Tag Archives: goth

A disagreement about The Cure

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We had disagreed about The Cure. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me but you were pretty militant about it. My position was that they had done so much poppier stuff in later years that you couldn’t credibly call them a goth band anymore and this was clearly a problem for you. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is not a goth record and that was 1987 so it’s not like it’s even a recent thing. It’s got trumpets. Surely the least goth instrument unless it’s in a Wagner symphony or something. I’m a bit sketchy on classical music. Would Bauhaus have been improved with a parping trumpet solo in the middle of Bela Lugosi’s Dead? Well, okay, maybe but that’s not my point. You countered that it wasn’t just about the music, it was about the aesthetic and the attitude. I think you said something about how it was like when you saw goths at the beach: they might be in their swimming gear, probably getting sunburnt, but they didn’t stop being goths just because they happened to be playing frisbee. Robert Smith didn’t look like a frisbee guy to me, I reckon he’d want to be buried in sand, just his mop of frizzed black hair left sticking out of the beach like a mass of gnarly seaweed. 

If I’m honest the conversation hadn’t gone to plan. I’d spotted you pretty quickly after arriving at the bar and clocked the dark hair, dyed a deep (dare I say blood) red at the tips, framing slightly sharp features, high cheek bones, slightly pronounced, pointed nose. A cascading array of ear rings, a series of studs and loops around, seemingly, the entirety of the outside of your lobes. Looked pretty cool. You had large, hazel eyes. They made me think of the Well Of Souls but I decided that this would be a terrible first line, even my own inner monologue was telling me that it was dreadful, and figured that the Cure tee-shirt (Boys Don’t Cry) you were wearing was a safer place to start than a cave where the spirits of the dead await Judgement Day. How wrong I was.

I didn’t actually get to start with a line. You watched me walking towards the bar and, evidently, clocked that I was wearing a Nirvana tee-shirt and stole my conversational opener. Do you actually like them or is this a zeitgeist bandwagon thing? It wasn’t exactly that but you said something like that and the inference was very much that I was a zeitgeist bandwagon rider rather than a genuine fan. I didn’t mind. Other than the tee-shirt I wasn’t really looking like an archetypal grunge head at that point, just jeans and a pair of trainers. I’d had my hair cut a couple of weeks ago and had gone very respectable in anticipation of the end of term and trying to find some work over the summer. So I was looking less Kurt Cobain and more trainee-accountant-on-the- weekend. Your scepticism was justified I guess. I hated people that wore band tee-shirts for bands they didn’t even like or know so I actually thought this was a good sign that the conversation had started like this. How wrong I was.

I told you that I had liked them from the start, which, in my head, was Bleach, but you seemed to know some obscure stuff that pre-dated that and had, apparently, seen them on the tour they did with Tad and Mudhoney, I felt less sure of my fandom. Obviously I knew who Mudhoney were but who the hell were Tad? You seemed to sense my sudden hesitancy and declared that you’d lost interest in Nirvana after Nevermind came out; production was too polished and poppy, you couldn’t get on board with the whole poster boy for an alienated generation stuff. I wasn’t ready to completely give way on this point and suggested that maybe it was a good thing that more people would get into some great music. You started to sing the chorus to In Bloom by way of response. He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along. At this point perhaps I should have called it quits and slunk off to see if my friends had showed up yet but it was going so far off plan that I thought it probably couldn’t get any worse. How wrong I was.

I needed to get the conversation away from me and onto her and the obvious pivot was the one that I’d planned to start with. Talk about The Cure. You obviously like The Cure. This will be a failsafe route into a chat in which you hopefully discover that I am a good guy, not likely to hit you with a line about the deep abyss of sorrow in your eyes, and we exchange numbers, say that we’ll hook up in future. In retrospect it was a mistake to pivot to The Cure by suggesting that they were, just like Nirvana, equally as guilty of softening up their sound, playing to the pop crowd, and that, maybe, just maybe, they weren’t a goth band anymore. You watched me make my series of statements with a bemused, slightly detached air. I felt like a fly flitting around one of those plants that seems benign and then eats them, jaw like leaves sliding shut efficiently, smoothly, dispatching their prey. Something to do with Venus but I didn’t really pay much attention in biology. Or mythology. You stayed silent, waiting for me to finish and so I prattled on a bit longer about how Friday In Love could practically have been the Friends theme song such was its sunny peppiness. I don’t think I actually said sunny peppiness but I was babbling by this point so all bets are off. I finally stopped talking. You raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was a considered reappraisal, an eyebrow that spoke of seeing something familiar from a fresh perspective, a perspective from someone that you were now thinking was pretty okay. How wrong I was.

