Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth

Despite Goth being a particularly British manifestation, both the USA and Australia also provide numerous provocateurs and schlock-troopers.

Over in sunny Stateside, ‘Rocket’ Ronnie Reagan continues with his ham-acting whilst hovering over the nuclear button. The B-movie Rorschach clot ever the pre-scripted marionette and malevolent mouthpiece hell-bent on quelling independent thought and ' un-American' activities. Actively amplifying and typifying Uncle Sham’s existential red-othering via a bogus manufactured monolithic nationhood to abjure growing dissent and obscure a slowing descent.

The Cramps’ psychobilly smarts (“the weird is the true manifestation of punk”) saw them trawl through a recent past to uncover the ill-begotten and forgotten, The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s “whippoorwill wail” of Gold testaments pertaining to the murk that lurks in the backwards backwoods, Diamanda Galas’s confrontational art of provocation, politics and polemics and Lydia Lunch’s reasonable raison d’etre to “shit in the face of history”. Eat that!

From the Antipodes come The Birthday Party’s hellshock, fire and brimstone scorched Earth sermonising and Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell’s sonic-terrorism of found-sounds and noise-poise.

A key theme throughout is the importance and potency of locale, a panoply of psychogeographic parades through place and space in channelling emotions and funnelling exasperation. Post-war town planned spans chock-full of dreamscapers trapped in consumerist comascopes.

The opening up of post-punk splinterlands of shamanic impressions and pseudo-satanic compressions where subtleties are misunderstood and imagistic horrorscapes abound: Yorkshire produces the Bronte sisters as Moors Mirtherers and the Ripper’s twilight terror. Democracy is duly delivered via the whack to the head and spirit crushing bloodshed (The battles of Beanfield and Orgreave).

A period of Cold War context and propagandised paranoia that paradoxically proved fundamental in fomenting fertile terrain for furtive fellows allowing the nether-legions of the bellwether regions (e.g. Berlin; Leeds, New Orleans) and ethereal edge-worlds (Ladbroke Grove; Soho) to emerge and converge en-masse upon the collective psy-che.

In enshrining these foundation myths Unsworth artfully uses the subculture as a lens or prism to examine the numerous cultural, political, technological and social upheavals that occurred. An artistic forwards thrust in competition with mendacious meddling with post-war progress. Craven acts of political perniciousness whose effects depressingly resonate today.

Occultural capital

Unsworth charts a family tree of forebears and progenitors, mothers and fathers, outlining the gene-pool that both fed into and emerged from punk’s splitting of the atomised. A phalanx of goth boot and fingerprints left behind from those doomed by fate and/or riddled with the predestination blues.

Equally rescuing prog from its lazy pejorative usage (‘thoughtcrimes during punk’s year zero’) and rightly situating progressive tendencies at the (he)art of Goth and proudly proclaiming the influential merits (‘transcends kitsch’) of the cinematic-panoramic glamateur-dramatics of film-score settlers such as John Barry, Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone.

Suburban undercurrents and overtorrents

Singing the praises of the perennially unsung, the book closes with an overview of the Cardiacs, purveyors of a sensory assault bric-a-brac racket that astounded and confounded in equal measure.  A uniquely British form of quaint awk-folk whose ghost industrial echoes remain ever audible.

This is a love-letter lament to the freaks, geeks, the oblique-chic that dress to transgress, a cast of alter egos, aliases, pseudonyms and factotums as 'protective shields' and shape-shifting silhouettes left free to roam and gloam.

Alchemisty-eyed

Unsworth's noirish flair floats to the flourished fore as she writes of shrivelled media ghoul Rupert Murdoch as the “vampire over the threshold” when acquiring The Sun newspaper, the act that accelerated his wretched rule of dumb. Additionally there’s a brilliant description of ‘two’ contrasting Elvises: ‘Burger King versus Sun God’.

Throughout it’s hard not to feel dewy-eyed at what once was, a time before the prevalent privatised monetised zones of restricted movement, once common land now commodified blandscapes filtered and altered through incessant surveillance tools. Rebel rhetoric and emboldened eccentricity rapidly co-opted and sold as the high-street’s new range.

Is this the book you’ve always dreamed, felt compelled to write?

Now I have written it, I realise that my lifetime's work has gone into it – everything good I have ever discovered came through my fascination with this music; and the music, film, literature art and aesthetics that informed the bands I got into during the Eighties. My own personal sense of alienation – living in the middle of a field in rural Norfolk in a scary old creaking, clanking farmhouse with shelves full of ghost stories to feed on – was alleviated though the lifeline of John Peel and the music press and I gradually found I was not as alone as I thought. In the little villages around where I lived and in the nearest big town, Gt Yarmouth, were a handful of others like me. Being Goths made it easy for us to spot each other across those large expanses of fields and marshlands!

