Origins
The word came before the music did. In October 1967, critic John Stickney used “gothic rock” to describe the Doors in a review for The Williams Record. The term drifted for a decade until November 1978, when Record Mirror’s Tim Lott applied it to Pere Ubu and Nick Kent invoked “gothic rock architects” to describe the Doors and early Velvet Underground in a review of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Then, in September 1979, Joy Division manager Tony Wilson called his band’s music “gothic” on the BBC television show Something Else, and producer Martin Hannett described their style as “dancing music with gothic overtones.” The label was loose and borrowed, but it stuck because the music kept getting darker.
Six weeks after Bauhaus formed in Northampton, they drove to Beck Studios in Wellingborough on 26 January 1979. In a single take, during a six-hour session engineered by Derek Tompkins (who had built the studio’s 16-track desk himself), they recorded Bela Lugosi’s Dead. It ran nine and a half minutes. David J’s descending bassline was pure dub reggae, slowed to a crawl. He later said plainly: “We were very influenced by reggae, especially dub. Basically, Bela was our interpretation of dub.” Daniel Ash played what he called “mutant chords,” partial barre shapes with the top E and B strings left open, run through an old HH echo unit that belonged to David J and crapped out constantly. Ash slid the unit’s controls to trigger cascading delays, and at points pressed his thumb against the tape to slow it manually. Kevin Haskins played spare, ritualistic drums. Peter Murphy intoned about the undead. The whole thing sounded like a séance conducted in an empty swimming pool.
The Sound
Gothic rock’s sonic signature is built on space. Where punk compressed everything into a wall of speed, goth opened the room up: cavernous reverb, long delays, guitars treated as texture rather than riff. The bass often carries the melody while the guitar floats above, processed through chorus and flanger into something shimmering and cold.
The gear choices were specific. Goth guitarists favored clean, high-headroom amplifiers: the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus (Robert Smith used the rarer 160-watt JC-160 with four 10-inch speakers), Fender Silverface Twin Reverbs, and solid-state HH amps. The JC-120’s built-in stereo chorus became a defining texture. The Boss BF-2 flanger was nearly ubiquitous, used by Daniel Ash, Robert Smith, and Billy Duffy of the Cult.
John McGeoch, who joined Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1980 after leaving Magazine, took this approach furthest. He mounted an MXR M117R flanger on his mic stand at hand height so he could manipulate its controls while playing his Yamaha SG1000. His arpeggiated, harmonics-rich guitar on Juju (1981) and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982) influenced a generation, including Johnny Marr, Robert Smith, and the Edge. Vocals, meanwhile, tended toward two poles: Siouxsie Sioux’s imperious alto or Andrew Eldritch’s cavernous baritone. The drums were often either hypnotically dirge-like or tribal and tom-heavy, and in several cases not human at all.
Machines and Scenes
The Sisters of Mercy never had a drummer. Andrew Eldritch, himself a former drummer, programmed every beat on a drum machine he named Doktor Avalanche and listed as a full band member. The Doktor’s hardware evolved with the band’s finances: a Boss DR-55 at first, then a Roland TR-606, a TR-808, briefly a TR-909, an Oberheim DMX on First and Last and Always (1985), and eventually a Yamaha RX5 reinforced by Akai S900 and S1000 samplers. That debut album was recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport and Genetic Studios in Reading between June and November 1984, reached number 14 on the UK Albums Chart, and cost enough to keep the band in debt until 1988.
The scene organized around specific cities. Leeds had the Sisters of Mercy and the March Violets, who shared rehearsal spaces and Eldritch’s Merciful Release label; the Warehouse venue was ground zero. London’s scene crystallized at the Batcave, a weekly Wednesday night that opened on 21 July 1982 at the Gargoyle Club, 69 Dean Street, Soho. Ollie Wisdom of Specimen organized it. To enter, you walked through a real coffin with the bottom removed. Cobwebs lined the ceilings, black bin-liners covered the walls. Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Nick Cave, and Ian Astbury of Southern Death Cult all passed through. The resident bands (Specimen, Alien Sex Fiend, Sex Gang Children) blurred glam rock theatrics with post-punk austerity. The original Batcave ran only five months at Dean Street before the upper floors were sold, but it had already given the subculture a physical home.
Cathedral Builders
The Cure’s relationship with goth was prolific and reluctant. Robert Smith has consistently rejected the label, yet the band’s dark trilogy is among the genre’s most essential work. Seventeen Seconds (1980) was recorded and mixed in seven days at Morgan Studios, London, on a budget of roughly £2,000 to £3,000, with the band working 16-hour days. Its single A Forest, built on Smith’s Jazzmaster-through-JC-120 tone layered with flanger and delay, became their first UK chart entry. Pornography (1982) pushed further into claustrophobic darkness, recorded while the band was disintegrating through drug use and infighting. Disintegration (1989) was Smith’s deliberate attempt to recapture Pornography’s atmosphere, and it became their commercial peak.
Fields of the Nephilim, formed in Stevenage in 1984, brought spaghetti-western imagery and occult philosophy to the template. Carl McCoy’s lyrics referenced Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft. Their debut Dawnrazor (1987) topped the indie chart, and the single Moonchild from their second album The Nephilim (1988) reached number 28 on the UK chart, proving goth could sell beyond the underground.
Afterlife
The subculture never entirely disappeared, but it went deep underground through the 1990s and 2000s. The revival came from unexpected geography. She Past Away, from Turkey, released Belirdi Gece in 2012, singing in Turkish over stripped-down post-punk with analog synthesizers and gated reverb, and found an international audience hungry for the sound. Lebanon Hanover, a Swiss duo, built a following through tracks like Gallowdance, which eventually crossed 43 million Spotify plays. Molchat Doma, from Minsk, Belarus, sang in Russian over cold, minimal wave-inflected production and became the most visible act in an Eastern European darkwave surge. Drab Majesty and Twin Tribes carried the torch in the United States.
The original practitioners left marks everywhere. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ influence runs through Radiohead, PJ Harvey, and Massive Attack. The Cure’s Disintegration regularly appears in all-time album polls. And Bela Lugosi’s Dead, that nine-minute dub-reggae séance from a Wellingborough studio, still opens goth nights in basements around the world, forty-seven years after it was recorded in a single take.
Essential Listening
- Bauhaus – In the Flat Field (1980)
- Siouxsie and the Banshees – Juju (1981)
- The Cure – Pornography (1982)
- Bauhaus – The Sky’s Gone Out (1982)
- The Sisters of Mercy – First and Last and Always (1985)
- The Cure – Disintegration (1989)
- The Sisters of Mercy – Floodland (1987)
- Siouxsie and the Banshees – A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982)
- Fields of the Nephilim – The Nephilim (1988)
- Christian Death – Only Theatre of Pain (1982)
- The Mission – God’s Own Medicine (1986)
- She Past Away – Belirdi Gece (2012)