Lately my aesthetic has been veering into the gothic look. My personal spin on it is mixing goth and mod – moth? And mixing goth and dandy – a quite common one! In turn I’ve been listening to more gothic/alt music like Kino, The Cure, Molchat Doma, The Smiths, She Past Away, Joy Division/New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, things like that. I wouldn’t say I’m part of the subculture though. I like to take inspiration from all the cool things I see in this world and who cares if I like something that doesn’t fit into this one small box? Life is too short to limit yourself. You can like more than one ice cream flavour, so why limit yourself to one genre of music? A lot of innovation in music and style comes from fusion and mixing different sounds or different aesthetics. As much as I love old things, I don’t believe in being a purist and doing things only one way. You learn the rules so you can know how to break them.
Which leads me to the common refrain in the goth subculture, “goth is a music subculture”. Yes, much like the mod subculture is centred around music, goth is very much centred around music, but you can’t act like style or aesthetic plays zero role in it. Think of a mod, you’re probably imagining a 60s style haircut, a Fred Perry polo, a turtleneck, slim trousers, nice striped suit, a green military parka, a-line dresses, mini skirts, Mary Quant, dogtooth patterns, op art patterns, Mary Jane shoes, and Doc Martens. Can’t forget the scooter: Vespa or Lambretta? With the mod subculture, I think there’s something for everyone in the fashion and music and that’s what I love about it. Mod outfits are timeless and classy and the music is varied, everything from jazz to R&B to soul to ska to rock and roll. Goth on the other hand, you either love it or you hate it. The music isn’t as varied as mod and sure there are some crossover hits that made it to the mainstream like “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Joy Division), “Happy House” (Siouxsie and the Banshees), “The Killing Moon” (Echo & the Bunnymen), “Lucretia My Reflection” (The Sisters of Mercy), “Love Like Blood” (Killing Joke), “Under the Milky Way” (The Church), “Just Like Heaven” (The Cure), and “Enjoy the Silence” (Depeche Mode), the reality is a lot of people don’t know as much about gothic music. You don’t have to be a goth to know these songs. Some people will say what makes gothic rock goth is the sound: the guitar effects, the drum beats and drum machines, prominent bassline, minimalism, and the vocals. However, I’d say that the aesthetic and the lyrics play an important part too.
Subcultures are kept alive by having new members come in. If it’s a closed off gatekeeping club, sooner or later, the subculture is going to die and that sucks. I want classic rock to live on long past its heyday. I said this a long time ago when I started my blog and I want to say it again: I find the reason people don’t get into something like a piece of media or a fandom or a subculture is because of intimidating elitist gatekeepers who take themselves and their hobbies way too seriously and they scare newbies away. While at heart, I’m a melancholy person with a mind so dark it’s practically vantablack, I try to keep my website as positive and welcoming a space as possible. I want to share the love of old rock music from the 50s to the 80s. You never know, that curious person who likes something casually might become a die hard fan. We were all new to classic rock once and we’re not born with all the knowledge programmed in our brains. I want to be your ambassador to classic rock. If someone doesn’t know much about classic rock, I see it as an opportunity to make a new fan. I’m the opposite of a gatekeeper, it’s my mission to get you to love classic rock and appreciate it in a new way. I always see it as an honour to be someone’s introducer to classic rock, like when someone says “I found out about this band or song because of you” that is the highest compliment. Welcome to the classic rock fandom! Be friendly and discuss rock and roll.
Goth did not materialise out of nowhere in the late 70s and early 80s, it had influences. As John Robb, author of The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth said, “The embrace of the dark and the gothic had been with us for millennia. For an eternity, humans have loved the dark, shivery tales, melancholic music, and a walk on the dark side. Over the centuries, gothic had meant so many different things to so many different people.” I highly recommend reading this book if you want a deep dive into the history of goth. A lot of the things I talk about on this blog post are in the book and there’s even more in the book! Not sponsored, just a book I genuinely like!
