One thing that has always baffled me about the goth subculture is that many people in it are absolutely fine with supporting a musician who openly hates and belittles them. Honestly, I can’t think of a single other subculture that would put up with this kind of behaviour. Can you?
How dare you speak badly about him! His music is iconic and you’re just jealous! Why should anybody be jealous of a musician who hasn’t bothered releasing an album of all new material in thirty years? A man whose best music was made in the 80’s because of other people in the band during that time. These people ended up in bands such as The Mission UK, Ghost Dance, The Cult, and The Damned.
Eldritch has done and said some pretty terrible things through the years. He has told goth looking fans that he hates them and then tells them to fuck off. The band Sunshine Blind was supposed to open for them at one point and when Eldritch found out they were goth kicked them off of the bill. He has famously not gotten along with fellow band members, and actually made Patricia Morrison sign an NDA after she was out of band. He even lied and said that she did not play bass in the recording of the album Floodland. QUOTE:
“But is it true that she didn’t play on Floodland? That is true. I intended her to, but she didn’t make the cut. She was still a key part of the band’s visual identity in this period – on the album cover and in the videos. I didn’t have a band so I couldn’t go on tour. So I did a year of promo for the album, and it was nice to have somebody to answer half the questions and look pretty. Not that I didn’t look pretty in those days…”
He is such a lowly piece of shit that he denies her any credit for having played on the album and says that she was just a pretty face. She was in The Bags and The Gun Club before this band so the woman could indeed play bass.
Then we come to the disaster that is the Vision Thing album. I like a couple of the songs on it but overall it is a really stale and boring album, with the exact same guitar riffs being played throughout most of it. He mentioned in interviews at the time that people didn’t like it because it was too heavy. Heavy compared to what? Vanilla Ice? The band Danzig made some very excellent albums around the same time and managed to actually sound heavy without relying on the same exact riffs in every song.
After pondering about it for a bit I think I know the answer as to why he hasn’t put an album out in the last thirty years; he doesn’t need to, because he knows that some goth rubes will pay money to see him play live. By all accounts his shows are very hit or miss and yet you will always find people in goth communities online talking about Eldritch like he is the second coming of Christ. I quite honestly have never understood all of the hero worship that he gets from the younger folks in the goth community. They don’t care if he openly hates them, he’s a famous goth musician from the 80’s so that must mean he’s cool!
FANS: His music is on fire and slaps so I have to see him live! His music is iconic which means it has to be important that I see him play! People will respect me more in the goth community if I show up at one of his shows and take a bunch of selfies of myself sticking out my tongue while they play This Corrosion. Since the band is so influential it doesn’t matter what he has done, his music has to still mean a lot!
I’ve noticed that this young crowd who go to his shows and speak about him constantly are usually also the ones who still support Morrissey and The Smiths. I will tackle that fascist pig in another post in the future.
I can kind of understand why younger people still go to his shows, after all the 80’s are trendy as all hell right now. However, anybody over the age of forty ought to know better because they will more than likely know somebody who has been fucked over in one way or another by him. Hell, I remember about thirty years ago somebody I knew got told off by Eldritch because he looked too goth. That instantly made me never want to see the man perform live, and to this day I haven’t.
Not wanting to support Andrew Eldritch playing shows because he is a horrible person is based upon having a set of principles. If a musician acts like an ass to other musicians, and even openly acts like a complete jerk to his own fans I’m not going to support them because I feel that such people do not deserve to be enriched by the very people that they hate. There are a whole lot of goth genre musicians who deserve way more support than he does because they actually appreciate their fans and put out new music on a regular basis.
People will sometimes react to my reasoning with ‘He’s a jerk, but he’s our jerk.’. No hon, he’s not ‘our’ jerk, he is your jerk. This is a prime example as to how the goth subculture can sometimes be its worst enemy. Having actual principles isn’t as important as throwing money at Eldritch like he’s a top notch male stripper, instead of recognizing him as the tired bitter old man that he really is.
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