The Art of Darkness

Intro

From the fall of Rome to the birth of Instagram. One thousand five hundred and thirty-four years. The sheer time span alone would be enough to convey the ambition behind “The Art Of Darkness”, the encyclopedic 650-page volume that writer John Robb has devoted to the history of goth music (see note at the end of the page). Because the red (blood) thread linking the deeds of the Goths to the very last neo-dark outfit of the 2000s is far thicker than one might imagine, confirming how a movement hastily dismissed as “ephemeral” (what could be more “out of fashion” today than a goth kid?) actually has deep roots and has evolved and cross-bred over the years thanks to a peculiar sensibility capable of transcending genres. As a firm believer in the broadest possible reading of genre, this writer can't help but be pleasantly struck by Robb's inclusive vision, starting with his insight in calling a classic rock institution like the Doors the “first goth band”, a group not usually perceived as belonging to that universe. Then again, Robb, 62, speaks with authority: not an academic, but a former musician and deep connoisseur of the British underground thanks to his time in Membranes, as well as a respected music journalist through various books and his webzine Louder Than War.

But let's take it slowly, because if Rome wasn't built in a day, imagine what happened after its fall…

The genesis

If the roots of rock are usually traced back to the early twentieth century, dusting off the blues chants of the Mississippi Delta, Robb – as noted – goes further, rewinding the tape all the way back to 24 August 410, when Rome was brutally sacked by an army of Visigoths led by King Alaric. The event had an immediate impact across the whole Empire, shaking it to its moral core: it was described by Augustine of Hippo as a sign of the imminent end of the world (“De civitate Dei”), while the theologian Saint Jerome claimed that “in one city, the whole world perished”. The Visigoths left the city, but the myth of Rome's inviolability had definitively collapsed. By the end of the fifth century AD, the Western Roman Empire no longer existed (its end is generally set at 476, the year Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus). “Ever since then, the term gothic has been associated with walk on the dark side”, notes Robb, recalling how the Gothic cathedrals of the late Middle Ages would soon supplant the classical style. The origin of the term “gothic”, on the other hand, can be traced back to Raphael's famous letter to Pope Leo X (1519), in which the artist, embodying the true spirit of the Renaissance, joined Baldassare Castiglione in rather unflattering judgments of Gothic architecture, “lontanissima dalla bella manera de' Romani”.

Gothic as “barbaric”, then (though Robb doesn't overlook the “gory glory” of classical Greek tragedies either), but also as the epitome of that darker, more macabre medieval imagination, which also drew on a series of myths and legends of Roman origin: tales of ghosts, witches and assorted beasts that fed what Robb calls “The dark age of superstition”. An era populated by unsettling creatures such as French werewolves, Scandinavian gjenganger ghosts and Norwegian trolls, Irish banshees (does the name ring a bell?), Romanian strigoi zombies and Portuguese bicho-papão bogeymen. A horror backdrop that would go on to shape the imagination of Romanticism and Gothic literature. Writers such as John Keats, William Blake, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley thus serve as “proto-goths”, alongside a French poète maudit like Charles Baudelaire, whose “Fleurs du mal” instinctively evoke – for rock obsessives – the rotting “Flowers Of Romance” of Public Image Ltd. In a long, poisonous trail running from the forerunner Horace Walpole and his “Castle of Otranto” (1764) to the most famous novels of Edgar Allan Poe, from the morbid obsessions of the Marquis de Sade to the nightmares of H.P. Lovecraft, Gothic fiction spreads a cloak of dark suggestion that links up with Sturm und Drang but also with the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the decadent aesthetics of JK Huysmans, and even the occult witchcraft of Aleister Crowley. A complex and varied cultural backdrop that would find striking new impulses in the twentieth century.

To all this, Robb adds an equally important piece: the fairy-tale dimension of childhood innocence set against murky fantasies, which pervades stories like those of the Brothers Grimm or Lewis Carroll, author of “Alice's Adventures In Wonderland” and “Alice Through The Looking Glass” (the latter phrase, incidentally, later borrowed by Siouxsie for one of her famous covers albums).

“Goth, in short, isn't just about black nail polish and lipstick, but the product of many artistic currents – as Robb explains in a recent interview with Diego Ballani for Rumore – All these currents embraced melancholy and the dark side of the human soul. Two of goth's greatest sources of fascination, sex and death, underpin both graveyard poetry and post-punk music. The figure of Nick Cave is in some ways similar to that of a modern Lord Byron. So the music wasn't born in a vacuum, it was steeped in this kind of feeling: the atmosphere, the reasons it existed, and the lyrical content were the same”. A sensibility that at a certain point begins to seep into popular culture. “We could trace it all back to those famous evenings in Geneva when Lord Byron and other writers challenged each other to write ghost stories – Robb adds – That's where works like Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’, Polidori's ‘The Vampyre’, LeFanu's ‘Carmilla’ and Bram Stoker's ‘Dracula’ came from. But to the overall picture we also need to add the fascination with Halloween, which especially in the United States represents a hugely important cultural element. All of this laid the groundwork for twentieth-century horror, which Hollywood helped make popular the world over”.

The sacred rock trinity

Right, but what about the music? Beyond an easily identifiable golden age of dark, roughly coinciding with the advent of post-punk and new wave, the flirtation between the Gothic and popular music began to show itself many years earlier. Take a figure like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, “the first shock rocker”, star of wildly theatrical shows accompanied by macabre stage props (skulls, Gothic costumes and voodoo symbols), as well as author of rock's most famous curse, “I Put A Spell On You” (later made known too through the cover by Creedence Clearwater Revival); or the “satanic” overtones of the Rolling Stones combined with Mick Jagger's proto-glam androgyny, or again the crepuscular poetry of Leonard Cohen, capable of exerting an incalculable influence on entire generations of noir “bards” (from Nick Cave onward), or finally the most hallucinated psychedelic nursery rhymes of the early Pink Floyd, the demonic symbolism of Black Sabbath and the occultism of Led Zeppelin, entangled in Crowley's black magic.

