Between the decrepit blues of “She’s Hit,” the death rattle ’n’ roll of “Big Jesus Trashcan,” and the roiling quagmire of the title track, 1982’s Junkyard sounded like the living end of rock music, its final testament. Amazingly, the Birthday Party retched up two more brilliant EPs, The Bad Seed and Mutiny. High points included the Disney-noir talking trees of “Deep in the Woods,” the Faulkner-meets-Deliverance horror of “Swampland,” and “Mutiny in Heaven,” Cave’s blasphemous vision of a corrupt and derelict heaven riddled with trash and rats, which the group matched with their most three-dimensionally vivid music, a soundscape teeming with gargoyles and bubbling with putrescence. In Goth terms, though, the Birthday Party’s most influential song was the 1981 single “Release the Bats,” an almost campy stampede of vampire sex that topped the U.K. independent charts. The advertisement for “Release” declared, “Dirtiness is next to antigodliness.”
Bauhaus’ own vampire anthem, 1979’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” is generally identified as the ground zero of Goth proper. Singer Peter Murphy’s striking looks—teeteringly tall, gaunt, with a bruised pout and perfect cheekbones—made him a Goth pinup, the ultimate erotic enigma. But what came out of those luscious lips was portentous and preposterous, an overblown farrago of sex and death, religion and blasphemy, uttered in a voice that virtually cloned David Bowie’s. Raised Catholic, Murphy kicked back against his upbringing with sacrilegious ditties such as “Stigmata Martyr,” which featured him reciting, “In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit” in Latin, accompanied in concert by simulated crucifixion postures.
With their shock rock gestures and Grand Guignol grotesquerie, Bauhaus were actually far closer to Alice Cooper than Bowie—exciting, but difficult to take seriously. They had a superb grasp of rock as theater, using stark white lighting to cast dramatic shadows. “It’s important to go to the theatre and escape from the street, use the space, find another element,” Murphy declared. Although their albums tended to sag under the weight of pretension, Bauhaus made flashy, thrilling singles, such as the dark, twisted art funk of “A Kick in the Eye” and the swirling vaporous mystery of “Spirit.” Daniel Ash’s guitar sound bore comparison with Gang of Four or Joy Division at their most harsh and hacking, especially on Bauhaus’ early postpunk-aligned efforts such as “Terror Couple Kill Colonel” and “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” with its fret-scraping guitar scree and metallic dub effects.
If Bauhaus, the Banshees, and the Birthday Party were the crucial groups that bridged postpunk and Goth, Killing Joke was the fourth cornerstone of the Goth sound and sensibility. Like the other three bands, they started out as postpunk experimentalists. In Killing Joke’s case, that meant following PiL’s lead. In 1980, singer/keyboardist Jaz Coleman talked of wanting to keep the funk but strip away disco’s “sugarshit” sheen, replacing it “with mangled, distorted, searing noise.” This element came from guitarist Geordie, who transformed Keith Levene’s sound into something sulphuric, inhumane, practically inhuman. Coleman added jabs of atonal synth and electronic hums, along with the barked menace of his vocals, which sounded like he was choking on his own fury. “Tension music,” the group called it.
Initially, Killing Joke seemed vaguely political. Their striking seven-inch sleeves and micro-ads in the U.K. music press grabbed the eye with images of the pope receiving a Nazi salute from German troops or a top-hatted Fred Astaire tap dancing over a trench full of World War I corpses. The name Killing Joke, explained Coleman, condensed their whole worldview into a single phrase, “the feeling of a guy in the First World War who’s just about to run out the trenches…and he knows his life is going to be gone in ten minutes and he thinks of that fucker back in Westminster who put him in that position. That’s the feeling that we’re trying to project—the Killing Joke.”
Jaz Coleman was an unlikely protest singer, though. A high-caste Brahman Indian on his mother’s side, Coleman was wealthy, well educated, and musically trained (after Killing Joke he became a classical composer). In almost pointed contrast to Coleman’s accomplishment, Killing Joke was conceived as a barbarian entity. Paul Ferguson’s beats were tribal and turbulent. Starting with their second album, What’s THIS For…! and reaching fruition on 1982’s awesome Revelations, Killing Joke shook off the PiL influence (all the dub and death disco trappings) and emerged as something closer to Black Sabbath: doomy, tribalistic rock that exulted in its visions of darkness and apocalypse.
