Gothic rock is British post-punk that turned towards the dark and found it beautiful, and it starts with a nine-minute song about a dead film star. Pitchfork says “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, which Bauhaus recorded in Northamptonshire in 1979, is widely accepted as goth’s wellspring. Soon afterwards the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and Killing Joke had given the sound its range. A London club called the Batcave gave it a home.
more
It never really went away. In late 2022 a dance scene from Netflix’s Wednesday, set to the Cramps’ 1981 cover of “Goo Goo Muck”, went viral on TikTok. Soon afterwards the Cure sold out three nights at Wembley Arena. This guide follows the music from a concert review in the 1960s to the clubs still full of black lace today. It ends with eight records to put on this Halloween, with the lights low.
Where the gothic sound came from
The word arrived a decade before the bands did. In 1967 the journalist John Stickney called the Doors “gothic rock” in a newspaper feature, after watching Jim Morrison sing “The End” in New York. John Robb, whose history of goth took him ten years to write, dates that review to October 1967. To Robb, Morrison was a quintessential goth: the baritone, the black leather and the fixation on the Romantic poets were all there.
The roots run deeper still. Rolling Stone traces a spark to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who recorded “I Put a Spell on You” in 1956 and climbed out of a coffin on stage in a flowing cape. Pitchfork reckons half the artists in its own history of goth borrowed from his act. The Velvet Underground added the all-black wardrobe, and in 1967 “Venus in Furs” sang about pleasure in pain when pop sang about nothing of the kind.
Then came Bowie. On July 6, 1972, he sang “Starman” on Top of the Pops in a gold-trimmed jumpsuit, and the future goths were watching. Rolling Stone names Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Smith, and Daniel Ash and David J of Bauhaus among them. David J later wrote that the performance hit him as “a galvanizing shock of beauty”. Robb puts it in four words: “No Bowie, no scene.” His recipe for the whole genre is Jim Morrison plus David Bowie plus punk.
Punk supplied that last ingredient. As the 1970s closed, Pitchfork writes, young musicians took up what punk left behind and leaned into echo, distortion, sparse guitar lines and a taste for the macabre. Peter Murphy of Bauhaus told the magazine that punk’s homemade labels let anyone press a thousand records, and that the DJ John Peel would play anything once. The BBC draws the line neatly. Punk was busy knocking culture down, it says, while post-punk was about building.
What it built had an old blueprint. Robb calls goth an artistic movement with its roots in great literature and architecture, from Edgar Allan Poe to the cathedrals. Sophie Chery, who left Paris for London at 19 in 1980, traces the line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula through Nosferatu and the original Cat People to Rocky Horror.
So when did “goth” stick? BBC Music says the word came into wide use in the early 1980s, for post-punk bands with gothic overtones in both sound and look. Joy Division’s producer Martin Hannett had already called them “dancing music with gothic overtones”. Their label boss Tony Wilson used “gothic” of them on Something Else, a BBC youth programme. The Guardian’s writer, then a post-punk obsessive in Perth, Scotland, remembers provincial towns full of plume-haired fiends by 1982. That was a year before the word itself was common.
Ian Astbury of the Cult told a different origin story in 1994. He credited Andi Sex Gang of Sex Gang Children, whom he nicknamed “the Gothic Goblin” because he lived in a Brixton block called Visigoth Towers. His followers, Astbury said, were the Goths.
The bands who built it
Bauhaus come first in most tellings. They formed in Northampton in 1978, and BBC News describes them as pioneers of the gothic rock genre. Peter Murphy told Pitchfork that he and Daniel Ash wrote half their first album in their first weekend together. Within six months they were top of the indie charts, and Murphy had never stood on a stage until a few weeks before. He jokes that a lot of their records sound like a cat scratching on a tin roof. Then he adds that the intent behind them worked, and that they still sound original.
more
Murphy is cheerfully rude about what came after. Bands sent Bauhaus loads of demos, he says, all low voices and gloom, and that became the goth scene, he guesses. Yet he notices his band’s shadow in unexpected places, such as U2 hiring Anton Corbijn for black-and-white photographs around The Joshua Tree.
