{"product_id":"multi-artistes_dressed-in-black-goth-divas-from-the-dark-side-1941-2025-cd_2026_soc","title":"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 learn more, read on.The music gathered here is a sonic manifestation of a tumultuous era, created by women with exceptional gifts. The music I fell in love with emerged from the late 1970s: the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, where endless social movements left the dead unburied and mountains of garbage in the streets. All the promises of punk were brutally dashed with the death of Sid and Nancy in New York; IRA bombs exploded in central London, and an apparently elusive serial killer terrorized West Yorkshire, with thirteen murders to his name. Bad omens that boded ill for the events of May 3, 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 opposition forces, whose dissident voices resonated across the country thanks to John Peel's show on Radio 1, against a backdrop of distorted guitars. Whirling fairground-style keyboards, swaying bass lines, and percussion evoking the echo of jackhammers or the soft tread of insects. Here, the unruly offspring of punk distilled the dissonance of the era into unprecedented 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 coal-eyed women expressed the alienation of their generation during that decade marked by the Cold War, the miners' strike, privatization, and AIDS.As I reflected on all this while writing Season Of The Witch, I also began to understand how this music was linked to previous generations of gothic mothers, dating back at least to the Industrial Revolution, and likely much further. The oldest song you will hear here is Shirley Collins' setting of \"Death And The Lady,\" collected just after World War II, but with roots plunging into the global pandemic of 1348-1349: the Black Death. Shirley devoted her long life to researching and reinterpreting songs that cross time and oceans to form an alternative history of events, recorded not by the victors of wars, but by the peasants who suffered their consequences.Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps performed a similar service when, with Lux Interior, she exhumed a crypt filled with forgotten blues and hillbilly singers and re-recorded their songs at Sun Studios, where Elvis had cut his first record. Diamanda Galàs, an American of Greek descent, the greatest and most fearless advocate for 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 was inspired by the enigmatic psychedelic seer Julie Driscoll.\"Making sense of the absurd is already genius. But sublimating these intuitions through the magic of sublime music... I return to my supernatural gifts. I hope you find enlightenment here.\" You know the dress code.","brand":"Multi-artistes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57476029383000,"sku":null,"price":23822400.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0898\/4943\/0360\/files\/0029667116527.jpg?v=1780998519","url":"https:\/\/vinyles.com\/en-us\/products\/multi-artistes_dressed-in-black-goth-divas-from-the-dark-side-1941-2025-cd_2026_soc","provider":"Vinyles.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}