'Whatever you think Gothic is, it includes the opposite as well.
‘Patrick McGrath’, ran the review of Martha Peake in The Observer, ‘may be the greatest Gothic novelist ever’. It’s not a form of approbation every writer of fiction would welcome - to be declared the modern master of an hysterical, stereotyped and adolescent genre which lacks even the identifiers that grant coherence, and a modicum of critical interest, to science fiction, or detective stories. Within the rigidities of their forms, these literary types can be recognised, bent, and made use of. Gothic literature was like that once, but much has happened since Charles Maturin dotted the last full stop on the final page of Melmoth the Wanderer: Gothic has become more a mood, a tendency, than a genre. How can you recognise that? How can you delineate and study it?'
'The first stage in medieval torture practice was for the victim to be ‘shown the instruments’ in the hope that the mere sight of the means of pain would encourage confession. The Gothic imagination, however, actively seeks out the instruments and signs of suffering, dissolution, and death, and finds in the contemplation of oblivion an excitement. This feeling arises not from romanticising death - a lazy phrase people often use when discussing Gothic – since Goths are well aware these things are unpleasant, but rather from a perverse exaltation that enjoys the prospect of the self degraded, debased and destroyed.'
'Where this in turn comes from is an even more obscure question, which only Dr Freud assists us in answering. After long pondering the meaning of self-destructive impulses, Freud posited the existence of an internalised mental system of rules and orders, which attempts to compel the individual towards ‘right’ behaviour, and which he called the Superego. The works expressing this idea, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) and Ego and Superego (1923), built it into his earlier theories of the sexual development of children which have now largely been abandoned (except, it seems, by a number of Gothic scholars), but the Superego theory itself need not be dropped as well. If the Doctor’s final analysis is correct, the whole of Gothic’s playful and not-so-playful dalliances with the machinery and images of oblivion amount to a theatrical working-out of internal moral conflict, the urge to transgress contending with the desire to see transgression punished. Like all Freudian theories, these assertions remain unverifiable; yet it is probably as far into the hall of mirrors as we can penetrate. If the Superego is not the Minotaur at the centre of the Gothic labyrinth, I resignedly invite other suggestions.'
'At its core, then, the Gothic aesthetic is a nervous business for all its burlesque qualities. Even the most mock-fastidious of its dress regulations, even the most ostentatious blasphemy or tasteless dismissal of the death of millions, is part and parcel of what the Doctor called ‘the work of mourning’. The Gothic tradition, now as in the past, keeps watch over the indistinct boundaries of the Supernal and the Infernal, observes who passes from the one to the other and the means by which they travel, scrutinises the Devil’s contracts and describes His methods of business.'
... 'We have to forget, and everybody has their own little tricks. Perilously, Gothic remembers more than normal; but it has its inoculations, too. Welcome, then, to the ball on the eve of Waterloo, the last grand masque as Venice slides beneath the waters, the final dance as the trumpets of the Judgement sound.'
'Siouxsie & the Banshees
British band. Formed in 1976 to play at one relentlessly incoherent outing, the Banshees accidentally persisted to become one of the most enduring offspring of the punk revolution; together with Joy Division and Bauhaus, they were the progenitors of Goth pop music, but became more central to the tradition than either, thanks to an unmatched ability to process and reuse fragments from the Gothic past with stylish panache and combine them with their glam-rock enthusiasms for Bowie and the Velvet Underground. The creative core of Siouxsie Sioux (Janet Susan Ballion), Steve Severin (Steven Bailey) and, after a break-up and reorganisation in 1979, drummer Budgie (Peter Clark) remained constant with several changes in the rest of the line-up. They have become a touchstone for modern Gothic: in 1992, for instance, Tim Burton courted them to provide a theme song for Batman Returns.'
'Sioux’s personality was dominant from the start, in both the Banshees’ style and subject-matter. A bookish drop-out energised by reservoirs of childhood rage, her mezzo wail could articulate menace, mischief, regret, or pure anger, and her love of creepy old movies led to echoes of Hitchcock and The Spiral Staircase appearing in the early singles. There were also themes of madness, violence, prostitution, and very ambiguous politics which could combine a tribute to an anti-Nazi campaigner (‘Mittageisen’) with a vicious, subtle, and daring assault on the state of Israel and victim-Judaism generally. A similar breadth was evident in the music, signalled by the first single which matched ‘Hong Kong Garden’’s sparkly cod-Chinese pop driven by punk thump with the B-side ‘Voices’, a painfully abstract howl. It was followed by albums characterised by eerie, echoey misanthropy (The Scream, 1979); deeply unpleasant, aurally muffled supernaturalism (Juju, 1981); ‘sub-hippie drivel’ (A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, 1982); a flawed but bold selection of covers (Through the Looking Glass, 1987); and finally shimmering glam, sometimes triumphant and occasionally crass. In her side-project with husband Budgie, The Creatures, Sioux has been even bolder, incorporating percussive elements, central-American and Hispanic tradition, and dance music. The Banshees’ most popular recording is still the compilation of early singles released in 1982, Once Upon a Time, and justly so: the sequence of tight, superbly controlled compositions inscribes a mighty scratch across the face of popular music, vicious, raging, and silkily seductive. It remains a more powerful single statement than anything else managed by their peers or successors or, arguably, themselves.'
'Eclecticism also characterised Sioux’s dress style. She graduated dizzily from combining Sally Bowles in Cabaret with Droog makeup from A Clockwork Orange to imitating Theda Bara and the early screen vamps, and thus reached back to the origins of Goth fashion. Showing a remarkable aptitude for extracting the Gothic potential from a wide range of cultural and historical signifiers, she appeared as a geisha, a Hawaiian princess, a virgin saint, and Louise Brooks, and together with Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy exerted a decisive influence on Goth style.'
'In the band’s whole career the keynotes, set by Sioux herself, were flamboyance, a truly majestic degree of elitism and pretention, and a wicked sense of humour. These characteristics always set the Banshees well above a Goth movement they inspired yet affected to spurn. They called it a day in 1995, but reunited for a tour in 2002; characteristically Sioux selected Hitchcock’s theme music, ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, to serenade the audience on their way out of the Shepherds Bush Empire.'