Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Single, 1979)

Used to brilliant effect in Tony Scott’s 1983 erotic vampire flick The Hunger Bauhaus’ performance of Bela Lugosi’s Dead features prominently in one of the most memorable opening scenes in film. This dirge has been called the first Gothic Rock record and, if not the first, it is certainly the most revered. I don’t remember the context in which I first heard it, but I do recall the effect it routinely had on the dance floor at The Bronx in the mid-‘80s. At 9 minutes 34 seconds, Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the Goth Stairway to Heaven. Just as then (and to this day) lanky haired sub-urban high school kids in tight jeans and Van Halen tour t-shirts dutifully slunk onto the floor for the Led Zepic, so too did (and to this day) the lanky haired sub-urban kids in eyeliner and black trench coats mope out of the shadows to take their place at the centre of the dance floor for the tribe’s compulsory act of religious observance.

There can be comfort in the repetition of ritual, but even for the most devout an overly lengthy sermon can become tedious, especially if you’re standing for the duration and moving as little as possible. In Stairway to Heaven the tempo change at about 5:30 both signals that you’ve more stairs below you than above (relief), but also demands that you speed up and do something suitably expressive, just when you’ve mastered the ergonomically efficient somnambulist shuffle of a couple reaching the end of a dance marathon (irritation). To be honest, I have yet to see someone make that 5:30 transition successfully and not end up looking like a flailing marionette in the hands of a drunken puppeteer – which seems to be what the Zep demands at this point in the song. There’s an analogous yet contrasting moment at about 7:40 in Bela Lugosi’s Dead, when even the band seems to have grown totally disinterested with this already minimalist dirge. Rather than pick things up a little and make a sprint for the finish, Bauhaus just kind of drop out, one by one. This poses a particular challenge from the observant Goths. Having, as a sub-culture, elevated the affectation of ennui to a high art, the dancers struggle to mask their genuine – and well earned – boredom. I’ve been on that dance floor in communion with the Goths and imagined them, heads down, eyes hidden under a cascade of jet black hair, questioning the Faustian bargain they’ve made with Peter Murphy, yearning for Stairway to Heaven’s comparatively early release at 8 minutes 2 seconds, and the option of refreshing with a nice tall Bloody Caesar rather than a more literal beverage.

Some twenty years later, I went to see Bauhaus live in Toronto. I stood in the back. I was flanked by women and men of my generation, most of whom had swapped knee high boots, corsets and lengthy leather coats for the simple elegance of black turtle necks, tapered pants or well tailored mini dresses. Expensive eyewear marked them as (to quote my friend Chris Wodskou) ‘the College Street Rapp Optical crowd’ and they wore shoes only nominally pointer than functionality would dictate. I concluded that the Gothic horde’s first wave had all grown up to become art directors, designers, architects, new media specialists and owners of boutiques that supplied furniture to the growing community of loft dwellers. Collectively, we remained as stationary as possible and slowly sipped our expensive Heinekens while the younger, more historically accurately attired, Goth kids surged forward as the show opened with Peter Murphy’s disembodied face appearing on a large TV wheeled to centre stage.

I realize now that, in almost perfect symmetry with the impossibly sophisticated and urbane characters played by Deneuve and Bowie in the opening scene of The Hunger, Tony Scott had foreshadowed our behaviour that night with chilling accuracy. Coldly observing the Goth kids from the back of that cinder block night club, we were exercising the only option available to us from our particular vantage. We weren’t there to experience our own vitality, but to feed on the vitality of others… younger others.

Just to prove to us that they fully understood the significant and requisite pain of the 7:40 moment, Bauhaus waited an agonizing twenty minutes before returning to the stage to play Bela Lugosi’s Dead as the encore. And those of us who had remained in the shadows had feet that ached exquisitely from a long night standing on the club’s hard concrete dance floor, only shifting periodically, ever so slightly, from side to side – the minimum necessary to keep our blood flowing and sustain the illusion of a pulse.

