Somebody’s heavily pixelated photo of a Twilight Zone shirt and member pass. Not my photo.
This is a second list of the songs that I used to hear in ‘alternative’ clubs from 1988 to 1992. The shirt above is from the alternative club The Twilight Zone that was in Alameda California. You had to have a member card to get in because of the local laws and it was an all ages club. These songs were either played there, at The Edge in Palo Alto or at One Step Beyond in Santa Clara. The music was always very eclectic. Enjoy!
EDIT: I did not permanently leave the r/goth community after this post, I just kind of held back for a few months before engaging with other people again. I didn’t get kicked out by the power tripping mods until more recently.
There seems to be a real tendency right now for younger people who identify themselves as goth to claim that alternative bands from the 80’s are goth. This is done partially through ignorance, and partially because they think that since they are goth that all of the music they like must also be goth. Echo & The Bunnymen being one of the more popular ones, with their song The Killing Moon being pointed out as a ‘goth’ song. What they fail to realise is that back in the 80’s they weren’t considered to be a goth band. In the strict sense they were considered to be ‘alternative’, a non mainstream band. They toured with Gene Loves Jezebel and New Order in 1987, a concert that I actually went to. There was one band out of the three that should be considered goth with a capital G, and it sure as hell wasn’t Echo And The Bunnymen. Oh, and it wasn’t New Order either in case you get that silly idea in your head.
You can tell some of these people until you are blue in the face, but do they listen? Of course not. It gets me kind of pissed off that the bands that I listened to as a teenager in the 80’s are being hijacked by a bunch of kids who think that they know more about the music of that time than I do. I’m not saying that my opinion is perfect or that I’m an expert when it comes to the music of the 80’s, but since I was a teenager during that time I definitely know quite a bit about the music from that decade.
Another thing that ticks me off is when people tell me that certain forms of music are not related to the goth genre at all, even though they were played at alternative clubs in the late 80’s alongside bands such as Christian Death and Specimen. I was there, I actually remember bands such as Desireless and Fake being played in sets. I associate those bands with the goth subculture because they definitely had a place in it during the late 80’s when the genre was starting to separate and have its own club nights. Anybody who says anything different wasn’t around during that time or is plain lying.
Another Brick by the band Fake. I love how he is carrying a guitar around during most of the video even though there isn’t any in the song
I actually left the Reddit goth group partially because of all of this. I just got sick and tired of people, who weren’t around in the 80’s, telling me I was wrong about what happened back then. Some genres such as synthpop definitely had a place in what was to become the goth subculture in the late 80’s and those songs were important to members of the burgeoning subculture. The synthpop that was created twenty years ago was a totally different animal. It took over goth club nights, along with EBM, and was very repetitive and stale. The current crop of wannabe 80’s synth/post-punk bands try to sound like ‘authentic’ 80’s music but a lot of the time they fall very flat. I like some of them a lot, but the bad really outweighs the good in that genre. A genre, that for some odd reason, is considered goth by the same people who dismiss 80’s synthpop as not being goth related.
What can we learn from all of this? There are people in the goth subculture that are so rigid in their definitions of the music that they can’t, or won’t, admit when they are wrong. When these people double down on their wrong assumptions just walk away, because they don’t want to listen to reason. Instead they only care about being right, much to the detriment of the subculture.
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.
