke.”
Jaz Coleman was an unlikely protest singer, though. A high-caste Brahman Indian on his mother’s side, Coleman was wealthy, well educated, and musically trained (after Killing Joke he became a classical composer). In almost pointed contrast to Coleman’s accomplishment, Killing Joke was conceived as a barbarian entity. Paul Ferguson’s beats were tribal and turbulent. Starting with their second album,
What’s THIS For…!
and reaching fruition on 1982’s awesome
Revelations,
Killing Joke shook off the PiL influence (all the dub and death disco trappings) and emerged as something closer to Black Sabbath: doomy, tribalistic rock that exulted in its visions of darkness and apocalypse.
Coleman saw Killing Joke’s music as “warning sounds for an age of self-destruction.” The end was nigh (“I’ll give it eighteen months,” he said in 1981), but Coleman was glad. The aftermath was “the period of time I’m looking towards at the moment,” he said, when a new, brutally instinct-attuned
un
civilization would emerge phoenixlike from the smoking ruins. Coleman told
NME,
“I see a more
savage
world ahead, right? It’s music that inflames the heart.” Fire was Killing Joke’s favorite of the four elements. They even recruited a fire eater, Dave the Wizard, to do his act onstage with the band. “Fire to me is symbolic of the will power,” declared Jaz. “I think the power of the individual is really underestimated.” Yet it seemed more the case that Killing Joke’s music exalted the power of the mob.
Goth’s appeal to the irrational and primal could sometimes stray into troubling territory, something Killing Joke exemplified. Coleman’s rhetoric—reveling in male energy, describing war as the natural state of the world, jubilantly heralding Armageddon—veered unnervingly close to that dodgy zone between Nietzschean and Nazi. “The violence that Killing Joke is about is not violence on the immediate level but the
mass
violence, the violence bubbling underneath your feet, the violence of nature throwing up,” Coleman solemnly proclaimed. “And we
become
that violence.” Even some Goths felt there was a faintly fascistic aura to the vibe catalyzed by Killing Joke at their gigs.
Latent Nazi tendencies were a source of anxiety in the Goth scene. The flirtation with fascist imagery can be traced back to Siouxsie (who in her early days wore a swastika and sang the unforgivable line “too many Jews for my liking”) and Joy Division. The March Violets took their moniker from the German nickname for those opportunists who joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1934, after Hitler declared himself führer. Nazi innuendos dogged the early career of Kirk Brandon of Theatre of Hate. It didn’t help that Brandon looked like an Aryan pinup and sang operatically, that early Hate releases came out on the SS label, and that the band’s gigs were often preceded by a tape of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Brandon’s allegorical anthems such as “Do You Believe in the Westworld?” strove to make epic political statements, but were fatally garbled, their sympathies open to conjecture. All that really came through loud and unclear was the singer’s desire to push himself forward as a messianic leader. “We’re not a band, we’re a movement,” he declared.
Any suspect totalitarian leanings were mostly held in check by Goth’s opposing attraction to Aleister Crowley’s libertine dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Curiously, given Goth’s attraction to all things forbidden, drugs weren’t especially important on the scene. Rather, the overall vibe of debauchery focused on sexual fetishism and vampy attire—fishnet stockings, black leather thigh-high boots, witchy eye makeup. With its emphasis on self-beautification, the Goth movement connected powerfully with women. “To this day, it’s got a bigger involvement of females than any other subculture,” claims Mick Mercer. Yet the hefty presence of women in the audience didn’t prevent Goth’s rapid degeneration into a sort of postpunk version of that most macho of genres, heavy metal.
The early Goths tended to share the postpunk mind-set of the Banshees. “Rock ’n’ roll” was something to be discarded, left for dead. But the Sisters of Mercy were defiantly rockist. Fans of the Birthday Party, they followed that group’s lead in embracing American imagery and rejecting the Europeanism of New Pop. “There’s an awful lot of dreadful bands coming out of England, especially London,” the Sisters’ singer/conceptualist Andrew Eldritch declared in 1983. “A lot of them come onstage with this, ‘We are not a rock band’ rubbish. So we go the other way—one step forward. We say ‘we
are
a rock band.’ Very loudly.”
This was fighting talk at a time when much of the London-based music media celebrated anything and everything so long as it wasn’t rock. Whether from overseas (Washington, D.C., go-go, New York electro, African music) or homegrown (the faux jazz Sade, the faux salsa of zoot-suited buffoons Blue Rondo A La Turk, the faux everything of Paul Weller’s Style Council), the only thing the disparate mélange of hipster fare in 1983 had in common was the absence of power chords and fuzztone. Aghast at this brave new world in which Nina Simone was a hallowed icon but Iggy was a forgotten boy, the Sisters of Mercy declared war on pop.
An Oxford-educated intellectual, Eldritch admired heavy metal’s stupidity and “relentlessness.” His band treated rock less as an evolving musical form than a repertoire of mannerisms and imagery (sunglasses after dark, speed-emaciated bodies clothed all in black). Displaying a weak grasp of how rock works as a physically involving music, the Sisters used a drum machine instead of a real drummer, while their guitar was atmospheric but insubstantial, the aural counterpart to the dry ice they shrouded themselves with onstage (a knowingly corny attempt at mystery).
The Sisters of Mercy’s “Temple of Love” was
the
Goth anthem of 1983. Its closest rival was “Fatman” by Southern Death Cult, which reached number one on the indie charts that spring. Even by Goth’s deteriorating standards, “Fatman” was a poor excuse for rock. But in some sense, the music was almost irrelevant. Through touring in support of Theatre of Hate, and later Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult picked up the slack left by those groups and by others, such as Killing Joke and the Banshees, when they’d split or gone mainstream.
Southern Death Cult resembled a cross between Bow Wow Wow and Led Zeppelin. They had the tribal tom-tom rhythms, and singer Ian Astbury wore a mohawk just like Annabella’s, along with feather and chicken bone necklaces (a jewelry collection that expanded with each visit to KFC). Astbury had actually spent five years in Canada as a youth, during which time he’d visited American Indian reservations. Returning to the U.K. just in time for punk, he became totally involved in 1977’s revolution. When punk died, Astbury felt rudderless and turned to Native American culture for spiritual sustenance. The name Southern Death Cult itself came from a Mississippi Valley tribe that maintained burial mounds and shrines.