Goth: A History
By Lol Tolhurst
Author: Lol Tolhurst
Rating: ★★★
While Goth occasionally has turned into a parody of itself (“Renfield” from “The IT Crowd” come to mind), there’s no doubt that its sounds, its majesty, its occasional self-serious lumbering pomposity have turned it into some sort of long-running youth movement. By rights, this should have petered out nearly 50 years ago if it were just a fad. I’ve long wondered, why does this black helium balloon never quite seem to deflate or pop?
I approached the book with two questions:
- How does Goth, a movement originating around 1975-1980 relate to the Gothic literature/arts of the 19th century?
- What were some of my favorite Goth acts like back in the day?
Tolhurst obliges answers in this book.
Goth the Eternal
By Tolhurst’s reckoning, the Gothic is something that’s been recurrent in our art for a long, long time. We can find strains of the Gothic in Byron, in the Brontës, in Grand Tour travelers coming across the lichen and overgrown ruins of ancient Rome in moonlight.
It has some kinship to cosmic horror (a thread Tolhurst does not supply) and to existentialism (a thread Tolhurst does supply): It’s where longing and our cosmic smallness and our cosmically huge emotions intersect.
So in some ways, the Gothic is eternal.
Goth the Temporal
But Goth as a snapshot of the eternal Gothic is a moment or serious of moments that happened in England under a reviled and reviled-as-cruel conservative government under Margaret Thatcher.
Not far from food rations and the horrors of street blocks blown apart by German bombs, desultory suburban boys chafe under Thatcher and imported American “consumerism is freedom” messages. This powder-keg finds ignition in the Sex Pistols media appearances and record. If the Sex Pistols told the youth: “Fuck ’em, you can do better than us, and we just did this,” Bowie and Bolan suggested that you could do it with style and, if you wanted, some intellectual heft. Toss in race and class riots to show that others were just about ready to bubble over too, Great Art, Cosmic Art seemed like a way to transcend. And thus the Goth era began with early acts like Joy Division, Suicide, Wire, the Cure, et al. all attempting to transcend their time in an era before cheap, ubiquitous, international communication. To make people pay attention to what they were feeling, they had to grab mics not likes.
Tolhurst himself is a good example of the youth finding existentialism and the eternal Gothic and turning it into art. His biographical tale serves as an object lesson.
The second question of why I read this book was to find out what some of the musical icons were like back in the day. Given his role as a well-regarded drummer in the Cure, many of the more iconic acts shared a stage or invited him backstage after a gig. The best anecdotes, for my money, were those relating adventures with Siouxsie (an original) and Joy Division.
The book is not exhaustive, but it is philosophical and well-written. Tolhurst definitely has a gift with language (no surprise from a lyricist!).
{
"title": "Goth: A History",
"author": "Lol Tolhurst",
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{
"highlight": "Then in 2019 we met for breakfast in a downtown LA diner, to talk about the future and to plan our past.",
"location": 121,
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},
{
"highlight": "That year among the books I read were Camus’s The Stranger, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Sartre’s Nausea. They all spoke to something darker within me, but also something more beautiful, and it inspired my playing.",
"location": 157,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Despite our passionate insistence that The Cure was not a Goth group, The Cure was very much a Goth group.",
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},
{
"highlight": "early dark albums, our “Goth phase,” if you will: Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.",
"location": 168,
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},
{
"highlight": "The Cure did not have a particular style; rather, we were the essence of a melancholy spirit.",
"location": 172,
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},
{
"highlight": "As a young punk on the outskirts of London, I also understood it to be many other things: a credo, a posture, a two-minute manifesto I could wave in the face of my fear to banish uncertainty and despair, and to give me hope in a dark and diminished Britain.",
"location": 180,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "punk was pure, instinctual nihilism, Goth searched for meaning—",
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"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "There’s a duality at the heart of Goth that’s beautiful and human and unearthly all at the same time,",
"location": 188,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Goth is not really a subculture I’ve come to understand. It’s a way to understand the world.",
"location": 195,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "was there to witness the spiritual birth of punk in the UK.",
"location": 234,
"annotation": "Nothing Hill riots, 1976. Police v. Caribbean community"
},
{
"highlight": "I live, as we all do, in a place defined by imaginary lines and mythical times.",
"location": 234,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "academics and military men sent bitmap text in Digi Grotesk—a proto-Goth name if ever I heard one.",
"location": 250,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "My younger readers might wonder how did we communicate our ideas in a coherent way? With a method that, as we shall see, was powerful enough to build a cultural framework and ensure that it would continue to make waves and define a generation of misfits and outsiders that still reverberates today.",
"location": 254,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This is a story of traveling across the globe’s imaginary geographical lines to bring ideas through music and words to other people directly. It’s similar to dharma transmission in that it moves from one person to another by playing the music or singing the ideas or celebrating those ideas together in a way that’s almost intravenous in its spiritual directness.",
"location": 257,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I had identified quickly that the lingua franca of the world was not English or Chinese or some other form of verbal communication, it was music.",