I went to a lot of lectures that year. I was a good student and even stuck around for the optional stuff on tax law that was like listening to an atonal dirge of noise for an hour. Quite a lot like how I felt about The Cure before they went poppy if I was honest but I felt this wouldn’t help to say out loud. All of those lectures were as nothing compared to the exceptionally detailed dissection of The Cure’s career, songs, principles, importance, and place in alternative culture, that you gave me over the next ten minutes or so. It was impassioned, frequently sweary, oddly sexually charged when you talked about Robert Smith and men wearing make-up, and pretty unambiguous in whether I was right or wrong about the whole pop sell-out thing. It was magnificent. The only trouble now was that I had started out mildly curious, attracted by those well-of-souls eyes, and now I was in deep. You were glorious and I had blown it because I didn’t know who supported Nirvana in the UK in 1989 and I thought The Cure had some tunes that milkmen would cheerily whistle. Not even goth milkmen either. You were fierce and intelligent and absolutely gorgeous and I had no chance. How wrong I was.

We had disagreed about The Cure. You said later that you were just messing with me and wanted to see if I’d stick it out whilst you unloaded all that stuff about dark majesty and direct lineage from punk that was more legitimate than Nirvana’s Beatles meets Pixies marriage of convenience. I don’t think you were entirely messing with me. You do have an inordinate amount of Cure records and that enormous poster of Robert Smith over your bed still kinda freaks me out a bit when I wake up in the morning. I told you the eyes thing after a couple of weeks. You rolled them in response so at least my instinct to keep that one to myself early on was correct. You’d be a decent point of judgement for the dead though. As long as they liked The Cure they’d be fine. I grew my hair back out but you shaved yours off. It suited you. I said it made you look like Ripley in Aliens. Alien, you said back. Well, I think Aliens is the better film, I replied. 

How wrong I was.

Almost at the end of July and almost at the end of my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital (fundraising page here).

This one was just a bit of fun but has its roots in an incident, a very long time ago, when I argued the merits of Lenny Kravitz with a woman at University who had a large poster of him on her wall. I still think I was right but it was probably a situation where it was better to be wrong…

The lies we tell ourselves

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The lies we tell ourselves become the truth of who we are. It was the Autumn of ’89 when I first heard that. We were in the pre-fab classroom the school had put up temporarily whilst they refurbished the Sixth Form block. It was cold, there was an electric wall radiator that leeched heat into the room but you only really felt it if you were at the two desks right next to it. We asked Watson, the Physics teacher, about it and pretended to be interested when he started talking about thermal radiation and conduction and convection. A few of us afterwards kicked around the idea of forming a band called Thermal Radiation – we were all try hard goths back then – but settled on Conviction Convection in tribute to Watson’s enthusiasm. None of us did that well in Physics.

I wasn’t sat at one of the warm desks that day. I was near the door, it was the worst place to be as the seals had worn from the repeated opening and closing since the start of term. There was a draught. I was hunched up, exhaling my breath to see if it was visible. I thought I’d read somewhere that the school had to let you out if the temperature was below a certain level and this was going to be my evidence. The fact that I didn’t actually know that temperature threshold or how that related to the point at which breath vaporised to mist were just inconvenient details. Like I said, none of us did well in Physics. Vaporised To Mist, though, was mooted as Conviction Convection’s first song but I think we nixed it in favour of Chaos Defrost after Pete saw it written as a setting on a microwave in Currys. The song wasn’t as good as the title but, to be honest, that was pretty much our default.

Written down this next bit will sound more dramatic than it was. It’ll look like a metaphor. If it’s like a metaphor does that make it a simile? I used to care about that stuff and I think it was him that made me care. The door swung open, it opened into the room and pushed a rush of cold air through the desks, through the chairs, rustling pages in text books, snaking its way round ankles exposed under too-short, one-more-term trousers, stealing over bored faces, blowing away tiredness from dry eyes. A man entered, maybe early forties, slightly untidy salt and pepper hair, close cropped beard, shirt sleeves rolled up despite the cold. He paced around the room which had fallen silent save for the reaching for papers that had been displaced by his arrival; boys retrieving their scrawled notes on Keats and Orwell, Austen and Marlowe. He stopped by the radiator and gestured that we should come closer. Nobody moved, not quite knowing what to do, until he spoke:

“Gather in boys. Gather in. If convention means you’re too cold to learn then I say convention is bullshit. Pull up your chair and gather in.”

