The Art of Darkness
John Robb discusses his new history of Goth music
As a journalist, I talk to a lot of people but few interviewees are better value than Manc based motormouth John Robb.
He’s funny, full of stories, passionate and well informed – a checklist of attributes he brings to his new book ‘The Art Of Darkness – A History of Goth’.
Talking to me for my Brum Radio music show, the Membranes vocalist and Louder Than War founder makes a key observation about the post-punk tribes of the late 70’s/early 80s.
There were the folk, he says, who dressed down. (This was my lot, a sometimes rather dour bunch who followed The Nightingales and the Fall.)
Then there those who dressed up, an altogether sexier mob whose threads hinted that fluids had been exchanged mid Atlantic between the peacockery of UK Glam and the strangely alluring New York dystopia inhabited by the Velvet Underground.
You could, of course, like Mark E Smith AND Bauhaus, but as the punk movement splintered into a messy diaspora, these nerdy divisions mattered far more than they ever should have, egged on by a weekly music press that thrived on division.
On this critical battlefield, as John notes with disdain, Goth was forced to retreat.
“There was always that thing in post punk music media, that groups who dressed down were treated as geniuses and groups who dressed up were treated as lepers” he says.
“The story of post punk was brilliantly told in Simon Reynolds book about the Gang of Four and all those bands – which are great bands, and I love those bands as well.
“But there's this whole other story going on, which nobody ever took seriously or documented.”
John is here to put that right with an encyclopaedic volume, featuring star contributors such as Nick Cave, Johnny Marr and Andrew Eldritch. He’s a true music nut who – like the best critics - tries to understand and explain why an artist is popular, rather than cut them down with ‘clever’ remarks.
There’s an appreciation of performers as diverse as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Virgin Prunes, Laibach, The Cure, Einsturzende Neubaten, and, er, Adam Ant. Adam Ant? Really??
“Adam made amazing records,” John enthuses. “People don't often talk about the music, they just talk about the phenomenon of Adam Ant, but they don't do the deep dive into what he was actually making musically.
“The first album ‘Dirk Wears White Sox” is a really off kilter piece, a very dark kind of post punk with incredible drumming on it as well.
“[Drummer] Dave Barbarossa at the time was 16/17 and he's doing dislocated, almost disco rhythms on these really weird quirky tracks about subject matter that’s darkly funny. You can’t quite tell what the joke is, but it's also completely unsettling to listen to.
“Then within a year, he's got Kings Of The Wild Frontier, which is the biggest record of the year, which is an incredible and even weirder record. ‘Dog Eat Dog’, the first single, is a mind-blowing piece of art rock, it's Cinemascope, it’s glam rock, it's everything crunched into one track”.
Like any art form, Goth didn’t arrive from nowhere. The movement – which bands often sought to disassociate from because of its uncool image – had its roots in the Romantic poets, 19th century writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker as well as European folk tales.
At its (dark) heart were the perennial teen fixations of sex and death, but musically there was a much more varied musical palette than the genre was given credit for.
“Goth music mixed in disco, funk, dub…” John recalls.
“A lot of punk and post-punk was very white in its influences but - and it never gets the credit for this – Goth was much more open minded.
“The idea of mixing something that's very European - like the idea of melancholic darkness - with black music is a quite a revolution.”
The Art of Darkness – The History of Goth can be pre ordered now.