uncarved.org blog

Jez: Look Mark, I’m a musician, in case you’d forgotten. Yeah? I answer to a higher law. The law of “if it feels good, do it”.

Mark: Oh, that’s a great law isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?

Jez: It’s the musician’s law. Colonel Gaddafi could not lay down a bass hook, Mark. That should be clear even to you!

[Peep Show Series 3 - with thanks to Bandshell on Dissensus for the quote and for inspiring this post]

Hopefully Gaddafi will be gone by the time this post goes live. I certainly won’t miss him, but I will grudgingly admit that he brought a certain erratic charm to international politics.

In the eigties and nineties fascist idiots like Nick Griffin and Blood Axis’ Michael Moynihan fell for this charm, distributing the Colonel’s Green Book - seemingly in the belief that he was a profound thinker.

fascist loons Nick Griffin and Derek Holland pose under a Gaddafi portrait in Libya

Griffin actually went one step further and headed off to see Gaddafi in the hope that he’d be able to tap him up for some funding for the National Front. Apparently this didn’t come to anything (unsurprisingly!), but the episode is certainly worth remembering now that Griffin has gone pseudo respectable and rabidly anti-Islam.

More enjoyable by far were the punks who recognised that Gaddafi’s charm was more about his flamboyant mentalism than any insightful philosophy.

God Told Me To Do It were a Hackney-based band would be universally recognised as being rubbish, were it not for their genius sense for the controversial and a neat turn in slogans. Their artwork was liberally reproduced in Vague back in the day and they were notorious for winding up the po-faced.

Having used the Colonel’s image on a few flyers, the group noticed in 1986 that the Libyan Embassy in London was temporarily  vacant, presumably in the aftermath of WPC Yvonne Fletcher being shot by one of its occupants whilst policing a demonstration outside…

[All GTMTDI images found via Kill Your Pet Puppy.]

Gaddafi also makes an appearance alongside some “loony left” tabloid bugbears in Stewart Home‘s black-humoured “Kill” which is available on the classic Stewart Home Comes In Your Face CD. The tune was later re-versioned as “Islam Uber Alles” by Blackpool psych-punk legends The Ceramic Hobs, but here is the original in all its dumb boot-stomping glory:

Stewart Home - Kill Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

More recently (and less interestingly), MIA has described Gaddafi as “always being one of my style icons”, and Asian Dub Foundation made an opera about him.

Here’s hoping that Libya will shortly become “the land of the free” and with that Gaddafi will become history.

Fanzine of the week #4

Available in print - and online as a free/donation pdf. (and from Amazon)

“We demand that the goth scene be more than a black-clad reflection of mainstream society”

I’ve written about goth on here before and it’s something that still appeals to me in many ways, although you’re unlikely to catch me wearing eyeliner or crimping my hair. Anarchism has also had an influence on my political (and other) thought and activity, although again I wouldn’t call myself an anarchist these days for a whole host of reasons which are probably best left for another time.

Graceless‘ radical/decadent/anarcho approach to goth interests me, recalling the early eigthies London of Alistair Livingstone’s “Subway surfing anarcho goths” and many of the reminiscences over at Kill Your Pet Puppy. I have a fascination with subcultures that are about more than fashion, and the attempt here to either highlight an ideological undercurrent in goth (or to inject one into it?) is intriguing. Certainly most of the books/mags etc on goth that I’ve ever seen have been largely about flogging music or clothes  (or expaning the marketplace within in which that takes place by reinforcing the goth identity?).

Graceless is well written and looks great. At over a hundred pages this debut issue is going to take some time to digest properly. There are some interesting interviews with people like Jarboe and Attrition (as well as acts which were new to me) and some cool features as well. I haven’t read it all yet, and I focus below on articles that made me think, which of course will be the ones that I have disagreements with.