Robb, however, identifies a kind of “sacred trinity” of dark, three bands that in some way shaped the birth and evolution of the phenomenon. First of all, as mentioned, the Doors, led by that “modern Byron” named Jim Morrison, whose artistic points of reference are rooted in Romanticism (starting with that same Blake who evoked the “doors of perception”), but also embrace Antonin Artaud's “Theatre of Cruelty” (see “the killer awoke at dawn” in “The End”), a Dionysian, Nietzschean-inspired exuberance (“The Birth Of Tragedy”), and even the visionary triptychs of the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

“Sex. Death. Psychodrama. The Doors were the true forefathers of goth rock”, Robb states, also recalling how their “People Are Strange” would become an anthem for urban zombies in the Brat Pack horror film “The Lost Boys” (1980).

After all, Morrison's baritone voice, wedded to the band's dark imagery and the Californian outfit's baroque sound, already hinted at many of the future dark scene's hallmarks, and it was precisely with them that the term “gothic” was used for the first time in rock criticism (in a review of their first New York concert in 1967). It's almost superfluous, finally, to recall the mark left by Morrison and co. on a cornerstone band of that scene like Siouxsie and the Banshees, who would pay tribute to them with an unsettling cover of “You're Lost Little Girl”.

Hot on the heels of the Doors came Iggy Pop's Stooges, among the most fervent disciples of the bacchanals of Jim Morrison and co. The Detroit Iguana was struck dumb by seeing them live and picked up their wildest, most feral charge, turning himself into one of the most transgressive performers of all time. At the same time, though, he stripped down their poetics into a desolate outlook that already anticipated punk nihilism. All it takes is two words, then: No fun. And that's that.

Last but not least, completing the (un)holy trinity of dark rock's forebears, are Velvet Underground, with the desperate nihilism of their disturbing urban tableaux, packed with alienation, loneliness, physical and moral perdition, sadomasochistic love, drugs, prostitution, violence and crime. With them, the West Coast sun sets over New York's basements, giving way to darkness through estranging, obsessive rituals (viola drones, the drone in general), sealed by the detached, alienated singing of Lou Reed, who would become one of the cornerstones of goth, just as his sepulchral female alter ego was embodied in the disquieting voice of Christa Paffgen aka Nico. It's no coincidence that the most famous song performed by the German singer with Velvet Underground, "All Tomorrow's Party", would retrospectively be described as a "mesmering gothic rock masterpiece" by American critic Kurt Loder.

Wham bam thank you glam

But between the proto-goth heroes and the protagonists of the most fertile and successful dark era, there's a hugely colourful bridge called glam rock. That's why we borrowed the title of the dedicated chapter in "The Art Of Darkness", which paraphrases a line from a famous Bowie song ("Suffragette City"), to spell out a connection that's often overlooked but crucially important. If it's highly likely that "punks were the bastard children of Ziggy Stardust", as Gavin Friday of Virgin Prunes once put it, it's almost beyond dispute that the entire darkwave scene found its chief guiding spirit in David Bowie. Everything in the London dandy's arc ended up deeply influencing the black-clad generation: from the dystopian, horror-tinged visions of concept albums like "Ziggy Stardust" and "Diamond Dogs" to shape-shifting and sexual ambiguity, from Kubrick-esque cinematic suggestions ("A Clockwork Orange" above all) to theatrical, icy, decadent crooning. All his masks - from the alien Ziggy to the alienated (and thoroughly unsettling) Thin White Duke, from the Orwellian cracked actor to the neo-romantic pierrot of "Ashes To Ashes" - always concealed something mysteriously bleak, a grotesque morbidity capable of casting a spell over entire generations of fans. "Bowie," Robb tells Rumore, "was the true architect of the '70s, a monstrously creative decade for music. Every one of his albums had a different sound, and, just as importantly, a different look to match. It's often said that goth is nothing more than glam turned black, but Bowie was also crucial for the new production techniques used on the albums he made with Tony Visconti. Many of those who went on to become goth musicians grew up on glam. In interviews he'd cite Burroughs, cut-up techniques, the Beat poets, Velvet Underground. All of that was unknown territory for British youth at the time. For all those kids, Bowie tore away a veil and showed them what lay beyond their bedroom walls."

If Bowie was certainly the most beloved and influential phenomenon of the glam era, the contribution of the man who was the undisputed trailblazer of that multicoloured season, at the helm of T. Rex, can hardly be denied: the "white swan" Marc Bolan, whose mark on punk and goth was no less significant, as testified by many key figures of that era, starting with Siouxsie Sioux, whose own look - electrified black hair, heavily kohl-rimmed eyes - was reportedly influenced by an eccentric Bolan appearance on the TV show Supersonic in the mid-'70s, at least according to Mark Paytress's account in "Bolan: The Rise And Fall Of A 20th Century Superstar". The English singer herself, for that matter, has openly acknowledged her debt to the Bolan-Bowie duo: "After them, everything was different; male singers wanted to be effeminate, female singers wanted to be masculine. It was an era of great sexual freedom. Punk then sharpened that rebellion further; that's how girls started becoming tougher and more aggressive, scary even."

