Last Time Around:
A Gothzo Memoir
by Kevin J. Bonham
“Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the norm” – Nietzsche
“Hang me for the vultures,
for they are most of my friends” – Blood Puppet, Vulture Oasis
Start with a couple of quotations ripped brutally out of context and twisted to one’s own nefarious ends, and heck, why not? This always was a culture of jackdaws, bright-eyed scavengers and people who won’t admit how much Leonard Cohen they really stole. If you think you’re the last suffering original artist on this happy conformist planet, you haven’t been paying much attention. You and your poetry collection will be taken to Seaworld and left there until the Killer Whale eats one and wipes its anus with the other. The order is not important.
Melodrama, as well as being the critical ingredient of Bad Goth Poetry, is one of the things which killed the previous Hobart goth movement, which burbled happily through the mid-80s, exploded in a black sulky wash over Salamanca, South Hobart and everywhere between with the release of Disintegration, started to putrify in 1991 and was buried by the scattered uncaring survivors in 1993.
In this relatively peaceful turn-of-the-century Hobart renewal, where the most serious public ructions visible are the fiery flamewars of former flatmates and the occasional disagreement over just how ugly Marilyn Manson really is, it’s hard to believe just how segmented and divided the previous mob were. Partly this is because “goth” was a much younger and more defined culture then – offshoots were not reined in through hybridism but instead quickly given a different name. Ignore them, dear, they’ll die out before you notice they’re having more fun than you. Thus it was with the greebos and the swampies.
Greebo was a global off-shoot of macho male goth scruffians who got tired of trying to look like a girl, mainly because they weren’t any good at it. They weren’t very good at washing, either, or motorbike-riding, though they faked an interest in precisely one of these pastimes. In the with-it world, greebos had their own music (bands like Gaye Bikers on Acid) but here they made do with Mudhoney and Soundgarden, devolved into sub-poppers, and were the only ones not to raise their heads from their bowls full of LSD in surprise when Nirvana went big. Kurt always was a Bauhaus fan. Swampies, on the other severed hand, looked like goths in a messy sort of way, attended Art School sporadically, listened to Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Lou Reed and were interested in precisely two things: heroin, and more heroin. There wasn’t enough heroin in Hobart to support all nine of them, so they left.
Even within the subculture itself (defined as loosely as a bad Adelaide petticoat) there were any number of deviant groups to identify and, should a divisive mood take you, vilify. These included:
“Oh Robert and Morrissey are so cool, when I get out of school I want to be just like them, it’s so great to be morbid and depressed and want to kill yourself, I just can’t understand why people are happy about anything. Hey, my boyfriend bought me a set of razorblades for Christmas, he’s so romantic and everything, but he’s gone to the mainland now and I’m so lonely and sad. No, get away from me, I don’t want to have sex because I’m worried I might enjoy it and turn normal, and anyway I’d rather sleep with a cockr … hang on, are you really in a band? And you’re really 35 years old? Can I come home with you?”
I don’t want to give the impression there weren’t real Goths in the scene, because there were, but the ratio of those whose involvement was deep and sincere, to those who either permanently had no clue or else were only there to get laid, was pretty damn low. Of course, the much-denigrated “spookykids” of today are arguably the same problem, but they are merely a large minority, and most of them learn remarkably quickly once you put an axe through their Web-TV, give their spiky collar to the dog, and set fire to their shift key to StOp ThEm FrOm WrItInG LiKe ThIs. What killed the first scene was that when goth became seriously untrendy and all the lightweights dropped out, the rest had already fled so far away from admitting to involvement that there was nothing left to constitute a scene.
Still, one judges a scene not by its failures but by the legacy it leaves. While it had little comparable to the Coven (occasional gothish sets at a joint called the Babylon, above what is now Café Who, were OK until the place got overrun by doofheads), it did actually have an original band, known as Prayers in Ashes until 1993 and Blood Puppet following personnel changes thereafter. PIA gigs were highly amusing events. The crowd consisted in equal measure of five types of people: those who liked the music, those who knew band members, those possessed by demons, those possessed by drink, and those there to ogle the bassist. The band itself, curiously, had about the same makeup. On one occasion a fundamentalist Christian strayed in and asked the lead singer at some depth why he felt moved to write such bleak and irreligious songs, to sing as if he was gargling molten magma, and to stare fixedly at audience members for no reason, leading to a highly amusing conversation. On a typical night one-fifth of the crowd would head directly for the bar, while the remainder would wallflower themselves around the room and sit in corners doing very little. Getting a goth to dance in those days was harder than squeezing water out of a rock, and only slightly easier than convincing Austudy to pay you.
There was one glorious exception, when an optimistic promoter set up a night called “The Cave” in the Brisbane Hotel. Blood Puppet played alongside the outstanding progressive-rock band Three Winters Cold and a bunch of middle-aged hippies who lowered the tone somewhat (“We’re here to sing about things that fill our minds with mystery and romance. Like … WITCHES”). Someone made considerable efforts with the décor, adding rubber bats suspended from the ceiling, stalactites, a skeleton and a black-clad religious madonna statue complete with black lipstick. By night’s end the bats had all been either thrown at the band mid-song or clubbed to death with stalactites, while the skeleton was bent double from a bad night on the dancefloor, and the statue had been stripped to the waist and deprived of both arms by a would-be rapist. The band and its followers were not invited back.
Prayers in Ashes / Blood Puppet (the former is a pun on the Birthday Party’s “Prayers on Fire”, the latter stems from a Nick Cave liner note) were both considerably better than the average generic goth band. The former were more traditionally goth. The latter denied the stereotype vigorously a la Andrew Eldritch, but nobody believed them (or him). They issued the demo tapes “The Future Falls” (1992) and “Mutate” (1994), both of my copies of which are almost unplayable, so don’t try scabbing them off me. The former consists largely of lengthy, driving, guitar-goth rock songs, reasonably similar to Fields of the Nephilim or Christian Death. Stereotypical goth topics – magic, pagans, serpents, poison, sexual excess and Edgar Allan Poe – predominate, but the presentation is intense enough that it rarely seems forced. The most infamous song on this tape is “Suspiria Virgin”, which both sonically and thematically is closer to early Bauhaus, and which details in rather callous fashion the deflowering of a foolish teenage girl. There is a sick rumour that this song is about a particular person. The sickest thing about this rumour is that it is true.
“Mutate” is a very different work, much more keyboard-based, experimental and tending towards electro and industrial. Unusual then, it is typical of the later-90s push of goth towards a more subdued sound and a less clichéd set of themes, similar to the attitude of bands like the Horatii or Manuskript for instance. The lyrics are far more eclectic, with a more modern and personal focus, and a stronger sense of self-determination.
You might hear rumours of a reformation. If these people ever dare to play in public again, simply adopt the following procedure.
Yell “Incoming!” as you walk in the door (or preferably, kick it down).
Walk over to the band, and say “Hello, goths” as sincerely as possible.
Tell them I sent you.