Okay, it was quite dramatic by our usual school standards. None of us had really heard a teacher swear before. There was that incident with a supply cover the previous year when they’d finally cracked under constant baiting about why they couldn’t get a permanent job and told us to “fuck off back to our over privileged detached houses on cultural wasteland cul-de-sacs”. I thought it was fair although technically my parents lived in a semi. Obviously we stole the line about cultural cul-de-sacs for the band which broadly offset the week of detention we also got. This new guy was different though; it was a deliberate choice of words, said softly, conversationally. It didn’t even seem like he’d seen Dead Poet’s Society that summer and was trying on a new set of post Captain-My-Captain clothes. We’d had a lot of that in the first couple of weeks of term with the arts teachers, in particular, seeming to embrace the idea of getting us to go on walks and stand on things to challenge our notions of conformity. I think the Head pulled them all in and stopped it after one of the third year kids slipped off his desk during a stirring rendition of a poem he’d written about why girls didn’t want to play Dungeons & Dragons with him. It was called “no dice”. Hairline fracture of his wrist which was unfortunate as it almost certainly put a temporary stop to his other major hobby at the time.

The rest of that lesson was more routine. A standard dissection of “Ode To A Nightingale” and a straight refusal of any of our attempts to move the discussion on to the extent of the Romantic poets’ drug consumption. What does the text tell you. Always back to the text. What does the text tell you. Is it true for you? That was what we came to understand as his key question, the one he always brought us back to for the rest of that year. He was always interested in this idea of truth and I don’t think I really understood what he was doing until much later, until after I’d told myself so many lies. But I was a teenage boy and understanding things – the real things – isn’t our strong suit.

Alongside the literary criticism and deconstruction he made us write. That was the first time he used the line about the lies we tell ourselves becoming the truth of who we are. I don’t remember it exactly but the gist of it was something like this: fiction is just truth disguised as lies, it’s made up, licensed lying. Use that license and tell your truth under that cover. The lies we tell ourselves become the truth of who we are so make sure you tell yourself the best kind of lies. The ones that are truth. I lied before, I remember it like it was yesterday, each and every word. But acknowledging that someone could reach me that closely, still, from so long ago, is a truth that I need a lie to hide behind.

So that year, I wrote. I mangled rhymes into poetry, flirted with blank verse (it didn’t flirt back, not a flicker), forced out prose, poured my all-out-of-perspective teenage heart into words upon words upon words. It wasn’t all overblown pubescent angst and existentialism. Despite the huge amount of moody goth music I was listening to I wrote some funny stuff, some parody reworking of the texts we were studying, a short play about the band imploding which proved eerily prescient although our demise ended up being more prosaic than my concocted conclusion. We fell out over how much dry ice should form part of our opening number. Everyone wanted the whole stage fogged up thick with it except for John, the guitarist, who said he couldn’t see his chorus pedal on the floor. He walked off one night when he stomped on his fuzz pedal instead and ruined the start of Chaos Defrost. I think we could have salvaged it but there was so much dry ice swirling around that it took him a couple of minutes to actually make his dramatic exit, he walked into the drum kit and then almost went over the side of the stage before he found the right way. It was a slow exit, stage right.

Nobody saw the stuff I wrote, except the stuff that was specifically for an assignment and that always felt a little filtered to me. Like I was keeping a part of myself back from everyone else. I guess I was. As well as not acing Physics I also wasn’t studying Psychology but even I can see that I was keeping a slight remove, keeping the truths I really needed to lie about for just myself.

I found it all recently and can see the traces of myself in there. The traces of who I am now from those dispatches from the past. It was a good reminder. I can even, in retrospect, see which bits were really my truth and which bits were just the lies I was telling myself, the lies I’ve continued telling myself.

Under the license of lies I decided it was time to start looking for my truth again. Time for some more stories.

This is a thinly veiled framing device for the stories I’m planning to write in July 2023. It’s not true but it contains truth and I suppose that’s the aim of all stories.

This one’s for all my English teachers. You taught me how to see and understand the world.

Lockdown: Leah

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The lockdown started on Good Friday. They’d all seen the pulsing amber light on their Medlets, all checked the subsequent notifications on their phones. It was community based, nothing national, the sort of thing that cropped up every few months. More often than not they were false alarms.

“Looks like we’re spending Easter in here, together,” said Leah.

“How convenient, I’d been giving up staying in for Lent,” said Cora. “What is it? Standard trace and erase?” She mimed pointing a gun with her fingers, hands clasped together, brought them up to her lips and blew.

“You’ve been watching too much VSI,” said Leah.

“I love that show,” said Aps. She’d joined them in the kitchen, still in her dressing gown, hair bundled up in a towel. “You know the ‘erase’ is an anti-viral delivered through an injection? They just gave them those stupid dart guns in VSI to make it more dramatic.”

“Next you’ll be telling me real hazmat suits aren’t skin tight and cut to the cleavage.”

“Sorry to spoil it for you. Male Med Police officers don’t regularly have to strip to the waist because their suit’s been compromised either,” said Aps. “And I think they took a fair bit of license with the decontamination showers.”

“True,” said Leah. “I thought the point of a shower was to get clean. Some of those scenes are downright dirty.”

