December 28, 2016 |
You might be surprised to learn there are currently rumblings about a goth revival. The hottest new guitar band in the country is an all-girl quartet called Savages. They dress in black and sound, on the evidence of their recent debut single, Flying to Berlin, not unlike Siouxsie and the Banshees. Then again, rather than surprise, you could be forgiven for feeling a certain déjà vu at this news.
There were rumblings of a goth revival a couple of years ago, when a sombre, if slightly operatic, singer called Zola Jesus was tipped for big things, the X Factor contestant Aiden Grimshaw was being styled to look like a something out of the Twilight movies, The xx won the Mercury Prize with a debut album that sounded not unlike The Cure, and a genre rejoicing in the title of “witch house” was the coming thing in dance music. At the time I interviewed a member of witch house’s leading practitioners Salem. “I don’t know why people call us goths,” he protested, to which the fairly obvious answer seemed to be: “Because you’re called Salem, you play something called witch house, your album has got a big crucifix on the front cover and it’s called King Night. You might as well have called yourself Gordon Goth and the Gothtones.”
And there were rumblings of a goth revival a few years before that, when The Horrors first arrived – with their hair dye and their pointy boots and their drummer called Coffin Joe – and Russell Brand was accomplishing the not-unimpressive feat of having it off with half the female population of London while dressed as a member of Fields of the Nephilim, and the big shock-horror news story was the emergence of a teeny cult called emo (dyed black hair, badly applied eyeliner, mopey demeanour, a liking for My Chemical Romance, whose songs were called things like Dead!, Cemetery Drive and It’s Not a Fashion Statement, It’s a Fucking Deathwish). They sounded like goths to me, but the Daily Mail went particularly beware-this-sick-menace about emo, branding it the Dangerous Cult of Teen Suicide – the last time it had got that excited about a bunch of black-clad youths, they’d been marching through the East End with Oswald Mosley and the Mail had been encouraging its readers to join them.
That’s three putative goth revivals in just over five years – pretty good going, even by the nostalgia-obsessed standards of the post-Britpop music business. But I’m starting to think you can’t actually have a goth revival, for the simple reason that you can’t revive something that never went away in the first place. These weren’t and aren’t revivals so much as reminders of the fact that goth is always with us. Appropriately enough, given how closely its adherents model themselves on the undead, goth is the youth cult that refuses to die.
Certainly, it seems to exert a unique, lifelong hold over its practitioners. A sociologist called Paul Hodkinson has published research into the dogged refusal of goths to stop being goths despite their advancing years, while the curious world of the middle-aged goth is well represented on the internet, where you can find people selling goth childrenswear (babygros bearing the legend I’M A LITTLE DARLING), goth parents-wear (T-shirts featuring the words I’M DEAD, with the E crossed out), websites that organise crèches at goth gigs and encourage goth parents to send in snaps of themselves with their kids for their Goth Family of the Month page, and details of goth bring-and-buy sales and meet-ups for professional goths working in the City.
There are various explanations offered as to why. Some people think middle-aged goths feel disinclined to hang up their crimpers and crushed velvet because they feel an unbreakable bond of belonging and community. Others have suggested it’s because goth’s brand of rebellion is largely stylistic – there’s nothing anti-establishment about being a goth other than the look, nothing about it that’s antithetical to getting a job and a mortgage and having kids. While others have pointed out that goth is the one remaining youth cult that you can still get beaten up for being a member of (or worse: in 2008, two men were given life sentences for kicking 20-year-old goth Sophie Lancaster to death in Bacup, Lancashire). If you’ve had to defend your sense of identity and style harder than anyone else, perhaps you feel less inclined to give it up as you get older.
You could say the phenomenon of the middle-aged goth is all the more striking because goth is the one look that has resisted assimilation into fashion’s mainstream. A few years back, a trend forecaster in The Independent claimed that Victoria Beckham had “gone goth”, but, put it this way, she didn’t look much like the ladies who flock to the annual Whitby Goth Weekend to enjoy not just the sounds of Gene Loves Jezebel, but also the goth pool competition, the goth dog walk and – I’m not making this up – the Real Gothic Ladies FC vs Whitby Gazette Girls penalty shoot-out. You could, if you so desired, dress like a rocker or clad yourself exclusively in clothes from Brighton’s mod emporium Jump the Gun and pass virtually unnoticed in the street – mod’s sharp lines, Fred Perry shirts and desert boots have long passed into the standard male wardrobe; likewise the 501s, white T-shirt, leather jacket and quiff of the rocker, or the spiked hair of the punk. But you can’t really be a goth without standing out as a goth.
It’s the one youth cult that comes with clothes that haven’t been toned down slightly by designers and high street stores so you can wear them without provoking comment, in much the same way that the music that goths love has never really been accepted into the pantheon of “classic rock”. You never see The Sisters of Mercy or All About Eve or The Cure in those 100 Best Albums of All Time lists. You never get The Mission on the cover of Mojo magazine. The mainstream thinks – as it has always thought – that goth is thunderingly uncool. It was never hip to be a goth, not even in its early days, and certainly not in its commercial heyday, when The Sisters of Mercy were on Top of the Pops and The Cure could briefly claim to be the biggest band in the world. That was 1988-1990, when if you were cool, you were listening to acid house and the Happy Mondays. It has always existed at a remove from fashion, which may explain why the various rumoured goth revivals of recent years have never come to pass. Having a revival implies an adherence to ongoing trends, and you can’t really have a trendy goth – it’s a contradiction in terms.
But if you’ve never been in fashion, you can’t go out of fashion, which accounts for goth’s ongoing appeal to kids. If you look at teenagers in 2012, the only ones who are identifiable as a member of any youth cult at all look like goths. You don’t see skinheads or psychobillies or ravers or any of the other cults I remember from my own youth; you just see goths. They might like music that sounds more like heavy metal than traditional goth rock, or identify themselves as emos, but they’re dressed in black, they’ve got piercings and dyed black hair, the boys have a bit of eyeliner on. It’s the last form of youth rebellion left that still has a hint of youth rebellion about it. The existence of the middle-age goths with their bring-and-buy sales and penalty shoot-outs notwithstanding, goth somehow still carries the tang of adolescent alienation, parental rows and slammed bedroom doors, which is pretty appealing if you’re (a) an alienated adolescent, or (b) a rock band that wants to project an image of otherness, of rebellion, of somehow being apart from the common herd. It has always attracted the same kinds of reaction from anyone who isn’t a goth: from bemusement to outright hostility. In an era when nothing appears to shock about rock and pop music anymore, when there’s a generation of mums and dads who love gangster rap, and the people who gobbed at The Clash are old enough to be grandparents, there’s something hugely appealing about possessing the ability to get people’s backs up, to launch the guardians of public morality at the Daily Mail into a frothing rage simply by the way you dress and the music you like. What rock band in their right minds wouldn’t want to tap into that?
Perhaps only goth can still do this. There’s something hugely admirable about that – it might be the last bastion of teenage rebellion left in a world where teenagers dress, more or less, like their parents. So let’s raise a pint of snakebite and black in salute.
Text by Alexis Petridis
Taken from Issue 44 of 10 Magazine
@alexispetridis