Glam, then, as music of liberation from the oppressive ideological cages of the '70s, but also as a cult of decadence and melodramatic ornateness that would go on to shape the fortunes of the dark era. While brilliant bands born in that season such as Roxy Music and Sparks would bequeath to gothic that touch of jarring eccentricity needed to mark out the dogmatic lines of punk (and here again is Siouxsie, with her disarming cover of the Mael brothers' "This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us"), and while the glamour-tinted Lou Reed of "Transformer" essentially just updated the ghosts of Velvet Underground for a new sexual revolution, it was above all the macabre "shock rock" of Alice Cooper that left a deep mark on the goth scene to come, with his tales of mental disturbance, phobias, necrophilia and murderous urges, wedded to shows populated by reptiles, cascades of blood, guillotines and electric chairs. A grand guignol vision of rock capable of spawning countless converts, ranging conceptually from the Bela Lugosi of Bauhaus to the pantomime of Kiss and the theatre of horror of Marilyn Manson.

The black wave

It is punk, however, that unleashes the long wave of darkwave. Through some miraculous alchemy, as often happens in the history of popular music, a series of disparate elements fuse together: legacies of the past and the spirit of the times, cultural and subcultural influences and fashion, creative urgency and music-business marketing. All of it converges in the birth of a phenomenon that - as Robb observes - found in punk and post-punk the language best suited to the moment, one able to place music at the very centre of young people's lives. As if gothic were, at bottom, simply the dark offshoot of the "no future" era, the next stage in a revolution that had profoundly reshaped the very approach to making music under the banner of do-it-yourself, allowing for a proliferation of bands unimaginable just a few years earlier.

The punk revolution swept both sides of the Atlantic, led on one shore by the Ramones, and on the other by the tandem of Sex Pistols and Clash. Along with countless bands of every stripe came curious figureheads too, like Jordan, the SEX shop assistant turned style icon with her born-performer attitude, using her own body as a form of artistic expression. In the book, she serves as an ideal guide to uncovering the true essence of a movement that wanted to sow "anarchy in the UK".

For dark music to be born, however, punk first had to die. Or at least turn into something else. Crowning that turning point was a generation of mutant hybrids, capable of bending the urgent, minimalist language of the blank generation to the most disparate sonic grammars (from gothic to electronics, from the avant-garde to funk), sketching out new aesthetics and new historical vantage points. They would call it post-punk, or new wave, or both.

Here too there's no shortage of grey eminences and godfathers, duly cited in "The Art Of Darkness". Besides the glam-rockers already mentioned, one need only trace things back to the horror-shock of Cramps and the abysmal gloom of Hawkwind's space rock, whose hypnotic sounds - as Robb notes - would prove a key influence on bands such as Killing Joke, Joy Division and Sisters Of Mercy; just as one certainly can't forget the role played by the chilling electronic pantomimes of Suicide (among the founding fathers of new wave as a whole, alongside other New York pioneers of the CBGB school such as Patti Smith, Television and Talking Heads), as well as the darkest fringes of krautrock (Can, Neu!, and even more so Amon Düül) and the "total" electronics of pioneers Kraftwerk, perhaps crossing paths with the Berlin-based Thin White Duke ("From station to station, back to Dusseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie", as "Trans-Europe Express" put it). If we really want to stretch the point - and Robb doesn't miss the chance to bring her up - there's even the very young neo-gothic heroine Kate Bush, grappling with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights on her debut single ("Wuthering Heights", indeed).

In short, an immense melting pot of influences that the gothic generation would end up absorbing and reshaping into new forms, following the classic "remake/remodel" mechanism (there's Roxy Music again, coincidence?). And this is where John Robb takes on the (nearly) impossible mission of the book: to bring order - establishing who came first and how the hierarchy runs - to the densely tangled web of dark artists spanning from the late '70s to at least the mid-'80s. A time when an army of black-clad figures in trench coats, leather jackets and Dr. Martens, but also fishnet stockings, fetish corsets and striking make-up, burst onto the scene. Stirring together the varied mix of aesthetic references that Robb sums up as follows: "Early glam, B-movies, camp and kitsch art, trash aesthetics, '60s psychedelia, late-Romantic poetry, fascination with Dadaist avant-gardes and the neo-Victorian era, but also with the urban desolation of Berlin and the metropolitan hell of New York, plus a healthy dose of dandy androgyny lifted straight from Bowie-Bolan." A voluptuous, sexually fluid universe, in which "the boundaries were often as blurred as gender itself, and visual fetishes were a constant."

Siouxsie and (then) the rest

Could it really be a punk infiltrator - indeed, even a groupie of the Sex Pistols' infamous Bromley Contingent - who gave birth to goth as we know it? According to Robb, probably yes, even though Siouxsie "hates the term goth," as do her bassist Steven Severin and many other artists tied to the movement. After all, the author explains, "no musician wants to be pigeonholed into a scene, especially one that didn't even exist when they started out." And yet, Siouxsie, with her witchy look and Cleopatra-style kohl-rimmed eyes, will forever remain "a goth icon, a constantly evolving work of art." During the Banshees' golden era, hordes of girls made up and dressed like her (the so-called "Suzettes") flocked to British clubs. And the credit isn't due solely to the undeniable charisma of the mysterious Susan Janet Ballion, capable of putting forward a female archetype that was at once romantic and aggressive, sensual and untameable, thoroughly unwilling to bend to the macho standards of the music business.

