EPISODE 05: THE BATCAVE (UK)

Greetings freaks and geeks and welcome to another episode of Nightclubbing with your host Cherry Pie, broadcasting from Lower Grand Radio in Oakland California. Happy October, Happy Halloween; I love this time of year when the veil is thin, the days are growing cooler and shorter, and my listening is turning dark. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the origins of the goth subculture and celebrating its music through The Batcave, which was a weekly night held in London’s Soho neighborhood from 1982 to 1985.

Who are the goths? Goths were Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe. Also, a subculture of fashion and music beginning in the early 1980s. So how do you get from an ancient tribe of people on continental Europe, to Bauhaus in the UK thousands of years later? Through storytelling, of course. Gothic fiction is a genre and literary aesthetic that emerged in the 18th century. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, marked by harsh laws enforced by torture and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. Placing a story in a Gothic building serves several purposes. It inspires feelings of awe, implies that the story is set in the past, gives an impression of isolation or dissociation from the rest of the world, and conveys religious associations. Gothic fiction is characterized by an environment of fear, the threat of supernatural events, and the intrusion of the past upon the present or the present being haunted by the past. Examples of Gothic literature are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and anything by Edgar Allan Poe. This would serve as huge inspiration to punks gone goth by the mid 1980s, but just one of many.

You see the term gothic rock first pop up in music in 1967, coined by music critic John Stickney to describe a meeting he had with Jim Morrison in a dimly lit wine-cellar, which he called "the perfect room to honor the Gothic rock of the Doors". You see it pop up again over 10 years later from music writers and critics to describe dark post punk, mostly happening in the United States and the United Kingdom at the time – post punk being a broad genre of rock music that emerged in the wake of punk rock, with the same DIY spirit and energy of punk, but determined to get away from rock cliches and to experiment with a more diverse array of influences and styles like funk, jazz, electronic and dance music; incorporating the production techniques of dub and disco; (and if you remember from a couple earlier episodes of this show we go into what dub techniques are, pioneered by King Tubby and later Larry Levan in disco) Lyrical content is inspired by art and politics, including critical theory, modernist art, cinema and literature. The early post punk vanguard was represented by groups like Siouxise and the Banshees, Wire, Joy Division, and The Cure… to name a few. Eventually, post-punk splits into several subgenres, as many broad umbrella genres do, and gothic rock is officially born in the UK.

Goth rock typically deals with dark themes addressed through lyrics and the music's atmosphere and arrangements-- with the use of primarily minor or bass chords, reverb, scything guitar, or dramatic and melancholic melodies. Specimen is one of these bands born of this movement, with their own brand of dark punk and glam influences. In 1982 they see that this goth thing is really gaining traction amongst their community, and there’s a lot of beautiful freaks just like them looking for a place to go to enjoy the darker things in life. Ollie Wisdom and Jon Klein from Specimen decide to start putting on a night once a week at 69 Dean Street and would call it the Batcave. This night only ran for 3 years from 1982 to 1985, yet it is so influential to goth culture. A lot of accounts suggest The Batcave was really the start of the movement, or at the least aided the progression of the it in a massive way. Specimen would be the house band, you had to walk through a coffin to get in, and fake spider webs hung from the ceiling. Nick Cave, Robert Smith, Siouxsie Soux and Steve Severin were all regulars. Today musically, I’m going to be focusing on bands that either played or were played by the DJs at The Batcave between 1982 and 1985.

Fashion at The Batcave championed a DIY attitude, embracing self-expression and individuality; in the 1980s goth fashion hadn’t reached the mainstream yet so couldn’t easily be found on the high-street — and what could be found in shops was expensive. The fact that you could make your own outfit at home for barely any money at all, and be as authentically goth as someone that had paid above-and-beyond for a similar outfit, is a really forward-thinking concept. To be a part of any sub-culture you need a uniform, and that can lead to class becoming a relative factor in who can be in the clique. Eradicating financial standing or class opened up an inclusive community where you could be an individual too; it’s no wonder Batcave has been put on a pedestal.

The Batcave’s run ended somewhere in mid-1985. No one really knows exactly when, unless you were there. The first wave of goth culture was coming to a close, and a new one was beginning to form, proving how entwined the subculture and the venue were. Goth culture has continued to diversify and spread throughout the world, still going strong even today.

TRACK LIST:

1. Dead Man’s Autochop – Specimen

2. Dead & Buried – Alien Sex Fiend

3. Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus

4. Sex-Eye-Make Up – The Glove

5. A Day – Clan of Xymox

6. Performance – Tones on Tail

7. The Calling – Death in June

8. Master and Servant – Depeche Mode

9. Sex Beat – Sex Beat

10. Spiritual Cramp – Christian Death

11. Forest Dying – Mephisto Walz