"location": 263,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Not for us the abstract counting of hits or followers on social media. No, we went somewhere—Boston, Brussels, Brisbane, Berlin—and then came back six months or a year later and did it all over again in a slightly different manner.",
"location": 281,
"annotation": "awesome Odysseus metaphor"
},
{
"highlight": "It’s a lesson that I still remember, never underestimate the personal touch, especially in something as intimate as music where you can make your dreams and beliefs a real part of others’ personal psychic geography.",
"location": 313,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Clash, the band Joe joined from the still-warm ashes of the 101ers, I would not have started on the path that led me here. That led me to music, art, literature, cinema, et al. To true manhood. The real trip. He saved me from being down-and-out in Horley and the home counties. DOA in suburban desolation.",
"location": 319,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We were labeled new wave before anybody thought of the name Goth and, truth be told, we weren’t quite punk or any old style of rock. We were evolving into something different. Post-punk.",
"location": 331,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Personally, I was looking for something with a more spiritual, perhaps even mystical, sense than the straight nihilism of punk.",
"location": 333,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "One of the things post-punk liberated was the sense of romantic longing that is inherent in teen lives.",
"location": 353,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Gothic literature began in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto,",
"location": 365,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "novels filled with dramatic events, incest, murder, hideous deaths, and terrible secrets that inevitably came to light.”",
"location": 369,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Goth as a musical direction was formed as a revolution. The initial spark came from punk, but the various themes of Goth music echoed those of Gothic works from previous centuries yet updated them for a new time.",
"location": 376,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Gothic remains, in sum, as an enduring term particularly serviceable in times of crisis—",
"location": 385,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Gothic literature represents the dark side of Romanticism,”",
"location": 389,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It is intensely theatrical,",
"location": 390,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Jack Halberstam says that Gothic novels use “the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies.”",
"location": 413,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "For Fahey, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is the quintessential work of Gothic literature that speaks directly to the mood of Gothic music.",
"location": 450,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "My rule of thumb, based on what I’ve observed over my long career, is that they are either about death or love. The difference with Goth music? They’re usually about death and love in the same song.",
"location": 466,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "when we are conscious, but only “of nothing.” This is the kind of darkness—what has been called “the way of negation”—that Eliot believes we should embrace, as a way of reaching God.",
"location": 492,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Meanwhile, Robert and Michael had found their books too: Robert while studying French literature at college, and Michael has always been an avid reader. In fact, even now, his house is full of books. The three imaginary boys always venerated the written word.",
"location": 517,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "a teen, I felt as though I was looking for meaning in a meaningless world. Being brought up Catholic, I chafed against religious reasoning—the promise of heaven, the threat of hell—but needed something that had at least a sense of morality.",
"location": 526,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The only reality is what we perceive here and now, and we don’t have the power to determine the outcome. We are only in charge of our own activities, and to that end, we have to take action to make life authentic.",
"location": 538,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Then punk came along. It set my world on fire. Add to it the philosophy of existentialism and absurdism from Camus and Sartre and that was all the inspiration I needed to get out there and do something.",
"location": 558,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I CONSIDER SYLVIA PLATH TO BE THE PATRON SAINT OF POSTMODERN feminist Goths.",
"location": 563,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "She was to become the beautiful curator of my dreams of escape.",
"location": 569,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "English, but not C of E. Not “one of us.”",
"location": 602,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Sylvia Plath",
"location": 634,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "ANNE SEXTON",
"location": 640,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Bedlam and Part Way Back,",
"location": 648,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "of the main differences between earlier rock music and Goth. The lyrical content of rock before Goth is externalized without much in the way of analysis.",
"location": 660,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In Goth, lyrics form out of emotional vulnerability as opposed to bravado and certainty. The process is one of internal analysis and confession, revealing to the world frailty and humanity. It’s all-inclusive, therefore attractive to the maligned and sidelined of the world. The connection is the reason.",
"location": 662,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "THE TERM “GOTH” WAS FIRST USED BY rock critic John Stickney to define a Doors gig when he described the cavernous venue as the perfect location for the “gothic rock” of the band.",
"location": 669,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It can also be seen as a template of sorts for Bauhaus’s epic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Both songs are exceptionally long and death-haunted. Bauhaus brought it into the Goth era with dub effects and the spooky baritone intonation of singer Peter Murphy. Also, both songs were recorded live with no overdubs.",
"location": 697,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "IT WAS A DREARY DAMP NIGHT WHEN I FINALLY SAW NICO PLAY. THE sort of dismal drizzle that England specializes in,",