“We’re watching it tonight, right?”

“God, yes,” said Leah.”

In the end the three of them sat up watching old TV shows. April stayed in her room until later, finally coming down to join them as the credits rolled over some hospital drama she didn’t recognise. The others had gotten used to her taking time out to be on her own; just need some time back in my coffin was her stock response if any of them asked if she was okay. It was getting late and the room was dark save for the images on the TV. April lit the pair of candles they had set up above the fireplace and then flicked on the fairy lights that they’d draped around the picture above it. When they’d moved in it had been something the University had left, a picture of balloons lifting off over the Clifton Suspension Bridge, but they’d replaced it with a Rothko print that Cora had picked up in the village. A swathe of red paint with a careless blue rectangle at the bottom. As the weeks had passed they’d each started to stick photos on it, usually just mini print outs of pictures of their nights out.

“April bringing the vibes,” said Cora.

April bowed her head. “I will be your guide through this enforced vigil. I will tend the flames and be the keeper of the holy fairy lights from Wilkos.”

“We used to sit up at home on Good Friday,” said Leah. “It was the most Catholic my dad got. Nothing for the whole year, no confession, no mass, not a whisper, and then Easter would come around and it was like he’d had a visitation. I bet him and mum are sitting there now. He will have dusted off the painting of Saint Pio. It’s the only time he takes down his signed photo of the Inter squad from 2010.”

“You must miss them,” said Aps. “Has he come around yet?”

“It’s complicated,” said Leah. “I do miss them but me and dad are still barely speaking. He’ll appear sometimes in the background on mine and mum’s video calls. Ciao piccola. That’s about as much as I’ll get, maybe a wave, and then he’s gone again. I don’t know. When he gets his mind set he’s pretty hard to budge.”

“Like father, like…,” started Cora. Leah pulled out the cushion she was resting on and flung it across the room at her.

“Hey, I am not at all like that!”

“So, that whole performance last month when you made us stop the Uber because the driver had a Britain Rising tattoo on his neck and we had to walk home across the Downs at half one in the morning, wasn’t, you know, a bit like that?” said Cora.

“Not at all. He was an asshole. You guys need to take that stuff seriously. I know you think all these little far right nationalists are a bit of a joke but that’s how they start. They nearly ruined Italy. Dad hated what happened after all the first waves of infections. Everyone was scared and they took advantage of it, no-one really stopped to work out what we were signing up to,” said Leah.

“You were close, weren’t you,” said April suddenly. She’d taken her usual position on the floor, legs curled up underneath herself.

“Yes, we were. It’s a cliche but I was his princess, he was my papa. He taught me everything about his home – the language, the culture, food, football – and he used to take me out boating on the lake, just so we could talk I think. It was like he wanted to infuse Italy in to me, like he thought he had to make up for the fact that I wasn’t born there. And I loved it. I still love it. In all sorts of ways it is my home but it just got… I don’t know, it just got small.”

“You should call him,” said April. “Not tonight, not whilst he’s enraptured with Saint… what was his name again?”

“Pio,” said Leah. “He’s a biggie. Stigmata, healing, the works. Actually, with the whole stigmata deal you’d probably like him…”

April grinned. “I am a multi-denominational goth. If you insist on labelling me a goth.” She looked down at the long black dress wrapped around her legs, intricate lace detail decorating the hem. “Okay, I am looking pretty gothy today. But I’m interested in all faiths, all creeds, and all peoples, bleeding wrists not essential. Seriously, you should call him. While we’re in lockdown. Call him.”

It was late. Aps had already been yawning for the past half hour, so, one by one, they turned in for bed. Leah was last up, pausing to switch off the fairy lights, leaving their mosaic of pictures scattered across the Rothko illuminated just by the candles. The faces of her friends flickering in and out of view in the dancing light. One of the photos was a passport sized shot of Menaggio, one of hundreds she’d taken from the lake that summer she’d helped out running the ferries. The sun was slipping down past the mountains behind the town leaving it bathed in a warm, darkening orange glow. She touched the image with one hand, executed a half-remembered sign of the cross with her other, and whispered good-night.

Some Kandi talking

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“Who’s this again?” Cora was lying back on the sofa, watching the reflected sunlight from April’s Medlet dart across the ceiling. The music was a dark, droning dirge filling the room. It felt like sinking into the warm honeyed embrace of every one night stand she’d ever had; seductive, noisy, edgy, maybe not that healthy but the kind of mistake you knew you were going to make again anyway. After Rob she’d made a few mistakes.

“It’s The Jesus & Mary Chain,” said April. “Happy When It Rains.”

Cora turned her hands in front of her face, moving them in slow circles in a gentle nod to April’s default dance move. “Another one of those songs? And, happy when it rains, really? Is that, like, your theme song?”

