Post by Deviancy on Dec 5, 2021 15:41:32 GMT
In the Beginning there was Punk.
Influences on goth stretch far further back, to Bowie, the Doors and the Velvet Underground, but the punk explosion of the mid/late 70s created the essential background for goth, in both music and fashion.
In the aftermath of punk in the late 70s and early 80s a bewildering variety of new and re-invented musical styles began to crop up, and around 1978-9 a style began to appear which the press had by late 1979 started to call "gothic".
The creators of this musical style (who were themselves influenced by the likes of the Velvet Underground and Bowie) were essentially Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus and UK Decay.
The first Banshees album ("The Scream", November 1978) and the first Joy Division album ("Unknown Pleasures", June 1979) laid much of the template for goth, with a notable absence of loud punk guitars and the emphasis on the rhythm section instead, along with a stark, hollow sound.
However, the first band who cannot be comfortably classified as anything other than goth were Bauhaus, who released their first single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", in August 1979. The Banshees could be considered punk, The Cure could be considered New Wave, Joy Division could be considered post-punk, but Bauhaus were unmistakably goth in music, looks, lyrics, art and style right from their first single. In many ways they were the archetypal goth band.
Around the same time as Bauhaus were emerging, UK Decay were discarding their punk roots and developing their own independent "gothic" sound. Although never as popular as Bauhaus, Joy Division or the Banshees, UK Decay were far closer to the second wave of goth bands and were an important influence on them.
By 1980/81 a new wave of goth bands were beginning to emerge- Danse Society, Play Dead, The Sisters of Mercy- and the Cure had abandoned their New Wave sound and created a unique "gothic" sound of their own. In February 1981 Abbo from UK Decay tagged the new musical movement "gothic", but it was to be another year or so before the movement really got going.
The crucial period for the development of goth into a fully-fledged subculture is mid 1982 to mid 1983, with particular emphasis on October 1982 as the month the new movemenet suddenly started receiving major media attention.
In July 1982 the Batcave opened up.
This was at first envisaged as a club for people who were fed up with the commercial direction of New Romantic and wanted something new and darker. At first it played glam and electro music, but several early goth bands also played there and the playlist gradually became more goth.
The Batcave thus became a major rallying-point for the emerging London scene and also attracted a lot of media attention, which in turn spread the idea of a new subculture around the country. In the wake of the Batcave, similar clubs opened around the country, and the Batcave itself went "on tour", giving goths outside London somewhere to gather.
Thus, whilst offering little in the way of music (apart from ASF and Specimen), the Batcave had a major impact on goth fashion and popularity. Essentially, it added a huge dose of "glam" and media attention to the emerging subculture.
Then in October 1982 Bauhaus released "Ziggy Stardust", which became a big hit (#15 in the UK charts) and put them on Top Of The Pops and the front cover of Smash Hits (October 1982).
The new wave of goth bands also began receiving serious media attention, with Southern Death Cult getting a front cover on the NME (October 1982) and Sex Gang Children getting a front cover on Noise! (also October 1982).
Following this, two articles in early 1983 focussed on what was by then unmistakably a separate movement.
In February 1983, Richard North of the NME hailed it as Positive Punk
A month later, Mick Mercer wrote a similar article about the new bands in Melody Maker (though his choice of bands, like Danse Society, was a lot more pertinent).
Meanwhile, the movement was getting a name- the term "gothic" had been floating around for a while, and the name was fixed to the emerging scene by two of the most important bands in it: Andi, the lead singer with Sex Gang Children, was tagged "Count Visigoth" and his followers tagged "goths" by Ian Astbury from Southern Death Cult. Dave Dorrell from the NME then overheard them using the term and it passed into journalistic use.
In October 1983 Tom Vague ws referring to "Hordes of Goths" in Zig Zag magazine, by which time both the term and the subculture were firmly established.
The Bands
Joy Division are not usually thought of as being goth, despite being referred to as "gothic" at the time, but their influence on goth bands was considerable. Their sparse, haunting sound was quite unlike anything else around at the time and spawned a host of imitators, especially after Ian Curtis' death (Bauhaus' first album and the Sisters' first single were both slammed as being the work of poor Joy Division copyists, which was rather unfair on Bauhaus). Their use of minimalist and gothic art on record covers also had a lasting influence (for instance, the cover to the March Violets "Grooving in Green", designed by Andrew Eldritch, has definite similarities to the cover of "Closer").