To Hell with Poverty! - Gang of Four (Another Day / Another Dollar, 1982)

It’s somewhat incredulous that I’ve managed to get so far into this protracted and spasmodic project without mentioning the film, Urgh! A Music War. Urgh!, which was released in ’81 or ’82, is an extraordinary snapshot of post-punk new wave scene in the UK and USA. The film documents concert performances – primarily in London, New York and LA – by over thirty acts. Some of them have had illustrious careers (The Police); others (Invisible Sex) would have remained anonymous but for their appearance in this infuriatingly difficult to access (legitimately) concert film; and one or two, most notably Klaus Nomi, are dead.

Coincidentally, when Klaus Nomi died in 1983 it was the first time in those intensely stigmatic early days of the pandemic that I recall hearing of a public figure dying of AIDS. The fact that Nomi was an androgynous countertenor who – when in full kabuki-like stage make up and dressed in two-tone vinyl with hair like a Kewpie in middle age and moving like a robotic Victorian porcelain doll – didn’t do much to challenge the media’s ‘gay plague’ hysteria that associated AIDS with all kinds of real and imagined homosexual degeneracy. It’s just occurring to me now, but there’s more than a little of Joel Grey’s Cabaret Emcee in Klaus Nomi. If the former is an icon of Weimar and the rise of Nazism, perhaps Nomi is a bellwether of life for the counterculture in the Reagan / Thatcher years. Nomi’s death was a shock to my 16 year old self and I will never forget the circumstances.

[I’m sure the books are already written, but if regular ‘duck and cover’ classroom exercises in anticipation of nuclear war profoundly marked the psyches of teens during the cold war era, then the spectre of AIDS in the early ‘80s was the threat that compounded the already complicated experience of adolescence for my generation.]

But I digress… Gang of Four was one of the groups featured in Urgh! Somehow I’ve managed to convince myself – erroneously it would appear – that To Hell with Poverty! was the song they performed in the film. It wasn’t, the song documented is He’d Send in the Army. What I did recall correctly and vividly is guitarist Andy Gill’s performance. He plays like he’s gripped by a sort of palsy; as if he’s just had a guitar thrust into his hands for the first time and been shoved out on stage to herk and jerk all over one of the most memorable, disciplined, funky baselines of the whole era. It’s pure genius.

Travel - Simple Minds (Empires & Dance, 1980)

The aforementioned 16 Candles was made by the American John Hughes who, in the period 1984-1986, wrote or directed a trilogy of seminal teen flicks starring the 80's geek muse Molly Ringwald. Sadly for Molly she suffered the fatal - and kind of ironic - mistake of 'peaking in high school' [this powerfully derisive phrase will take on greater and greater weight - and provoke a little pathos - as you age and encounter more and more of the 'popular' and 'athletic' kids at the Safeway check out, enduring the same cruel indignities that befall the rest of us].

On the subject of indignities... the soundtrack of the second in the Hughes triad, The Breakfast Club (1985), prominently features the saccharine Don't You Forget About Me, an absolutely dreadful and shameless attempt by Simple Minds to the grasp the elusive brass ring of US pop radio stardom via the silver screen. It worked spectacularly. The song was massive. However, fans of the pre-Breakfast Club Simple Minds who loved them for their 'originality' (or at least, as we invariably discovered retroactively, their unimpeachable good taste in conspicuous musical influences - Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, Neu!), ignored their entreaty with callous abandon and promptly forgot about them... with absolutely no deleterious effect on the band's considerable royalty cheques. Coincidentally, I graduated in the Class of 1985 and while I did see the Pretty in Pink in 1986, I never bought another Simple Minds album. I consider failure to separate one of the great plagues of the 20th century. Perhaps the only thing sadder than a middle aged man squeezing himself into his high school football jacket is a Harry Ainlay CHS '85 reunion playing Don't You Forget About Me as its last dance.

Twenty years on, while I remember both Hughes films and Simple Minds fondly, I mostly remember Molly Ringwald for having dated Adam Horowitz of The Beastie Boys and Dweezil Zappa, and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds for having married Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders and subsequently serial rockgamist Patsy Kensit.

