Siouxsie Sioux: A hostile and valueless reality.
The Degraded Present
BECAUSE HE FEELS that society should be destroyed, Nick Cave is also a lover of horror — note the appearance of Count Dracula in his list of favourite things. For Cave, death and darkness — being closer to the truth of the human condition — are sublime. Luckily, his baby feels the same way:
My baby is all right
She doesn’t mind a bit of dirt
She says ‘horror vampire bat bite’153She says ‘horror vampire
How I wish those bats would bite’1
‘Release the Bats’ was a certified Batcave floor-filler — for obvious reasons. It would also become The Birthday Party’s most important contribution to the goth aesthetic. As Simon Reynolds shows in Rip it Up and Start Again, Goth first emerged as an alternative to two recent developments in post-punk — the rabble-rousing Oi! movement, and the anarchopunk scene centred around Crass.2 Goth became a home for kids who liked the energy of these bands, but were bored by the politics. Anything with a whiff of romance, darkness and mystery was bound to appeal to them — and ‘Release the Bats’ had plenty of all three.
When the singer in ‘Mutiny in Heaven’, sprouts his ungodly wings and flies out of the twentieth century, he’s offering his listener something no amount of agit-prop or personal politics can provide — an escape route from the world as it is. Siouxsie and the Banshees embodied this same quality. ‘[Juju] was released at the height of the Thatcherite years,’ remarked music writer Keith Cameron, talking to Siouxsie in 2008, ‘yet you seemed to be inhabiting your alternative reality, a horror-show phantasmagoria: Halloween, Voodoo Dolly, Arabian Knights…’
‘Right!’ the singer replied. ‘You’re saying “Thatcherite years”, and I’m going: “Really?!” I wasn’t even aware! We were in our own universe.’3
The flight to this alternative reality is what links together the motley collection of bands who came to be embraced by the ‘white faces’ in the early ’80s, and has been central to the appeal of goth through the decades. The Cure, for example, are not really goth. But to Geoff Rickly of Thursday, growing up in the ’90s, they were of a piece with the other goth bands he liked because they seemed to offer an escape route from the present day.
‘The goth and British bands I liked had the same visceral kick as regular punk but it seemed more like a place for me, a space you could inhabit. Something far away from reality.’4
Similarly, for Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and Davey Havok of AFI, the appeal of goth is precisely this escape from the present day, an escape that punk with a capital ‘p’ can never allow. In Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult, The Damned, Alien Sex Fiend, The Virgin Prunes and The Sisters of Mercy, the Britain of 1979–84 is only suggested by its absence. All these bands made the leap out of what Alex de Jonge calls ‘the degraded present’ and into something out-of-time, something eternal and unchanging.5 Siouxsie and The Banshees’ ‘Spellbound’ invokes the world of the irrational, dreams, magic and madness. Siouxsie asks us to cast our minds back to childhood and the ‘beckoning voice’ that seemed to call us through the cradle bars. These deep-seated urges, she insists, cannot be ignored — they define us for all time, and all our efforts to civilise ourselves, from pre-school onwards, are reduced to nothing when we hear this siren-sound again.
The contrast with the Leeds positivists couldn’t be more complete. In ‘Love like Anthrax’, Andy Gill scoffs at the idea that, deep in the human soul, there are permanent emotions that everyone can relate to because they have not changed in thousands of years. If this is true, what hope do we have of perfecting society? None at all, says the goth. We can’t change, because we’re not lumps of dough, but unfathomable mysteries, full of primitive urges and recurring nightmares. These timeless and tragic emotions have haunted humanity for thousands of years, and will continue to haunt us for thousands of years to come.
This, for the punk activist and pop deconstructivist alike, is almost unforgivably backward. That’s why, when they went looking for a name for this unwelcome eruption of romantic gloom in their new pop universe, critics of the day settled on ‘gothic’. The word had almost the identical connotations it had for the reviewer of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto — ‘gothic’ meant superstitious, irrational and unhealthily obsessed with love, religion and death. The implication was — haven’t we grown out of all that stuff?
But these criticisms ignore the fact that the goth’s attachment to the timeless and the tragic is the result of the very same ‘Enlightenment’ that the pop optimist claims to advocate. Nick Cave, like Wordsworth, would eventually find his God, but for the majority of the romantics — including Shelley, Keats, Byron and Goethe — such simple faith was impossible. Romanticism, as Norman Davies has observed, is characterised by a profoundly religious temperament — a longing to believe.7 But more often than not, when the romantics, having found no satisfaction in the modern world, went looking for God, they found him gone. The blame, as usual, lay with Newton and his followers, who in the rush to rid Christianity of its mystery, had rationalised God into a corner, and finally out of existence.