April leant down over Cora, her face looming closer and closer until it blocked out the rest of the room. She stopped about an inch from Cora’s face. “Embrace the darkness, my friend, embrace the darkness.” They both smiled. “Is that my mascara by the way?”

“Well, you have so much I figured you wouldn’t notice…,” replied Cora.

When the others arrived home a couple of hours later they were still in the lounge, Cora now sitting up cross legged, April sat on the floor in front of her, head back in her lap. Cora had braided a few strands of her hair, interlacing them with purple ribbon. April’s eyes were closed and she was softly mouthing the words to a song none of the others knew. I’m not like them, I can pretend.

“Well look at you two,” said Leah.

“April’s been educating me on all the miserable music that we were lucky enough to miss in the late 80s. Now I know why our parents fucked us up so badly,” laughed Cora.

“It’s miserable music you can dance to,” protested April, opening her eyes. “Not this one so much but all the other stuff. And you’re more than capable of being a fuck up on your own without blaming your parents.” Cora poked her tongue out in response.

“Is this Nirvana?” said Aps. She’d come in behind Leah, laden with shopping bags. “That guy that shot himself. You know, the one on the tee-shirt.”

“I’m sure that’s just how he’d like to be remembered,” said April. “Yes, it’s Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is your man. Icon of alienation and isolation.” She flicked off the music streaming on her phone, thumbs flying as she searched for something. She held up a picture of him, blonde hair falling round his face framing blue eyes, a pensive frown.

“He sounds more like he’s your man to be honest,” said Cora. “I like ’em a little sunnier. He’s hot though, I’ll give you that.”

Aps snatched up the phone to look more closely at the picture before rummaging back through one of the bags she’d carried in. She fished out a flyer which she passed over to April as she handed back the phone. “I knew I’d seen him today. I picked this up for you, April, thought it looked like your sort of thing. They were giving them out in the Union.”

The flyer was postcard sized and filled with a picture montage of bands April recognised. Pixies, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, Stone Roses, Sisters, Mudhoney, Violent Femmes, Cure, Cult, Pulp, Oasis, Blur, the Stones, the Beatles. Kurt’s face was lost in there somewhere, the same shot that had appeared first on her phone. She had seen him today. Emblazoned across the top it read: Kandi Klub presents Club George. Down the bottom were details of the venue: The Thekla, Saturday nights, room limit 100. She shook her hair loose from Cora’s fingers and stood up. “We have to go. Seriously, we have to go to this.”

Cora, curious, plucked the flyer from her and examined it. “You sure they stick to that room limit? Someone told me about The Thekla. It’s that club on a boat, down in the harbour.”

“They have to stick to it,” said Aps. “They’d be shut down within a week if they mess around with that. They’ll have checks going in as well.”

“Come on Cora, it’ll be fun,” said Leah. “I mean, we won’t know any of the music but you can just pretend we’re partying in April’s head for a few hours.”

“So there’ll be dry ice and a strobe?” said Cora looking at April.

“You better believe it,” she replied.

 

 

……

This one is part of the overall set of stories about April and crew but as they’re in Bristol, even in the near future, it seemed only right to send them to the Kandi Klub. I don’t think it exists any more but perhaps someone will pick it up again one day.

RIP DJ George and thanks for the memories.

April

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April liked to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. Alone had always felt safe. She didn’t know why it felt safe and, in a way, it really shouldn’t have. When she was fourteen she contracted a viral infection and had been sent to one of the Isolation Containment Units that had been built after the big Covid-19 outbreak in 2020; she’d picked up one of the mutations that seemed to surface every couple of years. Sent away to the ICU. Or, the ‘I don’t see you’, as they quickly came to be known. She didn’t feel special, it happened to lots of kids.

When she’d applied for University they’d asked her about it. There were rules around disclosure and changes to the privacy of your medical history, all for the greater good but there was no hiding your viral record anymore. They seemed as interested in how she’d coped with six months on her own as her physical health, lots of questions about how she felt she’d integrate with the student body, how she worked with others, what the experience had taught her. What had it taught her? That she liked to be alone. Was that it? She was savvy enough not to say that, primed as she was through endless rounds of re-integration therapy to talk up the importance of social connections, the work she’d done in remaking friendships, and learning to physically be with people again. We are social creatures. She’d nodded through enough sessions with a succession of earnest counsellors to be able to regurgitate that stuff by rote. Sometimes she’d even believed it. Sometimes.

