SO NOIR SO GOOD

With The Cure’s US dates being hailed as the tour of the summer, Siouxsie cutting an imperiously witchy figure at festivals, everyone from Bauhaus to The Mission still active, various releases including a box set, a slew of books, and newspaper articles, Goth seems destined to outlive all other subcultures. The polymorphously perverse post-punk movement that began in a club in London has since seeped into all corners of modern life, from Batman movies to Billie Eilish – even Eurovision 2023 seemed inundated with goth sonics/imagery. Jeremy Allen casts a kohl eye over its origin story and speaks to goth prime movers. 

At The Horror Show! exhibition at Somerset House in London recently, something evil was lurking in the darkened basement of the south wing. To imbue the place with a sense of the macabre, patrons were met with the nine-and-ahalf-minute goth-dub masterpiece, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by Bauhaus, in full and on repeat, as they stepped into the exhibition space.

Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy intoning about bats, bell towers and the undead is the perfect way to start this trawl through the UK’s goth counterculture from the 70s to the present as your eyes dart from a devil-horned Marc Almond to a vampiric Thatcher, with an impressionistic splurge called Post Viral Fatigue by modern Bake Off celebrity goth Noel Fielding bringing things up to date.

Walk a few metres more at The Horror Show! and you’ll see a display case full of attire from the Batcave, the goth haunt that ran in London between 1982 and 1985, exhibiting bitumen-black, birdshit-speckled outfits worn by patrons in a dark transmutation of the DIY punk style.

“It really was the true birthplace of the British goth-pop cult, and it fitted me like a glove,” says Soft Cell singer Marc Almond, who regularly attended the Batcave and played there with his flamenco goth side-project Marc & The Mambas. “I really felt at home there. And it was a home for those who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream or didn’t fit in anywhere at all, really.”