Goth All Too Goth

Well, this doesn't have to be about Goth, it just is. It could be about Shoegaze (it probably is somewhere), Sarah Records/C86, postpunk in any (all?) of it's forms, Industrial, punk in some of it's forms (maybe the anarchopunk revival is missing, but surely it's on the horizon)...

(Though even Nietzche's subtitle was A Book For Free Spirits - altogether now: Woooooooooo!)

In fact, more on this later perhaps. There's a few things curdling after a brief twitter last night...

Have we reached a time when new musical re-runs/reinventions ONLY serve to send people back to the originals? Wytch House >>>> Goth? I hope not; I like a lot of the new takes on goth, postrock, shoegaze, rave... Some more than I liked the originals...

But I'm going to deal with my feelings on this in a different post (even that sounds portentous, sounds Goth). And I meant to say postpunk not postrock - I can't even imagine what a postrock revival might sound like...

For now, back to Goth. Goth has been in the air. All of these (and there's more a out there) are great takes on the genre which have stopped me posting my own... all you need is here, honestly... some great music, memories and musings... Besides, I've wittered enough about Danielle Dax and Kensington Market

Instead, I'm going to contest that this is the Gothest / nonGoth thing I can remember, especially the bit where the actual shivering man gets into the action (around 1.22):



Bruce Gilbert of Wire on the music. Interesting to think that sort of notGoth Goths The Fall had a dalliance with Michael Clark during the mostly excellent Kurious Oranj thing circa:



So, NotGoth? Perhaps. But make-up doesn't make the Goth; the Goth is inside, the Goth is in the veins of history, the Goth could only occur in the deadheartlands of Britain, as Glam got tainted and rubbed raw by Thatcherism and unemployment and the little dayglo daftness of Glam went a whiter shade of pale.

Which brings me to Leeds, Goth(am) City and especially to the Goth poem extraordinary: Tony Harrison's V:







When this was shown on TV it was a shudder, a brutal slap, a beautifully straightforward, non-residual, non-allegorical punch in the face; a proper TV event, a ghostly presence that reminded everyone that Channel 4 was independent...October 1987 seems closer now than it's every been, I'll not be surprised if V gets a re-screening soon, some wag'll see the fun in showing it all over, people are noticing, the eighties are coming back to haunt us in a way unimaginable just a few years ago...

Unimaginable and Inevitable, those Two Tribes of Doom.

Where next?