I’m sure Peter Murphy, a.k.a the “Godfather of Goth,” would want to see his band Bauhaus first on this list. Hence, we also note the bands that owe a debt to them for their own existences. But mostly they left a legacy that will forever mark a key turning point in rock 'n' roll. Some still carry on making music to this day. These musicians hated the label.įor better or worse they still started a movement that should have died, but instead has been mimicked over and over again by young artists fascinated by doom and gloom and co-opted by fashion trends at even stores like Hot Topic.
These are the bands who were at the forefront of the goth rock movement, a label many of them called "shite" at the time. Many wore early English rock influences clearly on their sleaves, like punk and glam rock, but are clearly pushing forward to something new and different. All feature literate lyrics that reference profound ideas from the mystical to the existential. Most of the bands noted below arose from England's post-punk scene in the late 1970s and evolved into something else. excluding one exception (it's called cognitive dissonance, humor me. Everything after the bands listed and explored below were some sort of rip-off. This list, though, consists of albums that could generally be described as classic goth albums.Let’s make one thing clear about this list: the only goth bands that matter were those at the forefront of this short-lived scene in England. There are countless bands who have taken a slice of inspiration and then there are bands like The Cramps and Cocteau Twins who were embraced by the scene if not fully goth themselves. There are bands that helped set the scene for goth, like German artist Nico, her one-time collaborators in The Velvet Underground and gloomy post-punks Joy Division. There’s a romance to it, even when it’s dealing with dark and melancholy themes.
Gothic music has a tendency to lean towards the dramatic and artistic, often with a literary or poetic bent. And, if it looks like a bat and squeaks like a bat, it’s unlikely to be a duck. So if the bands themselves won’t own their own gothness, it’s down to the perception of others. Andrew said in a Virgin.Net interview in 1997: “I'm not interested in what g***s think… I’m constantly confronted by representatives of popular culture who are far more g*** than we, yet I have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord.”
Bauhaus, The Cure and even Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters Of Mercy have categorically stated that they are not and never were goth. It doesn’t help that most of the people you might think of as goth’s prime movers have rejected the tag. There’s no arguing that it grew out of post-punk in the UK in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but even from that starting point it remains difficult to pin down.
0 kommentar(er)