Additionally, they were a major source of the term "gothic" as applied to post-punk music.
However, Joy Division were never really a goth band and were certainly never part of the goth scene; by the time the goth scene proper started to emerge Ian Curtis was dead and the rest of the band had become New Order.
They were never really regarded as "goth" musically by goths, either, despite the obvious debts owed to them by a lot of goth bands. A lot of first-era goths viewed them as too "mainstream" owing to their posthumous popularity; also, their image was rather too bleak (from a Batcave point of view, they were decidedly unsexy). And they had their own following, the "long raincoat brigade".
Siouxsie and the Banshees were not involved in the goth scene as such, but had a massive influence on it in terms of both music and image. Their music had been called "gothic" as far back as 1979, and their music formed the template for a lot of female-fronted goth bands in much the same way that Siouxsie's looks provided the style for many female goths. Between them, Siouxsie and Bauhaus pretty much designed the early goth look.
And, once again, the Banshees may have been important in establishing the use of the word "gothic".
Their authorized biography contains some comments from them about the goth scene, here.
Bauhaus are the first band who cannot be comfortably classified as anything other than goth. UK Decay and The Banshees could be considered punk, The Cure could be considered New Wave, Joy Division could be considered post-punk, but Bauhaus were unmistakably goth in music, looks, lyrics, art and style right from their first single. In many ways they were the archetypal goth band. They were also involved in the early goth "scene", and had a major influence on goth fashion.
UK Decay are almost forgotten now, but they were important movers in the early goth scene. Abbo, from UK Decay, was responsible for using the word "gothic" to tag the emerging movement.
Sex Gang Children, along with Southern Death Cult, were one of the leaders of the new wave of goth bands who appeared in the early 80s. They are also most likely the inspiration of the term "goths" as applied to members of the emergent subculture.
Southern Death Cult were the other leaders of the "Positive Punk" scene which sprang up in 1982 and effectively became the goth scene. It's quite likely Ian Astbury was the first person to use the term "goths", originally about the fans of Sex Gang Children.
The Cure, like the Banshees, were not part of the scene, and were less influential. However, their music and image fitted, and they were adopted into the goth canon. After "Pornography", one of their bleakest albums, they suddenly went in a pop direction, moving away from a goth sound but inadvertently helping to bring the idea of "goth" closer to the mainstream.
The Sisters of Mercy, despite their later dominance of the goth scene, were not that important in the early scene. Their main claim to fame in the early years is being the first of the second wave of goth bands to release a single, though their first gig wasn't until several months later. It's odd that the Sisters came to dominate goth, since they were so different from the rest of the early goth bands: they had deep vocals and a drum machine whereas most of the early goth bands were characterised by tribal drumming, and none of them had vocals much like Eldritch's. In 1982, the important bands were Bauhaus, UK Decay, the Banshees, the Cure, Southern Death Cult and maybe Sex Gang Children: the Sisters had yet to emerge from the shadow of Joy Division (reviews regularly commented on their similarity).
The Birthday Party came to England in early 1980, at much the same time that Bauhaus & co were gaining popularity and some of the second wave of goth groups were forming. Whether they were actually a "goth" group as such is highly debatable (and I would be inclined to say they were very much their own thing), but they arrived at the time the scene was forming and played with a fair few of its protagonists, including Bauhaus. The "goth" tag may have been a result of this and the "Release the Bats" single (July 81), which the band regarded as something of a joke.
Play Dead were never major movers within the goth scene. Although they formed in 1980, they didn't start picking up popularity until 82/83 and whilst they eventually put out three consistently good albums and an impressive number of singles, they never enjoyed the influence or relative mass appeal of the Sisters, Banshees or Bauhaus. However, in Mick Mercer's opinion: "they were important early on, because their crowd were one of the first to go to most gigs, as that whole touring ethos kicked in, where people started following one band at the expense of all others."
Danse Society at one stage seemed poised to take over as leaders of the goth scene, but it never quite happened. They formed in 1980 and by the end of 1982, when they'd released their excellent "Seduction" mini-album, there was a major buzz about them. They had a distinctive and promising musical style and in Steve Rawlings they had a good-looking and charismatic frontman. However, they signed to a major label and things went downhill from there. In the end, their major contribution was probably in getting people interested in the bands around them by having attracted attention themselves.
