Half Man Half Biscuit – Blood and Porridge

May 22, 2023June 11, 2023

Happy World Goth Day 2023

From worldgothday.com / © BatBoy Slim

Today, May 22^nd, is among other things International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, National Vanilla Pudding Day and, due to it being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, Sherlock Holmes Day. However, what piques my interest in May 22^nd is the fact that it’s also World Goth Day. Yes, it’s that date in the calendar when we celebrate Goth, the world’s most black-clad, most kohl-eyeliner-rimmed, most sunlight-adverse musical sub-culture. Today even has its own Goth-themed logo, designed by the fabulously-named BatBoy Slim.

To mark the occasion, here are links to a dozen of my favourite Goth tunes on YouTube. My apologies if, first, you have to sit through a few of those annoying and asinine adverts that nowadays seem to clog the channel like fatbergs in a London sewer. .

To start with, here’s one of the genre’s most old-school bands, Fields of the Nephilim, with their 1987 anthem Moonchild – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Moonchild is also the name of a novel that occult icon and self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley had penned 70 years earlier. With the sepulchral voice of singer Carl McCoy and the band’s peculiar look – moth-eaten Wild West gunslingers covered in flour – I thought Fields of the Nephilim were a bit of joke during their 1980s heyday, but I have to say they’ve grown on me since then and I find Moonchild and its lyrical refrain (“Moonchild, lower me down, lower me down / Moonchild…. Lower me down, down, down, down, down, dowww-wwwn!”) irresistible.

© Situation Two

Also defiantly old-school in sound, but of a more recent vintage – it was originally released in 2006 – is Tear You Apart by Californian band She Wants Revenge. Like many people, I hadn’t heard the song before it was used in a 2015 episode of the TV show American Horror Story (apparently at the insistence of Lady Gaga, who featured among the cast). When I did hear it, with its cheeky emulation of the dub-style guitar sound from Bauhaus’s 1982 epic Bela Lugosi’s Dead, and its titular homage to Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980) by Joy Division, I genuinely believed for a moment this was a 35-year-old Goth classic that’d somehow eluded me since the 1980s.

Another band hailing from California is London After Midnight, who no doubt took their name from the long-lost 1927 silent vampire film London After Midnight, which starred Lon Chaney Sr. In a genre where too often songs lapse into pompous, overblown melodrama, their 1992 song Sacrifice manages the difficult trick of being stately and melodramatic – check out that thunder in the background – while being rather sweet and jaunty as well.

© Rotation

Now for a classic from the early 1980s and the nascent years of Goth music: 1982’s Torch by Soft Cell. The Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and Dave Ball would probably hate to see themselves categorised as ‘Goth’ and have one of their songs included in a playlist like this, but their sound – and especially the gorgeous trumpet-synth sound featured here – has always, for me, evoked the scene’s candlelit melancholia. Incidentally, when the pair of them were interviewed in the Guardian earlier this month, Almond made a memorable observation about how old age suddenly sneaks up on you: “One day you’re smearing your naked body in cat food at art college, the next you’re choosing terracotta pots at the garden centre.” Yes, Marc, I wholly agree. Not that I ever smeared my naked body in cat food at art college, though.

And here’s another synth-orientated duo. In 2011 Light Asylum consisted of Brooklyn singer Shannon Funchess and keyboardist Bruno Coviello – the latter departed shortly afterwards – and I found this clip of them on YouTube performing their song Dark Allies live at the time. Funchess’s barnstorming vocal performance is amazing. It’s just a pity that the audience seem as animated and appreciative as an army of arthritic zombies.

Still keeping with synth-y musical outfits… Despite the death of founding member Andy Fletcher in 2022, the veteran Basildon band Depeche Mode have a new album, Momento Mori, out this year and, like Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13^th movies, seem unkillable. I’m partial to this remix – the ‘Headcleanr Rock Mix’ – of their song Nothing from the 1987 album Music for the Masses. The Rock Mix takes out much of the original’s synth sound and replaces it with one that’s, well, rocky. It also plays up the song’s ‘Woo-woo!’ backing vocals and the result is like an up-tempo version of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1968).