Decadent Politics covers the poetic, visionary and utopian I guess. It posits decadence as being anti-fascist, which is interesting (and certainly believable if you look at Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism on sexual repression etc):

“Today there are those that say fascism is simply fashion, that to strut around in a SS uniform and festoon our lace with the Nazi death-head skulls is meaningless and should cause no concern. Saying this is to ignore what they represent on a symbolic level. We would never wear a McDonald’s golden arches to a goth club because it represents mass conformity. So does the iron cross. The zombies wear business suits, and they are not satiated only with the brains of the living; they also hunger for our hearts and souls.”

A radical’s guide to spooky music is an interesting overview of the bands and artists who the author feels represent “radical goth”, including Coil, KMFDM, Bauhaus and Joy Division. A lot of the lyrics and politics quoted aren’t about things I am especially interested in: animal rights, non-specific rebellion, anti-consumerism, anti-americanism. But it’s probably a bit much to expect the goth subculture (or one aspect of it) to develop identical politics to my own. As manifestos go this is an interesting drawing together of various tendencies in goth that certainly demonstrate that it is far from apolitical.

I am quite wary of political activists who over-identify with subcultures these days. I think “identity politics” is a trap which divides people and can lead to situations where cultural signifiers like music (or even ethnicity and sexuality) are seen as more important than people’s relationships with each other and their experience of capitalism where they work or live.

However, the flipside of this is that a purely political approach in which you only talk to people about, say, the conditions on their housing estate, or cutbacks at their workplace can come across as a bit robotic. So there’s a balance to be struck between the (sub)cultural and the political, which is increasingly difficult to achieve as culture fragments into more and more niches. As Steve Goodman and Kodwo Eshun pointed out, the “long tail” posits a society where there is less and less communal experience and more and more instant individualised consumer gratification.

Subcultures have a role to play in changing the status quo, and goth’s outright promotion of androgyny and gender equality is all for the good (although hardly universal, as the article here about “goth misogyny”  and “pick up culture” at some goth nights makes clear). I guess what is missing is a fully developed critique of how capitalism operates as a set of relationships, of the system rather than some of its manifestations (war, hunger, etc). But it’s not like any other music/fashion based subcultures have that.

There’s a fair bit in Graceless about Goths and their place in the anarchist scene. As someone who has had gothic tendencies and has some sympathy with parts of anarchism this all seems a bit too confining. I find the worlds of info-shops, squats and goth clubs quite alienating these days, despite being interested in them as social phenomena (and in the ideas which circulate in them). I suppose hanging around in places like that helped me develop my ideas and a sense of who I am, but I think people are kidding themselves if they reckon that havens for alternative fashion are going to play a useful role in mass struggles. Indeed there are a few passages in Graceless which abhor mass culture, the mainstream and suit-wearing “zombies” (see quote above). Contributors have mixed feelings about Marilyn Manson, but Lady Gaga (arguably the most visible current example of the gothic aesthetic, albeit not sonically) is conspicuous by her absence.

I suppose this is really getting into similar territory to two articles about anarchopunk I’ve republished on my website:

• Veg Wedge (on anarchopunk’s moralism and failure to prioritise)
• White Punks On Bordiga (on the limits of subculture as mechanism for social change).

That said, I can of course completely understand why retreating into / immersing yourself in subcultures is a good and necessary thing for some people. If you’re one of a handful of freaks in the bible belt then there must be an incredible feeling of solidarity and self-empowerment if you start your own DIY Goth Night (as one contributor did, smack bang in KKK country). The murder of Sophie Lancaster is chilling reminder of the sort of intolerance people who dress a bit different can face out there in small town England in the early 21st Century.

Your Goth Is Dead: The Rise And Fall of Goth In America is a nice overview of the developments of the subculture in the nineties, including goths being seduced by rave and ironic self-mockery which is I suppose the antithesis of the playful po-faced strategies of the eighties.