Coleman saw Killing Joke’s music as “warning sounds for an age of self-destruction.” The end was nigh (“I’ll give it eighteen months,” he said in 1981), but Coleman was glad. The aftermath was “the period of time I’m looking towards at the moment,” he said, when a new, brutally instinct-attuned uncivilization would emerge phoenixlike from the smoking ruins. Coleman told NME, “I see a more savage world ahead, right? It’s music that inflames the heart.” Fire was Killing Joke’s favorite of the four elements. They even recruited a fire eater, Dave the Wizard, to do his act onstage with the band. “Fire to me is symbolic of the will power,” declared Jaz. “I think the power of the individual is really underestimated.” Yet it seemed more the case that Killing Joke’s music exalted the power of the mob.
Goth’s appeal to the irrational and primal could sometimes stray into troubling territory, something Killing Joke exemplified. Coleman’s rhetoric—reveling in male energy, describing war as the natural state of the world, jubilantly heralding Armageddon—veered unnervingly close to that dodgy zone between Nietzschean and Nazi. “The violence that Killing Joke is about is not violence on the immediate level but the mass violence, the violence bubbling underneath your feet, the violence of nature throwing up,” Coleman solemnly proclaimed. “And we become that violence.” Even some Goths felt there was a faintly fascistic aura to the vibe catalyzed by Killing Joke at their gigs.
Latent Nazi tendencies were a source of anxiety in the Goth scene. The flirtation with fascist imagery can be traced back to Siouxsie (who in her early days wore a swastika and sang the unforgivable line “too many Jews for my liking”) and Joy Division. The March Violets took their moniker from the German nickname for those opportunists who joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1934, after Hitler declared himself führer. Nazi innuendos dogged the early career of Kirk Brandon of Theatre of Hate. It didn’t help that Brandon looked like an Aryan pinup and sang operatically, that early Hate releases came out on the SS label, and that the band’s gigs were often preceded by a tape of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Brandon’s allegorical anthems such as “Do You Believe in the Westworld?” strove to make epic political statements, but were fatally garbled, their sympathies open to conjecture. All that really came through loud and unclear was the singer’s desire to push himself forward as a messianic leader. “We’re not a band, we’re a movement,” he declared.
Any suspect totalitarian leanings were mostly held in check by Goth’s opposing attraction to Aleister Crowley’s libertine dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Curiously, given Goth’s attraction to all things forbidden, drugs weren’t especially important on the scene. Rather, the overall vibe of debauchery focused on sexual fetishism and vampy attire—fishnet stockings, black leather thigh-high boots, witchy eye makeup. With its emphasis on self-beautification, the Goth movement connected powerfully with women. “To this day, it’s got a bigger involvement of females than any other subculture,” claims Mick Mercer. Yet the hefty presence of women in the audience didn’t prevent Goth’s rapid degeneration into a sort of postpunk version of that most macho of genres, heavy metal.
The early Goths tended to share the postpunk mind-set of the Banshees. “Rock ’n’ roll” was something to be discarded, left for dead. But the Sisters of Mercy were defiantly rockist. Fans of the Birthday Party, they followed that group’s lead in embracing American imagery and rejecting the Europeanism of New Pop. “There’s an awful lot of dreadful bands coming out of England, especially London,” the Sisters’ singer
/conceptualist Andrew Eldritch declared in 1983. “A lot of them come onstage with this, ‘We are not a rock band’ rubbish. So we go the other way—one step forward. We say ‘we are a rock band.’ Very loudly.”
This was fighting talk at a time when much of the London-based music media celebrated anything and everything so long as it wasn’t rock. Whether from overseas (Washington, D.C., go-go, New York electro, African music) or homegrown (the faux jazz Sade, the faux salsa of zoot-suited buffoons Blue Rondo A La Turk, the faux everything of Paul Weller’s Style Council), the only thing the disparate mélange of hipster fare in 1983 had in common was the absence of power chords and fuzztone. Aghast at this brave new world in which Nina Simone was a hallowed icon but Iggy was a forgotten boy, the Sisters of Mercy declared war on pop.