So, this book begins when my political and cultural awakening really began too, and that was with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. My original title was Season of the Witch: Goth in the Time of Thatcher, as it begins with her coming into office and ends with her being booted out, with the music taking us through the decade as a response to the times we lived through. Not entirely unreasonably, my publisher felt that we shouldn't put her name on the cover as no one would buy it! But it is very much a social as well as epic pop history of 1979-90, with Gothfathers and Gothmothers in each chapter adding a deeper historical context; and also a filmography and guide to building a Gothic Library – Goths being voracious readers, of course.

I started plotting it out when Stephen Coates asked me if I would give a talk on the history of Gothic music in the crypt of Kensal Green cemetery for Walpurgisnacht 2020. The Grim Reaper, in the form of Covid, had other ideas – but by the time, I had written 5000 words and did not want to stop. So, with the encouragement of a couple of friends who thought I had something of value to say about the subject, I turned this into a book proposal. Thankfully I found a sympathetic publisher in Pete Selby at Nine Eight Books who let me write the story the way I wanted to – politics and all – so that name change was the only thing that really differs from my original pitch to him.

I wrote the book in a time of great turbulence, globally and personally, but once I had the green light it happened really quickly. I kept on finding things my younger self had stored away for future reference, really valuable things like the handwritten transcripts of all my interviews from the time before I had a computer (roughly 1987-95), some of which were with people like Lux Interior who sadly are not with us any longer. So, it did seem that this was the book I had always been destined to write and it all poured out of me – grimoire as memoir. After 30 years practice in journalism, novel-writing, biography and teaching, I was accomplished enough at my craft of writing to do it properly.

Is goth a very British bricolage reaction and response to society’s stultifying straitjackets?

I do think the Gothic is something in our DNA. After doing a lot of talks and getting a lot of questions on this subject, I think the Eighties Goths I look at in the book are responding to a nation in trauma – how the Thatcher government used the apparatus of the state, the police, army and the influence of Rupert Murdoch, for whom rules and laws were bent and evaded – to overthrow the Post-War Consensus and inflict on the working class of Britain their own shock doctrine of Free Market Economics. Hand-in-hand with what Reagan was doing in America.

The music these bands and artists made renders those times the same way that previous generations (Gothmothers and Fathers) had recorded theirs – Percy Shelly writing The Mask of Anarchy about the Peterloo Massacre in the time of Lord Liverpool, whose record rein in office was equalled by Thatcher; Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in the year there was no summer; the Brontës seeing the mills go up around them in the Yorkshire Dales. In fact, the best example is probably William Blake seeing 'The Dark Satanic Mills' at the beginning of The Industrial Revolution and then Justin Sullivan from New Model Army quoting Jerusalem in '1984', his song about the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, at the end of it.

This is the tradition I think those bands/artists are adding their voices to, alongside the Romantics, The Decadents, The Dadaists and The Surrealists, who all made startling and provocative statements with their art at times of huge social turmoil. And we still remember those statements and refer back to them, because someone like Oscar Wilde or William Blake could surmise their society or the moments in time they lived through more effectively than any historian. Just as no one will ever bring back what it was to live in late Seventies Manchester more vividly than Joy Division; evoke the terrors of The Yorkshire Ripper like Siouxsie and The Banshees' 'Night Shift'; or write a crystal ball requiem for Civil War to come like The Sisters of Mercy's 'Heartland'. If you want to know what the Eighties felt like, here is your soundtrack.

What does – can – being a goth provide someone trapped in stifling suburbanality, striving to be ‘different’?

Solace, kinship, understanding and, believe it or not – fun! Two Goth stereotypes I would like to smash with this book is the notion that Goth is A. Humourless and B. Apolitical – which I could do with two words: Lydia Lunch. The most fearless, ferocious and hilarious person I have ever met. I think Goth has been looked down on, misrepresented and mocked because it is a very female-friendly, very gay-friendly and very literate subgenre, all of which are not things that the knuckle-draggers like to see flaunted. When I was a 13-year-old watching Soft Cell doing 'Tainted Love' on TOTP that was the moment I knew I was not alone.

And that wherever Marc and Dave were going, I wanted to follow.

There was no such thing as a gay club in Gt Yarmouth, just one pub where freaks of all varieties were safe from the marauding beer boys thanks to the presence of the local chapter of the Hells Angels and the older punks who drank there and tolerated and encouraged us more sensitive types. A lot of my friends were gay but terrified of coming out and so what Marc Almond symbolised for us was incredibly important – he was sending out messages that we could pick up on. That being different is not in fact bad, but actually to be commended. But it's very hard to act on that if you have no back-up and no role models – it was even very hard for Marc Almond to do what he did back then. Being gay may have been technically legal in the Eighties but it was utterly and often violently disapproved of.

Politically goth is partyless, more an embodiment, empowerment and expression of the self through literary and cultural exploration? Discuss.

That is again to suggest that this is a very insular and pretentious movement, disengaged with the real struggles of the world. Tell that to Diamanda Galàs when she was articulating the pain of the loss of her brother and an entire generation to AIDS while the US/UK governments sat back and did nothing for six years. Tell that to Joolz and NMA when they were running through cordons of police to get food to the families of striking miners – and are continuing to play fundraisers for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign to this day, forty years later. Tell that to Lydia Lunch –I dare you!