Some of the most rewarding pieces in this issue stretch the definition of Goth backwards in time – Dressed To Kill: Illegal Dandyism looks at youth cults like the Zazou and Edelweiss Pirates, whose fashion sense shocked the totalitarian regimes they lived under, and provided them with enough reason to take on fascists physically as well as culturally. There are also some intriguing investigations into the Darker Side of Victorian Children’s Tales and German expressionist cinema during the rise of Nazism.

As I said above, I’ve mainly concentrated here on my differences with Graceless. That strikes me as being more interesting thing to write about than saying “it’s great!”, which it most certainly is. It’s made me ruminate on a lot of good stuff and I’m very happy that they’ll be including a contribution from me in the second issue. If you’re interested then you’re probably already reading the magazine itself instead of ploughing though my waffle here.

I had to overhaul the uncarved shop.

Someone hacked my site through the old shop and installed a phishing scam on uncarved.org. Basically a load of faked bank webpages were on there. 

I’m not quite sure what to think about that. I’m not keen on people preying on the naive and vulnerable, but it’s not clear to me if the banks end up suffering from these scams or their customers.

(If you ordered anything from the old shop don’t fret, none of your bank details or anything serious were stored on the site).

Basically I agree with Martin on this one – there should be more people robbing banks in the traditional way and less of this computer-based tom-foolery. Same goes for music – in the olden days people had to stuff LPs or CDs into their trenchcoats if they wanted to hear stuff for free. Or at the very least have some decent mates to tape things for them.

Which is a slightly unusual way of introducing a top ten showbiz bank robbers:

1. The Bonnot Gang, 1911-1912

French anarchists who were the first to use cars for their getaways. The book about them is full-on, I can recall a few accounts of bitter sectarian in-fighting, including a rival sect’s printing press being smashed up.

This tradition is allegedly being kept alive by Italian insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo Bonanno who was arrested at the age of 70 in 2009 for robbing a bank in Greece. My recollection is that there was some doubt about whether he actually did the deed.

2. John Dillinger, 1933-1934

Didn’t he rob 23 banks or something? William Burroughs was keen on him: “To John Dilinger in the hope that he is still alive“.

3. Bonnie and Clyde, 1931-1934

Exerted an almost tectonic pull on everyone from Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot to Papa Levi. Inspired that whole Thelma and Louise live fast die young, roadtrip kind of vibe.

4. Ronnie Biggs, 1963

Punk icon recently discussed here.

5. Red Army Faction / Andres Baader & Ulrike Meinhoff, 1970-1972

Sports cars, flashing their tits to the PLO, bombs aplenty. Punk, and yet so very serious and so very very wrong.

6.The  Covenant Sword And The Arm of the Lord, 1980s

Extreme right wing “Christian Identity” cult which robbed 19 banks in 8 US states in one month. They apparently spent all the money on guns, displaying a typically fascist lack of imagination. Included here because Cabaret Voltaire named their 1985 album after them.

7. Patty Hearst, 1974

“Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people!”

Sixties pin up! Rich girl turns insane maoist terrorist! Locked up and then pardoned by philanderer Bill Clinton! Acts in John Waters movies!

8. Chelembra Bank Robbery, 2007

80 million rupees in the back of the van. Our anti-heroes took over the restaurant under the bank. Then drilled a massive hole through to the vault under the guise of renovating it.

If that isn’t mad enough, the whole scheme was inspired by a Bollywood movie. Respect.

9. The Geezer Bandit, NOW

For the name alone, really. This guy is apparently in his SEVENTIES and has been expropriating the expropriators in Southern California. He’s done 13 banks, including one on the 28th of January this year. Apparently has inspired facebook fan pages and also at least one copy cat robber. Also rumoured that he’s a young man in a rubberised Scooby Doo villain mask?!

10. Unknown: Central Bank of Iraq, 2003

The day before the United States began bombing Baghdad, nearly US$1 billion was stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq. This is considered the largest bank heist in history. Opportunism or what?

ANGRY BIRDS GOLDEN EGG BRIGADE BONUS LEVELS:

Rubbish bank robbers:

They were trying to put it back?!