An Oxford-educated intellectual, Eldritch admired heavy metal’s stupidity and “relentlessness.” His band treated rock less as an evolving musical form than a repertoire of mannerisms and imagery (sunglasses after dark, speed-emaciated bodies clothed all in black). Displaying a weak grasp of how rock works as a physically involving music, the Sisters used a drum machine instead of a real drummer, while their guitar was atmospheric but insubstantial, the aural counterpart to the dry ice they shrouded themselves with onstage (a knowingly corny attempt at mystery).
The Sisters of Mercy’s “Temple of Love” was the Goth anthem of 1983. Its closest rival was “Fatman” by Southern Death Cult, which reached number one on the indie charts that spring. Even by Goth’s deteriorating standards, “Fatman” was a poor excuse for rock. But in some sense, the music was almost irrelevant. Through touring in support of Theatre of Hate, and later Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult picked up the slack left by those groups and by others, such as Killing Joke and the Banshees, when they’d split or gone mainstream.
Southern Death Cult resembled a cross between Bow Wow Wow and Led Zeppelin. They had the tribal tom-tom rhythms, and singer Ian Astbury wore a mohawk just like Annabella’s, along with feather and chicken bone necklaces (a jewelry collection that expanded with each visit to KFC). Astbury had actually spent five years in Canada as a youth, during which time he’d visited American Indian reservations. Returning to the U.K. just in time for punk, he became totally involved in 1977’s revolution. When punk died, Astbury felt rudderless and turned to Native American culture for spiritual sustenance. The name Southern Death Cult itself came from a Mississippi Valley tribe that maintained burial mounds and shrines.
Undergoing various lineup changes, SDC turned first into Death Cult, and then the Cult. With the jettisoning of “Death” went the group’s remaining Gothic vestiges. With amazing speed and shamelessness, the Cult devolved into straightforward long-haired cock rockers. The reference points were of late-sixties and early-seventies vintage: the Doors, Steppenwolf, Led Zep. A vague aura of quest clung to song titles such as “Revolution” and “Spiritwalker.” But by 1985 the Cult essentially became everything the Sex Pistols and punk had aimed to destroy. Singer Ian Astbury was last seen in the company of Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger, performing as a surrogate Jim Morrison in the rock nostalgia outfit, the New Doors.
IF GOTH TOOK ONE ROUTE from postpunk back to loud and proud rock, Echo and the Bunnymen followed another: not descending into the darkness but soaring into the light. The celestial drive of their crystal guitars and beseeching vocals suggested a quest for some kind of grail or glory. In the band’s early days, the Bunnymen’s lead singer, Ian McCulloch, was himself often compared to Jim Morrison. His baritone had a similar rich timbre and grandeur, but he also possessed a purehearted adolescent quality that the Doors’ singer had rapidly lost through self-abuse and self-aggrandizement. When the Liverpool band first hit the scene in 1979, they were considered harbingers of the “new psychedelia,” despite the fact that in those days they never ingested anything more deranging than pints of ale. Later, the Bunnymen were identified with what some called the “Big Music”—a style of purified eighties rock that was postpunk in its minimalism, yet redolent of the sixties in its feeling of transcendence—alongside groups such as the Waterboys and Simple Minds. But of all their contemporaries, it was U2, the Bunnymen’s rivals, who ultimately took the Big Music sound and made it big.
The template for that sound was laid down by Television, who were either the last sixties group or the first to make eighties rock. One of the seminal bands from New York’s midseventies CBGB scene, Television actually had a much bigger impact in Britain than in America. NME predicted that the group’s singer and lead guitarist Tom Verlaine would dominate the next decade like Bob Dylan had the sixties. Television even had a couple of U.K. hit singles. In a weird way, Verlaine and Television’s second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, showed British bands the path to a non-American future for electric guitar, insofar as their playing owed little to Chuck Berry or the blues greats. Hearing Television’s 1977 debut, Marquee Moon, “was just such a throw-down to me,” U2’s guitarist the Edge said. “The electric guitar had really become such an unoriginal-sounding instrument.” For all their transcendental song titles, such as “Elevation,” “Glory,” and “The Dream’s Dream,” there was nothing wispily hippie-dippy about the New York band’s music. It was diamond hard, a music of fierce purity. You can hear the reverberations of Television’s plangent sound all across eighties British music, but nowhere more richly than on Echo and the Bunnymen’s first two albums, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here.