The Virgin Prunes were complete oddballs, and as with so many other bands, their main connection with the goth scene was having a sufficiently avant-garde sound and image in the right time and place. They were mainly noted for their extremely theatrical and OTT live shows, whilst their recorded material was of variable quality ("If I die, I die" is probably their most accessible album).
After the Beginning
As I've outlined already, by late 1983 goth was a fully-formed subculture, and by 1984/85 bands were starting to get irritated with being labelled "goth" bands.
By 1985, "goth" had changed considerably from its early roots.
Most of the early bands had split up (Bauhaus, UK Decay, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult) or mutated in a pop direction (Danse Society, the Cure) and the original movement seemed to have ground to a halt.
The way was now clear for what I call the "Gothic Rock" bands, as distinct from the earlier "Gothic Punk" bands.
The remains of Southern Death Cult, after a brief stint as Death Cult, had become simply The Cult. They moved steadily in first a "hippy-rock" direction (with the "Love" album) and then a full-on Rawk! direction (with the "Electric" album).
Meanwhile, Craig Adams and Wayne Hussey, having left the Sisters of Mercy when they split in 1985, formed The Mission, who were to become prime purveyors of the "Gothic Rock" style, borrowing heavily from 70s rock bands.
Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch, after major legal wrangles with Adams & Hussey over use of the name Sisters of Mercy and Sisterhood (Eldritch released the Sisterhood album "Gift" to stop them using the name), essentially became the Sisters of Mercy, teaming up with Patricia Morrison on "Floodland" and Tony James on the rockier "Vision Thing".
The classic "gothic rock" axis was completed by latecomers Fields of the Nephilim, whose sound took the deep-vocal atmospherics of The Sisters of Mercy and took it in a direction that eventually ended up not far from prog rock.
Meanwhile the Cure, having pulled back from full-on pop mode, were still popular amongst goths, as were the Banshees, who'd moved in a melodic and mellower direction.
Somewhere along the line All About Eve also got conscripted into the Gothic Rock canon, which given their pleasant, inoffensive hippy-folk sound, showed just how far the idea of "goth" had strayed from its early post-punk roots.
Fashion trends changed in line with the sound, so the earlier "glam-punk" look became less common and a "dressier" style took over. For men, spiky hair and ripped clothing became less prevalent and long hair, hats and more expensive-looking shirts and coats started to appear. For women, flouncier, frillier styles also started to take over.
Along with the evolution in style towards a more genteel look, people also started to look back to 18th/19th century "gothic" styles in literature and dress. This was probably largely a result of the scene having been labelled "gothic", and is an interesting example of the effect a label can have upon a scene.
The UK alternative scene in the mid-to-late 80s was dominated by this Gothic Rock sound and style, with the above bands making frequent appearances in the mainstream charts and selling out larger venues.
However, whilst popular, much of the "Gothic Rock" was very far removed from the early scene.
Whereas the gothic pioneers were innovators, in search of something fresh and interesting instead of a punk scene that had quickly grown stale, many of the Gothic Rock bands were content to plunder the past - the Mission and the Cult were particularly guilty of this, plundering the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC.
Paradoxically, whilst Punk had in part been a reaction against the excesses of stadium rock bands, Goth, which evolved from Punk, had reinvented it.
This was eventually to be its undoing, since the alternative scene moved away from Gothic Rock to Rock, with bands like Zodiac Mindwarp and Crazyhead, and then to the inevitable reaction against goth, with indie bands like Carter and Neds Atomic Dustbin favouring a no-frills unpretentious scruffy look and sound that was in direct opposition to the overdressed look and sound of Gothic Rock.
Then there was Acid House, Baggy, Grunge and Industrial, all of which ate away at the goth fanbase until by the early 90s goth was looking very shaky. There were occasional flashes of life, such as the success of the 1992 remix of "Temple of Love" (with Ofra Haza), but the sure sign of a scene in terminal decline was the lack of popular new bands coming through. There were bands out there, such as Rosetta Stone and Children on Stun, but they only had a small (though admittedly dedicated) following. By the mid-90s Goth had become a minority interest in the UK, and remains so to this day. Certain aspects of the goth look and sound have been appropriated and re-invented, notably by the metal scene, but there is no sign of Goth, whether in its original or Rock form, becoming popular again.
Elsewhere things were different, and the goth scene is still huge in certain other countries, notably Germany. In Europe the goth scene merged to some extent with the industrial scene to create an "industrial goth pop" sound that was to dominate the goth/industrial scene in the late 90s and early years of the current millennium.
