• Title: Goth – A History
• Author: Lol Tolhurst
• Genre/Subject: Goth music history
• Publisher: Grand Central
• Publication Date: 2023
• Start date: 4/15/25
• Finish date: 4/28/25

Review:

I’ll be honest right here at the start and say that I knew nothing about goth, goth music, or the history of the genre. Nothing beyond black hair and makeup and that The Cure was a band. So I got this book and now I know a lot more about goth as a subculture, the history of its beginnings and a lot about the connections between goth and punk music. I’m not an expert by any metric but I learned a lot and enjoyed this book very much, even much more than I expected to.

To begin at the beginning I think the best place to start is with the title of the introduction: From Punk to Poignancy. This was important for me right at the start as I had no idea that this was the progression, or more accurately that goth had anything to do with punk. But that’s why I read books right? The story of goth really begins with the beginnings of punk music in the later 1970s, right about 1976 lets say. Shelves of books have already been written about punk music and its history, its effects on fashion, politics, art and everything in between. So I’m not going to presume to add anything to the scholarship besides what the connections are as outlined in this book.

So what gives then? In my mind goth is a bunch of kids wearing dark clothes and listening to sad, depressingly dark music. In my head it’s monochromatic and electronic,, nothing that I wanted on my 1980s walkman to be sure. This of course is completely superficial and false as I learned very quickly in the first chapters. Having read John Lydon’s autobiography about his time in the the punk scene as Johnny Rotten I know that there is a lot more to punk than spiky mohawks and safety pins. But for a segment of the punk community there was something missing, something more cerebral and more intellectually satisfying that punk seemed to promise but could not deliver on. Into the vacuum (or to put it more gothily: into the void!) came goth music and that was led by one singular group: The Cure.

Even the name of the group is significant as it is a comment on growing up in Thatcher’s Britain with its economic depression and its sense of cold war hopelessness permeating everywhere. That was this disease and this was the cure. And by the cure that was a sardonic joke about there being no real cure for anything. With that being said this was not a hopeless descent into the abyss, but rather a reaction against the Reagan/Thatcher/Gorbachev policies that had settled like a dark cloud over the world. The movement was less of a protest and more of a commentary, a quiet but incisive documentary narrator if you will. While punk was a revolution goth was the aftermath that answered the question of what comes next.

Almost exactly like punk, goth began in the UK and developed overseas in New York and California. Iggy Pop a goth? No, not strictly speaking but certainly an influence and a force to move it out of obscurity. David Bowie a goth? Again, not in the canonical sense but a prime mover in putting forward a new type of beauty, androgynous and elegant. Goth took these leads and ran with it, looking to the past for inspiration but firmly rooted in the modern world. Also like punk, goth is not popular and whenever it started to become mainstream it developed a different sound, a different look and veered off in other directions, like Emo or Death metal as examples.

If asked a month or a year ago, Can I name a goth band? Sure, Bauhaus, Christian Death. But now I’d have to include PIL, Depeche Mode, maybe even Phil Collins for an outlier. I can’t define what goth is, what the sound is, what the look is. It’s different things at different times to different people. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey is goth. Anne Radcliffe is goth, literally gothic in every sense of the word.

How to conclude? I’ll say that goth is something that follows something but moves forward under its own momentum, with its own feel, its own sounds and its own thinking. I like goth as it seems to be inclusive of outsiders in a world that continually wants to exclude, to pigeonhole, to make you conform. I’m not going to buy eyeliner or a trenchcoat, but I’m going to be compassionate towards those who want that look and I now understand why they want that.

As this is a critical exercise I would say that one thing I tired of in the book was the thing you find in most musical histories: the “boy those were the days and this one club, wow I remember this one time…” thing. I just can’t get into war stories about a club that closed in 1986. Or at stories about any clubs really. I spent 25 years or more stuck inside bars and clubs and take it from me that nothing : A. Happened the way you remember it

B. Was any different from any other bar or club in human history and most importantly

C. Was the best, or the craziest, or the most fun, or anything. You got drunk, there was music, it was dark, and the bathrooms were a biohazard.

So with that being said, this was an excellent, well resarched and lovingly written history of a culture that I knew nothing about it. I highly recommend this book to all fans of 20th century music regardless of whether you like the goth sound or or not. It gave me a much better understanding of not only what goth is, but why it remains a style now when so many other movements are in the dustbin of history.