I haven’t yet done one of these, so here’s an inaugural. Love and Rockets formed in 1985 from the ashes of Bauhaus, one of the first post-Beatles “Aw, man, they broke up?” bands in my elder sister’s musical experience. Since a goodly part of my teenage years’ musical taste was informed by what Megan was listening too (she knew all the cool kids), I remember this well.
You might not remember Bauhaus, but they’re fairly important in the foundation of goth rock, although they never liked that label. Everybody who was in the aforementioned “cool kids” group of my sister’s friends went through a goth rock phase, not going so far as to put on pancake makeup a-la “Drakkar Noir” in “Raising Hope”, but there were definite dark eyeliners and half-shaved heads with spiked hair.
There’s something about being fourteen and having… hrm… “inaccessible access” I suppose would be a good phrase… to a cadre of sixteen-year old girls who all were definitely not the Debbie Gibson sort.
Back to the band… they’re these guys (sorry about the poor audio quality):
Yep, that’s Peter Murphy, who went solo later on. If you don’t recognize him from that video, you’ll recognize this song:
Anyway, I’m a fan of Daniel Ash playing the guitar, and this song is on my “driving really fast” mix. It got play on the way to Vegas, and I thought I’d share it for today.
That Peter Murphy solo album deserves to be on a “Perfect Albums” list somewhere.
(Additionally, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was supposedly originally making fun of the whole goth scene but those who bought the record unironically spent exponentially more money than the folks who “got” the song. Or so the story was told to me.)Report
Now I have Roll Call and Crystal Wrists playing at the same time in my head, like the two dueling pianos guys are playing them against each other.Report
Indeed. And as great as Cuts You Up is, I’d also give a shout out to the song that immediately follows it on that album.Report
It sounds like it could easily have been a frustrating experience. Your typical 16-year-old boy will often be willing to interact with a 14-year-old girl in a way that your typical 16-year-old girl will not interact with a 14-year-old boy and the more the 14-year-old boy would really like something like that interaction to take place the less likely it is that it will actually happen.Report
On the plus side, it definitely saved me from some hazing (although it also inspired a couple of rounds as well).Report
We went about as far with our hair as Notre Dame would let us, that’s for sure.Report
I like Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, but dig Tones on Tail more. Peter Murphy is still surprisingly good if you get a chance to see him live.Report
As punk crashed and the Goths emerged from the shadows, X was knocking out some pretty impressive stuff. Not exactly goth, but as my daughters went goth, they would often lift this from their Dad’s desk and this is what I’d hear blasting from the basement:Report
Do you see X as not being punk?Report
Ecch, X got lumped in with the punk bands but I never quite thought of them that way. For me, punk begins with outfits like MC5 and diverged into a host of genres somewhere around 1979. Goth clearly emerges from punk right about the time X’s Los Angeles comes out. Punk had been diverging since the beginning: some people try to call the New York Dolls punk. That definition just doesn’t work for me.
X’s Los Angeles has Ray Manzarek’s organ all over it. Punk had always resisted keyboards. Joy Division and the Cure, goth said keyboards were okay again. Punk was a tiresome phase in music, entirely necessary I suppose, since rock had damned near lost its way and need to be pruned back viciously. The critics were using the word Punk to describe early Bauhaus, too.Report