Curiously, there now seems to be a resurgence of interest in the earlier, punkier goth sound ("Deathrock" in US parlance), so things might yet come full circle.
Subculture
The goth movement may be viewed as an interplay between the music, the fashion and the people who formed the subculture. The question is, where did the people who joined/formed the emergent subculture come from?
Or, to quote Mick Mercer:
"It stands to reason there is a logical gap between Punk and Goth. It isn't like a whole new audience just appeared from nowhere, which begs the question, who made up that initial crowd?"
There seem to have been three main strands of people who formed the goth gig and club-going crowd.
First, there were the disaffected punks. As stated on the punk page, by the early 80s punk had lost its early inventiveness and become increasingly harsh and stale, offering little of any interest musically.
To quote Mick Mercer again:
"We were all punks who didn't like the more basic form, and in particular it was the Gloria Mundi, Ants, Ultravox crowd who would be seen cropping up at the earlier gigs. You'd think Ultravox might be the sort of band who'd attract the pseudo--trendies, but most of the people at the gigs were total headcases. Ditto The Pack/Theatre Of Hate, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, Sex Gang thing. Every time you'd go to those gigs you'd see the Ants/GM U-vox people."
(Note: Mick Mercer is talking about the John Foxx-era Ultravox, and about the pre-pop era Ants)
Second, and probably later, there were disaffected New Romantics.
The original New Romantics had been a "dressy" reaction against the increasingly harsh and masculine direction of the punk scene, but New Romantic had quickly entered the mainstream, becoming a commercial "pop" scene.
To quote Merlina, talking about the early days of the Batcave:
"For the crowd I was with it was a reaction against New Romantic which had gone distinctly fluffy - Di was wearing frills & every schoolkid had knickerbockers - and NR music, while always more 'poppy/bouncy' had turned plain cheesy (and it takes at least a decade of nostalgia injections to appreciate that kinda cheese!)."
Finally (and this is where I come in), there were the "post-punk teenagers". Too young for punk, and unimpressed by its remnants, we listened avidly to the likes of Joy Division, Bauhaus and Killing Joke on John Peel's radio show, and scoured the music press for similar bands. Going to gigs and clubs, we fell in with like-minded people, and found ourselves part of this thing later called "goth".
Influences on goth stretch far further back, to Bowie, the Doors and the Velvet Underground, but the punk explosion of the mid/late 70s created the essential background for goth, in both music and fashion.
In the aftermath of punk in the late 70s and early 80s a bewildering variety of new and re-invented musical styles began to crop up, and around 1978-9 a style began to appear which the press had by late 1979 started to call "gothic".
The creators of this musical style (who were themselves influenced by the likes of the Velvet Underground and Bowie) were essentially Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus and UK Decay.
The first Banshees album ("The Scream", November 1978) and the first Joy Division album ("Unknown Pleasures", June 1979) laid much of the template for goth, with a notable absence of loud punk guitars and the emphasis on the rhythm section instead, along with a stark, hollow sound.
However, the first band who cannot be comfortably classified as anything other than goth were Bauhaus, who released their first single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", in August 1979. The Banshees could be considered punk, The Cure could be considered New Wave, Joy Division could be considered post-punk, but Bauhaus were unmistakably goth in music, looks, lyrics, art and style right from their first single. In many ways they were the archetypal goth band.
Around the same time as Bauhaus were emerging, UK Decay were discarding their punk roots and developing their own independent "gothic" sound. Although never as popular as Bauhaus, Joy Division or the Banshees, UK Decay were far closer to the second wave of goth bands and were an important influence on them.
By 1980/81 a new wave of goth bands were beginning to emerge- Danse Society, Play Dead, The Sisters of Mercy- and the Cure had abandoned their New Wave sound and created a unique "gothic" sound of their own. In February 1981 Abbo from UK Decay tagged the new musical movement "gothic", but it was to be another year or so before the movement really got going.
The crucial period for the development of goth into a fully-fledged subculture is mid 1982 to mid 1983, with particular emphasis on October 1982 as the month the new movemenet suddenly started receiving major media attention.
In July 1982 the Batcave opened up.
This was at first envisaged as a club for people who were fed up with the commercial direction of New Romantic and wanted something new and darker. At first it played glam and electro music, but several early goth bands also played there and the playlist gradually became more goth.