They couldn’t really turn her down in the end. Her grades were outstanding: they would have been good but six months soaked in syllabus and then, more and more, off syllabus had set off fires in her mind. She’d found it hard coming out but not for the reasons they’d anticipated: she was bored, hemmed back in by a curriculum she felt she’d outgrown. In turn that had just made her withdraw more, retreat back to her safe place to be alone with Shakespeare and Sartre, Plath and Plato, Joyce and Nitetzsche and Austen and all the other dead intellectual heavyweights she counted as friends. She’d heard them whisper round school that she was intense, up herself, aloof, distant, but it wasn’t that. She felt as insecure as the rest of them but held it all inside, looked for answers in the past from people that had thought all this before, not people stumbling around in the present trying to figure it out for the first time. That’s how she saw it then. Now, sometimes, she has doubts. Same as her doubts about the difference between being alone and being lonely.

In the ICU she’d spent long days listening to music and had latched on to a bunch of bands from the 80s that no-one else seemed to remember. The Cure and Bauhaus and Sister’s Of Mercy. Nick Cave. She’d find one band, listen to them on repeat for days, and then the algorithms did the rest, leading her on to the next like a virtual version of an older sibling she never had. It wasn’t fool proof. She listened to so much stuff from the late 80s that her recommendations started to fill up with hair metal and house music. She never understood house until later, feeling it vibrate up through her feet in a club, watching a tangled mess of aloft arms, slack jaws, saucer eyes, from the throng on the floor. It wasn’t music to be alone with. The hair metal she never understood. But it did point her to the New York Dolls and so she always chalked it up as a win.

It wasn’t that she missed it. There had been hard nights, video calling parents in tears, scrawling out angry diary entries, sinking into a withdrawal deeper than being alone, sinking into depression. It wasn’t all literature, music, and a Zen like state of self reflection. She was a kid. A lot of them were. Most of the ICUs were stacked with either kids – Aggressive Virus Spreaders – or the elderly or people with poor auto-immunity. Some of the doctors had started calling them the AVS and the AV nots. She didn’t blame them, it had sounded pretty funny to her, even locked up, but some of the older patients had complained. She’d had a fairly dark sense of humour before isolation and nothing in the experience lightened it.

April was nervous. They’d told her when they’d offered the place that they couldn’t guarantee her accommodation on her own. In fact, she’d had to avoid requesting it, just in case it appeared as a black mark against her application: not adapting post isolation, unwilling to risk placing with other students. It wasn’t that. She just liked being alone. The lack of guarantees had proven prescient.

April hesitated at the door. There was a discrete plate next to the letter box identifying the house as the property of the University of Bristol. She pressed the buzzer, turned her face towards the small, circular security camera and waited. The intercom crackled.

“Hey, you must be April. I see you. Come on in.”

 

 

 

All My Friends: Jo, Jo Jo, Joanna

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I’m Joanna now. For at least the last five years. Joanna. No, not Jo. Definitely not Jo Jo. Nothing that you can play back to me across the span of years separating us as we are today, all thirty something and figuring we can get on with things now that we know who we are, and how we were then, nebulous, not quite set, wobbling around in the moulds we’d crafted in adolescence, cooling into the hard and fast people we were going to be. No name, in short, that you can append with any of the rhyming prefixes that marked those years together and which, at the time, I had laughed along with. Blow Jo. The time Richard regaled seemingly the whole campus with a tale about our oral adventures. My oral adventures. He wasn’t one to reciprocate which was unfortunate as his three minute missionary mission hadn’t exactly knocked me out of orbit. Houston, we have a problem. Or flow Jo. A personal favourite; a fairly routine, clumsy mishap spilling the contents of my bag onto the floor one night in the pub sparking tampon related hilarity and an incident in which a pint of snakebite and black was soaked up in its super absorbent layers. Crow Jo. I dressed in a lot of black then, stayed pale, went heavy on the mascara, dyed my hair, listened to the Sisters and All About Eve and the Mission, so I vaguely understood this one. Of all of them this was probably the one I’d been happiest to wear as a label back then; their intentions may not have been entirely good but I wore this one like a badge of honour. I’m pretty sure there were others: slow Jo (always late), go Jo (always first to leave), and various comments on my sexual proclivities or otherwise (no Jo if I batted away some cack handed, groping pass from an unwelcome suitor or pro Jo if I decided to have some fun and it was, in the classic male-female double standard, deemed too soon or, heaven forbid, a one night stand).

