Goth’s undead! The dark return of Britain’s spookiest subculture

Last November, the Tim Burton-directed, Netflix Addams Family reboot, Wednesday, saw a dance scene go viral on TikTok: Wednesday herself, played by Jenna Ortega, flailing beautifully in black organza to the Cramps’ goth-schlock-psychobilly 1981 cover, Goo Goo Muck. It came after Burberry showed a dramatic, extreme-goth collection; soon after, the Cure sold out three nights at Wembley Arena. Now, two hefty books are about to arrive documenting goth’s endurably undead history, John Robb’s The Art of Darkness: the History of Goth and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth. And summer sees the return of the long elusive goth sphinx herself, as Siouxsie Sioux headlines Latitude festival.

This month brings the definitive original soundtrack, Young Limbs Rise Again: the story of the Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985. A stunningly comprehensive, 90-track compilation, it features the iconic ghouls heard at London’s early-80s goth mecca and includes a lusciously illustrated, 80-page history book, featuring the scratchy, B-movie, Batcave artwork that defines the goth aesthetic to this day.

But if goth feels suddenly back, it never really went away, eternally lurking in a teenage bedroom somewhere: unavoidable in recent years alone in the black tears of Billie Eilish, in Coronation Street storylines about goth Nina Lucas, in Noel Fielding’s comedy-horror jumpers on Bake Off … What’s the enduring appeal? Kris Needs, author of the Young Limbs Batcave book and a regular Batcave DJ, sums up his own chaotically carefree goth years with two words.

“Freedom and irreverence,” he says. “We could all just dress up, be really stupid, take loads of drugs, I’d play Bowie, the Gun Club and then a ridiculous Ken Dodd record. It’s a spirit these days I find really rare.”

The original goth phoenix of the late-70s and early-80s rose from the still-smouldering embers of post-punk, its renegade spirit adapting the dressing-up thrills of the fearless new romantics. Atmospherically, what began with the haunting Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus in 1979, the spectral Christine by Siouxsie and the Banshees a year later and the agonised album sleeve mourning scene of Joy Division’s Closer, the music evolved into frenetic, electro-glam, industrial art-rock headed for the nation’s dancefloors.

By 1982, still a year before the term “goth” was widely used, the UK provinces were populated by plume-haired fiends, inky apparitions in bullet belts, buckles and black lipstick. Up in Perth, Scotland, I was one of them, a post-punk obsessive drawn to this glamorous tribe, both deathly serious and fantastically absurd. For disaffected provincial kids like me, this intense, often preposterously grandiose subculture offered not only an alternative reality but a life.

“Leeds was the goth capital,” notes Dave Ball, who formed synth-pop pioneers Soft Cell with Marc Almond in the city in 1978, where they wrote Martin, about a troubled, vampire-fixated boy. Never truly goth themselves, they found it irresistible anyway, and by 1981 were black-clad, stud-festooned pop stars at No 1 on Top of the Pops. “It was romantic, intellectual, Byronesque,” says Ball. “I always found goths were the sensitive, bright kids, very gentle.”

I venture a theory: that the least threatening people are actually the ones who look most frightening: because their madness is all on the outside, not the inside, where the danger lies. “I think that’s true,” he nods. “A hard exterior, with a soft centre. Like a dark chocolate.”

Jonny Slut (AKA Jonny Melton) was the keyboard player with fright-wigged, fishnet-draped, glam-spooks Specimen, the Batcave house band (who also founded the club), famed for his towering deathhawk hair (a deathhawk being an even more voluminous mohawk). Beautiful, androgynous and terrifying, he was a defining goth figurehead who escaped provincial Peterborough to join the band aged 19.

If the goth aesthetic was an outer manifestation of an inner worldview, how would Jonny Slut describe his? “It was an expression of your ‘otherness’, wasn’t it?” he muses. “Of not feeling like you fitted in, of not wanting to fit in. It was sexy but also asexual. I remember feeling not particularly gay, not particularly straight. I didn’t care. Other things were more important, friendships, music, the way we were living.”

He laughs. “I saw a meme the other day, a picture of me and it said something like: ‘I was non-binary back when it was called goth.’ I’m glad whatever it was I was trying to do has transmitted into the future.”