Something had to be the building blocks. I think of rock and roll as like Legos, it all builds on each other and influences each other. You wouldn’t have the music of the 60s without the music of the 50s and you wouldn’t have the music of the 50s without the music that came before it. Just looking at the goth subculture, just the aesthetic, you can see inspirations dating back to at least a century before the whole subculture started and some influences a bit more recent than that. Medieval architecture, Victorian mourning dress, books like Frankenstein and Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, horror films, punk rock, electronic music, even disco, vampires, witches, TV shows like The Addams Family. People have had a fascination with the dark and macabre for a long time. In this blog post I want to look at “goth before goth” and see who was doing this look or sound before the subculture was born. With this being a classic rock blog, I’ll only be focusing on the 50s, 60s, and 70s and only looking at musicians that one wouldn’t immediately think of as goth. While the songs may not have that signature gothic sound, there’s some dark, macabre, and occult themes in these examples. When putting this list together I thought: what would a 1960s goth like? Hope you enjoy this blog post, and for the goths reading this, don’t take it too seriously.
1. “I Put A Spell On You” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1956)
If anyone could be credited as the inventor of goth as we know it, it would be no one other than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, also the inventor of shock rock. October isn’t just Halloween month, but also Black History Month in the UK. Like many other things in music, black people were also pioneers in goth. This song was incredibly influential and like nothing else out there. Who else in the 50s was popping out of coffins dressed up as a vampire and walking around with skulls? Long before Arthur Brown and Alice Cooper! British rock pioneer Screaming Lord Sutch named himself after Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. This song has been covered by a wide range of musicians like Nina Simone, CCR, Alan Price, Annie Lennox, Arthur Brown, Bryan Ferry, and Jeff Beck and Joss Stone.
2. Elvis Presley with Vampira (1956)
Before Carolyn Jones played Morticia Addams in The Addams Family, Maila Nurmi played Vampira on a local TV show in Los Angeles, introducing horror films on TV. Unfortunately, very little footage of Maila as Vampira survived. You might even remember her name if you’ve seen the Tim Burton film Ed Wood, a biopic of the film director of the same name, since she was in Ed Wood’s so-bad-it’s-good movie Plan 9 From Outer Space. She called the dialogue so crappy that she refused to speak and omitted all of her lines so she was silent the entire movie, but you could easily spot her with that distinctive look.
Maila Nurmi met a lot of famous people back in the 50s and yes, one of them is none other than the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. There’s a doctored photo of the two of them (the real one is of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner) that people use as evidence that they had met, but there’s actually a real one, which you can see below. The two met in Las Vegas.
3. “Jack The Ripper” – Screaming Lord Sutch (1963)
The United States had Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Meanwhile in the UK, there was Screaming Lord Sutch, a garage rock pioneer who would later start his own political party, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, running for parliament 39 times and never winning. Kind of like Britain’s Vermin Supreme? Anyway, long before that, he was an early shock rock star, doing a lot of the same things as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, like emerging from a coffin during performances, but he did some of his own things like growing his hair to shoulder length, in a time when a mop-top was seen as long. He worked with producer (later, murderer) Joe Meek on some horror themed songs that were way cooler than “The Monster Mash”. “Jack The Ripper” opens with a woman screaming before going into some camp sounding music with Lord Sutch talk singing. Not only was he an early shock rock star, he also dabbled in psychedelic rock early on when the subgenre was being invented. He had other horror themed songs like “Dracula’s Daughter” and “Murder in the Graveyard”.
4. “Leader of the Pack” – The Shangri-Las (1964)
While I wouldn’t say there’s much in common sound wise between teen tragedy songs of the early 60s and 80s gothic rock, there’s still that macabre theme and it’s perfect for Halloween or when you have an itch and sad music is gonna scratch that itch. I know when I’m feeling blue, I want to listen to music that reflects that. There’s a lot of great splatter platters out there, but I think the best one has to be “Leader of the Pack”, a song by the bad girls of rock and roll The Shangri-Las. I love the melodramatic delivery and the storytelling in this song, perfect examples of these cool elements in pop music. There’s something Shakespearean about it and I know that gothic music has a literary influence in there.
