Joy Division – 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

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.

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.