Not actual bank robbers:

Rob Da Bank – festival organiser

The Blaggers – anti-fascist Oi band, who became “ITA”.

Banksy, heritage attraction in bohemian Stoke Newington.

Fanzine of the week #2

Over 50 pages of leftfield guitar-based music, good attitude with tasty DIY layout and graphics.

The Ramleh interview is especially good, focussing just as much on their underrated guitar work as much as power electronics. They also ask Ramleh mainstay Gary Mundy about Croydon and dubstep artist Burial – a nice fresh approach.

The interview with Bruno Wizard of proto- UK punks The Homosexuals is a bit “all over the place” largely due to Bruno’s exuberant personality, but that makes for a much better read than the usual band interview.

“Suggested listening circumstances for the unemployed single male” is a nice feature and I also enjoyed the articles on “Geocaching” (GPS enabled treasure hunt / derive) in Hackney, “Mixtape Wars” (in which three people do compilation tapes and comment/disrespect on each other’s) and the rant on punk/hardcore record collecting.

I was less bothered about the other band interviews because I’d never heard of them… maybe I should investigate…

Niche Homo is avaiable from here.

The motherlode seems to be at this South American fashion blog.

But a lot of those featured aren’t actually all that improbable, I guess.

Maybe Ashlee Simpson is such a tortured soul that she regularly plays the first three Sabbath albums on rotation?

For all I know David Beckham, Miley Cyrus and Charlotte Church really do all share a deep and profound love for The Maiden?

Metal is funny like that – despite all the moral panics about Satan and head-banging health hazards, I don’t really think it has any kind of criticism of society at its core. I mean you can argue the toss about punk, but surely metal can simply be reduced to the youthful hedonism of rocking out and/or getting wasted, with some stuff about dragons thrown in for good measure?

I’ve written about my thankfully very brief brushes with metal and rawk before, but it’s not really my thing. So I can’t really work up much defensiveness or laughter when its imagery is used by celebs.

So y’know – if Britney wants to be into Led Zeppelin, fair enough!

But there is still part of me that has a weirdly protective attitude about punk. I actually find this troubling and hilarious in equal measures. Disentangling my own bizarre personality traits is the reason for this series about t-shirts I guess. (That, and posting photographs of attractive bare-armed young ladies seems to have a positive effect on my blog views, for some reason…)

Getting back on track, here is Lindsay Lohan wearing some garms from eighties California hardcore punk groups:

And “It Girl” Alexa Chung in a “Am I more skeletal than my t-shirt?” pose.

(with thanks to Sharon)

This is Sir Philip Green, the billionaire boss of Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge among others. 

These UK companies are part of Green’s Arcadia Group which is in turn owned by Taveta Investments Limited, which is registered to an office on the tax-haven island of Jersey. Taveta Investments is owned by Green’s family members living in Monaco, where income tax is 0%. It has been estimated that this set up enabled Green to avoid paying £300million in tax in 2005 alone. 

Sir Philip was a vocal supporter of David Cameron, George Osbourne and the Conservatives before last year’s election.

Incredibly, he was asked to assist the coalition government with its spending review after it had been elected – a tax evader deciding on how tax revenue should be spent on services he doesn’t need to use. 

The UK government has said with sinister monotony that tough choices have to be made in the current economic climate and that “we’re all in it together”. The tough choices have resulted in misery for ordinary people as wages have been frozen or reduced whilst Value Added Tax has been increased. Not to mention savage cuts to the welfare state and high levels of job insecurity. 

Top Shop's flagship London store closed by protestors

(image above from Harpymarx blog)

So it’s hardly surprising that people got pissed off about this and protested at Arcadia shops in the run up to Christmas. What is more surprising is that these protests received reasonably positive coverage in right wing rags like the Daily Mail. 

But what’s this got to do with the Sex Pistols, you might ask? 

