In 18th-century monuments and art you often find putti, which are like cherubs, only without a body - happy little chubby baby faces fluttering about on wings. Chobham Church in Surrey, we discovered, has a variant on this theme we hadn't seen elsewhere. And for some reason they are peculiarly shudderworthy.
I am having a terrible time buying things from eBay at the moment, and my debit card wants a rest. It's not all faded engravings and ecclesiastical tat: here are two, or four depending how you interpret things, of the latest purchases, lovely sets of coffin and spiderweb cufflinks in bright silver. The coffins open to reveal a skeleton, and the spiders rattle around the web in search of the fly at the centre!
The shop which supplied these delightful items is Stuart Sinclair Silverware.
I've finally completed my Myspace trawl of self-described Gothic artistes. More here.
I often end up where I shouldn't be. Out wandering the hills near Wotton, Surrey, looking for a well, I spotted a tiny dot on the map with beside it the single word 'Tower'. Not in Gothic script or anything else to indicate a monument. As the sky turned black and the rain pelted I toiled up to the hilltop and found something I never expected.
There's a line of wall behind a fence - a sham ruin of stone and arches. Of course you shouldn't go in, and of course I did. I'd suffered enough not to investigate the vague and massive shape I glimpsed through the pouring trees. And it is, indeed, a tower, like a small and swallowed version of Clavell's Tower at Kimmeridge - only twenty feet or so high, and enough space inside for a winding stair and possibly an internal floor. A plaque in the ceiling reads 'ND 1924', hardly the most popular era for building Gothic follies; but apart from an indistinct image at the tower's top (a knight on horseback, or perhaps not) nothing else gives a clue to its history.
A bizarre show at a bizarre little gallery: a gallery split into two, in fact, which led me originally to go to the wrong bit. The hook which got me here was the chance to see some of Harry Price’s snaps. The great paranormal investigator of the 1920s and 30s turned the light of science onto ghosts and mediums – often in the form of flash photographs. In fact, apart from a couple of the famous images, including the ghost before the altar of St Nicholas’, Arundel, they’re unemotional and often unintentionally comic: a medium slumped against a table, ‘Mrs Wilkins emitting ectoplasm’, that sort of thing. The modern work forms a commentary on all
I often wonder whether Siouxsie can be accommodated within the Goth spectrum now, if indeed she and the Banshees ever could. Mantaray hasn’t helped me decide, but it shouldn’t matter. She’s still being played at Goth events, so that’s probably enough.
Mantaray is Siouxsie’s first solo venture and plenty of commentators have done a lot of work trying to read her recent history into the music, which, as usual, is the least interesting question. The album is in fact a tremendously assured, confident statement of the girl’s indomitability:
I've always adored Polly Jean Harvey from the first hearing of 'Sheela na Gig' on John Peel's show years ago. Each album she produces seems to be completely different from the others, from the jagged violence of Rid of Me through the demented swamp blues of To Bring You My Love to the slick pop-rock of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Yet - like Gothic itself - the Corscombe songstress has maintained a strange unity. In fact, White Chalk, with its tales of brokenness, sorrow and loss, could be classed as her most completely Gothic work to date.
The Chap can be located here.
20th April 2007
In 1775 the Grand Duke of Tuscany ordered the opening of a museum of zoology and natural history in Florence. The first director, Felice Fontana, began a collection of anatomical wax specimens for the instruction of the city's medical students. 232 years later, we arrived for a look around.
Most of the museum - reached up an endless series of stone staircases, they don't go in for disabled-access much - consists of rooms full of dusty and frankly rather motheaten-looking zoological specimens in cases, all very well, but nothing particularly striking. Then, at the end, this - an incredible collection modelling in wax organs, bones, muscle systems, a very strange set of tableaux by one Gaetano Zembu of Sicily - and most dramatically a number of full-size human forms, in various stages
Click here for more about the Museo La Specola.