In Between Days - The Cure (Head on the Door, 1985)

This one I associate less with a specific event or person, than with period of transition of which The Cure - and bands like them - were a part. I gave myself a bit of a 'makeover' in 1983. Gave up the jean jacket, feathered hair and wispy moustache, in favour of a somewhat 'cleaner' look. New Wave was well underway; I was mid-way through High School; and realizing the headbanger look wasn't working for me, but lacking the nerve to be a punk, I chose a middle ground (not the last time). The 80's were all about the floppy (foppish) forelock, paisley shirts, cardigans, desert boots, and all kinds of self-absorbed nonsense. If you are interested in better understanding the sub-urban Prairie experience of that era, watch the two great and harrowing documentaries of the period: Fast Times at Ridgemont High and 16 Candles.

Take the Skinheads Bowling - Camper van Beethoven (Telephone Free Landslide Victory, 1985)

I'm really not sure why I chose to put this on the CD. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that 'Take the Skinheads Bowling' appeared on a compilation published by the UK magazine Uncut in December 2005 called 'John Peel's Festive 15'. Listening to The Fall put me in mind of John Peel (Peel's favourite band) and... here we are. It's a silly song, but with the recurring image of skinheads in a bowling alley, it neatly lampoons the absurdity of being a bald headed racist in 18 hole Doc Martens, suspenders and a bomber jacket... in Southern California to boot. Anyway, to see how skinheads look bowling, there is, inevitably, a video on You Tube. Got big lanes... got big lanes... look the same... look the same.

How I Wrote 'Elastic Man' - The Fall (Grotesque, 1980)

Grotesque was (after Patrik Fitzgerald's Gifts & Telegrams) the greatest of Michael's Southgate Public Library discoveries. Easy to see why he couldn't resist the cover. Rapidly dubbed to cassette tape, Grotesque was the soundtrack for many late night adventures in Michael's Dad's Toyota Corolla. I can honestly say that, at the time, it was the strangest thing I'd ever heard, not least of which because of the snarling, lazy, almost spoken, vocals of Mark E. Smith (seen here in 1985). He hasn't aged especially well, competing with The Pogues Shane McGowan for the ravaged face of rock award.

The Fall were huge favourites of the hugely influential British DJ John Peel. Of course, we had absolutely no idea at the time, we just liked the cover and the nasty music. When Peel died in 2004, the BBC called in Mark E. Smith for an opinion. He wasn't especially helpful...

I had to wait until September of 1994 to see The Fall, in Vancouver at The Starfish Room. One surviving account from that night suggests he wasn't very helpful on that occasion either.

Ghost Town - The Specials (Ghost Town, 1981)

So, like I said, 1981 things weren't looking too good in the UK, and it all boiled over in April with major rioting in Brixton, which kicked off an explosive summer of street battles. By the time Mark and I arrived to spend our summer holidays with our grandparents, the nightly news was full of flying bricks and burning cars as rioting raged up and down the country. Handsworth, Toxteth, Southall, Moss Side were a long way from the idyllic country life of Waltham St. Lawrence, but my grandparents talked of nothing else. The rioting hit its peak in early July. Sypathetically, 'Ghost Town' hit number #1 on the UK singles chart on July 7th and stayed there for three weeks.

Keep in mind that this was the era before MuchMusic and MTV. Music video was in its infancy, and, if you lived in England, everything stopped on Thursday night for Top of the Pops, the weekly chart show where with a countdown, live performances and awkward dancing. I remember seeing The Specials on TOTP that July. I was 14 years old, and I really wasn't sure what the hell was going on in England that summer, but I was absolutely convinced that 'Ghost Town' was going to give me a better idea than sitting in the country listening to my grandparents perspective on Britain's decay. I'm pretty sure this is the performance we saw. There's a bleak little video too.

Top of the Pops was cancelled by the BBC last year. They say it was because they couldn't compete with 24-hour music channels. I like to think it was because they went back and had a look at the archives and realized they hadn't done anything relevant since July 1981 and gave up out of self-disgust.