Well, after the protests Sir Philip spent the Christmas period at a £17,000-a-night Barbados resort with his family. Oh and his super rich chums Simon Cowell, Michael Winner and Sylvester Stallone. In fact Green likes his friends so much that he’s immortalised them on a special t-shirt: 

Comparing himself to the Sex Pistols is clearly Green’s great new wheeze, because here he is again, this time with himself and his wife as Sid ‘n’ Nancy: 

Punk was always a mixed bag of left and right influences, but surely a Billionaire Tory appointee like Green using Jamie Reid’s logo to bolster his own bogus “rebel” status is the ultimate in recuperation? 

Or perhaps not – a number of people have pointed out that Green bears a striking resemblance to Sex Pistols guest vocalist and train robber Ronnie Biggs. But whilst Biggs and his accomplices in the great train robbery were convicted of stealing £2.6 million in 1963, Sir Philip’s ambitions are far greater – and completely untroubled by judicial complications.

It’s been a while since I did one of these so here goes:

First up Audrina Patridge wearing an Exploited t-shirt.

And OK, I’d never heard of her either, but apparently she’s a US reality TV show star who features in the lyrics of Tinie Tempah’s “Pass Out”:

Heidi and Audrina eat your heart out,
I used to listen to you dont wanna bring arms house
I got so many clothes I keeps em in ma aunts house,
Disturbing London baby we about to branch out

So that adds some early grime to the mix as well (Demon’s “you don’t wanna bring arms house / I’ll bring arms house to your Mum’s house / you don’t wanna bring no beef / bring some beef you’ll lose some teeth”).

I wonder what Audrina’s favourite Exploited song is?

Mild disquiet was expressed last year when Beyonce wore a t-shirt onstage with the words “punk ass motherfucker” and “Never Mind The Bollocks” on it “amongst other obscenities”

Finally, here is model Georgia Frost wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt and a Prada skirt.

But if these attractive young ladies and their context-free fashion makes you seethe, just wait until the next installment…

Beyond The Implode anarchopunk podcast 5 Nov 2010 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A collaboration between Martin and the good folks of Youarehear. With some help from me.

Classic and obscure tunes with some verbal commentary both refined and rabid.

Unfortunately anarchopunk wasn’t able to overcome the contradictions of capitalism and all the main players seem to be threatening each other with legal action right now.

Martin recently reviewed the recent reissue of Crass’ “Feeding of the 5000″.

See also the uncarved.org Critical Look At Anarchopunk for some good reading.

Oh and if you’re on twitter get on the all new @BTi_Enquiries stream.

STOP PRESS: Full tracklist and charateristically self-deprecating write up is now available at Beyond The Implode.

STOP PRESS 2: Nice review and commentary at History is Made at Night.

To the ICA last night, for the UK premiere of the Superstonic Sound documentary.

This was billed variously as a film about Don Letts, or perhaps a film about UK bass culture featuring Don Letts and his role in it:

“a documentary, which fuses his life story with that of the history of bass culture in Britain. From Kingston to London, New York to Rio, bass has had a resounding impact on musicians and music lovers alike. It is a meeting point for people from different cultures, backgrounds and races and continues to inspire innovation and change. Following 3 generations of DJ in the Letts family, Superstonic Sound charts the impact of Jamaican bass and how it changed British music and society forever.”

The film is actually an hour long advert for the Letts “brand”. Which is fine if you like Don Letts, I guess. For me the best parts were from Don’s film archive shot in Kingston JA and Brixton in the 1970s. I would have loved to simply watch all that, alongside the footage he apparently has of Prince Far I and others.

Unfortunately last night’s event seemed to suggest that anything involving Don Letts has to end up being about Don Letts more than anything else. Quite a lot of the film is taken up with Don wandering around London with his son reminiscing on his life, or sitting in his studio being interviewed for radio programmes (which seemed a lot more interesting than the film we were watching).

Both Don and his son Jet come across as OK people who have had interesting lives and made worthwhile contributions to culture. The difficulty is that Don is a self-confessed hustler who seems to be perpetually focussed on promoting himself so he can blag the next deal. And fair enough – there are a lot of people like that and it’s not like as a black guy in the seventies he was going to make a good go of being a civil servant or a bank manager.

