“Dressed In Black” was curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of the book Season Of The Witch: The Book of Goth – a woman who considers herself fortunate to have had Siouxsie Sioux, Lydia Lunch and Diamanda Galàs for role models while she was growing up. For further illumination in Cathi’s own words, read on.
“The music gathered here is an aural manifestation of turbulent times, made by women possessed of supernatural abilities. The music I fell in love with emerged from the dark end of the 1970s: The Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, when intractable industrial action left the dead unburied and mountains of rubbish in the streets. All the promise of punk came to a brutal end with the deaths of Sid and Nancy in New York; IRA bombs exploded in central London and a seemingly uncatchable ripper roamed West Yorkshire with 13 murders under his belt. Ill omens that augured badly for the events of 3 May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became our first woman prime minister. Dressed in blue and ready to whip the country to her heel.
“But at night, malcontent youth were united by forces of opposition, whose dissenting voices were aired across the land on John Peel’s Radio 1 show, set to the sound of slasher guitars, swirling fairground keyboards, loping basslines and percussion that recalled the echo of jackhammers or the march of insect feet. Here, punk’s unruly offspring distilled the dissonance of the times into a new kind of music. Flirting with the fetishist and taboo, drawing upon horror and science fiction imagery, they were the outlaw leaders of the greatest style tribe of the decade: the goths. Dressed in black, these kohl-eyed women voiced the alienation of their generation during the decade of the Cold War, the Miners’ Strike, privatisation and AIDS.
“Reflecting on all this while writing Season Of The Witch, I also began to realise how this music linked to previous generations of gothmothers, going back as least as far as the Industrial Revolution, probably much further. The oldest song you will hear here is Shirley Collins’ setting of ‘Death And The Lady’, which was collected just after World War II but has its roots in the global pandemic of 1348-49: the Black Death. Shirley has spent her long life researching and breathing fresh breath into songs that span time and cross oceans to form an alternative history of events recorded not by the victors of wars but the peasants counting the cost.
“Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps performed a similar service, when she and Lux Interior disinterred a crypt-full of long-forgotten hillbillies and bordello blues singers and re-recorded their songs at Sun Studios, where Elvis cut his first disc. Greek-American Diamanda Galàs, that greatest and most fearless defender of AIDS victims, drew upon the demotiki tradition of her forebears in the hills of Sparta. A teenage Lydia Lunch channelled Billie Holiday’s 1941 version of the notorious ‘Gloomy Sunday’ into big band jazz for the no wave New York of 1980. Perhaps the most distinctive female face of the 80s, Siouxsie Sioux was herself inspired by the enigmatic psychedelic seeress Julie Driscoll.
“To make sense of the absurd is genius enough. But to then cast the glamour of sublime music around those insights – I come back to my point about supernatural abilities. I hope you will find illumination within. You know the dress code.”