Listening to 1980’s Crocodiles, the first thing you notice is how sparse the sound is. Les Pattinson’s granite basslines carry the melody, Will Sergeant’s jagged quartz guitar leaves lots of empty space while avoiding anything resembling a solo, and Pete De Freitas’s minimal drumming is all surging urgency. Then you marvel at the precocious authority and poise of McCulloch’s singing. Many of the Bunnymen’s songs are rooted in doubt, anguish, despair—“Is this the blues I’m singing?” wonders McCulloch on “Rescue”—but the tightness and brightness of the Bunnymen’s sound transmits contradictory sensations of confidence, vigor, elation.
The Bunnymen’s audience overlapped with Joy Division’s—those overcoat-clad young men with the weight of the world on their shoulders—and in some ways Heaven Up Here feels like an answer record to the previous year’s Closer. It is harrowed by the same things: hypocrisy, distrust, betrayal, lost or frozen potential. In “The Disease,” McCulloch sings about how his life could change “just given a chance,” then pleads, “If you get yours from heaven/Don’t waste it.” But whereas Closer shows Ian Curtis fatally mesmerized by his own dread visions, Heaven Up Here ultimately turns its face toward the light. “We have no dark things,” declares McCulloch on “No Dark Things,” pointedly renouncing Gothic gloom and doom, and a few songs later, the album goes out with the blasting euphoria of “All I Want,” a celebration of desire for desire’s sake.
Filling out their spare sound with guitar overdubs, keyboard glints, vocal multitracking, and atmospheric vapors, the sheer majesty of Heaven Up Here put Liverpool back on rock’s map in a way it hadn’t been since the Beatles. Unlike other British cities, from the outside Liverpool looked like it hadn’t really responded to punk. In reality, the upheaval of 1976 did galvanize Liverpool’s live music scene, which had been stagnant during the early seventies. “But the city never produced a classic punk group or anything like Oi!,” says Paul Du Noyer, NME’s Liverpool correspondent at that time. Nor did postpunk flourish there, at least not the kind of experimental sounds that came out of London, Sheffield, and Leeds, such as industrial synth noise, avant-funk, and apocalyptic dub.
“All that postpunk vanguard stuff, we’d just think that was completely stupid,” says Bill Drummond, who managed Echo and the Bunnymen and cofounded the pioneering Liverpool indie label Zoo. According to Drummond, it’s not so much that Liverpool music had to be tuneful—“it had to be a celebration. McCulloch’s lyrics were often angst laden, but there was a gloriousness to the music.” One could say exactly the same about the two other leading postpunk grou
ps to come from Liverpool during this period: Wah! Heat, with their ringing chords and endless crescendos, and the neopsychedelic outfit the Teardrop Explodes, whose singer, Julian Cope, described the band’s songs as “cries of joy.”
Cope, McCulloch, and Wah! front man Pete Wylie were originally in a “band” together. The Crucial Three existed mostly as a figment of bragging and gossip. They only wrote a couple of songs and never played a gig. This sort of phantom band—the Mystery Girls, the Nova Mob, A Shallow Madness—was a peculiar hallmark of Liverpool. Almost every significant person on the incestuous scene was involved in a group with every other significant figure at one point or another. “People enjoyed the role-playing aspect,” says Du Noyer. “They liked the process of naming groups and conceptualizing around groups more than the grind of getting equipment together and rehearsing.”
The entire Liverpool scene clustered around the punk club Eric’s, which served as the laboratory for the city’s future stars, including the band Big in Japan. Formed by Drummond, its ranks included the charismatic glam punkette Jayne Casey along with future Banshee drummer Budgie, future Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer Holly Johnson, future Lightning Seed/record producer Ian Broudie, and future Zoo cofounder/Teardrop keyboardist/music biz mogul Dave Balfe. Romping somewhere at the intersection of Roxy, Rocky Horror, and the zany, garish Scottish pop-punk band the Rezillos, Big in Japan were “an explosion of color,” says Drummond. “We totally went for it onstage. And were totally embarrassing.”
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