There are twelve sepulchral pages of sepulchral Goth extravaganza in the new edition of Vive Le Rock! But there's more where that came from in these exclusive online interviews...
LOL TOLHURST speaks exclusively about his excellent book Goth: A History....
“The title might be Goth: A History but it’s more a history of this person as a Goth, that’s the emphasis that I wanted to put on it, that it’s more about growing up in those times [in post-industrial,Thatcherite Britain]. There’s an awful lot of misunderstanding about it and also there’s not a lot of information because this thing,” he says, holding up his mobile phone, “didn’t exist so nobody’s got
photos, so it’s down to us who can remember still to say this is what was important.”
The irony for The Cure in the early Eighties seemed to be that the gloomier their music became the greater commercial success it enjoyed. Pornography was arguably their most miserable work, containing songs such as ‘One Hundred Years’, ‘The Hanging Garden’ and ‘Cold’, yet it was their first album to enter the Top Ten. Today, Lol says that he is “humbled and gratified at the same time” by the band’s lasting impact.
“I’ve lived out here in California for thirty years now and I go places, like little small towns, all over the States and I can see the Goths, even the kids that don’t even know they’re going to be Goths yet – you walk into a local coffee shop and they’re all there. It’s more of a way of being and it has a history now and it’s something that’s fairly universal, which is why it became successful.
“It’s not that The Cure had gigantic hits everywhere, it’s that we were known – and still are known – pretty much everywhere that people listen to music. There are some places that you can go on this planet that you would think, Oh, don’t you know this band? and people would go ‘No’, but people know who The Cure are pretty much worldwide for a long time now, so that’s what really makes it work.”
Lol says he wanted the book to look at Goth in a broader cultural context, explaining that, “I don’t think you can look at it in separation, it’s part of everything.” He adds, “I know there are people of my age now and they still have the same mentality about things and they still have the same beliefs, and it’s something that’s a comfort to them, so I like that aspect of it.”
To that end, he’s interested in the work of the Irish writer Tracy Fahey, whose work focuses on reimagined folklore and female gothic. “I met Tracy a few years ago in Ireland when I was doing a book tour for Cured and we kept up a friendship and we’ve had a big conversation on [Goth.] She’s written some great books as well,” Lol says.
“To me, [Goth] is a community of artists, not just musicians… It’s more of a cultural movement than anything else, it explains a lot of things of things to me and I know that does for a lot of people, so that’s really where I’m going to go in the future, I’ve got some ideas percolating for book number three and that’s where it’s going to go, how you connect all the ideas together. I look at it like this: it’s kind of a secular religion, it doesn’t have a deity or anything at the head of it, but it’s a spiritual belief in its own way.
“A lot of music is like that – if you look at the Deadheads (fans of
the long-running American rock band The Grateful Dead) or something,
it’s the same kind of thing. It’s a way of being in the world that
explains things to you.”
The music scene of the time offered the likes of Lol Tolhurst a means of
escaping from small town life in Crawley. “There’s only two ways traditionally in England to get out of those places: you’ve either got to be very good at football or you’ve got to have a band,” Lol says. “Robert was pretty good at football, he was okay up to a point, but me and Michael [Dempsey, The Cure’s original bassist] weren’t so we thought it had to be a band.”
Lol says the first band they felt an affinity with was Siouxsie and The Banshees. “Before then there was that brief flurry of pub rock, and I don’t think we were particularly enamoured with too many of those [bands],” he says. “One of the good things about living down in Crawley was we were kind of isolated, it was not like living in the big city. I talked with my friend Kevin Haskins from Bauhaus about this; they had the same thing in Northampton, they were like the only show in
town and so they could mature on their own.
“I look now and realise that was what was important about The Cure’s beginnings: we weren’t in London, right there in the city, otherwise we would’ve been running around chasing our tails all the time trying to find out what’s the next thing. Britain, much more than [the US], was always very fashion conscious. I look at the Charts now in England and I’ve got no idea who half of them are at all, it changes so
quickly. When I first got here the opposite was true. I’d get these free newspapers that they used to give out in record stores and I’d go, 'Wow, Savoy Brown, they’re still playing'. Because the place is so much bigger, you could do that. 'Lynyrd Skynyrd are still playing'.
“For us, being isolated, even just by 25 miles, was like a blessing because there was only one other band in our town and Neil Gaiman, the writer, that was his band. I read an article where they asked him why he became a writer and he said, ‘Well, I was in a punk band and the other band in the town was The Cure so we stopped and gave up, which was magnanimous of him, but there was no competition in that way, we were able to grow on our own.”
Lol was not totally immune to London’s Goth scene, though. Moving up to central London after his mother died, he visited several of the scene's famous hangouts. “That was the time when [Goth] was all starting and that’s when I met the Banshees who were great club-goers, especially [Steve] Severin. There was the Camden Palace and The Batcave,” he remembers. "The good thing about The Batcave was it wasn’t just for people that looked goth, you could look like anything
in there, as long as you had the price of admission and a beer or two, you were in. In the book, I put some photos of The Batcave that I got from Mick Mercer and it’s funny because you look at those pictures and you think everybody must have looked like that. But half the clientele was just there because it was the club to go to.”
