Cradle of Filth – Blood and Porridge

May 22, 2025May 22, 2025

Happy World Goth Day 2025

It’s May 22^nd, which a quick check on Google informs me is Sherlock Holmes Day, Harvey Milk Day, International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, and, thirst-quenchingly, both Chardonnay Day and National Craft Distillery Day. But most interestingly for me, in honour of the planet’s spookiest and blackest-clad musical sub-culture, it’s World Goth Day.

With that in mind, here are YouTube links to a dozen Goth tunes that I’ve been listening to recently. Be prepared, though, for a few annoying YouTube ads for fast-food outlets, perfumes and designer footwear before you get to the delights of the music itself.

First off… I knew nothing about Sidewalks and Skeletons before I stumbled across this number, Born to Die, on YouTube a little while ago. According to a Google search, “Sidewalks and Skeletons is the solo project of UK artist of Jake Lee, who grew up in Bradford, England”. Lee was at one time a deathcore guitarist but during the past two decades has been attracted more by ‘dark electronic music.’ Anyway, as well as being an impressive (if rather intense) listening experience, Born to Die comes with a video that’s a memorable amalgamation of epileptic-seizure-inducing lighting effects and quaint-but-creepy clips from some old, black-and-white silent movies.

Here’s a song called Edison’s Medicine by the San Francisco band In Letter Form. A track on their 2016 album Fracture Repair Repeat, it manages the tricky feat of sounding a bit like late 1970s legends Joy Division, whilst having enough personality of its own to also sound like something other than a song by Joy Division. (There’s a whole sub-genre of bands out there who sound like Joy Division and nothing else – I’m looking at you, Editors – a sub-genre I like to call ‘Joy Revision’.) Anyway, it’s great The only thing to sour the experience of hearing its melancholy gorgeousness is knowing that, tragically, the band’s singer Eric Miranda passed away the same year it was released.

© Sacred Bones Records

And there’s a pleasant (but again not too derivative) Joy Division vibe running through my next choice, Cyaho, by the Belarussian band Molchat Doma. It appears on their 2018 album Etazhi. Popular belief has it that Goth music evolved in wintry, out-of-way cities in northern England in the Margaret Thatcher-dominated 1980s. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that a similar sound emerged from Minsk, the wintry (during the coldest months its temperature drops to minus seven degrees) out-of-the-way capital of Alexander Lukashenka-dominated Belarus. Though apparently, they’re now based in Los Angeles.

If all this Joy Division-influenced music is making you feel glum, here’s the cure. I mean it. Here’s the Cure. In 2000 Robert Smith and co. released their eleventh studio album Bloodflowers, which was greeted by some snotty reviews in the music press. “Goth-awful!” exclaimed the now-defunct Melody Maker, hilariously. What a lot of nonsense. Bloodflowers is a great Cure record. Incidentally, it’s currently the album I listen to most on my elderly iPod while I subject my equally elderly bones and joints to a workout in my local gym. And the very best thing on it is the second track, Watching Me Fall, a mighty, majestic thing indeed. It’s like listening to a Gothicised version of a relentless Led Zeppelin stomper such as When the Levee Breaks (1971) or Kashmir (1975).

My next song is Troops by London-based singer Grace Solero and her eponymous band. It originally appeared on their first album, New Moon, in 2009. I don’t know if Ms. Solero would be pleased to be described as a purveyor of Goth music, but there’s an amount of witchy darkness here, though mixed with some radiant, soaring moments too. In fact, it’s the song’s polarities – its rawness and tenderness – that appeal to me.

There was a time when Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, famous for performing with his band the Bad Seeds and for once fronting the raucous punk-Goth outfit the Birthday Party, seemed a Jekyll and Hyde character. Sometimes you’d get Nice Nick, singing gentle, pretty songs like Into My Arms (1997) that you ‘d happily let your granny listen to. Yet you’d also get Nasty Nick, responsible for such sonic assaults as Stagger Lee (1996) where Cave hollered about slobbering on people’s heads and filling them full of lead while Blixa Bargeld shrieked apocalyptically in the background, which you’d only let your granny listen to if you wanted her to die so you could inherit her money.

© Mute Records

Some have lamented the fact that as he’s grown older, Nice Nick has come to dominate Cave’s musical output while Nasty Nick has mostly disappeared. But I just go with the flow… Here’s an example of what I consider Nice Nick at his best, the ballad Sweetheart Come from 2001’s No More Shall We Part. I can’t understand why it hasn’t received more attention, praise and love as I think it’s a marvellous song. Though the lyric “And if he touches you again with his stupid hands / His life won’t be worth living” suggests a smidgeon of Nasty Nick lurking in the mix.