The Batcave thus became a major rallying-point for the emerging London scene and also attracted a lot of media attention, which in turn spread the idea of a new subculture around the country. In the wake of the Batcave, similar clubs opened around the country, and the Batcave itself went "on tour", giving goths outside London somewhere to gather.
Thus, whilst offering little in the way of music (apart from ASF and Specimen), the Batcave had a major impact on goth fashion and popularity. Essentially, it added a huge dose of "glam" and media attention to the emerging subculture.
Then in October 1982 Bauhaus released "Ziggy Stardust", which became a big hit (#15 in the UK charts) and put them on Top Of The Pops and the front cover of Smash Hits (October 1982).
The new wave of goth bands also began receiving serious media attention, with Southern Death Cult getting a front cover on the NME (October 1982) and Sex Gang Children getting a front cover on Noise! (also October 1982).
Following this, two articles in early 1983 focussed on what was by then unmistakably a separate movement.
In February 1983, Richard North of the NME hailed it as Positive Punk
A month later, Mick Mercer wrote a similar article about the new bands in Melody Maker (though his choice of bands, like Danse Society, was a lot more pertinent).
Meanwhile, the movement was getting a name- the term "gothic" had been floating around for a while, and the name was fixed to the emerging scene by two of the most important bands in it: Andi, the lead singer with Sex Gang Children, was tagged "Count Visigoth" and his followers tagged "goths" by Ian Astbury from Southern Death Cult. Dave Dorrell from the NME then overheard them using the term and it passed into journalistic use.
In October 1983 Tom Vague ws referring to "Hordes of Goths" in Zig Zag magazine, by which time both the term and the subculture were firmly established.
The Bands
Joy Division are not usually thought of as being goth, despite being referred to as "gothic" at the time, but their influence on goth bands was considerable. Their sparse, haunting sound was quite unlike anything else around at the time and spawned a host of imitators, especially after Ian Curtis' death (Bauhaus' first album and the Sisters' first single were both slammed as being the work of poor Joy Division copyists, which was rather unfair on Bauhaus). Their use of minimalist and gothic art on record covers also had a lasting influence (for instance, the cover to the March Violets "Grooving in Green", designed by Andrew Eldritch, has definite similarities to the cover of "Closer").
Additionally, they were a major source of the term "gothic" as applied to post-punk music.
However, Joy Division were never really a goth band and were certainly never part of the goth scene; by the time the goth scene proper started to emerge Ian Curtis was dead and the rest of the band had become New Order.
They were never really regarded as "goth" musically by goths, either, despite the obvious debts owed to them by a lot of goth bands. A lot of first-era goths viewed them as too "mainstream" owing to their posthumous popularity; also, their image was rather too bleak (from a Batcave point of view, they were decidedly unsexy). And they had their own following, the "long raincoat brigade".
Siouxsie and the Banshees were not involved in the goth scene as such, but had a massive influence on it in terms of both music and image. Their music had been called "gothic" as far back as 1979, and their music formed the template for a lot of female-fronted goth bands in much the same way that Siouxsie's looks provided the style for many female goths. Between them, Siouxsie and Bauhaus pretty much designed the early goth look.
And, once again, the Banshees may have been important in establishing the use of the word "gothic".
Their authorized biography contains some comments from them about the goth scene, here.
Bauhaus are the first band who cannot be comfortably classified as anything other than goth. UK Decay and The Banshees could be considered punk, The Cure could be considered New Wave, Joy Division could be considered post-punk, but Bauhaus were unmistakably goth in music, looks, lyrics, art and style right from their first single. In many ways they were the archetypal goth band. They were also involved in the early goth "scene", and had a major influence on goth fashion.
UK Decay are almost forgotten now, but they were important movers in the early goth scene. Abbo, from UK Decay, was responsible for using the word "gothic" to tag the emerging movement.
Sex Gang Children, along with Southern Death Cult, were one of the leaders of the new wave of goth bands who appeared in the early 80s. They are also most likely the inspiration of the term "goths" as applied to members of the emergent subculture.
Southern Death Cult were the other leaders of the "Positive Punk" scene which sprang up in 1982 and effectively became the goth scene. It's quite likely Ian Astbury was the first person to use the term "goths", originally about the fans of Sex Gang Children.
The Cure, like the Banshees, were not part of the scene, and were less influential. However, their music and image fitted, and they were adopted into the goth canon. After "Pornography", one of their bleakest albums, they suddenly went in a pop direction, moving away from a goth sound but inadvertently helping to bring the idea of "goth" closer to the mainstream.
