Birth of Bela Lugosi's...

Remember the time when you were young....dressing up like a vampire, putting on your makeup and trying to look pale with thick ebony eyeliner, blood red lipstick, and layers of draped clothing in any shade of black.

Hiding in corners, in the shadows listening to the Cure's 100 years and hoping to spot a real VAMPIRE... While that time may be long forgotten now, somewhere out there... a young girl maybe doing the same thing hoping to meet a real VAMPIRE...

1) Birth of Bela Lugosi's (historical)
2) Bela Lugosi's Dead? (goth in the 90's)
3) Sound... of Goth


The media (NME)took the term Gothic from Siouxsie and the Banshees, who used it to describe the new direction for their band. However the earliest significant usage of the term (as applied to music) was by Anthony H. Wilson who was overcome by a rare moment of lucidity on a 1978 BBC TV program when he described Joy Division as Gothic compared with the pop mainstream.

Perhaps Joy Division (who he was managing) are not what we now think of as Goth but it is possible that they are at the source of the term. Bauhaus were labelled as Gothic as early as 1979 when they released Bela Lugosi's Dead.

People and the media have always not taken Goth music seriously... They felt that people into Goth are only overly pretentious and trying real hard to look like a Vampire, - with the their concert settings surrounded with tombstones... they wore lots of black and silver and had extreme black hair (of course, this is true, but that's what makes the stuff fun!). All the journalists were more concerned with looks than the music. So every band with that "Gothic" look were labeled as a Goth band, despite some of them not really sounding like one.

Goth music dealt mostly with death and religous imagery, bands like Christian Death, Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy (although they were more focused on politics) they were considered Goth because of their looks and sound.

Mission was considered Goth too(I personally disagree) because Wayne Hussey was once with the Sisters and so he carried the label with him to his new band...

The movement of the punks in the late 70's and early 80's gave birth to the strange melodies we now affectionately call "Gothic". It was started because the people spurred on by Punk wanted to incorporate broader, more alluring emotions and passion within their music which Punk did not allow. Bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Siouxsie and the Banshees(they started out as punk before they mellowed)...and a short lived but still a Goth favourite.. The Bauhuas . They brought Goth to the attention of the media in Europe with the release of the #1 Gothic Anthem, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" late in '78. This song brought Goth out of the closet. From then on, virtually every Indie label in the country had at least one Goth band and every venue willingly opened its doors to Goth bands.

With the widespread success of Goth,many new bands began to emerge from the underground scene. More bands like Christian Death, the Sisters of Mercy and Field of the Nephilim began to gain the recognition they deserve. Even smaller bands like Virgin Prunes and Specimen started to have their own faithful followers.

After a while it started getting really hard to explain the Goth scene during that time with so much chaos going on. Many bands come and go so fast that everyone felt that Goth may be fading. Even the media started to make fun at Goth, their fans, the music and the bands. This made everyone want to get away from them.

But there is this band which redefined the term MORDERN GOTH.The Sisters of Mercy, yes the Sisters... Andrew Eldritch and that drum machine. All this years sitting at the throne up there... The shadowy figure behind the smoke in the concert, invoking doomed dreams. The influence they have on many young bands is hard to gauge. It is this influence on the movement of these early bands that kept the scene alive all this years.

The scene has truly contracted a lot all this years but it also has evolved into a new look, sound and class....


Next: "is Bela Lugosi's Dead??"
References were taken from : goth.org, Dark Side of the Web & Heaven, Melancholy

By Bret Ong

Real Fresh