As someone who’s also a fan of heavy metal, I should enjoy the crossover of it and Goth music known as ‘gothic metal’. But with a few exceptions, such as County Suffolk’s awesome Cradle of Filth, the bands don’t appeal to me. HIM, the Rasmus, Nightwish, Charon, Unshine… Their music seems all a bit too tasteful and pretty for my tastes, and the ones with female singers appear to be doing their best to sound like Evanescence, a very successful band who never floated my boat. Plus they all seem to come from Finland – is being a member of a gothic-metal band a prerequisite for getting Finnish citizenship?

However, here’s one Finnish gothic-metal outfit I do like, the melodramatically-named Eternal Tears of Sorrow. This song, Sweet Lilith of My Dreams, the opening track on their 2006 album Before the Bleeding Sun, begins daintily enough, before gathering speed and volume. It’s just a shame that Eternal Tears of Sorrow announced their disbandment three months ago.

And just to show there are gothic-metal bands with female singers whom I like too, here’s Lacuna Coil, from Italy (not Finland). Two years ago, Lacuna Coil played a gig in my current city of residence, Singapore, and I’m still annoyed at myself for missing the opportunity to see them then. This song, Blood, Tears, Dust, from their 2016 album Delirium, nicely combines the operatic vocals of their singer Christina Scabbia with the growlier and more traditionally-metallic tones of their other singer, Andrea Ferro. And musically, it rattles along.

That’s enough about gothic metal. Now it’s time for another hybrid – Goth music blended with twangy surf music. The song in question is from the 2022 EP Surf-Goth by Melbourne artist Desmond Doom and its called Get Me Out. Actually, the dark sounds and dark sensibilities mixed with springy surf guitars put me in mind of some earlier efforts by feedback-loving alternative rockers the Jesus and Mary Chain. (If Jim and William Reid knew I had mentioned the Jesus and Mary Chain in a piece about Goth music, they would probably come around to my house and kill me. So don’t tell them I did that.)

© Desmond Doom Music

Come to think of it, though, back in 1998 I bought a Goth compilation album called Nocturnal, which had two Jesus and Mary Chain tracks on it… And also on that album, near the end, was my next choice, Big Hollow Man by the singer, producer and artist Danielle Dax. I thought the song was charming, even though it seemed lighter and poppier than most other stuff on the record. But should anyone doubt Ms. Dax’s credentials for appearing in a list of Goth tunes, I’ll point them to the fact that in 1984 she played the wolf-girl in Neil Jordan’s masterly film adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves (1979). There’s nothing Gothier than that.

I’ve described the veteran band Killing Joke in the past as a ‘Goth / industrial juggernaut’ with a ‘crunching, thunderous urgency’. The next song, I am the Virus, from Killing Joke’s 2015 album Pylon, does nothing to make me change my opinion of them. With its Beatles-baiting title, it takes retrospective aim at George Bush Jr, Tony Blair, the War on Terror, the second Iraq War et al: “There’s a darkness in the West,” roars singer Jaz Coleman, “oil swilling guzzling corporate central banking mind-f**king omnipotence.” I suppose in 2015 Bush and Blair’s catastrophic intervention in the Middle East seemed the worst thing that could ever happen. Mind you, since then… According to their Wikipedia entry, the band have been ‘inactive’ since the death of guitarist Geordie Walker in 2023. But now, in this dire era of Trump II, I feel we need them more than ever.

Finally, here’s Dead Can Dance, another band who combine Goth music with something else – in their case, ‘world music’, the patronising catch-all term Westerners use to describe traditional music from non-Western countries. Dead Can Dance have been mixing genres enthusiastically since 1996’s Spiritchaser, although on this song, Amnesia, from the band’s 2012 album Anastasis, the world-music elements are less in evidence. Well, apart from the insistent chime of band-member Lisa Gerrard’s yangqin, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘Chinese hammered dulcimer’. Whatever, Amnesia is both a stirring and a wonderfully-mellow composition and it makes a good item with which to end this list.

Happy World Goth Day 2025!

© Procreate

April 19, 2024April 29, 2024

The incredible shrinking wardrobe

The past few weeks have been extremely busy because I’ve been moving house – not the easiest of things to do if, like me, you live in Singapore. So, here’s something light and frivolous.

It’s said that you become more conservative as you grow older. That’s because, people reason, of the material and financial possessions you acquire over the years – property, cars, shares – which make you increasingly suspicious of lefty governments inclined to levy high taxes on you and generally interfere with your accrued wealth.

Maybe that explains why I’ve singularly failed to shift rightwards in my politics as I’ve become wrinkly and decrepit. These days I’m a cranky old left-wing git, whereas formerly I was a cranky young left-wing git. It’s due to the fact that I haven’t amassed property, cars, shares, etc. Actually, from the look of my finances, it’s likely I’ll be spending my dotage stacking supermarket shelves.