Joanna suited me better these days. I think they’d all been surprised that I’d cut back my hair, neat bob, still jet black, and they were a little thrown by the suit. I’d come straight from the office. I assume, perhaps, they thought I’d turn up in the bat mobile or astride a giant raven or something rather than in my standard issue, company scheme Ford Mondeo. It was white, had too many miles on the clock for its age, and struggled to start on cold mornings. It got me from A to B and served as a neat metaphorical expression of where I was in my life. I’d spent a decent part of that first evening with all of us back together trying to imagine what each of the others would choose to drive but had given up after pegging Clare as wanting an Alfa – looks lovely, slightly aggressive, but completely unreliable and will always let you down – but needing a Golf – something steadfast and whilst not that sexy to look at, actually quite exciting underneath if you picked up the right model. One of the merits, or otherwise, of working in a brand consultancy was that I could now reduce almost any emotional expression to a mental exercise that shorthanded human behaviour to car choice or likelihood of being life and soul of a party or best-fit celebrity. Clare would be Jennifer Aniston: likeable but doomed to make terrible romantic choices. At a party she’d be the one flirting and subsequently sleeping with the guy with whom she’s done all of this before, writ large, whilst her old friends look on with quiet pity and the man that actually loves her, is obsessed with her, watches in drunken despair. Oh look, that’s exactly what she is doing. Maybe there’s more to those brand projection techniques than I give them credit for.

My main concession to my past, to the old Jo that they’d all known, was to bring my laptop so that, at the very least, the weekend would be soundtracked appropriately. I wasn’t selfish enough to turn every evening into a re-creation of a night out at Sector 5 but I knew that once everyone was suitably refreshed that I’d get away with chucking on ‘Temple Of Love’ or ‘In Between Days’ or, at a push, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’. Turns out that I  totally didn’t get away with the Bauhaus. Neil and Jon took over DJ duties at that point to enthusiastic encouragement from the others and played the hits as remembered through everyone’s indie-tinted glasses, presumably with those thick rimmed NHS prescription frames. Some time later, after what seemed like a long discussion, they settled on LCD Soundsystem which I’m not sure was likely to unite the new, shiny us in the same way that, say, Smells Like Teen Spirit united the memory of us. I liked it more than Jo would have: she was a bit more militant about that sort of thing. She would have found it a bit too arch, a bit too knowing. I just danced.

I danced and I remembered. It was like I’d always been on the periphery before, always observing, and a flood of memories came back seeing them all again. Jason holding an upside down, empty pint glass on his head, tears of beer streaking down his cheeks, other hand raised in celebration. Neil asleep on Jon’s floor surrounded by vinyl, the two of them sharing music into unconsciousness. Gina in the library with the lead piping. No, seriously, Gina in the library, protesting as me and Clare dragged her out to join us in the Union on a Friday afternoon. Richard, in a rare moment of not being a total dick, buying that nine bar after our finals and initiating the second summer of love in ’94. To be honest I don’t really remember that: June went up in smoke. Lizzie getting us backstage, into the VIP area, at Glastonbury after blagging security that she was managing PR for Rolf Harris. Back then he needed less PR, not sure even Lizzie could pull that one now. All of us eating vodka jelly and opening our hearts to each other as only drunken strangers can. All of us vowing to keep in touch. All of us swearing these were the best days of our lives.

I danced and I remembered. I even remembered Jo, the various versions of Jo that were foisted on me whether I wanted them or not. I think she would have liked Joanna.

 

Hey now, hey now now

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2. This Corrosion – Sisters of Mercy                                                         When: 1987

If there’s ever a competition to find the worst goth in the history of the UK then I will put my name forwards. I guess this could form the basis of my application.

My first forays into building my own record collection began, in earnest, from the age of around 15. I had a few bits of vinyl from late primary school – notably Abba’s “Super Trouper” LP – and had once traded a T-Rex 7” that had belonged to my dad with my Uncle Steve for… wait for it… Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face”. In my defence I was 9. It’s still not a great defence. However, the arrival of adolescence signaled a renewed interest in music.

Initially it’s fair to say that much of my taste was borrowed, mostly from my parents. Quite a bit of this has stayed with me – Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Queen, Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens, Meatloaf, Motown, early Rod Stewart – but it’s fair to say that none of it felt like it was really mine. In most cases it literally wasn’t mine – held on a set of old C60 cassettes that my dad insisted on using despite the fact that you couldn’t fit an album on one side. For a very, very long time I didn’t realise that Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was a double album; the only up side of this was it made my first listen of “Comfortably Numb” even more jaw dropping. It’s also fair to say that, in the mid to late 80s, this was a collection of artists that was nobody’s idea of “cool”. Such vagaries aside, of course, I can now confidently state the case for any of them – although Meatloaf is a stretch (but a pertinent one given the song at hand, more of which later).

Ah, “cool”. A concept long past my understanding but one that would have greatly preoccupied my teenage self. At that time it probably would have meant owning a Lacoste cardigan, in some suitably pastel shade, and persuading Caroline from the Number 20 bus to see Top Gun with me. Cool, and Caroline, proved elusive. However, irrespective of what this slippery concept fully entailed, the notion that music, or specifically bands, could be a marker for how you presented yourself to the world seemed to be part of it. If adolescence is the time when you begin to build your own identity, and particularly the way in which that identity is shown to the world, then music was very definitely a set of bricks I wanted to use.