But the revolution wrought by Siouxsie and the Banshees - named after the film "Cry of the Banshee" starring Vincent Price - is also, and above all, musical. "I don't think it's ever been stressed enough just how innovative that band was," Robb points out in his interview with Rumore. "Especially on the first two albums, with Kenny Morris on drums and John McKay on guitar: they had a sound that seemed made of glass. No one had ever sounded like them, and plenty of bands, like the early Joy Division, were influenced by it. The sonic sparseness of Joy Division and that sense of emptiness running through their songs was already there in the Banshees' music. With them, punk's narrative took new directions for the first time and became the blueprint for what would come to be called goth."

Simple, isn't it? Just to set the record straight for revisionists and detractors of the most famous female icon of the goth era. The dates back this up too: it's 20 September 1976 when, at London's 100 Club, the Banshees launch into 20 minutes of harrowing improvisation based on "The Lord's Prayer", during the Punk Festival organised by Malcolm McLaren, also featuring Sex Pistols and Clash (for the occasion, Siouxsie and Steven Severin recruit Marco Pirroni, future guitarist of Adam & The Ants, and Sid Vicious on drums!). Siouxsie instantly floors the crowd with her unmistakable voice: mournful, booming, hypnotic, sensual. But her bleak, aggressive, unsettling stage presence causes just as much of a stir. "Sign the Banshees - Do It Now" reads the graffiti on London's walls in early 1978. In July 1978, eleven years after the Doors episode - as Robb recalls - the term gothic gets attached to another band: "Parallels and comparisons can be drawn between the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees and that of gothic rock architects like the Doors and the early Velvet Underground," writes critic Nick Kent. A few months later, in March 1979, he would use the term again in reference to "Secondhand Daylight", the second LP by Magazine, the band fronted by Howard Devoto, who had quit Buzzcocks saying "what was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat".

In autumn came “The Scream”, Siouxsie's debut album, which marked the split from the “no future” ethos of her punk cousins: the Banshees' music, in fact, favours archaic lyrics and shadowy atmospheres, leaning on murky sonorities, echoes, reverbs and jarring distortions. A mood halfway between horror and occult mysticism, which finds its natural vehicle in the London rocker's macabre cabaret style and which would develop even further in subsequent works (in particular “Join Hands”, 1979, and “Ju-Ju”, 1981). Siouxsie updates, in an even darker and more melodramatic key, the bare, sepulchral atmospheres of Nico, the songwriter who, as mentioned, remains a touchstone for generations of goth fans.

Still with one foot in punk sonorities, “The Scream” marked the start of a new season, because, as Robb writes, “after the frenzy of punk, Baudelaire's dark flowers were now really beginning to bloom”. Joy Division too were labelled “gothic” by critic Tony Wilson when, in September 1978, they signed to Factory. Meanwhile, bands like Wire and Public Image Ltd. (where the muezzin-like John Lydon landed after his stint in the Sex Pistols) steered punk into new waters, shaping a much deeper, more atmospheric and hallucinated sound, one that heightened the sense of disorientation even further, and which linked back to the work of other wave pioneers such as Stranglers and Ultravox!. All of them determined to shake off the rote formula in order to make room for keyboards and sophisticated arrangements: precisely the prog fetishes that Sex Pistols & co. had banned outright. “It was the punk generation reacting to the endless anguish of living in the UK, surrounded by crumbling post-industrial buildings and the nightmare of the Cold War. The apocalypse party had begun”, Robb notes.

The map of darkness

And so goth was born. An underground phenomenon that spread in patches across the whole of Great Britain in the late '70s, the undisputed stronghold of the movement. Riding the wave of decadent Bowie/Roxy Music-themed nights – but also following in the footsteps of the lysergic trips of the Cramps – alternative clubs blossomed in every corner of Albion, from cult venues like the Phono in Leeds or the Batcave in London to underground clubs in small satellite towns such as Bradford, Northampton, Wakefield or Crawley. Often they were simply “alternative discos” where dark music spread while also cross-pollinating with a seemingly opposite universe, black music (so much for the supposed racism some critics go on about). “It was a key influence – says Robb – Goth embraced the rhythm and nuance, the sensuality and spaciousness of black dance music. Many goth musicians absorbed the sinuous beats of disco and funk into their music. Siouxsie was a disco fan, the Sisters Of Mercy covered 'Emma', a soul-pop track by Hot Chocolate, and on 'Alice' all they did was freeze the neo-disco groove of the drum machine, while the tribal beats of Killing Joke were laced with funk and disco – their 'Follow The Leathers' mixed Donna Summer with the apocalypse – and Bauhaus's own 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' was built on a dark form of dub”.

There is no single true epicentre of the phenomenon: while the capital, London, can boast the iconic mask of the queen of the night Siouxsie Sioux, Manchester answers with the hypnotic, agonised litanies of the late Joy Division's Ian Curtis (“not a goth band in the classic sense, but one able to exert an enormous influence on the scene through its immersion in the dark side of existence”), while Liverpool can claim the darkly Doors-esque new psychedelia of Echo & The Bunnymen, but above all the Sound of the equally luckless Adrian Borland.

It is, however, another city that stakes its claim as the possible dark capital: the leaden Leeds. Already home to the iconic Phono, the Yorkshire steel town soon became one of the movement's cornerstone locations, also giving birth to one of the undisputed messiahs of the goth scene, Andrew Eldritch, whom Robb describes as “a shadowy and charismatic figure who morphed from a diligent Clark Kent-type student into a nocturnal frontman”, putting his crypt-deep voice at the service of the Sisters Of Mercy and their wild danse macabre, driven by a legendary drum machine that was even given a name, Doktor Avalanche: no compendium of the goth era could leave out their “Marian” and “Temple Of Love”. And from their ranks would also emerge the no less gloomy repertoire of Wayne Hussey's Mission.

