Goth is not the easiest genre to define. There’s no arguing that it grew out of post-punk in the UK in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but even from that starting point it remains difficult to pin down. It doesn’t help that most of the people you might think of as goth’s prime movers have rejected the tag. Bauhaus, The Cure and even Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters Of Mercy have categorically stated that they are not and never were goth. Andrew said in a Virgin.Net interview in 1997: “I’m not interested in what g***s think… I’m constantly confronted by representatives of popular culture who are far more g*** than we, yet I have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord.” So if the bands themselves won’t own their own gothness, it’s down to the perceptio...