The problems with this narcissism are twofold.

Firstly it means that the actual ”history of bass culture in Britain” doesn’t get told properly.

The film was all too brief about Don’s father playing his soundsystem in a church basement after the Sunday service in the 1950s. Things then move predictably on to punk and the Roxy (skipping over rudeboys and skinheads dancing to ska in the sixties). The eighties are represented by Big Audio Dynamite and Don going to New York to discover hip hop (“black punk rock”). The nineties don’t get a look in, so no rave or jungle or garage. The story skips directly to dubstep, presumably because Don digs it and his son is a producer and club promoter.

My esteemed colleague Jamrock pressed Don on his opinion of Grime during the Q&A and after the show. Basically he’s not into it and didn’t feel that it fitted into the tradition he was talking about because it’s all bling and designer labels and not about chanting down babylon. I think, for me, the way that grime is produced and distributed and functions as an autonomous expression of urban working class culture is political in itself – regardless of lyrical content.

Whilst there are many things I’m not keen on in grime culture, it is undeniable that it’s a lot closer to being “black punk rock” than a lot of the music in the film. It is certainly a lot less palatable than dubstep to many people and has been subject to even more interference from the police than the Sex Pistols and the Clash ever were.

Plus it simply isn’t true that grime is all about bling – it was initially a reaction to the champagne and designer clothes of UK garage.

Furthermore grime reflects the politics of the world it is created in. Which are generally crap. It may be that the economic and social conditions of this decade mean that politics and people’s relationship to it become a bit more interesting, which might mean more interesting subcultures develop. It is a bit wrongheaded to say that dubstep is acceptable in this context, but grime isn’t.

Unfortunately a potentially interesting discussion of these issues was curtailed by the second problem with the cult of Don – that people buy into it. The backwards and forwards between my friend and the star of the show was interrupted by another audience member who wanted to have her say. Which is fair enough, except all she seemed to want to do was big herself up and tell Don how amazing he is.

Many of the other “questions” were of a similar caliber, although there were some interesting tangents where younger audience members raised the issue of generally feeling helpless, having too much information and not having black and white issues to kick out against. Which makes me wonder if the whole event was framed around a nostalgia for the simpler times of the seventies.

Don got his fire back when talking about trying to acquire stock footage of black culture for his documentary films and being charged thousands of pounds for a few seconds of footage of someone like Sun Ra, which Ra’s estate won’t see any of. “Who owns the culture?” is a crucial question to be asking.

But so is “Who decides what’s in the culture and what isn’t?”

There is a film to be made which covers ”the history of bass culture in Britain” which shows that  “From Kingston to London, New York to Rio, bass has had a resounding impact on musicians and music lovers alike. It is a meeting point for people from different cultures, backgrounds and races and continues to inspire innovation and change.”

Unfortunately, enjoyable as it was – and raising as many questions as it did, Superstonic Sound is not that film.

I’ve previously written about my teenage years hanging around with goths in St Albans:

In mid eighties suburban Hertfordshire, goth was pretty good lowest common denominator “alternative” fodder. Black clothes were de rigeur anyway and we tended to huddle together with the other weirdos to avoid violence from people who took exception to our appearance.

Plus, let’s be completely honest, hanging around in a pub for some underage drinking with some impossibly foxy goth girls was a lot more interesting than sitting alone in your bedroom again listening to Foetus and reading William Burroughs.

So I was interested to see Kiran Sande’s 20 Best Goth feature over at FACT Magazine. The inevitable, and planned, reaction to these lists is to get people up in arms about what has been left out – this was as true of Droid’s fantastic 20 Best Ragga feature as of the current one.