But there's also remote Northampton, ready to exhume the vampiric remains of Bela Lugosi('s dead), the subject of the first anthem by Peter Murphy's Bauhaus, boosted also by the far-sighted work of broadcaster-DJ John Peel and destined to rise to the role of the movement's grotesque outpost, fusing the macabre, dissonant tones of dark-punk with the theatrical attitude of glam rock through memorable nightmares and relentless horror-dances. From the outskirts of Hertfordshire, Stevenage to be precise, comes the echo of Fields of the Nephilim, cowboys of the Apocalypse with their occult, obsessive rituals, capable of giving the genre a connotation that had never been so intellectual and esoteric, where Sergio Leone's western desert serves as the backdrop to the pagan rites of Aleister Crowley.

And while you have to venture into remote Basildon to take part in the “Black Celebration” of synth-pop pioneers Depeche Mode – who were also heavily influenced by darkwave at a crucial stage of their career – from Crawley, Sussex, come the essential Cure, led by that guiding spirit of an entire generation named Robert Smith, determined, after his stint alongside Siouxsie, to turn the band's early post-punk into a funereal, decadent darkwave, distilled in the trilogy “Seventeen Seconds”-“Faith”-“Pornography”. “A masterpiece of melodramatic melancholy”, this last one, which would earn them the transformation “from raincoat band to a fully-fledged gothic outfit” – what could be more goth than an opening line like “it doesn't matter if we all die”? (“One Hundred Years”) – as Robb points out, also recalling the psychedelic charge of their trips, almost a dark version of acid blues' lysergic journeys, riding the wake of Smith's nightmares, “a modern Peter Pan eternally locked in his little room of neurotic insecurity, emotional poetry and fervid imagination”. A path that would continue over the years through various genres, but always with one foot inside their impenetrable Forest.

In “The Art Of Darkness” other names crucial to the movement's spread on British soil also get a chapter each, even though they are not usually identified among the movement's promoters. Take, for instance, Public Image Ltd., who, through the very figure of John Lydon, made explicit more than anyone else punk's crossing over into the misty fog of darkwave, with their claustrophobic, alienating psychodramas, between Metal Box and the Baudelairean “Flowers Of Romance”. Or the no less visionary Damned, led by Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible, the first English punk band to release a single (“New Rose”) and, at the same time, among the founders of gothic rock with their theatrical blend of garage, psychedelic rock and cabaret. Or again the pirate Adam Ant, a dazzling, daring performer who – as Robb writes – “seemed to embrace sex and danger at the heart of punk” and who, in a later phase, “would develop his provocative nature by creating a gothic, neo-romantic prototype”. And finally the Chameleons, with their post-punk psychedelia turned pitch-black, and Jaz Coleman's Killing Joke, lords of chaos “capable of combining powerful dub, tribal funk, neoclassical melodies, tank-like riffs and apocalyptic vocals” in a sort of permanent wait for Armageddon. “Not goth but definitely dark”, Robb decrees.

Finally, there's room for lesser-known and certainly underrated acts, such as the poignant Lords Of The New Church of the emaciated, charismatic Stiv Bators, Luton's UK Decay, often credited as the first band to be pinned with the “goth band” label, and Bradford's Southern Death Cult, the first, short-lived incarnation of Ian Astbury's group, destined to win over the dark faithful under the name The Cult, in particular with the essential “Love”, a meeting point between evocative darkwave and Zeppelin-esque temptations. All of them seeds of a “black fever” that would spread very quickly across the whole of Great Britain, going on – as so often happens – to influence the rest of the Old Continent.

But plenty of room is naturally also given to the leading names of dark music beyond Albion's shores. Starting with those Irish “cousins” who could hardly avoid feeling the effects of their geographical closeness to the deeply gloomy Britain of the Eighties. In particular, in Dublin's Lypton Village the diseased seeds of a band like Gavin Friday's Virgin Prunes would sprout, unmatched in staging a chilling Dadaist cabaret, full of screams and blood, black masses and frenzied dances, in the vein of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. A macabre, pagan ritual that would reach its peak in the 1982 masterpiece “…If I Die, I Die”. Among the members of the Ballymun circle were also two boys named Paul Hewson and David Evans, later better known as Bono Vox and The Edge of U2. The same starting point, then, for two careers that would run parallel and almost complementary to one another: one underground, the other under the spotlight.

It is instead above all the metallic clanging of Berlin's Einstürzende Neubauten that represents the Art Of Darkness of Teutonic stamp. A claustrophobic, noise-driven sonic imprint that captures all the tension of a city torn apart by the Wall in the depths of the Cold War, laying the groundwork for the movement's future industrial branches (from Nine Inch Nails onward). “The duality of Blixa Bargeld and co. – writes Robb – was deliciously shocking. The music was brutal, magnificent and original, with all the guttural power of the German language manifesting itself in an era of Anglo-American musical dominance”. The homeland of kraut-rock, after all, had helped forge that cauldron of countless styles called new wave, of which the dark current became a sub-genre. And the German variant of the Neue Deutsche Welle would spawn interesting acts related to the dark scene, such as Gudrun Gut (drums, guitar, vocals) and Bettina Köster's (vocals, saxophone) Malaria!, of whom Robb also reports earlier accounts tied to their experience at the “Eisengrau” fashion shop in the Schöneberg district. An extremely fertile scene that would produce leading artists such as Nina Hagen, Grauzone, Abwärts and Xmal Deutschland, as well as a cornerstone act like DAF (Gabi Delgado and Robert Görl), whose synth-punk minimalism would germinate into EBM, passing through martial, outrageous anthems such as “Der Mussolini” in a whirl of obsessive rhythms, the sublimation of Körpermusik, the most authentic and visceral encounter between the body and the machine.