One thing that brought this lack of acquisitions home to me recently was my discovery that, after moving into a new apartment, I could comfortably fit my entire collection of clothing into half a wardrobe. Well, half a wardrobe plus a shelf for storing a couple of folded trousers and one drawer in which I stash all my socks, underwear and accessories (basically a beanie hat, a sporran, and ‘anti-leech socks’ worn while trekking in the Asian mountains). My incredible shrinking wardrobe now contains a few work-shirts, a work-jacket, a sweater that’s never used because I live in sultry Singapore, a kilt and a bunch of mostly old and mostly black T-shirts. And that’s it.

Anyway, hanging those T-shirts in their new wardrobe in their new home inspired me to take a walk down Memory Lane…

Firstly, here’s one with your actual Godzilla on it. That’s the city-stomping, take-no-shit-from-anyone Japanese Gojira, not the wimpy Hollywood version who appears in buddy movies with King Kong. By the standards of my wardrobe, this item is an example of ultra-modernity, since my partner bought it for me last year.

Meanwhile, this was a Christmas present given to me by my partner’s mum. She heard I was a fan of County Suffolk’s greatest symphonic-black-gothic metal band Cradle of Filth and kindly procured this T-shirt for me featuring Nigel Wingrove’s cover artwork from their 1996 album Dusk and Her Embrace. It’s probably just as well, though, that her mum didn’t purchase for me the most famous T-shirt that Cradle of Filth have brought out.

She was also nice enough to buy me a T-shirt emblazoned with the iconic cover design for the 1984 compilation Bad Music for Bad People by that mighty psychobilly band The Cramps. In this case, the artist responsible was Steve Blickenstaff and he perfectly captured the band’s trashy punk-horror aesthetic.

Meanwhile, here’s a T-shirt bearing the name of evergreen (or ever-black) goth band The Cure. If I remember rightly, a friend bought this for me as a memento of the Marseille gig the band did during their 2008 European tour. I was thinking of attending the gig myself but, because of the expense and effort involved in getting to Marseille, wimped out. It’s now 2024 and I still haven’t seen Robert Smith and co. perform live, so I really wish I’d got off my bum and gone for it in 2008. Especially as it sounded like an awesome gig – they managed to play a dozen songs during the encores alone.

Around the same period, sometime in 2008 or 2009, I picked up this T-shirt in the famous market in central Norwich. Showing a ghoulishly-green deceased person and the tagline, ‘When there’s no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH’, it’s the poster from the seminal 1979 zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero. (The remake, which Zack Snyder directed in 2004, is great during its first half-hour but after that gets a bit ‘meh’.)

And this is the inevitable AC/DC T-shirt, which I bought a few months ago in our local branch of that hardcore, uncompromising, heavy-metal hangout, Cotton On. I live in the tropics and it’s an indispensable part of my beachwear, along with a pair of black jeans and pair of Doc Martens. Come to think of it, an AC/DC T-shirt, black jeans and Doc Martens also constitute my streetwear, sportswear, casualwear, workwear, partywear and eveningwear.

No wonder I received this ZZ Top T-shirt – again from my partner’s mum, who really does spoil me. I’m clearly a Sharp Dressed Man.

May 22, 2022July 23, 2022

Happy World Goth Day 2022

© Halperin Productions

Does the sun seem to be shining a little less brightly, or a little more darkly, today? Does the air seem unusually clammy, redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the bleak December’ rather than the cusp-of-summer May? Do the people walking past on the street seem to be sporting a tad more kohl eyeliner than normal? Are you staring at your TV, unsure if the pudgy, chaotic, tousle-haired figure you see on the screen is indeed Boris Johnson and not Robert Smith?

If the answer is ‘yes’… Well, this is probably because today, May 22^nd, is World Goth Day. According to Wikipedia, the idea of having a day dedicated to the planet’s blackest-clad subculture ‘originated in the United Kingdom in 2009 initially as Goth Day, a smaller scale celebration… inspired from the broadcasting of a special set of shows on BBC Radio 6.’

So, to mark the occasion, here’s a playlist of my dozen favourite Goth tunes, with YouTube links. (My apologies for any ultra-irritating YouTube advertisements that might pop up at the beginning.)

© Cleopatra

First up is the Goth-dancefloor fixture Adrenaline by Liverpudlian band Rosetta Stone. Actually, when I think of all the Goth nights I attended in my youth in places like Edinburgh, Norwich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is the only tune I remember the DJs playing. Yes, I know they must have played other stuff, but this is the one song that accompanies my memories of those events. (Maybe they did play Adrenaline all night long, in a Gothic variation on that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal organise a charity disco and then realise they only have one record, the Specials’ Ghost Town.)