Siouxsie and the Banshees formed in 1976, the same year as the Cure. Siouxsie Sioux had followed the Sex Pistols around as part of the Bromley Contingent. Pitchfork argues that without her goth might never have taken root at all. Her fright-wigged silhouette and her album covers gave the genre its ankhs, its Cleopatra eyes and its art nouveau lettering.
The Cure never accepted the label. Robb says Robert Smith did not identify with the term. In Robb’s words, the Cure said they definitely weren’t goth, though for many fans they absolutely were. Smith has called himself only a “footnote” in goth history. Co-founder Lol Tolhurst grew up Catholic, and he told the BBC that Camus and Sartre gave him and his friends a map out, intellectually and emotionally.
Joy Division sit awkwardly too. The BBC says they lacked the romanticism of the big goth bands, but built musical sepulchres out of post-industrial Manchester. It hears in Ian Curtis a voice of introspection, swinging from frantic to melancholy inside one song. Their only nationally broadcast TV performance came on Something Else in September 1979, when they played “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control”.
Killing Joke came out of an advert. Guitarist Kevin “Geordie” Walker and bassist Youth answered a notice in Melody Maker placed by Jaz Coleman and Paul Ferguson, and the band played their first show in August 1979. Walker remembered going to meet Coleman and arguing with him at once about his taste in music. He said he liked the intensity of the argument, kept hassling the band, and soon moved in with them. When Walker died after a stroke on November 26, 2023, aged 64, Coleman said he had never left his side in 44 years. Youth said Walker had defined “a generation or three”.
The Damned crossed over from punk as well. Rolling Stone notes that singer Dave Vanian had worked as a gravedigger, and that the band had moved into gothic rock by the mid-1980s. NME hears the turn earlier, on 1980’s The Black Album.
Leeds was the scene’s other capital. Dave Ball formed Soft Cell there with Marc Almond in 1978, and he calls the city “the goth capital”. He remembers goths kindly: “the sensitive, bright kids, very gentle”. The Sisters of Mercy came from Leeds too. BBC Music says they took their name from a Leonard Cohen song and combined the dirge of the Velvet Underground with the sparseness of Suicide.
Then there was the Batcave. Specimen’s singer Olli Wisdom opened it in 1982 as a place for his band to play, and it became the goth club. “We weren’t trying to start a movement,” he said in 2016. Keyboard player Jonny Slut had left provincial Peterborough to join Specimen at 19, and his towering deathhawk made him a figurehead. Guitarist Jon Klein made the club’s posters and decorations, cobwebs and blood-spattered mannequins included. Guests walked in through an upright coffin with its bottom taken out. Nick Cave’s band the Birthday Party were regulars.
The records that set the rules
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was the first song Bauhaus ever recorded. Murphy says they cut it first at a four-song demo session, in one take, and it was the first vocal he had ever sung into a studio microphone. It runs close to ten minutes, with more than a minute of pulse and swirl before the first bass note. Pitchfork hears more dub and krautrock in its structure than punk. Rolling Stone points to Daniel Ash’s dub-inspired guitar and the echoing rimshots. In 1983 the song played over the opening of Tony Scott’s film The Hunger, with Bowie as a vampire stalking a club. Bauhaus followed it with four albums between 1980 and 1983, from In the Flat Field to Burning from the Inside. BBC Music says those records hold many of gothic rock’s touchstones.
The Cure’s “A Forest”, from 1980’s Seventeen Seconds, went the other way from excess. Pitchfork calls it a masterpiece of minimalism, built on a four-note synth part and a steady motorik groove. Two years later, the Cure made Pornography. Rolling Stone calls the 1982 album a landmark, opening on the line “It doesn’t matter if we all die”. Even Smith admits its centrepiece, “The Hanging Garden”, is pretty goth.
Siouxsie and the Banshees’ third album, Juju, came out in 1981 and reached the Top 10. Bassist Steven Severin said it was the first time they had made a concept album that drew on darker elements, without planning to. Siouxsie said later that many goth bands had imitated Juju, “but they simply ended up diluting it”. Pitchfork gives the guitarist John McGeoch much of the credit for its single “Spellbound”. His phased lead sets the tone and his frantic acoustic strumming fills out the rest. McGeoch was gone from the band within a year.
Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” came out in 1980, months after Ian Curtis died. Peter Hook has written that it is not his favourite, because it reminds him too much of Ian. Their album Closer is part of the same story, and the Guardian lists its mourning-scene sleeve alongside “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and Siouxsie’s “Christine” as the music’s beginning.
The Birthday Party made “Release the Bats” in 1981. The song’s producer remembered them walking in dressed in black, as if from a church that had fallen to ruin. Pitchfork says the band meant it partly as self-parody, and that the joke only showed off their strengths.
By the middle of the decade the sound had grown bigger. The Sisters of Mercy released First and Last and Always in 1985, driven by a drum machine they called Doktor Avalanche. Rolling Stone calls it a peak moment in post-punk’s turn into goth. It and 1987’s Floodland were both Top 15 albums in the UK. Pitchfork says the Sisters appealed to serious goths and nobody else, and says their refusal to tone it down made them goth icons.
Killing Joke had a hit in 1985 with “Love Like Blood”, from the album Night Time. Pitchfork calls it a real radio hit, still carrying the band’s chugging power chords and fixation on mortality. Coleman based it on the writings of Yukio Mishima, and said he liked the idea of writing with blood.
The Grammy site notes that Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Sisters of Mercy both reached the Billboard charts in the 1980s. Gothic rock had become more than a London club’s private taste.
How goth spread and changed
Many fans date the first wave’s decline to 1986, Rolling Stone says, when the sound crept into the alternative rock mainstream. The Cult show the shift. They shortened their name step by step, from Southern Death Cult to Death Cult to the Cult, and broke through with the “stadium goth” of “She Sells Sanctuary”. NME counts that song as a giant hit on both sides of the Atlantic in May 1985.
more
Splits spread the sound further. In 1986 Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams left the Sisters of Mercy and called their new band the Sisterhood, to Andrew Eldritch’s annoyance. Renamed the Mission, they reached number 2 in the UK with 1988’s Children, produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
America took goth in its own direction. Pitchfork says the all-ages dance clubs where it found a foothold in the mid-1980s are unthinkable without Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”. In Los Angeles a parallel death rock scene grew up, and Christian Death made religion its theme on 1982’s Only Theatre of Pain. By the end of the decade Depeche Mode had become a stadium electronic goth act in the United States, the BBC writes. Their darker turn started with 1986’s Black Celebration, according to Rolling Stone.
The 1990s were harder. Pitchfork says goth went mostly underground during grunge, when anger and sarcasm were in fashion and despondency was not. The BBC says it became terminally unfashionable in Britpop Britain. Yet it kept seeping into other music. BBC Music hears gothic undertones in PJ Harvey, Marilyn Manson, the Manic Street Preachers and Nine Inch Nails. NME says that in 1990s America goth turned more pained and confessional, as on Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”. The 1994 film The Crow carried a soundtrack with the Cure, and Nine Inch Nails covered Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” for it.
Metal took a lot. In Britain, the BBC notes, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost built gothic doom from heavy riffs and atmosphere borrowed from the Sisters of Mercy. Type O Negative from Brooklyn wrote what Pitchfork calls a power ballad for goths, “Love You to Death”, in 1996. The Grammy site lists Lacuna Coil, Nightwish and HIM among the gothic and symphonic metal bands that lasted. Later, nu-metal borrowed too. The BBC hears the Cure in Linkin Park and notes that Deftones openly credit goth.
Then goth came back in the mid-2000s, loudly. Pitchfork credits My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco with putting a pop spin on the old melodrama. NME says MCR’s 2004 breakthrough “Helena” crossed goth with emo, and made black clothes and eyeliner teenage rebellion’s default once more. In 2006 Peter Murphy and Gerard Way sat side by side on MTV to promote a gothic box set, and neither could quite define goth. Evanescence’s Amy Lee was, in NME’s phrase, the undisputed queen of noughties goths, and the band shot the “My Immortal” video in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.
Not everyone welcomed the revival. NME recalls a Daily Mail campaign that warned parents about emo as a “suicide cult”, and NME’s writer argued that what the paper feared was really goth. Robb says being a goth had long carried risk. Fans would cover their clothes with heavy coats on the way to a show, afraid of attack, and reveal them only once inside the venue. He sees attitudes shifting now, and points to the work of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation.