And it is again in Berlin that the fates of Einstürzende Neubauten and the gothic bard par excellence, the Ink King Nick Cave, cross paths: at the dawn of the '80s, having left behind the fetid basements of Melbourne (Australia), he was still leading his Birthday Party, “armed with their dark-hued vision of the future, with a sound in which Shakespearean drama and Byronic poetics mixed with criminal violence but also melancholy beauty”, as Robb points out. In a single so programmatic even in its title, “Release The Bats”, according to the author, all the dark charge of the project is condensed, capable of detonating first in the underground goth clubs of London and then Berlin. After all, Cave fully embodies the prototype of the Byronic artist, with his passion for literature and poetry mixed with a maudit attitude, the result of a life of excess and addiction. Long black hair, gaunt face, a deep, gloomy gaze, King Ink, leading his Bad Seeds, would remain one of the other key “masks” of a gothic scene from which, however, he would gradually try to distance himself, tempering his early blood-soaked blues-rock bacchanals into a “total” singer-songwriter art. But it remains beyond dispute – Robb notes – that his powerful, blasphemous vision makes him one of the pillars of “modern gothic”.

Robb also doesn't forget other only seemingly marginal scenes from the dark-hued Old Continent of the '70s-'80s, such as the French post-punk scene, Belgian new beat (a direct forerunner of hardcore techno) and Dutch darkwave led by the brooding Clan Of Xymox and Gathering, or the formidable Yugoslav new wave (with a separate chapter for the martial industrial of Slovenia's Laibach) and the more mysterious experiences of Eastern Europe (think of Poland's Siekiera and “Nowa Aleksandria”), as well as Scandinavian (Norwegian, in particular) black metal, also mentioning Italian acts like Neon and Gaznevada (but forgetting others no less relevant, such as Litfiba and Diaframma).

And then, of course, there is the intricate cartography of across the pond, to which the chapter titled “American Gothic and Dark Art of the American Dream” is devoted. In an imaginary cultural journey that goes from the Southern Gothic of rural backwaters to the futuristic Gotham City, Robb traces the coordinates of an America “obsessed with religion” and which, precisely for that reason, has often “danced with the devil”, ever since the days of the earliest bluesmen and rockers – from Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley, via Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Having covered the sixties' heart of darkness, embodied by the trinity of Doors–Stooges–Velvet Underground, American rock then repeatedly fed on gothic suggestions, from the psychobilly liturgies of the Cramps to the chilling art music of Suicide, not to mention the role played by the Greek (though San Diego-born) muse Diamanda Galas, with her demonic litanies steeped in death and dark literature. After all – as Robb observes – America's fascination with the dark side had deep roots, from bizarre figures like Vampira, a 1950s TV host, to cult films by George A. Romero such as “Night Of The Living Dead” (1968), all the way to the veneration of Halloween. And the end of the hippie utopia, symbolically marked by the tragedy of Altamont (where, during a Stones concert, eighteen-year-old African-American Meredith Hunter was killed, stabbed by members of the Hell's Angels' violent “security detail”), would help create a climate of growing gloom that would go on to influence many bands to come: “Its was getting dark out there”, John Robb concludes.

So even American punk has its own “dark side,” which the author traces above all to crucial underground experiences such as the heart-pounding beach-punk assaults of Black Flag, fronted by the “caged animal” Henry Rollins; the horror punk of the Misfits, driven by Glen Danzig’s shock baritone; the murky imagery of Lydia Lunch, the Queen Of Siam; the beach-punk with dark undertones of X, led by priestess Exene Cervenka; the nascent noise-psychedelia of Michael Gira’s Swans; and that “orchestra of death” called Type O Negative, capable of melting gothic, heavy metal, hard rock, pop and progressive into its incandescent magma.

But it’s above all with the death-rock rituals of Rozz Williams’s Christian Death that American goth builds a valid and disruptive alternative to the British brand. Their debut “Only Theatre Of Pain” (1982) – as Robb recalls – “is a dark snapshot of the gloomy underbelly of Los Angeles,” with its malevolent sabbaths and occult-ritual atmospheres, later translated theatrically onstage by Williams in his provocative shows, complete with wedding dresses and giant crucifixes, creating a blasphemous imagery that would deeply influence entire generations of followers, starting with the reverend Marilyn Manson.

In a gripping survey built on memories, testimonies, curiosities and sharp musical analysis, Robb brings this “dark map” back to the surface in all its vivid creativity, lending it philosophical depth and often letting the protagonists themselves speak, recounting their own stories. And in the background there they are, the goths. A black-clad population with hearts on fire, whom a former member of the “tribe,” Suzanne Harrington – in a conversation with Robb for the Irish Independent – defines as “creatures of the night who melted in the sun and who mostly came from the urban outskirts, mysterious melancholy souls who huddled together and whose look required quite a bit of effort, between ‘black lipstick, leather clothes, eyeliner, hair dye, corsets and fishnet stockings.’”

