Dressed In Black - Goth Divas From The Dark Side - 1941-2025

Description

The exhibition “Dressed In Black” was conceived and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of *Season Of The Witch: The Book of Goth* - a woman who considers herself lucky to have had Siouxsie Sioux, Lydia Lunch and Diamanda Galàs as role models during her adolescence. To find out more, read on. The music gathered here is a sonic manifestation of a turbulent era, created by women endowed with exceptional gifts. The music I fell in love with emerged from the late 1970s: the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, when endless industrial action left the dead unburied and mountains of rubbish in the streets. All the promises of punk had been brutally extinguished with the deaths of Sid and Nancy in New York; IRA bombs had exploded in central London and an apparently elusive serial killer had spread terror across West Yorkshire, with thirteen murders to his name. Bad omens that boded ill for the events of 3 May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became our first female Prime Minister. Dressed in blue and ready to bend the country to her will. But at night, rebellious youth united within the opposition forces, whose dissenting voices echoed across the country thanks to John Peel’s show on Radio 1, against a backdrop of distorted guitars. Swirling fairground-tinged keyboards, rolling basslines and percussion evoking the echo of jackhammers or the soft tread of insects. Here, the unruly offspring of punk distilled the era’s dissonance into a new kind of music. Playing with fetishism and taboo, drawing on horror and science-fiction imagery, they were the outlaw leaders of the decade’s most iconic gothic movement. Dressed in black, these women with smoky eyes expressed their generation’s alienation during this decade marked by the Cold War, the miners’ strike, privatisation and AIDS. Reflecting on all this while writing Season Of The Witch, I also began to understand how this music was linked to earlier generations of goth mothers, going back at least to the Industrial Revolution, and probably much further. The oldest song you will hear here is Shirley Collins’s setting of “Death And The Lady”, collected just after the Second World War, but whose roots lie in the global pandemic of 1348-1349: the Black Death. Shirley devoted her long life to researching and reinterpreting songs that travel through time and across oceans to form an alternative history of events, recorded not by the victors of wars, but by the peasants who suffered the consequences. Poison Ivy Rorschach of The Cramps performed a similar service when, with Lux Interior, she unearthed a crypt full of forgotten blues singers and hillbillies and re-recorded their songs at Sun Studios, where Elvis had recorded his first record. Diamanda Galàs, Greek-American, the greatest and most fearless champion of AIDS victims, drew on the demotiki tradition of her ancestors from the hills of Sparta. As a teenager, Lydia Lunch transformed Billie Holiday’s 1941 version of the famous “Gloomy Sunday” into a big band jazz piece for 80s New York no wave. Perhaps the most striking female figure of the 80s, Siouxsie Sioux herself drew inspiration from the enigmatic psychedelic seer Julie Driscoll. “Making sense of the absurd is already a feat of genius. But sublimating these intuitions through the magic of sublime music... I come back to my supernatural gifts. I hope you find enlightenment here.” You know the dress code.