Honourable mention: I get this gothic feel from the backing vocals of John Leyton’s 1960 teen tragedy “Johnny Remember Me”, a Joe Meek production.
5. The Witch – The Sonics (1965)
Listening to the lyrics, The Sonics seem to be describing someone who dresses witchy, or gothic! Gothic rock features distortion and you can hear a bit of a distorted sound in this song and in the rest of their discography.
6. The Standells appear in Far Out Munsters (1965)
The Addams Family wasn’t the only gothic sitcom of the time, there was also The Munsters: Herman, Lily, Eddie, and Marilyn Munster. By this point, rock and roll was the dominant genre and TV shows wanted a piece of that pie and so they had musicians on as guest stars. The Munsters needed a rock band and so The Standells (of “Dirty Water” fame) made a guest appearance in an episode where the Munsters get away and rent out their house to a rock band.
7. “Boris The Spider” – The Who (1966)
I’m gonna say it, my favourite goth of all time is John Entwistle. I know, your eyes may roll, but The Ox was goth before goth from his dress sense to his music. He dyed his hair jet black so Roger Daltrey could stand out by being the only blond in the band. He wore a skeleton suit on stage. He had spider jewellery. He had a skeleton guitar strap. He had a spider bass. His stage presence is gothic. If I had to imagine a 60s goth, it’d be John Entwistle, no doubt about it. Look at the album covers for Smash Your Head Against The Wall and Whistle Rhymes. He had an album called Rigor Mortis Sets In.
His earliest goth moment has to be “Boris the Spider”. A great Halloween song with a growling bass and a death metal growl to match.
8. “I Hate You” – The Monks (1966)
If anyone committed to the bit, it would have to be The Monks, who shaved the tops of their heads like monks. They were a group formed in West Germany by American G.I.s stationed there. Listen and you might hear the ancestors of punk and gothic rock in the sound: distortion and feedback, stuff that was popular in the 60s garage rock era. Very ahead of its time!
9. “Ode to Billie Joe” – Bobbie Gentry (1967)
Teen tragedy songs were out by this time, but Bobbie Gentry got a hit with this one because of its unique spin, Southern Gothic. The song tells the story of a boy named Billie Joe McAllister who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge from the point of view of a girl who works on a farm with her family somewhere on the Mississippi Delta. The girl is saddened by Billie Joe’s death, but the girl’s parents don’t care and even go as far as to talk crap about Billie Joe so nonchalantly. An old school, dismissive of mental health issues mentality. An example of the generational divide that you see in every era, a story as old as time. A year later, the girl’s father dies and the mother is grieving. Now does she understand how tragic this was for the narrator? But also what was actually thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge?
10. “The End” – The Doors (1967)
Jim Morrison is one of the names you’ll see the most when you look up influences of gothic rock and it’s not hard to see why. He was poetic, bookish, and sometimes his songs got a bit dark. Beatniks were an influence on Jim Morrison, and you might argue that the beatniks were a precursor to the goth. He loved leather and romantic literature and his singing voice was deep and beautiful. The appropriately titled final track of their acclaimed self-titled debut, “The End” is often cited as an early example of gothic rock and you can easily hear why in both the sound and the lyrics. Don’t believe me? Well, The Doors were the first band to be described as gothic rock, way back in 1967.
11. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” – The Velvet Underground (1967) – but also their entire discography, for real!
If I had to associate any band with misfits, I’d say it would have to be the Velvet Underground. A band that the world was not ready for yet. Sure it was the Swinging Sixties, but you have to remember that the people running the show were old conservative squares (sound familiar? same as it ever was, as David Byrne once sang) and the radio was certainly not going to play anything obscene. The Velvet Underground weren’t afraid to sing about LGBT topics, drugs, and kinky sex and none of those topics were radio friendly, but Lou Reed would get a big hit with the very queer “Walk on the Wild Side” in 1972. Keep in mind, Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial was in 1964 and he was sentenced to four months hard labour for telling offensive jokes, talk about cancel culture! Sound-wise The Velvet Underground were avant-garde and raw and real and what made them unmarketable in the 60s made them adored by their fans.