It was very easy to dismiss the phenomenon as a graveyard version of punk, as if it were just a passing prêt-à-porter fad destined to be swept away in no time. But the subsequent musical evolution and the branching of darkwave into other future genres would prove this thesis – so dear to rock purists – utterly baseless. Pushing Robb’s argument to the extreme, one could even draw a parallel between the underestimation of gothic art by the champions of classicism in the Renaissance (those “barbaric” cathedrals so disliked by Raphael) and what happened to gothic music at the height of its explosion, when reviewers acting in bad faith refused to look beyond the cliché of the “costumed monster.” Moreover, as Robb again recalls in the Independent interview, the goth tribe was on average far more educated than other subcultures of the time: “Being gothic meant embracing melancholy, dancing with death, giving in to the allure of sex. It was different from other musical movements of the time, because it was much more centred on art and literature.” And yet – Robb further explains to Harrington – “goth has never enjoyed the favour of the press, and even bands like Bauhaus were ruthlessly panned by the music critics of the day, despite being one of the great art-rock acts.”

Remnants of a deeper Darkness

The casual listener tends to place the end of the dark season somewhere in the mid-1980s, when wave and post-punk handed the baton to new pop and gradually left centre stage. But, just as with prog – pronounced dead by the end of the 1970s – this is a wholly superficial and misleading account.

As mentioned, it was above all industrial rock that absorbed, from its earliest experiments in the 1980s, the attitude and aesthetic of the darkwave era. It’s particularly in the industrial forge of Sheffield, among crumbling basements and abandoned old factories, that an unstoppable creative ferment spread. The backdrop is the noise liturgies that guru Genesis P-Orridge was detonating in London with his Throbbing Gristle. But the horizons stretch even further. They could chase the anarchic dreams of the old Dadaist pioneers of Zurich (Cabaret Voltaire), or push the clock even further forward, toward an undefined future where Kraftwerk’s robotic electronics and jazz-funk grooves let themselves be dragged by dark-punk’s obsessive basslines toward a menacing, destabilising avant-garde, as in the case of Adolphus “Adi” Newton’s Clock Dva (ex-Human League). These were experiences that would prove essential to the development of the industrial movement of the 1990s, led by Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, but also by bands like Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly. And since gothic is above all an atmosphere rather than a proper style, one cannot help but also associate the term with partly divergent musical stories, such as those of Current 93, Coil, Nurse With Wound and Whitehouse.

Linked only by the thin thread of martial rhythms, the stark neofolk sounds of Douglas P’s Death In June and the electronic-neoclassical symphonies of twins Nigel and Klive Humberstone, aka In The Nursery, certainly played a decisive role in ferrying the dark imagery of the Eighties into the following decade, as did the arcane, solemn ethno-gothic of Dead Can Dance (Lisa Gerrard & Brendan Perry), described by critic Ned Raggett as “a consciously medieval European sound.” It’s almost superfluous to mention the enchanting beauty of albums like “Spleen And Ideal” (1986), “Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun” (1987) and “The Serpent’s Egg” (1988), cornerstones of that thoroughly distinctive 4AD strand, whose champions – in the dream-pop field – included the legendary Cocteau Twins, who were themselves also fully caught up in the darkwave fever, at least in their early days, as shown by their debut “Garlands” (Elizabeth Fraser, after all, has always recalled being a huge fan of Siouxsie).

But the shadow of darkwave also brushed against hazy shoegazer-before-the-fact acts like the Jesus & Mary Chain, leaving a clear mark on that musical world too, as well as on the dark-ambient (and even metal) landscapes of the German band Lacrimosa. And – as Robb rightly points out – goth roots also branched out toward Bristol, if you think of the foggy mists of Portishead or of a bleak trip-hop manifesto like Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine,” described as “a reflective gothic masterpiece hopelessly out of time” (with Fraser herself as guest star). Even more boldly, Robb also brings in Suede’s britpop, mentioning the “gothic sensibility” of their decadent songs, caught between suburban sex and esoteric visions.

In short, traces of the gothic universe, however scattered and freeze-dried, seeped into the most disparate genres. Acting as a trait d’union between the darkwave era and its present-day offshoots was also an undergrowth of artists, often independent, capable of deeply renewing goth’s roots by cross-breeding them with other influences. Not all of them, it must be said, are mentioned by Robb – and this is perhaps the main gap in “The Art Of Darkness.” While Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows (the gothic-baroque project founded in 1989 in Frankfurt by transgender composer Anna-Varney Cantodea) gets a well-deserved mention, the entire Projekt universe is missing from the roll call – the label whose guiding light is Sam Rosenthal, leader of Black Tape For A Blue Girl, to whom we owe the gothic masterpiece of the 1990s, the neoclassical “Remnants Of A Deeper Purity” (but also the no less thrilling “The Scavenger Bride,” dedicated to Franz Kafka and 1913 Prague) – and which encompasses a whole galaxy of groups devoted to reclaiming and reworking dark stylistic traits, such as Attrition, As Lonely As Dave Bowman, Unto Ashes, Arcana, Autumn’s Grey Solace, Tearwave and, above all, the masterful Lycia, led by guitarist Mike Van Portfleet, fully capable of embodying this new dimension of dark music: no longer a theatre of horror, a morbid impulse or an Ossianic ritual, but a metaphysical representation of desolation, of cosmic pessimism (just listen to the immense concept album “Cold,” on the theme of winter and isolationist frost). A work built through subtraction, which drained the most Grand Guignol heart out of gothic rock, arriving instead at chamber music and ambient, brushing against the tones of requiem and Gregorian chant.