The Sisters of Mercy, despite their later dominance of the goth scene, were not that important in the early scene. Their main claim to fame in the early years is being the first of the second wave of goth bands to release a single, though their first gig wasn't until several months later. It's odd that the Sisters came to dominate goth, since they were so different from the rest of the early goth bands: they had deep vocals and a drum machine whereas most of the early goth bands were characterised by tribal drumming, and none of them had vocals much like Eldritch's. In 1982, the important bands were Bauhaus, UK Decay, the Banshees, the Cure, Southern Death Cult and maybe Sex Gang Children: the Sisters had yet to emerge from the shadow of Joy Division (reviews regularly commented on their similarity).
The Birthday Party came to England in early 1980, at much the same time that Bauhaus & co were gaining popularity and some of the second wave of goth groups were forming. Whether they were actually a "goth" group as such is highly debatable (and I would be inclined to say they were very much their own thing), but they arrived at the time the scene was forming and played with a fair few of its protagonists, including Bauhaus. The "goth" tag may have been a result of this and the "Release the Bats" single (July 81), which the band regarded as something of a joke.
Play Dead were never major movers within the goth scene. Although they formed in 1980, they didn't start picking up popularity until 82/83 and whilst they eventually put out three consistently good albums and an impressive number of singles, they never enjoyed the influence or relative mass appeal of the Sisters, Banshees or Bauhaus. However, in Mick Mercer's opinion: "they were important early on, because their crowd were one of the first to go to most gigs, as that whole touring ethos kicked in, where people started following one band at the expense of all others."
Danse Society at one stage seemed poised to take over as leaders of the goth scene, but it never quite happened. They formed in 1980 and by the end of 1982, when they'd released their excellent "Seduction" mini-album, there was a major buzz about them. They had a distinctive and promising musical style and in Steve Rawlings they had a good-looking and charismatic frontman. However, they signed to a major label and things went downhill from there. In the end, their major contribution was probably in getting people interested in the bands around them by having attracted attention themselves.
The Virgin Prunes were complete oddballs, and as with so many other bands, their main connection with the goth scene was having a sufficiently avant-garde sound and image in the right time and place. They were mainly noted for their extremely theatrical and OTT live shows, whilst their recorded material was of variable quality ("If I die, I die" is probably their most accessible album).
After the Beginning
As I've outlined already, by late 1983 goth was a fully-formed subculture, and by 1984/85 bands were starting to get irritated with being labelled "goth" bands.
By 1985, "goth" had changed considerably from its early roots.
Most of the early bands had split up (Bauhaus, UK Decay, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult) or mutated in a pop direction (Danse Society, the Cure) and the original movement seemed to have ground to a halt.
The way was now clear for what I call the "Gothic Rock" bands, as distinct from the earlier "Gothic Punk" bands.
The remains of Southern Death Cult, after a brief stint as Death Cult, had become simply The Cult. They moved steadily in first a "hippy-rock" direction (with the "Love" album) and then a full-on Rawk! direction (with the "Electric" album).
Meanwhile, Craig Adams and Wayne Hussey, having left the Sisters of Mercy when they split in 1985, formed The Mission, who were to become prime purveyors of the "Gothic Rock" style, borrowing heavily from 70s rock bands.
Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch, after major legal wrangles with Adams & Hussey over use of the name Sisters of Mercy and Sisterhood (Eldritch released the Sisterhood album "Gift" to stop them using the name), essentially became the Sisters of Mercy, teaming up with Patricia Morrison on "Floodland" and Tony James on the rockier "Vision Thing".
The classic "gothic rock" axis was completed by latecomers Fields of the Nephilim, whose sound took the deep-vocal atmospherics of The Sisters of Mercy and took it in a direction that eventually ended up not far from prog rock.
Meanwhile the Cure, having pulled back from full-on pop mode, were still popular amongst goths, as were the Banshees, who'd moved in a melodic and mellower direction.
Somewhere along the line All About Eve also got conscripted into the Gothic Rock canon, which given their pleasant, inoffensive hippy-folk sound, showed just how far the idea of "goth" had strayed from its early post-punk roots.
Fashion trends changed in line with the sound, so the earlier "glam-punk" look became less common and a "dressier" style took over. For men, spiky hair and ripped clothing became less prevalent and long hair, hats and more expensive-looking shirts and coats started to appear. For women, flouncier, frillier styles also started to take over.