© Mute

Goth icon Nick Cave received some flak this month for being part of the Australian delegation that attended the coronation ceremony of King Charles III. When challenged about this on his website The Red Hand Files, Nick declared an admiration for the House of Windsor, stating that the late Queen Elizabeth II “seemed almost extra-terrestrial and was the most charming woman I have ever met.” This from someone who once duetted with P.J. Harvey? Wow! Nick must have found Queen Liz powerful stuff indeed. He also answered the question, “What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?” by saying: “…well, the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious about using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do.”

In fact, I wouldn’t have minded Cave attending the coronation if he’d brought his band the Bad Seeds along with him and they’d been allowed to perform my all-time favourite Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds number Stagger Lee, which is the next song on my list. (In the Stagger Lee video, Nick looks scary even while wearing a pink T-shirt.) Yes, the coronation would have been a much livelier affair if, instead of Handel’s Zadok the Priest, Westminster Abbey had resounded to Nick Cave hollering about slobbering on someone’s head and climbing over pussies to get to ‘one fat boy’s asshole’. And having Blixa Bargeld shrieking animalistically at the moment that Charles got crowned would have worked perfectly.

There was never much chance of Robert Smith, frontman and mainstay of the Cure, getting invited to the coronation. Not as he once said of the Royal Family, “I’m much better than them. They’ve never done anything. They’re f**king idiots.” Anyway, here’s footage of the glorious Mr Smith performing, not with the Cure, but as a collaborator with the Canadian band Crystal Castles in 2010. They’re doing a cover of the song Not in Love, originally recorded by another Canadian outfit, Platinum Blonde, in 1983.

From indy100.com

I don’t know why I like this cover of the 1968 Yardbirds number Heart Full of Soul by the Goth band Ghost Dance – who were formed in 1985 by Gary Marx (late of the Sisters of Mercy) and Anne-Marie Hurst (late of Skeletal Family), and who disbanded in 1989, but who have recently reformed again. I just do. It’s a joyous-sounding thing.

Not normally joyous is the sound of Goth / industrial-rock juggernaut Killing Joke, whose mission according to singer and keyboardist Jaz Coleman was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form”. Actually, the band’s crunching, thunderous urgency rarely sounded ‘exquisite’ or ‘beautiful’, but it was pretty impressive. Here’s a track I like very much from their eponymous 2003 album. It’s called Asteroid and features Coleman screeching the blunt but memorable refrain, “Asteroid…! Coming in from the void!” The hectic drums are courtesy of a guest artist, Nirvana and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl. Killing Joke had once accused Nirvana of plagiarism because of the similarity of the guitar riff in Nirvana’s Come as You Are (1991) to the one in their 1985 song Eighties, so clearly there were no hard feelings between them and Grohl.

© Zuma / Epic / Columbia

Idiosyncratic Birkenhead indie-rock troubadours Half Man Half Biscuit could in no way be described as ‘Goth’, but their 2000 song With Goth on our Side not only takes the mickey out of a certain Bob Dylan effort, but also pokes affectionate fun at music’s darkest subculture with its tale of Dai Young, who’s ‘the king of Welsh Goths’, and his girlfriend: “She sits and she crimps / Her mother’s convinced / She’s communing with imps.” The girlfriend also has a kid brother called Wilf, who’s all right because ‘he’s into Placebo and Cradle of Filth’.

And to call the curtain on World Goth Day 2023, here’s Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees, the stand-out track on their 1986 album Tinderbox – which, incidentally, was the first album by the band that I ever bought. Needless to say, I hold Siouxsie Sioux in high regard. Indeed, if Nick Cave believes Queen Elizabeth II is the most extra-terrestrial and most charismatic woman he’s ever met, well, I can only surmise that he’s never met Her Gothic Highness, the majestic and imperious Siouxsie.

© Polydor / Geffen

January 14, 2021January 15, 2021

Trump-town riots

© CBS News

“It’s a disgrace, there’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace.”

So spoke President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally at Washington DC on January 6^th. This was before the rally’s attendees launched an assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress were meeting there to certify Joe Biden becoming the 46^th president and Trump’s successor.