Their first album featured vocals from German model/singer Nico, someone considered a major goth influence, and one song where you can really feel the proto-goth sound is “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Nothing like a gloomy Velvet Underground song when it’s raining and you’re feeling depressed.
12. “Fire” – Arthur Brown (1968)
While not goth per se, this song is certainly theatric, dark, and a little fun. Shock rock is back! I think this video really says it all. In all seriousness, I could see this being covered and adapted into an 80s gothic rock song.
13. “Wicked Annabella” – The Kinks (1968)
The Kinks are one of those bands who have seemed to do it all and early on: garage rock, raga rock, psychedelic rock, and gothic rock? Hear me out, “Wicked Annabella” is a proto-goth song from the witchy lyrics to the distorted sound to Dave’s eerie vocals to Pete’s Bach inspired bass. It’s a great autumn song from a proto-cottagecore album, The Village Green Preservation Society. The inspiration behind the song? A woman that Ray called “sexually out of my league”.
Honourable mention: Not really gothic, but the “Dead End Street” music video shows The Kinks carrying around a coffin and then at the end someone pops out and scares them. It was so dark that the BBC banned it.
14. The Marble Index – Nico (1968)
The album cover already is shouting goth and it’s a departure from the more folk/baroque pop Chelsea Girl. Jim Morrison, whom Nico described as her soul brother, encouraged Nico to write her own songs and that’s exactly what she did on The Marble Index. Nico had no interest in being in a band and singing poppy songs. Much like how The Doors was a band with a literary reference in their name (from The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley), Nico took inspiration from literature for her album title, coming from The Prelude by William Wordsworth. Nico composed the album on harmonium and wanted to play it on all the tracks and that might have been the source of a lot of arguments with producer John Cale, who said it was out of tune with itself. Musically, the album departs from the in vogue raga rock and instead opts for a more European classical music inspired sound. This album could also be an early example of dark ambient. Overall, it sounds like you’re in this strange world and you’re having a bad trip. It’s like the really avant-garde bits of Sgt Pepper turned up to 11.
15. “The Raven” – Glass Prism (1969)
There are quite a few rock songs about Edgar Allan Poe. Before The Alan Parsons Project released their Poe themed album, a Pennsylvania rock band called the Glass Prism released an album called Poe Through The Glass Prism in 1969. The group were dressed up in dandy costumes with one of the band members holding a raven. Looking at the album artwork, it’s patently obvious that it was released in the 60s. My favourite song is their single “The Raven”. I’m not sure where I found it, but I liked it because of its Procol Harum like sound and because it’s one of my favourite poems I remember from English class. Here’s an interesting article about them published in 2021. The band had broken up in 1971 and they reunited decades later, playing in 2007, 2008, 2012, and 2021.
16. Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls – Coven (1969)
Here’s something interesting about this band. They had a song called “Black Sabbath” (in both cases it was the first track of the album), they had a member of the band called Oz Osbourne, and they used the sign of the horns before Black Sabbath. Say what? That’s gotta be one of the most insane coincidences in classic rock. The band wanted to write songs with horror, macabre, and diabolical themes. A good decade plus before the Satanic panic took place, Coven released an album called Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls. It was the first recording of the Black Mass. Daring now, and even more so in 1969! Right around this time there was a bit of a scare around the occult because of the Tate-LaBianca murders so the album was pulled from shelves. However, Coven did get one hit with “One Tin Soldier”, totally different from this album here (you can find the One Hit Wonderland episode on it here). I love Jinx Dawson’s voice. My favourite song on the album is “The White Witch of Rose Hall”, based on the story of Annie Palmer. While it’s got more in common with heavy metal than gothic rock, a lot of goths like heavy metal.
17. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
Sure metal isn’t exactly goth, but there’s no doubt that if you look at pictures of Black Sabbath, you’ll be like if goth existed in the early 70s that’s how it would have looked. Imagine a blend of hippie and goth: that’s Black Sabbath’s aesthetic back then. The opening/title track starts with rain and a church bell ringing and is considered the first doom metal song. Overall the album is really dark and goes into magick and occult themes with blues rock and distortion. This is the blueprint for heavy metal.
18. Jimmy Page buys Aleister Crowley’s house (1970)
Jimmy Page is a rock star often associated with the occult. He famously collected Aleister Crowley memorabilia and when he got the opportunity to buy Crowley’s house, he jumped on it! By this point Boleskine House was falling apart and there had to be a lot of work done to make it liveable, but Jimmy Page got the house restored and kept it as faithful to when Crowley lived there in the early 20th century. Funnily enough, Jimmy Page didn’t spend much time there as he would have liked to. His intention was to buy it to write songs in it and get some inspiration from the surroundings.
In my book Crime of the Century, I talk about Jimmy Page meeting director Kenneth Anger at an auction where they were bidding on Crowley memorabilia. Kenneth Anger briefly stayed at Boleskine. In short, they did not get along very well and Kenneth Anger called Jimmy “dried up as a musician”. Anger wanted Page to do the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising, but due to them falling out, he left the project. Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil got in touch with Kenneth Anger and composed the music from prison, true story! Honourable mention: the music for Lucifer Rising sounds kinda gothic to me – incredible because what would Bobby Beausoleil know about goth at that time with him being in prison for all those years and gothic rock hadn’t become a thing yet.
To purchase Crime of the Century, click here. To learn more about Crime of the Century, click here for blog posts I’ve written about my book and some behind the scenes stuff related to my book.
19. Church of Anthrax – John Cale and Terry Riley (1971)
You know John Cale because of the Velvet Underground, well he collaborated with Terry Riley on the art rock/minimalist album Church of Anthrax. Before that, Terry Riley released the influential pioneering ambient album A Rainbow in Curved Air that inspired the band name Curved Air, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”, and was an inspiration to Pete Townshend and so he wrote “Baba O’Riley” as a tribute to him and Meher Baba. The gothic elements can be heard in the prominent bass, droning sound, but it still has that jazzy funky 70s sound. Some aspects of the sound remind me of Nico’s The Marble Index. Here’s a good writeup of the album from Rockasteria.
20. Distance Between Us – Don Bradshaw-Leather (1972)
Imagine gothic prog rock, well here’s what it would sound like: eerie, improvised, lots of piano and ritual drumming, I could hear this in a haunted Victorian mansion. The album cover is shouting goth before goth. I’m getting similar vibes to Bobby Beausoleil’s music. Don Bradshaw-Leather dropped this epic album and then dropped off the face of the earth. He’s mysterious and not much is known about him. If you want a psychedelic goth, this is perfect for zoning out and looking at a liquid/oil light show.
Honourable mention: The drumming on this album made me think of this 1971 song “Burundi Black”, a recording of drummers from Burundi that was taken from a late 60s French album called Musique du Burundi. That same year, South African expat John Kongos released two fuzzy glam rock singles: “He’s Gonna Step On You Again” and “Tokoloshe Man”, the latter song is about a Zulu water spirit that terrorises people.
21. “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” – Roxy Music (1973)
Now that we’re well into the 70s, we’re starting to get more of a gothic sound as we know it. It’s sinister sounding, it’s creepy sounding. Just like “Virginia Plain” blew me away on the first listen, this song has a similar impact with its ahead of its time sound. I love how the sound changes from this gloomy synth sound to a guitar solo at 3:07 and then at 4:22 those guitar effects! I love when a song has different parts. At this point, Brian Eno was still in the band, but he would soon after leave and embark on a solo career of art rock and then the ambient music he’s known for, and he collaborated with Robert Fripp of King Crimson too.