So if you’re thinking that we’re headed, inexorably, towards a declaration that my first, independent view of what was cool happened to be goth then you’d be right.

“This Corrosion” was the first single released by the second (arguably third) version of The Sisters Of Mercy. Rising to prominence – or more appropriately emerging from a heavy fug of dry ice – in Leeds during the early 80s the Sisters had basically imploded come 1985. Singer Andrew Eldritch, beginning a pattern that was to repeat through the band’s life, fell out with then guitarist Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams. The latter two formed a new band called The Sisterhood but were thwarted in establishing their new outfit by Eldritch; concerned that the name was too similar to The Sisters Of Mercy he quickly put out a single under The Sisterhood name in order to legally claim it. Allegedly, though never substantiated, it ended in the civil courts with Eldritch suing his former brothers-in-black for £25,000, and winning. When he then put out the album Gift under The Sisterhood name the opening track, “Jihad“, begins with a female voice intoning two, five, zero, zero, zero. History may judge all of this petty but, regardless, one consequence of the ignominy and acrimony surrounding the split and resulting spat over band names was “This Corrosion”.

Hussey and Adams formed The Mission whilst Eldritch, having seen off the perceived threat to the Sisters’ name, picked up his old band moniker and pressed ahead, taking his music away from the guitar orientation of debut album “First And Last And Always”. The first fruit of the new direction was “This Corrosion”, an eleven minute electro-rock track, featuring a 40 piece choir, produced by Jim Steinman (of “Bat Out Of Hell” fame, hence the earlier Meatloaf reference). You don’t really hear a guitar until a solo break, almost four minutes in.

The song directly relates to the break up of Sisters mark 1. According to Eldritch the lyrics are largely a parody – aimed squarely at Hussey – and are deliberately not intended to mean anything; just to sound “cool”. In that, and to my 15 year old self, he very much succeeded. I had no idea what “kill the king when love is the law” or “give me siren, child, and do you hear me call” meant but they sounded amazing. Particularly in the context of a song that, musically, absolutely pummels the senses.

I’m not totally convinced that all of the lyrics are as much a pastiche as Eldritch claims. There are some fairly direct nods to his former band mates: “selling the don’t belong”, “do you have a word for giving away, got a song for me?”, and the final section could be read as Eldritch’s farewell address to them:

I got nothing to say I ain’t said before

I bled all I can, I won’t bleed no more

I don’t need no one to understand

Why the blood run hold

The hired hand

On heart

Hand of God

Floodland and driven apart

Run cold

Turn

Burn

Like a healing hand

Even if, to keep Eldritch at his word, that section is pure mockery, only intended to call Hussey on the (as perceived by Eldritch) meaningless nature of his lyrics, it’s still one of my favourite 30 seconds of recorded music ever. And it’s definitively the coolest.

What’s interesting, in retrospect, about my love of this song is how it bridged what I’d inherited musically and what I went on to seek out. As alluded earlier one of the records my dad passed on to me was Meatloaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell”; an utterly ridiculous, overblown pastiche of 50s American rock and roll. I think it’s fantastic. Bat is as much Jim Steinman’s record as ‘Loaf’s and his production job on “This Corrosion” – New York Choral Society, Wagner, £50,000 budget – followed the basic template he made plain in the title of a song on “Bat Out Of Hell 2”: “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Steinman’s orchestration and bombast made it easy to like the Sisters. At the very least you listen to the choir open the track and think: what the hell is that ? Well, you certainly did in a year that boasted Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as its biggest record.

The song opened up “alternative” music for me, via Bauhaus and Siouxsie – goth opening up indie. It also, strangely, opened up folk music for me, via All About Eve who became associated with the late 80s goth scene (somewhat erroneously but that’s a story for another time). Unknowingly at the time it also primed me for Berlin era Bowie, undoubtedly an influence (musically and stylistically) on Eldritch.

Most importantly it was perhaps the first time I marked out some musical territory that didn’t belong to my parents, wasn’t inherited: was a free choice about my own tastes and how I saw myself. The fact that I was choosing to see myself as a very pale, very thin man, dressed all in black leather, picking his way through a post apocalyptic wasteland, with only a similarly clad female dominatrix for company perhaps says much about the plight of an average 15 year old boy growing up in Plymouth in the late 1980s.

And so here’s why I lay claim to being the UK’s worst goth. Whilst, in my head I stalked the West Country in a long dark trench coat, quoting Poe and Coleridge, my jet black hair lustrous beneath the full moon, in reality my only concession to being an actual goth was to buy a black shirt. A shirt which survived precisely one of my mother’s boiling washes before being forever rendered a washed out grey.

In my heart though I’d changed.