It's immensely exciting to stumble across musicians you've never encountered before that ring all the right bells, a pleasure increased if not very many other people have done the same. I remember hearing PJ Harvey playing her first session for John Peel in 1991; finding Diamanda Galas'sYou Must Be Certain of the Devil in a record shop in Oxford; pausing the credits on Plunkett & Maclean together with my sister to find out who was producing that carnivalesque shrieking on the soundtrack (it was the Tiger Lillies); and our friend Maurice playing us the Dresden Dolls. This year, it's happened again.
www.allmusic.com cited the Stolen Babies as a 'similar' band to the Dresden Dolls, so I looked them up. They aren't in any way like them, other than being similarly unclassifiable, but you come to expect that. Anyway, I was sufficiently taken by the little snippets of music I found on the magic Web that I ordered their album, There Be Squabbles Ahead, and, it having arrived, spent forty-five minutes laughing almost solidly. So much 'Goth' music (if there can be said to be such a thing) is produced by po-faced would-be lost souls with a sense of self-importance in inverse proportion to their imagination or ability. Not this. This is fun. I can't recall a band whose output contains as much traditional shouty thrash-Goth which has quite such a sense of humour, from the jaunty Burtonesque visuals to the musical style, for which 'eclectic' is not a sufficient word. Just when you think you have a track pinned down in terms of genre and mood, the Babies get bored and in comes the accordion. Or the tuba, or trumpet, euphonium, sitar, stroviol (I never expected to see that instrument in any band's sleeve notes), or, as they admit, 'electric guitar wankage'. It's just so funny. 'Lifeless' is the only song which strikes a classically miserabilist Goth tone, and it works very well in that vein; alongside it you get such wonders as 'Swint? Or Slude?', which could have emerged from a wandering troupe of ghostly klezmer performers looking for a lost fairground. No, this is not the Dresden Dolls, whose sense of fun is anchored in real sentiment and rage. It isn't the Tiger Lillies, who while you're wondering what depths of depravity they can plumb next, can twist your anxieties with a sad ballade. The Stolen Babies appear to be driven by nothing deeper than the desire to amuse: thankfully they seem to have the talent to bring it off. Absolutely splendid: completely superficial, but what a dazzling surface. Two questions: when will they come to Britain, and what's next?
At last, we actually managed to get out to hear a recognisably Gothic band ... albeit thanks to a chum buying us tickets as a joint birthday present. The Roundhouse, a converted rail turntable, is a wonderful venue with an ad-hoc atmosphere that makes it feel as though you're doing something undefinably dangerous and edgy rather than just watching a band. Actually, we could quite happily have done without some of the edgier bits of this show, namely the Australian avant-garde dance troupe, and the compere Margaret Cho thanks to whom we won't be able to look at Chinese women in quite the same way again for some time to come. But one of the warm-ups, Jason Webley, provided a set of jauntily gloomstruck tunes on the accordion which we much enjoyed.
One of the Tate's blockbuster exhibitions this year focused on Gothic. Marvellous! We attended on a Saturday when it wasn't overrun with visitors and thought it was quite splendid. The subtitle was 'Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination', though Blake was largely an afterthought, represented by bookplates and so on which shrank in the face of Fuseli's blazing theatrics: instead 'Fuseli and Friends' would have been a more representative title. What the show did was demonstrate how Fuseli - and Blake, despite his eccentricities - was part of an artistic continuum, not an isolated genius whatever he might have liked people to imagine. It also showed the connections between art, pop literature and entertainment (we much enjoyed the 'Gothic Gloomth' room with its fake books in the dim centre of the room, the raucous satire of Gillray, and loved the unexpectedly spooky Phantasmagoria). What you had to do was keep your head, and remember that all this stuff was largely crap. Glorious, flashy and tremendous crap, but crap all the same. Forget that, and the swooning maidens, muscular Classical heroes, feys and witches become overwhelmingly wearisome.
The exhibition is now closed, but you can still find out more by clicking the image ...
Would Tim Burton's creepily touching Gothic fairy-tale film from 1990 starring Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder translate to a ballet at the hands of acclaimed director Matthew Bourne? We thought it did. The choreography was splendid, so precisely defining the various characters - even if a few of the youngsters were fairly interchangeable - and the music, a lot of which was based on Danny Elfman's original score for the movie, swept up and down with a great sense of fun. The sets were hugely inventive, and we were very impressed with some of the remarkably filmic effects, such as the cheerleader portraits 'coming to life' in Edward's dream sequence. Amazing what you can do with sheets of painted gauze! A massively enjoyable evening.
Check here for the ballet's tour dates and more information.