Honourable mention for “Love is the Drug”, great song!
22. Station to Station – David Bowie (1976)
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Thin White Duke eras were definitely an influence on many a gothic rocker. It’s theatric, it’s genderbending, and it got dark sometimes. One thing that I love about David Bowie is how varied his discography is and how there’s something for everyone and he influenced so many musicians from a wide variety of genres, yes including goth! He really did reinvention and eras before Madonna and Lady Gaga (both of whom are huge David Bowie fans) and Taylor Swift. The oddballs and misfits of the world saw Bowie and said “he understands me”! While the funky “Golden Years” is on this album, there are a lot of krautrock influences (even before his move to Berlin) and avant-garde influences. You can hear a bit of a gothic sound on the title track (which gets funky at 5:20) and “Wild is the Wind”. During this era, David Bowie took a lot of inspiration from Aleister Crowley and the Kabbalah. David Bowie once said in an interview with Q Magazine in 1997 that Station to Station was “the nearest album to a magick treatise that I’ve written”.
23. “Don’t Fear The Reaper” – Blue Ćyster Cult (1976)
How clichĆ©d, a song about death being on a gothic themed list! But what’s more goth than singing about death and embracing that one day it will happen? Death is sad no doubt, but I think to truly appreciate life, you must really understand death and see it head on and confront it. It’s normal to feel sad and fearful about death, but death is an ending, it’s not bad or good. Everything comes to an end. Besides the lyrics, that stun guitar by Eric Bloom is giving goth. Goth, but make it cowbell!
24. The Idiot – Iggy Pop (1977)
Another friend of David Bowie, Iggy Pop is also credited as a goth influence. The Idiot, named after Dostoyevsky’s novel about a prince with epilepsy who goes crazy, was the last album Ian Curtis listened to before taking his life just before Joy Division were to go on their first American tour. Ian Curtis had epilepsy and started experiencing seizures in 1978 and they worsened over time. Medications prescribed to help with his epilepsy had nasty side effects like mood swings. His condition got so bad he couldn’t even hold his daughter because his wife worried that he’d drop her. Photosensitive epilepsy and rock and roll aren’t a good mix and Ian Curtis would have seizures on stage. On top of that, he had a fear of flying. The Idiot is Iggy Pop’s first solo album after the breakup of The Stooges. Sound wise, imagine a more gothic, Krautrock inspired sibling to The Stooges. David Bowie produced this album before going on to work on Low, the first album of the Berlin Trilogy. On this album you can find the first recording of the Iggy Pop/Bowie composition of “China Girl”, which David Bowie would release in 1983 – really cool to hear this Low style version of it! If you’re looking for goth sounds, I recommend the tracks “Nightclubbing” and “Funtime”, but the whole album is really good!
25. Nite Flights – The Walker Brothers (1978)
Scott Walker, yes the same Scott Walker who did a version of Jacques Brel’s “Jackie”, released a goth album right at the start of gothic rock. The first four tracks: “Shutout”, “Fat Mama Kick”, “Nite Flights”, and “The Electrician” are his contributions to the album. David Bowie covered the title track for his 1993 album Black Tie White Noise. A bit funky, a bit dark, a bit experimental, a bit new wave, it’s the direction music was moving in. At the time, Scott Walker was really into David Bowie’s Heroes album and used this as the blueprint for Nite Flights. Like a ping pong game, David Bowie listened to Nite Flights while recording Lodger, the last album of his Berlin Trilogy. “The Electrician” inspired David Bowie’s “The Motel” and Ultravox’s “Vienna”. Gary Walker’s contribution to the album “Death of Romance” is another good one to listen to. As for the John Walker compositions, I liked “Disciples of Death” and “Child of Flames”.
Like with a lot of my lists, this isn’t an exhaustive list of goth before goth. If you have any favourite proto-goth moments that I’ve missed that you want to mention, feel free to share in the comments section. Happy Halloween Month!
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