But what differentiates goth from other genres is its high level of fuzziness. There are relatively few arguments about what is or isn’t reggae, or who is or is not a reggae fan. But whilst everyone knows what a goth is, very few people in its eighties heydey admitted to being one, least of all the people in the bands. This game of goth accusation and denial even afflicts middle aged men who are succesful dubstep producers.

This adds a certain complexity to the historification process, which is already fraught with issues such as the tension between recording what was popular at the time and what went on to be influential. And of course the personal credibility of the author.

The FACT piece is clear from the outset that it cannot be a history of what was popular with goths (not least because of the author’s youthfulness). Comrade Stagger Lee’s response to the FACT article includes some great personal history, a mix and some good examples of omissions.

That isn’t a bad dialectic right there, which is a fancy way of saying that these two have done most of the work. All that remains is for me to introduce some wildcards and argue the toss!

I carried on hanging around with goths when I moved to London in 1988. Indeed, I lived with someone who had been in a very early incarnation of goth thrashers Creaming Jesus. There were a few clubs a bunch of us went to like KitKat, Friday nights at the Electric Ballroom (was that called “Full Tilt”?), Tuesdays at the Camden Palace (Feet First) and even a Saturday night bash in the club above the Manor House pub, by the tube station of the same name. There was also the Slimelight, but I think that came later when my interest had properly waned.

These nights all had the advantage of being really cheap to get into and filled with attractive goth girls. They were also a right good laugh - something that people with no first hand knowledge of gothdom may not realise.

Both FACT and Lee’s lists miss out these three tunes. All of which were surefire goth dancefloor fillers. You could also probably expect to hear a blast of PIL’s “Rise” and Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb were also de rigeur, soon to be joined by virtually anything off the first Nine Inch Nails album. And late period Siouxise and the Banshees (“Wheels on Fire”, “Peekaboo” etc). And yes, “Cat House” and “Big Hollow Man” by the legend which is Danielle Dax.

What I like about the tunes listed above is that people avoid them like the plague now – they can’t be cited as influential or hip. But they were huge tracks which people danced to week after week in the late eighties and early nineties. I suspect they still get played at goth clubs now, somewhere.

Perhaps I remembered them as being better than they actually are in the cold light of day in 2010. In fact, a good few of them sound a bit leaden and overproduced in that eighties way. But they do catapult me back to dark clubs, ripped to the gills at the age of 19/20. Which I think makes them important, and valuable – to me at least.

I suppose what I’m saying is that writing about classic music is well and good, but writing about the history of subcultures can’t be done by just selecting the best bits – any more than a “greatest hits” compilation can truly represent an artist.

Martin has also contributed to the discussion with an excellent post over at Beyond the Implode. His piece combines some great anecdotes with some good musical selection and is much funnier (intentionally!) than me wittering on like an old fart here.

Loki brings things up to date with a look at Zola Jesus over at An Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming. I first heard them on Boomkat’s psyche-dub “14 tracks” compilation. Their collab with LA Vampires was a standout track for me and whilst the own efforts are much less dubby, they are significantly more goth – a definitely worth investigating.

ZJ are also flagged up in the FACT feature as being a current incarnation of goth. It’s easy to argue for a goth continuum:

• Siouxsie
• Bauhaus
• Sisters of Mercy
• Sisters clones like the youtube vids above
• Nine Inch Nails
• Placebo
• Marilyn Manson
• emo?!
• The Horrors etc
• Lady Gaga
• Zola Jesus

That’s just off the top of my head – to pursue the idea we would need to demonstrate connections between each stage and fill the gaps. I’m not really interested in doing that. Possibly the list is total bollocks anyway, but you see what I’m getting at.

What I am interested in is whether the resurgence of goth now has parallels with the economic and cultural conditions in the early eighties.

Is it a miserablist escapism – a way of internalising uncertainty about the future? Or simply an amplification or adolescent emotional intensity? Or both?

Do people turn back to artiness in times of austerity because they have lots of time on their hands, or because they are seeking something greater than trying to make ends meet?

It’s not time for me to get the pointy boots out again, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things with some interest.