Bravely, Trump used the pronoun ‘we’, which normally means ‘me’ as well as ‘you’, when he declared: “…we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to the Capitol…” Then, bravely, he didn’t accompany his supporters when they marched off to confront and fight their way past the Capitol’s police force (many of whom, as it happened, were suspiciously reluctant to do their jobs). Instead, bravely, Trump headed back to the White House where, bravely, he watched the ensuing carnage on TV.

In his speech, Trump claimed that November 2020’s presidential election, when Joe Biden won 72 more electoral college seats and 7,250,000 more votes than he did, and which everybody from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice – not to mention the judges who chucked out 60-odd lawsuits filed by Trump in protest – agreed had been held fairly, was even more fraudulent than an election held in a third-world country. Even more!

I guess I should credit Trump for using the term ‘third-world countries’, which is an improvement on his previous term for less-well-off parts of the planet, ‘shithole countries’. I doubt, though, if he’ll ever evolve to the point where he refers to them as ‘developing-world countries’, or even less-patronising terms like ‘low-and-lower-middle-income countries’, or ‘the global south’, or ‘the Majority World’.

As somebody who’s spent much time living in (what I’ll call) low-and-lower-middle-income countries, I have to say I’ve never seen a spectacle as humiliatingly ridiculous as the one in the Capitol following Trump’s rabble-rousing speech on January 6^th. I’ve lived in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il and Libya under Colonel Ghaddafi, dictators whose perpetual self-aggrandisement led to some ludicrous sights indeed. But nothing I saw in those places compares to last week’s scenes, where American politicians fled from their chambers while doors buckled, windows imploded and police and secret-service officers were pushed back by an inexorable, invading tide of white supremacists, Nazis, militiamen, crackpot conspiracists and MAGA nutjobs.

It resembled the start of a zombie-apocalypse movie – the bit where a live TV broadcast, announcing the emergency and urging calm, is interrupted by the studio staff looking into the lobby and screaming off-camera, “They’re here! They’re here!” Though this wasn’t so much Dawn of the Dead as QAnon of the Dead.

© Sony Soho Square

And during my time in what Trump thinks of as ‘shithole countries’, I’ve never seen performers from such a theatre of the absurd as those who were centre stage in the Capitol when, temporarily, the mob occupied it. The QAnon-shaman guy with the buffalo furs and horns and the painted face, resembling the figure on the cover of the 1993 Jamiroquai album Emergency on Planet Earth after it’d spent a night sleeping in a skip. The other guy with the furs, plus glasses and a dead beaver on his head, looking like the world’s shittest Davie Crockett. The guy in the bobbled ‘Trump’ hat who walked off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, now under arrest and subject to a thousand jokes on social media about when he’ll ‘take the stand’. The guy with the Santa Claus beard and the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ T-shirt, whom one right-wing idiot later tried to deflect criticism from on social media by suggesting he might actually be an ‘Auschwitz survivor’… Hold on, though. Someone celebrating Auschwitz in 2021? That’s not absurd. That’s frightening.

Indeed, after the initial absurdities broadcast on the initial news reports, there came more frightening accounts of what’d happened. A police officer died of injuries sustained while being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Another officer, a black man, had to offer himself as bait and lure a racist mob away from the senate entrance, so that those inside got a few extra minutes to evacuate. (While these things were happening, other officers, clearly sympathetic to the mob’s intent, were dismantling barriers to let them pass and posing for selfies with them.) Journalists were attacked. A makeshift noose was strung up outside. Masked figures roamed around carrying zip-tie handcuffs, apparently planning to take hostages.

Meanwhile, there was the jaw-dropping contemptibility of Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, the Texan cowpat, and Josh Hawley, a man who physically and spiritually resembles Miguel Ferrer’s scumbag executive in Robocop (1987). Even after the insurrection, they kept on parroting Trump’s honking-mad claims about election fraud and they voted against Biden’s certification. Obviously, this is because they want to secure the support of Trump’s deranged base when they launch their own bids to become president in 2024. With Cruz and Hawley, it’s not so much ‘we the people’ as ‘me the people’.

