Even now, forty-plus years after its inception, the musical genre known as “goth rock” still bewitches me. Great bands like Bauhaus and Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxie and the Banshees all seemed to break out when I was in high school. In other words, when I needed them most. I was a shy, introverted kid in a brash, extroverted decade, and the dark, conflicted lyrics and controlled sound of goth rock spoke to my soul. If heavy metal is for people with too little serotonin, then goth rock is for people with too much.
One thing that still amazes me about goth rock was how diverse it was, less like a sub-genre of rock than its own, self-contained, parallel rock universe. Inside that universe one could find an analog to almost every kind of standard music. There were goth-rock-pop songs and goth-rock-dance songs and even something like goth-rock-disco songs. And, with the emergence of England’s great band The Cult, there were even goth-hard-rock songs.
When listening to one’s first The Cult song, one might easily mistake it for just another hard-rock song as the first guitar-driven bars come out of the speaker. But then Ian Astbury’s magnificently clean and expressive baritone sails out, and one realizes, with a shock, that this is something totally different. And special.
Looking back on this video for my favorite song by The Cult, “She Sells Sanctuary,” I now see that Ian Astbury dressed like Captain Jack Sparrow, danced like Jagger, and sang like Freddy Mercury. God bless him. He helped get me through some very hard years.
Ash Clifton, Writer 