Goth❌Industrial

I wouldn’t say The Smiths were goth…Siouxie definitely was. I’d say it’s good to be confused…back then goth wasn’t a strict set of bands or a strict aesthetic…it was a loose association of counter culture misfits: heavy on fetish, heavy on vampires, heavy on queer folks.

Here’s the goth scene, as I experienced it:

If there was one band and aesthetic that does define goth…it was Bauhaus (specifically Bela Lugosi is Dead, much of their other music was art - not goth), their appearance/performance in the film The Hunger, and the plot of the film itself - that song and film was the template for early goth clubs and culture. Yes, the guy who directed Top Gun “invented” goth.

Loosely The Cure (Robert Smith) was aesthetically foundational to goth…but not a lot of their music was (maybe The Forest and that’s it). Siouxie and The Banshees for sure. Danielash. Peter Murphy (The Maxell guy). Joy Division/New Order were also aesthetic corner stones…but you wouldn’t necessarily hear the music that much: the t-shirts were part of many goth uniforms (you might also see a Smiths t-shirt here and there…but their sound was anti-goth - BUT some of Morriseys solo stuff was goth ;)). For Joy Division you could only play Love Will Tear Us Apart so many times - their New Wave/punk stuff was mostly antithetical to early goth. Strangely David Bowie, who was actually in The Hunger, somehow was mostly passed over by goths. The goth look at this time was starting to be defined: BLACK sprinkled with fetish, vampire, punk, and (what would become) alternative.

Musically it was mostly songs and not bands - with the exception of Love and Rockets who “filled out” the genre a bit later on (until they went alt metal). Some early notables were Nemesis (Shriekback), Warm Leatherette (The Nornal), The Killing Moon (Echo and the Bunnymen), Da Da Da (Trio) and more odd “genreless” songs like that. It kind of depended on the DJ…because you’d get a lot of inappropriate dance music thrown in that was rejected by the scene - the DJs were experimenting (what worked in New York might not work in Toronto (because you’re dealing with regional subcultures not cemented by social media or even MTV). There basically weren’t enough songs to keep the moody goths on the dance floor the whole night in the early days - there were so many times the dance floor got cleared by the wrong Robert Palmer song - and they couldn’t get them back without dropping Tainted Love way too early.

The Sisters of Mercy came along and we had our first bonfide Goth Band (even if they’d been toiling in obscurity for a decade or more…everybody ran and got their back catalogue and pretended they always knew them).

At that point the scene splintered and goth became uniform and they started listening to boring trance. Alt rock, taking love and Rockets with them (even though they’d return later) became mainstream. The more interesting stuff - and more “goth like” (counterculture/fetish) scene - persisted with the Industrial folks when NIN/Ministry/Skinny Puppy first hit. Those vampire/industrial nights in the early 90s were peak goth…it encompassed the widest array of music and was most accepting of looks. All the people who eventually came to define the genre of goth made their own exclusive (and terrible) scene: the era when you got all the lame electro goths who just cared about how they looked - they eventually took the vampires with them when Industrial died.