Another key label of this neo-gothic resurgence unjustly overlooked by Robb is the Swedish Cold Meat Industry, founded in 1987 by Roger Karmanik, which, until its closure in 2014, produced sumptuous chapters of dark-ambient, neofolk and martial industrial through artists such as All My Faith Lost, Atrium Carceri, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, Raison d’être and ROME. Also missing from the roll call is the crucial story of Aurora, the German duo formed by Peter Spilles and Patricia Nigiani as a side project of Project Pitchfork, who produced genuine masterpieces of this 1990s “gothic renaissance,” such as “The Land Of Harm And Appletrees” (1993) and “Dimension Gate” (1994), with their dark, romantic lieder enriched by an extraordinary melodic gift.

These are absences that weigh heavily in a book of encyclopaedic scope like “The Art Of Darkness,” which aims to serve as a sort of definitive guide to dark music, and one hopes that future reprints will fill in the gap.

Being gothic today

The book’s final chapter is inevitably devoted to the present (or near-present), with the barely veiled aim of suggesting that darkness is something we simply cannot do without in times as dark and dystopian as the ones we’re living through, amid pandemics, wars, devastation and alienation. Robb’s answer, in an interview with Repubblica about the social and cultural conditions for a possible return of dark aesthetics, is illuminating: “Black is eternal, sensual, it will never go out of fashion. It’s true that today’s mood recalls late-Seventies London, when we lived under a terrible government and the threat of the Cold War. But exploring the dark side doesn’t mean wallowing in self-pity – quite the opposite. There’s a famous saying: ‘If you’re afraid of death, you can’t celebrate life.’ If the world is ending, you might as well throw a party – this movement was born precisely in the clubs. Besides, the fundamental themes of goth culture are death and sex, primal forces.”

It’s only right, then, to mention the leading figures of the post-2000s dark scene, from American act Soft Moon, led by Luis Vasquez, with their “Cure-meets-NIN” influence, to Norway’s Ulver, protagonists of a curious arc from black metal to the bleak, Depeche Mode-like electropop of “The Assassination Of Julius Caesar,” from the doom-metal monoliths of the shadowy Sunn O))) to the hypnotic soundtracks of Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem (memorable his music for the vampire couple of Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”).

And while emo introduced a new generation to certain goth stylistic traits (think of bands like My Chemical Romance, Evanescence or Him), the new new wave wave ushered in a kind of dark revival that, starting from Interpol’s “Turn On The Bright Lights” (close to the atmospheres of Joy Division, thanks also to singer Paul Banks’s ghostly voice, but with a fuller, more layered sound), moved on to the different dark strains of groups like I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Vanishing, Cold Cave, Horrors (especially the ones on the milestone “Primary Colours”), as well as the mysterious Have A Nice Life of the black monolith “Deathconsciousness.”

Robb's key insight, however, is to identify female figures as the true protagonists of this dark renaissance. If it's true - as the author points out - that "in the 21st century, most contemporary groundbreaking music is made by women", then one's mind inevitably turns to Sweden's Anna Von Hausswolff, with her "dramatic canyons of atmospheric sound" punctuated by the tolling of her church organ, to the leaden lo-fi neo-gothic-industrial landscapes of Nika Roza Danilova aka Zola Jesus, and to the undisputed muse of the new global goth scene: Chelsea Wolfe, among the most credible heirs to Siouxsie in terms of iconic status and charisma, capable of interpreting every shade (of black) of the new millennium, from folk to doom metal (and back again), through a fascinating personal journey studded with demons and redemptions, abysses of pain and redemptive catharsis.

But if dark music (barely) survives today - perhaps transplanted into EBM and techno territory, or even pop (Robb goes so far as to cite Billie Eilish and Rihanna!) - its aesthetic is certainly still thriving, having, according to the author, been completely absorbed into mainstream culture by now, through phenomena such as the Batman saga (Hans Zimmer's score included), Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula", the noir imagery of David Lynch, or Tim Burton's entire filmography, including the recent Wednesday Addams TV phenomenon ("Wednesday"), which has managed to carry goth aesthetics over to the Netflix generation, not to mention the comics, anime and video games from which youth culture today draws a good deal of its references. Such pervasiveness leads Robb to state that "the art of darkness is everywhere you look". Even if it's "constantly evolving, because every style dies once it becomes codified". And while goth-themed nights are still common all over the world, dedicated festivals abound too, from the major Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig, which we've covered several times on these pages, to Projektfest, the dark-ethereal gathering that brings together many artists from Sam Rosenthal's label.

Finally, as mentioned, there are new means of transmission such as the web and social networks, in an era in which music has become less central. "I think the biggest carriers of goth culture today are Instagram and YouTube influencers," Robb observes in his interview with Rumore. "It's always about the same themes: death, sex and life. It's also a culture with historical depth, one that can give you a sense of what it means to belong to it without making you feel trapped inside it. Often, those who love goth love not just the music but also culture, the arts and literature. So if you're a smart, melancholy teenager, that might well be the right place for you."

Meanwhile, breaking a long silence, Siouxsie has returned to the stage with a series of concerts, including an Italian date at Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan. Some fans even dusted off their old wardrobes for the occasion. And the story goes on...

Author: John Robb

Titolo: The Art Of Darkness – The History Of Goth

Publisher: Louder Than War Books

Pages: 650

Price: 30 euros

John David Robb (Fleetwood, England, 4 May 1961) is an English musician and journalist, best known as the bassist and singer of post-punk band The Membranes, active since the mid-1980s.

He writes and runs the website Louder Than War and a monthly music magazine of the same name. A deep connoisseur of the British underground, he has written books on rock bands (Stone Roses, Membranes, Charlatans) and musical movements such as punk and post-punk. Since 2014 he has run the Louder Than Words music writing festival, held in Manchester every November. His latest book, "The Art Of Darkness - The History Of Goth", is currently only available in its original English-language edition.

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