I suppose I should react to this with schadenfreude. The USA has a long history of promoting revolutions and insurrections in other countries. The most notorious of many examples were the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which the USA and its little sidekick the UK orchestrated in 1953 (and which begat the Shah of Iran, which begat the 1979 revolution, which begat the Ayatollah, which begat the Iran we know and fear today), and the 1973 coup d’état it engineered against President Salvador Allende that resulted in the murderous, fascistic rule of General Pinochet. Now it’s embarrassingly fallen prey to an attempted coup of its own.

Still, all the sanctimonious blather about the USA being the mother of democracy and the shining light for other nations to follow, often propagated by Hollywood movies, does worm its way into your consciousness no matter how hard you try to resist. So although the idea of American democratic righteousness is more myth and propaganda than reality, seeing its political heart get trashed by Jamiroquai-shaman guy, beaver-on-head guy, lectern-guy, etc., was rather sad.

From twitter.com / schwarzenegger

Incidentally, if the notion that the USA is the great champion of democracy is cheesy guff, it was appropriate that a few days later Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of cinema’s greatest proponents of cheesy (though enjoyable) guff, went viral in a video in which he praised American democracy. Arnie even likened its resilience to the sword of Conan the Barbarian. The sword’s blade, he explained, becomes stronger the more it’s tempered by punishment. (Sorry, Arnie, but I seem to remember Conan’s mantra being to ‘crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women’. Which doesn’t sound terribly democratic to me.)

But returning to the topic of low-and-lower-middle-income countries… From 1999 to 2001 I worked in Ethiopia. When I arrived there, most Ethiopians’ experience of the outside world was via an antiquated TV set kept in a wooden cabinet in the neighbourhood coffee shop or bar, which gave them access to two terrestrial channels. The channels’ output seemed to consist mainly of clips of traditional Ethiopian dancing, English football matches that’d taken place three weeks earlier, and reruns of Jake and the Fatman (1987-92).

Within two years, however, satellite TV had arrived with a vengeance. Suddenly, those same people were being exposed daily to dozens, if not hundreds of channels crammed with glossy adverts and pop videos dripping with opulence – fancy cars, penthouses, jewellery, designer clothes. It was all phoney nonsense, of course. Most people in other countries didn’t live like that. But how was your average Ethiopian expected to know? And how, I wondered, would this impact on the psychology of a people whose country was then, and still is today, pretty impoverished? (In 2018 its GDP per capita was ranked 167^th in the world.)

As it turned out, I should have been more worried about the Americans and how they’d cope with rapid advances in communications technology and especially with the sudden arrival of social media. For now we have vast numbers of Americans taking Trump’s twitter ravings as the gospel truth. Also, vast numbers of them believe the insane drivel that is the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, whereby Trump is battling a worldwide network of paedophilic, baby-eating Satanists who control everything, especially everything that’s liberal.

Whoever Biden appoints as a successor to Betty DeVos, Trump’s wretched Secretary of Education, will urgently need to promote 21^st century skills like critical thinking and digital literacy in the nation’s schools. Otherwise, thanks to social media and the Internet, the USA will collectively disappear down an extremist rabbit hole or get locked into a far-right echo chamber.

Ironically, Trump, so disdainful of ‘shithole countries’ in Africa and elsewhere, is probably closest in his vanity, bluster and puffed-up preposterousness to some of the infamous dictators who ruled certain African nations after the end of colonialism. I’m thinking of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko who, while most of his subjects lived in poverty, built a palace that became known as ‘the Versailles of the jungle’, travelled using a fleet of costly Mercedes-Benz motor cars and hired Concorde for shopping trips to France. What Trumpian things to do. I’m also thinking of Uganda’s Idi Amin, described in 1973 by his country’s American ambassador as ‘racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous and militaristic.’ That sounds like Trump down to a T.

By the way, talk of Idi Amin makes me think of the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, based on the 1998 novel by Giles Fodden. In that, a hapless, vain and dim Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, cosies up to Amin, played by Forest Whittaker, at the start of the latter’s career and soon gets more than he bargained for.

Thinking of The Last King of Scotland’s imaginary scenario, I’m somehow reminded of the real-life scenario here:

Anyway, America, one week has passed since the Capitol insurrection. You’ve got just one more week to go before Biden gets inaugurated and the Orange Blob, hopefully, is cast off into powerlessness and obscurity.

You’re halfway out of Crazy Town. Hope you make it. Good luck.