Sophie Chery, bass player with Batcave-playing regulars Sexbeat, a 19-year-old escapee from Paris to London in 1980, found in goth a “timeless expression, this fascination with the dark side”. The Batcave’s decor and artworks (posters, flyers, logo, lettering) were all created by Specimen guitarist/artist Jon Klein (Chery’s then-boyfriend), who would go on to spend seven years in Siouxsie and the Banshees. His Batcave garlands included sheets of cobwebs, camouflage and mannequins spattered with fake blood, while an upright coffin with the bottom removed formed the walkthrough entrance. Chery remains enchanted by the culture, tracing its lineage back to the 18th and 19th centuries, to gothic architecture and literature, “from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Rocky Horror to fantasy culture, to 20th-century film, Nosferatu, the original Cat People, to elegant, dark, sensual fashion”.

She pauses and thinks again. “It’s logical that people are still amused by it,” she decides. “But also, we live in dark times. Kids today are scared. Climate change. Sexually, it’s difficult. Economically, it’s difficult. In the early 80s I rented a room in London, in a whole house, for £5 a week. It’s not a ‘free’ mood now. Kids are not as liberated as we were.”

Like all the best clubs, the Batcave, says Jonny Slut, “burned bright” and burned out: youth culture moved on and in 1985 he shaved off his hawk, “and had an orange unicorn point on the front of my head and an Ariel Automatic packet pinned to the back of my jacket”. He went on to work with Adamski and the KLF, and in 2002 launched the electroclash club night Nag Nag Nag. Still an occasional DJ, he lives a “quiet life” in Dorset, where he makes chutney (“I’ll send you a jar if you like”) but keeps an eye on clubland trends. “The coolest London club nights now look very goth,” he notes, citing Monster Queen and Wraith.

Is the goth resurgence today mostly about the look? “There’s still plenty of music around, coldwave-y, dark, techno-y,” he decides. “But I don’t think music is as important to youth cults now. That was our only form of expression, wasn’t it?”

Wraith is run by Parma Ham, an artist, DJ and designer involved in the recent Burberry campaign, who is, says Jonny Slut, “part of a coterie of little [clubland] devils much more extreme than we were”. Parma Ham could be Jonny Slut: the Next Dimension, creating explicit, S&M fetishist imagery, with a deathhawk two-feet tall. Their partner, the equally fantasy-alien artist Salvia also creates extreme looks, through disturbing body modification, both Photoshopped and real: a recurring theme is extra limbs and she also glues thin arcs of medical tube to her face. It’s an expression of recovery, she states online, solemnly, “from the constant trauma of living”.

Goth has endured, and will always endure, believes 29-year-old Essex alt-rock insurgent Cassyette (real name Cassy Brooking) because the pain of being young will always endure. It remains, she says, the outer representation “of your inner darkness, it’s being anti a society that makes you feel uncomfortable”.

Cassyette is on Zoom, wearing a pink hairnet over peroxide hair, with a barbed wire neck tattoo, the word “degenerate” tattooed across her throat (her fans are the degenerettes), and on her back, “a massive neo-goth futuristic bat-wing situation”. As with so much alternative music today, she’s incorporated goth elements into both her look and sound – which veers from death metal to Pink-inspired pop. Outspokenly feminist and queer, she’s a TikTok devotee (“it facilitates loads of subcultures”) including fashion TikTok’s “Whimsigoth – amazing!”

The difference for young goths today, she decides, is “you don’t get bullied for it like you did before”. Also, with the permanent threat of being photographed or filmed in public, and the constant pressure from wellness gurus online, their focus is on clean living and staying in control. Most gothy kids today, certainly, are not living in drug-berserk chaos or in threadbare squats (as Jonny Slut happily was, for years). “They’re very health-conscious.”

I wonder if Cassyette thinks today’s goth resurgence is simply the zeitgeist, reflecting the Wednesday-watching Gen Z, especially: the apocalyptic thinking, horror-bombarded, digital natives who’ve grown up convinced the planet is wrecked, humanity is hideous, and the world is run by idiots. “You’ve nailed it with that!” she agrees. “And that’s where being anti-society, anti-patriarchy comes in, because fuck this.”

The fabulous, supposedly frightening Jonny Slut, meanwhile, is true to his word (and proves his own goth spirit endures). A jar of chutney arrives, labelled “Jonny Slutney!” and meticulously packaged in a box swathed in glossiest black gaffer tape. He sends a text: “It looked like a little coffin when I sent it off!” Then: Three bat emojis. Three black hearts.

• Young Limbs Rise Again, the Story of the Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985 is released via Demon Music on 24 February