"location": 804,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "her follow-up album in 1968, The Marble Index, was much different, using the harmonium as its sonic center around which swirl dark washes of strings, bells, and psychedelic effects in a disorientating and dark, cultlike atmosphere.",
"location": 827,
"annotation": "Nico"
},
{
"highlight": "With this one song, and its haunting evocation of “living dream” and “begging scream,” Nico had foretold Goth.",
"location": 864,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "IF EVER THERE WAS A MAN DESTINED TO EXPLORE THE POLAR OPPOSITE of his beginnings it was Scott Walker. Walker (born Noel Scott Engel) was an American singer-songwriter, composer, and record producer who lived most of his professional life in England.",
"location": 932,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The first time I put it on and heard the first line of the second track “Cosmic Dancer” about dancing “when I was twelve,” I hugged the cover to my chest. I was home.",
"location": 979,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The best music always comes from a place of authenticity. The human spirit needs to express its deepest meaning to be able to live in peace, even just to exist sometimes. I have known several artists who could not pull themselves out of the spiral of dark moments that leads to the end that befell Curtis. It’s true that “music hath charms to calm the savage breast,” but unfortunately sometimes it’s just not charming enough.",
"location": 1253,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Lyrically, the album borrowed from the works of J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs. Ballard was a reference for the band because his stories often dealt with near-future suburban dystopias that resonated with their own upbringing in postwar British suburbia. The album cover was shot by Paul Wakefield and inspired by the 1968 Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer, based on the short story of the same name by John Cheever. The eerie cover photo of swimmers against a reverse-colored swimming pool, dark blue tiles and light blue stripes, was especially haunting and evocative to me.",
"location": 1609,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Siouxsie I first met in 1979 was the antithesis of the female singer archetype of rock music of the sixties and seventies. Previously, women were valued for their photogenic sex appeal over other attributes like singing, songwriting, or musicianship. Siouxsie was about to turn that equation on its head. She was neither demure nor eye candy. She was powerful and assertive, unconventionally beautiful, and undeniably attractive to men and women alike. Women especially sensed that she was on their side, coming out of the heavily misogynistic ambience of the mid-seventies. She turned that particular trope on its head. Punk was the vehicle, and Siouxsie and the Banshees was there at the beginning of what would become post-punk.",
"location": 1638,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Everything was harsher in London. No green trees outside the windows. Just a dark and endless maze of Victorian alleys, their black smoke walls dripping with the eternal drizzle.",
"location": 1673,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "underneath it all there was the unmistakable feeling of degradation and dissolution inherent in the poisonous reality of postwar England. “Don’t expect to see your dreams realized” pulsed the neon signs of Soho’s sex shops and theaters.",
"location": 1675,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Every time I got on the train and passed through Clapham Junction (the biggest train junction in the world I believe at one point) and peered intrusively into the projects alongside the rail line, I mentally heaved a sigh of relief that I was not trapped in that particular vortex of despair. My life might have been rough, but I had opportunities to do something with it, opportunities that had been denied a great many of my countrymen and women.",
"location": 1680,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "think what he was witnessing was the end of that version of The Cure that made those three Gothic albums. Everything changed after that—and not just because I changed instruments. It was never the same band again. Never.",
"location": 1866,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Musically, we had two main rivers (and many tributaries) at our core: the two p’s—punk and psychedelia.",
"location": 1904,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We were existentialists, not racists.",
"location": 1919,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Gothic is a mode that responds to crisis.”",
"location": 1948,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The first of the three albums, Seventeen Seconds, is a kind of smudged sadness. Next came Faith, which is both questioning and challenging. Lastly, Pornography is a declaration of anger and melancholy and a surprise glimmer of hope. Three steps to heaven or hell.",
"location": 1953,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Catholicism is, at its heart, a very intense religion full of dark theatrical symbolism and guilt.",
"location": 1960,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "To my mind there is a rich vein of English musicians like Bowie, Drake, and Martyn that shaped the making of Seventeen Seconds.",
"location": 2079,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Robert had read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, a sort of Gothic-flavored Lord of the Rings,",
"location": 2164,
"annotation": "That’s a description of a thing!"
},
{
"highlight": "Pornography is the pinnacle of The Cure as a three-piece unit and represents my proudest moment as a musician. Is it strange that the best creation comes from the darkest times?",
"location": 2196,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Nietzsche, and the lines that had petrified me were, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.",
"location": 2722,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Goth wasn’t born in The Batcave, nor would it die there.",
"location": 2802,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The structure of a new town was almost guaranteed to either imbue you with apathy or fire you up to change.",
"location": 2901,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "TVT, who put out his debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, on October 20, 1989.",
"location": 3076,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}