december 30th extract

The Birthday Party- Big Jesus Trash Can

I was quite prepared when this track just came up this morning to spend 500 words and a bit of time slating The Birthday Party. I listened to it while brewing a pot of coffee, having a smoke and mulling it all over. I could follow a route of seeing the Birthday Party as responsible (in part) for the emergence of goth; all that Old Testament imagery, wailing and gnashing of teeth, big back-combed matted hair, tales of depravation, disgust, murder; black clothes and black imagery. On the other hand I could look at the intrinsic dark humour of The Birthday Party; how the fact that it is so very much over-the-top; that it’s really impossible to take it all with any level of seriousness that it’s actually a comedy record (not in a Barron Knights-style but you know what I mean)-it’s so self-consciously dark and bleak that it’s as if they thought so hard to make it grim and then added (trowled and heaped) another layer and more on top because it wasn’t at that level of grimness that they wanted. It’s basically so much darkness that you can’t help but laugh at the sheer, unremitting and relentless nature of it all. 

I was also thinking about how my British mis-conceptions of Australia have them down as a lager-drinking, sports-loving nation of people and how that seems at odds with the personae of The Birthday Party. Did they break off recording this album at any time for a can of Fosters and to sit down to watch some Aussie Rules? Did their tour schedules have five day breaks so they could make sure they’d see the Ashes? (It would be quite a good image to see Nick Cave and the lads wandering around Sydney Cricket Ground, looking suitably dishevelled.) I’ll bet they’re not openly into sports but that a little bit of them cheers inside if England loses the Ashes. I suppose that my mis-conceptions of Australia could in some ironic way, mirror their views of U.S. as Australians in their mid-twenties when this album was recorded. All Southern Gothic-ness. There certainly doesn’t seem to me anything specifically Autralian about The Birthday Party and if I didn’t know that they were from the other side of the world I’m sure I would think that they were from America (or, bearing in mind their goth-ness, Leeds or Bradford.)

november 10th extract-siouxsie & the banshees

Siouxsie & The Banshees- Mirage

Mmm…Siouxsie & The Banshees. The band that launched a thousand Goths. I suppose that they have a lot to answer for. I really can’t be bothered into looking deep into the history of Goth. Did it really start with the Banshees or was it a home for disillusioned metal fans? I’ll bet that there’s a whole bunch of theories and learned papers about it all; there’s probably even a chance to study it at post-grad level at some second tier university.

Whichever way it is and whatever the extent that goth has entered the mainstream-see the Twilight books and films to catch a glimpse of how all-pervasive it’s become-it’s clear to me that goth is one of those subcultures that will hang around for a long time. There’s been thirty or so years of this nonsense and it shows no signs of abating. What is really worrying is that it keeps switching from generation to generation. Most sensible people who have a brief flirtation with goth; an odd dabble with black nail varnish for example or a tendency to only wear black clothes and big boots seem to grow out of it and after a few years spend their Sundays trooping around Ikea for bookcases named Billy. (I wonder if Ikea do a range of sofas called Eldritch; that would be ironic. Or maybe iconic. If they did they’d only be made out of velvet and come in one colour.) Most people don’t hang around in the goth environment for too long. It’s more of a rite of passage. You see the odd few forty year olds desperately hanging on with their crimped hair and bad tattoos but that’s like anything else-there’s still vestiges of 60- year old mods whizzing around on scooters and even older teddy boys refusing to hang up their crepe-soled shoes. But goth is something else altogether. It seems to have gained a life of it’s own and just refuses to stop.

As sub-cultures go though, I don’t actually mind goth too much. I generally feel a bit paternalistic about it. It is ridiculous-there’s no doubt about that but as it’s generally only a fleeting obsession for kids who move onto something else I don’t think that it does much harm. If anything it does make me smile-goths seem to take it all so seriously. I do have a bit of part to play in the inexorable rise of goth though because I was one of the early contributors to the Banshees coffers when I bought their first album. In my defence though, at the time I couldn’t see what it would all lead to. I just thought I was buying an album that had garnered rave reviews and was seen as “disquieting” and “unsettling”. I’ve just listened to it once again merely as background for this piece and putting aside the crystalline production work by Steve Lillywhite (which goes to show that it is actually possible to polish a turd) it now just sounds daft.