The one thing that really has shocked a lot of my readers is that Ian Curtis voted for Margaret Thatcher – and not only that, but demanded that his wife Deborah did the same, so as not to "cancel his vote" – even though that information is not new. Which I think goes to show how deeply party-political Goth in the Eighties actually was.

Unlike most other subcultures that exploded from punk goth has shed its former mock-shock tag and is arguably the one that still retains its capacity to shock and awe: stylistically, aesthetically, musically stand out from the co-opted high street show-windowfication of ‘rebellion’. True?

There has been plenty of discussion on this subject at my talks so far – whether the young Goths of today have it easy and don't have to go looking far and wide for their clothes, hair dye and apparel like we did! Which may be true, but part of the fun for me always was the quest – I could never afford to buy Vivienne Westwood's clothes and had to save for months to buy Johnson's boots or La Rocka gear –but I did have a sewing machine and enjoyed the challenge of DIY. Lots of the records that are easily available today were deleted and I spent almost every day rummaging through the bargain bins to find treasure. Finding a copy of The Doors' first LP was like finding The Holy Grail!

Most of my Goth role models made up their looks as they went along, which was also very empowering. I had a particular favourite pic of Joolz from Sounds, looking like Queen Boudicca that was stuck to my wall when I was at Art College, and one of Robert Smith from Smash Hits in my bedroom that I used to style my hair on. I never actually thought I could ever look as good as Joolz, Siouxsie or Lydia – but Robert Smith's hair was achievable.

I think I can see this all reflected in the awesome-looking people who have come to my talks and are young enough to be my Gothchildren. You really don't need a lot of money to look good. I got into the habit of cruising second hand shops as a teenager and still get most of my outfits – and records, books and home furnishings –that way. When I discovered the effect that a pair of crimpers and a bottle of eyeliner could have in protecting me from the unwanted advances of beer boys in my teenage years it was the equivalent of putting on a suit of armour. I am sure it remains the case that for teenage Goths, getting ready to go out is the best bit of the evening…

What’s your take on California’s Cruel World, a ‘festival of goth’?

Compare and contrast with the fliers from the first Futurama Festivals in Leeds – bands and cost of tickets!

Your series of novels – gritty Brit noir, a litany of the characters that lurk in the shadows, those on the fringes of society, quietly resisting social mores – goth in all but name?

Absolutely. The phrase 'history is always written by the victors' is the reason I have written every single one of my books. Noir fiction became my real passion in the early Nineties when I met Derek Raymond, who seemed to me to be the Johnny Rotten of crime fiction. David Peace – like me, a teenage Sisters of Mercy fan – was another massive influence.

Reading his Red Riding Quartet was like getting a slew of new Goth records by old favourites I had never heard before – he absorbed all of that music into his fiction and wrote the same way John McGeoch played guitar. He was equally obsessed with Derek Raymond's black novels and we both ended up with the same editor and publisher at Serpent's Tail – John Williams, who looked after Derek Raymond at the end of his life. So that is another thing that came full circle in the book – I was very pleased to interview David about his teenage years in The Hellfire Club at the epicentre of Goth's Own County as it went though The Ripper and the third cycle of Civil War, the Miners' Strike. And John Williams was one of those people who urged me to write this book.

So yes, on my writing journey, Goth went into Noir fiction at the time Britpop ascended to wipe out what remained of underground pop culture. I don't think I could have written Season of the Witch without having learned everything I did about writing and researching from the making of my six crime novels, most of which are based on or inspired by real, unsolved cases and/or those with aspects of witchcraft. Noir fiction is all about giving a voice to those who have had their voices taken forcibly from them. Which is what I tried to do with mine.

Then I came back to writing about music eight years ago, when I was asked to write Jordan's biography with her. And Jordan was another mystery with a life story that had epic noir proportions…

Would you agree with the argument that goth as a subculture exalts the feminine, dissolves gender and sexual stereotypes through spectacular displays of camp and glam which helps negate misogyny?

I hope it does help to negate misogyny, homophobia and racism – but it didn't do much to help Sophie Lancaster when she came face-to-face with a psychopath. So much for her suit of armour. My dismay at her terrible fate was one of the reasons I wrote Weirdo – essentially, my Goth novel, which was set in 1984 and explored witch hunts and female transgression in the Norfolk landscape of my youth.

However – what else can you do to your oppressor but laugh at them and stick your green-fingernailed talons up in their direction as flamboyantly as possible? Ridicule is nothing for us Goths – we are so used to it – but the very thing all dicktators are most afraid of.

Who would comprise your Goth supergroup?

Andrew Eldritch (vocals), Gary Marx (guitar), Ben Gunn (guitar), Craig Addams (bass), Doktor Avalanche (drums), circa June 1983.