I’ve heard many authorities declare that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the greatest Goth song of all time. But by way of something different, I’ll offer this tune instead, which is a cheeky riposte to the venerable Bauhaus anthem: Bela Lugosi’s Back by the fabulously titled Lesbian Bed Death. I love how they’ve peppered the song’s video with footage from that hypnotically weird and dream-like movie White Zombie, which had Lugosi as its villain back in 1932.

© Polydor

I’m a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I thought on this playlist I’d include something from the formidable SIouxsie Sioux’s other band the Creatures, which she formed with fellow Banshee and one-time husband Peter ‘Budgie’ Clarke. I’ve had a fondness for the Creatures ever since seeing them perform a storming set at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in 1999. This is called Pluto Drive and listening to it always lets a few tingles loose on my spine.

A band I saw in Edinburgh during the same period, though this time at the city’s Liquid Rooms, was the Mission. Now it was customary that when the Mission played their most famous number, the Led Zeppelin-esque Tower of Strength, their die-hard fans – who were known as ‘the Eskimos’ – would climb on top of each other and create a human tower in the middle of the auditorium. Well, not so much a tower as a pyramid, with lots of Eskimos on the floor forming its base, and smaller numbers of them forming the higher levels that tapered up to its apex. This was easy to do during the Mission’s heyday in the 1980s, when those Eskimos were mostly lean, lithe and light teenagers. However, by the late 1990s, the Eskimos had got not only a wee bit older but also a wee bit heavier… And I watched the building of that human Tower of Strength with some trepidation. Predictably, the whole thing soon wobbled and toppled over. But at least no Eskimos were hurt.

Anyway, here’s the song Belief from the Mission’s 1990 album Carved in Sand. I don’t know why this song isn’t better known, as I always thought it was an epic, relentless thing epitomising the band at their bombastic best. (Though some unkind critics would probably reword that as ‘at their bombastic worst’.)

Similarly, I don’t know why this next tune, Number One by the German outfit Clan of Xymox, isn’t better known either. It soars in an impeccably synth-y way.

I’d like to think that if, besides being tested for the ethnic groups you came from, your DNA could be tested for the musical sub-cultures you belonged to, my DNA would show a strong ‘Goth’ component. However, also being a fan of heavy metal, I’d hope that it showed a big ‘metalhead’ component too. Thus, my next two choices lie in that fascinating area where the two genres, Goth and heavy metal, overlap. First, here’s the wonderfully sepulchral – thanks to the band’s vocalist, the late Peter Steele – Everyone I Love is Dead by Type O Negative.

And here’s the finest goth-metal band to ever hail from Country Suffolk, East Anglia: Cradle of Filth. Their song A Gothic Romance: Red Roses for the Devil’s Whore follows a tried-and-trusted Cradle of Filth formula, starting with a civilised, classical-music opening, but rapidly descending into howling, pounding, guitar-mangling chaos. As ever, the croaking / shrieking vocals of Suffolk icon Dani Filth are at the forefront.

Now it’s time for another Goth dancefloor-stomper. It’s hard to resist Doctor Online by industrial Norwegian outfit Zeromancer, a song I assume was inspired by the infamous, euthanasia-supporting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, aka ‘Doctor Death’.

Canadian band the Birthday Massacre are smartly named. The word ‘birthday’ suggests glowing candles, ornately decorated birthday cakes and, generally, the magical happiness that people associate with childhood memories of their Big Day; while the word ‘massacre’ suggests, well, blood, darkness and death. That juxtaposition sums up Goth perfectly. And here’s their song Happy Birthday, whose vibe nicely blends that sense of child-like wonder with sinister premonitions that something bad is going to happen.

Returning to Bauhaus for a moment, I find this solo effort by their celebrated frontman Peter Murphy, Cuts You Up, poignant and rather lovely.

The young band Savages – okay, that’s young by my standards: they formed in 2011 – are described in their Wikipedia entry as a ‘post-punk, noise rock, alternative rock’ outfit. That description sneakily avoids using the ‘G’ word… But come on. I defy anyone to listen to their song Husbands and not think of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their imperious best.

Finally, how else could I finish this post but with a link to the greatest Goth anthem ever, the Sisters of Mercy’s majestic, thunderously operatic This Corrosion? Be warned – this is the 11-minute remix. By the end of those 11 minutes, after you’ve been bludgeoned into submission by singer Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison’s caterwauling vocals, by producer Jim Steinman’s celestial choirs and Wagnerian guitar-squalls, and by that never-ending chorus of “Hey, now / Hey, now now…”, you will be begging the Sisters for mercy.