The influence ran through guitars as well as wardrobes. Pitchfork reports Kevin Shields and Jimmy Page as outspoken Killing Joke fans, and notes the claim that Nirvana took the melody of “Come as You Are” from “Eighties”. Johnny Marr talked to Robb about how the Birthday Party’s Rowland S Howard shaped his own playing.
Europe kept the older sound closest. The Grammy site quotes Ronny Moorings of the Dutch band Clan of Xymox, who says the scene is healthy and still going strong, especially in Germany. A spokesperson for the Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival says people still want to see the old heroes.
Where gothic rock stands now
Goth’s latest return is not subtle. Burberry showed a dramatic goth collection and the Cure sold out Wembley Arena. Siouxsie Sioux, long elusive, was booked to headline Latitude in the summer of 2023. A 90-track compilation, Young Limbs Rise Again, told the Batcave’s story from 1982 to 1985, with an 80-page illustrated history. Its author, the Batcave DJ Kris Needs, sums up those years in two words: “Freedom and irreverence.”
The old guard are busy. In 2023 the BBC reported the Cure preparing their 14th studio album, and Siouxsie returning to live performance. Lol Tolhurst and the former Banshees drummer Budgie were making an album together that they called “goth-adjacent”. Robb and Tolhurst had both published histories of goth that year.
Younger musicians carry the sound in new shapes. Pitchfork names Jenny Hval, Makthaverskan and Zola Jesus among those keeping it alive. Cassyette, an Essex alt-rock singer, told the Guardian that goth will endure because the pain of being young endures. She sees one change for the better: young goths are no longer bullied for it as they once were. Amira Elfeky, from Connecticut, released her debut EP Skin to Skin in 2024 and talks about loving romantic, Victorian, vampiric things. When a commenter sneered that her song “Tonight” was “girly metal”, she adopted “girl metal” as a joke and carried on.
The clubs have changed less than you might think. Jonny Slut says the coolest London club nights now look very goth, and names Monster Queen and Wraith. In San Francisco, Death Guild was the longest-running weekly gothic club night in the United States when the Grammy site reported on it in 2014. Moorings told the same piece that most of the European audience was under 24.
Goth has even reached the gallery. In 2023 the artist David Panos made Gothic Revival for NN Contemporary Art in Northampton, setting the town’s Guildhall and All Saints Church against music from a choir and a local band playing Bauhaus songs. “I was a goth way back when,” he told BBC Radio Northampton, and Bauhaus were the first thing he knew about the town.
Fans have their own day, too. World Goth Day falls on May 22, which BBC 6 Music declared in 2009.
Jonny Slut, once a terrifying figure at the Batcave, now lives quietly in Dorset and makes chutney. He sent a jar to the Guardian wrapped in black gaffer tape, with a text: “It looked like a little coffin when I sent it off!”
Starter guide
- Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Bauhaus, 1979). It appears on Rolling Stone’s 50 best goth songs and NME’s 20 greatest goth tracks, and Pitchfork calls it goth’s wellspring.
- A Forest (The Cure, 1980). NME counts it among the 20 greatest goth tracks, and Mojo puts it among the Cure’s 30 greatest songs.
- Atmosphere (Joy Division, 1980). It appears on both NME’s 20 greatest goth tracks and Rolling Stone’s 50 best goth songs.
- Release the Bats (The Birthday Party, 1981). NME counts it among the greatest goth tracks, and Rolling Stone lists it among the 50 best goth songs.
- Love Like Blood (Killing Joke, 1985). It appears on NME’s 20 greatest goth tracks and Rolling Stone’s 50 best goth songs.
- She Sells Sanctuary (The Cult, 1985). NME counts it among the 20 greatest goth tracks, and Rolling Stone’s 50 best goth songs hears it as “stadium goth”.
- Helena (My Chemical Romance, 2004). It appears on NME’s 20 greatest goth tracks and Rolling Stone’s 50 best goth songs, and Pitchfork says MCR led the mall-goth charge.
- Red Right Hand (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Rolling Stone lists it among the 50 best goth songs, and NME puts it on its playlist of goth classics.