Along with the evolution in style towards a more genteel look, people also started to look back to 18th/19th century "gothic" styles in literature and dress. This was probably largely a result of the scene having been labelled "gothic", and is an interesting example of the effect a label can have upon a scene.
The UK alternative scene in the mid-to-late 80s was dominated by this Gothic Rock sound and style, with the above bands making frequent appearances in the mainstream charts and selling out larger venues.
However, whilst popular, much of the "Gothic Rock" was very far removed from the early scene.
Whereas the gothic pioneers were innovators, in search of something fresh and interesting instead of a punk scene that had quickly grown stale, many of the Gothic Rock bands were content to plunder the past - the Mission and the Cult were particularly guilty of this, plundering the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC.
Paradoxically, whilst Punk had in part been a reaction against the excesses of stadium rock bands, Goth, which evolved from Punk, had reinvented it.
This was eventually to be its undoing, since the alternative scene moved away from Gothic Rock to Rock, with bands like Zodiac Mindwarp and Crazyhead, and then to the inevitable reaction against goth, with indie bands like Carter and Neds Atomic Dustbin favouring a no-frills unpretentious scruffy look and sound that was in direct opposition to the overdressed look and sound of Gothic Rock.
Then there was Acid House, Baggy, Grunge and Industrial, all of which ate away at the goth fanbase until by the early 90s goth was looking very shaky. There were occasional flashes of life, such as the success of the 1992 remix of "Temple of Love" (with Ofra Haza), but the sure sign of a scene in terminal decline was the lack of popular new bands coming through. There were bands out there, such as Rosetta Stone and Children on Stun, but they only had a small (though admittedly dedicated) following. By the mid-90s Goth had become a minority interest in the UK, and remains so to this day. Certain aspects of the goth look and sound have been appropriated and re-invented, notably by the metal scene, but there is no sign of Goth, whether in its original or Rock form, becoming popular again.
Elsewhere things were different, and the goth scene is still huge in certain other countries, notably Germany. In Europe the goth scene merged to some extent with the industrial scene to create an "industrial goth pop" sound that was to dominate the goth/industrial scene in the late 90s and early years of the current millennium.
Curiously, there now seems to be a resurgence of interest in the earlier, punkier goth sound ("Deathrock" in US parlance), so things might yet come full circle.
Subculture
The goth movement may be viewed as an interplay between the music, the fashion and the people who formed the subculture. The question is, where did the people who joined/formed the emergent subculture come from?
Or, to quote Mick Mercer:
"It stands to reason there is a logical gap between Punk and Goth. It isn't like a whole new audience just appeared from nowhere, which begs the question, who made up that initial crowd?"
There seem to have been three main strands of people who formed the goth gig and club-going crowd.
First, there were the disaffected punks. As stated on the punk page, by the early 80s punk had lost its early inventiveness and become increasingly harsh and stale, offering little of any interest musically.
To quote Mick Mercer again:
"We were all punks who didn't like the more basic form, and in particular it was the Gloria Mundi, Ants, Ultravox crowd who would be seen cropping up at the earlier gigs. You'd think Ultravox might be the sort of band who'd attract the pseudo--trendies, but most of the people at the gigs were total headcases. Ditto The Pack/Theatre Of Hate, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, Sex Gang thing. Every time you'd go to those gigs you'd see the Ants/GM U-vox people."
(Note: Mick Mercer is talking about the John Foxx-era Ultravox, and about the pre-pop era Ants)
Second, and probably later, there were disaffected New Romantics.
The original New Romantics had been a "dressy" reaction against the increasingly harsh and masculine direction of the punk scene, but New Romantic had quickly entered the mainstream, becoming a commercial "pop" scene.
To quote Merlina, talking about the early days of the Batcave:
"For the crowd I was with it was a reaction against New Romantic which had gone distinctly fluffy - Di was wearing frills & every schoolkid had knickerbockers - and NR music, while always more 'poppy/bouncy' had turned plain cheesy (and it takes at least a decade of nostalgia injections to appreciate that kinda cheese!)."
Finally (and this is where I come in), there were the "post-punk teenagers". Too young for punk, and unimpressed by its remnants, we listened avidly to the likes of Joy Division, Bauhaus and Killing Joke on John Peel's radio show, and scoured the music press for similar bands. Going to gigs and clubs, we fell in with like-minded people, and found ourselves part of this thing later called "goth".