He’s interested to note that the tribal aspect of Goth remains today, saying, “My son just played that big goth festival in Germany and that was the biggest audience he’s ever played to... Normally he’s used to playing to a hundred or two hundred people and there a thousand people came, there’s still a tribe somewhere. As much as people protest that they’re not Goth, they probably are. We don’t all identify in the same way but it’s like that old saying about pornography in the law case, I don’t know what that is but I know it when I see it. I know Goths when I see them, I know if you’ve got our records in your collection, I can tell.”
Its cultural influence is now worldwide, he believes. “Here, there’s stuff about California beach Goths, which is true” he says. “I just came back from Hawaii with my wife and there are Goths on the beach there.” As a part of British culture, he feels it “celebrates the place that we come from – you only have to walk around London or any of the older cities in England, it’s there in the walls and the
structures, it looks Gothic even before you even think about it”.
Today, alongside a flourishing writing career, Lol has returned to music, collaborating with former Banshees drummer Budgie on the 2023 album Los Angeles, which they recently toured in the US. After a tumultuous battle with alcoholism in the late Eighties which led to his sacking from The Cure, and subsequent failed court case against Robert Smith for lost earnings, he has turned his life around and was pleased to reconcile with his friend from childhood.
“I’ve known Robert for sixty years, so it’s a friendship but it’s more family than anything else,” he tells Vive Le Rock. When last year The Cure played Los Angeles, he went along to see them. “We’re standing around just after the show and the tour manager came and got hold of me and my wife, and I’d brought my niece, and we went down into the bowels of the Hollywood Bowl, which is very sacred ground but also it’s like being cut away from everything, and we walked into this room and it was like going back to the pub in 1977,” he says. “Everybody in the band had brought their families with them for this trip as well so I knew everybody in the room, and it was like going back to the pub in the Seventies. It’s like family, it goes up and down, [but] me and Robert get on pretty well at the moment.”
He recalls their brief reunion in 2011 where they performed their first three albums live. “I got back to England to start rehearsals and it was like a bicycle, you get back on and you know exactly what to do, it was instantaneous. I’d set my head up thinking I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that and once I got there it was fine. A lot of people don’t get to that point. For all of us, we’re not getting any
younger. Life changes and life changes you. When we were younger men, you're much more focused on the next mountain, you have to go through life and get beaten down a bit to understand it’s big circles and you have to do this and that to get to the next one otherwise you just fall back down to the previous one. So you’re more understanding of everybody and I think that has happened to us all.”
FRANK DRAKE - FLAG PROMOTIONS
When did you promote your first goth act?
“That's a tricky one, it was probably back in the early days of Flag
Promotions when we started putting gigs on in a function room next to
The Chequered Flag (as it was called then in East Lane, North Wembley).
We named that room The Flag! Hence the name Flag Promotions. I honestly
can’t remember which was the first but in those halcyon days we put on
early shows by Altered States, And Also The Trees, Sad Lovers & Giants,
Mesh (they used to bring a whole coachload of their fans and family up
from Bristol!)... And I am still working with them today! Oh and a
secret gig with Peter Murphy! And even Gary Numan played there for his
30th birthday!”
How big is the goth scene these days? Are there new bands coming through
that you can promote?
“Goth had only a fleeting moment as mainstream, like when Sisters Of
Mercy and The Mission were regularly on the front cover of the NME,
Melody Maker and Sounds, etc. Lately it’s having a renaissance thanks
largely to films like Wednesday and the awesome Tim Burton. Lots of
traditional Goth bands are pulling big numbers, the Sisters, The
Mission, Bauhaus etc. As for new bands, yes there are a few but a lot of
music these days is less genre-specific, like Interpol, Editors etc -
they are not called Goth but they are really! And there’s a whole army
of new bands that are inspired by the likes of Joy Division. I’m
always going to put on the darker aspects of music and interesting bands
like Ludovico Technique and The Birthday Massacre who merge goth with
industrial and metal with great panache! We are also bringing Aurelio
Voltaire back for the Halloween season and he’s getting more and more
popular! There’s some great acts that we continue to work with who are
excellent and back on the scene like The March Violets, Skeletal Family,
Gene Loves Jezebel, NFD and 13th Chime and Ghost Dance have all reformed
and are on fire! As for newer goth-related bands to watch out for: Witch
Of The Vale, Cold In Berlin, Gothzilla, Insect, Mechanical Cabaret,
NAUT, Dimethoxy etc.... I’ll stop now. Apologies to the inevitable
ones I haven’t mentioned!”
Check out our Goth spectacular in the new edition of Vive Le Rock!