Goth goes Glam

 

What tarts!

Gene Loves Jezebel must have seen Love and Rockets enjoying Stateside sucksess with the T. Rexy "So Alive" and they thought "we'll ave summathat, eh boyo?"

 

That said, I do really enjoy "Motion of Love" as sound + vision in all its effrontery and fakery

The phasing on the backing vocals...

It's less "going glam" in the '70s T. Rexy sense and more glam as in glam metal, hair metal... 

I suppose this is prime Bad Music Era, but the ShitBrit is definitely improved by the attempt to conquer Billboard rather than just scale the summit of the UK independent chart. 

The missus is quite fond of Gene Love Jezebel's early stuff when they have a sort of neo-psych / Cult circa "She Sells Sanctuary" vibe....  but I prefer this would-be sell-out phase. 

Tragic story, though - the Aston brothers fell out terribly, and there are now two versions of Gene Loves Jezebel touring different sectors of the world. I forget which brother has North America. 

Checking Wikipedia, it says they fell out twice: 

"The brothers reconciled in the mid-1990s, wrote some new songs together, and shared a house in Los Angeles"

But that detente didn't last, resulting in a permanent ruction and the ongoing rival Gene Loves Jezebels. 

 And then this happened

"In September 2018, Jay Aston, James Stevenson, and Peter Rizzo were named as defendants in a lawsuit brought by Michael Aston for infringement of his trademark at the end of Jay Aston's Gene Loves Jezebel's first US tour in ten years. Jay Aston's band argued that they had complied with the agreement with Michael Aston to the best of their ability. At the hearing on 7 January 2019 in Santa Ana, California, before the judge The Hon James Selna, the judge found in favour of the defendants on all of the five counts that Michael Aston had brought and ordered him to pay the defendants' legal fees."

So many of these Goths ended up living in Los Angeles... Peter Murphy for instance. 

Lol Tolhurst also (met him at the Hay Festival in Mexico last year, at a lunch organized by the British Ambassador for all the U.K. authors...  educated fellow, we had a good chat)

I suppose many British pop stars and cult stars end up here... and why not... it's where the Biz is... the weather is better

There's also a big Goth scene (industrial too) in LA, a kind of spiritual dissidence against sun and outdoors-iness and tans and health. The commitment it takes to wear all black heavy clothing head to foot all year round in Southern California...

If they didn't literally move to LA,  Brit Goth groups often tried to move there sonically /career-orientation-ly

Tempting to say Flesh For Lulu are the dreggiest dregs of the Bad Music Era, but then there's Balaam and the Angel, there's The Bolshoi, there's Sex Gang Children

Thing I never knew - Julianne Regan was the bassist in Gene Loves Jezebel at one point, prior to forming All About Eve.

Oh my God, there is Wiki Fear and Wiki Fizzle, but sometimes there is Wiki Manna - just a pure gift of brightness and joy irradiating one's life

So... I learn that The Mountain Goats, as in John Darnielle, did a whole album called Goths, and one of the songs tells the saga of Gene Love Jezebel (it sounds a bit like Jackson Browne's "The Pretender")

Robert Smith is secure at his villa in France

Any child knows how to do the spiderweb dance

Siouxsie has enough hits to keep the bills paid

Every New Year's in Los Angeles, you can still see Richard Blade

But the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel

Yeah, the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel

They charted once or twice

They were on a major label

When the singer went solo

He left money on the table

The two main guys are related

They're at war with each other

Now there's two Genes loving Jezebel

One for each brother

But the world came to agree

What you see is what you get

And what you get is what you see

Whether you're The March Violets or The Bolshoi

Bands who had to leave the darkness for the sun

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry were on Cherry Red, I think

They've been playing clubs since 1981

To be fair to Gene Loves Jezebel

Billy Corgan brought them on stage

It was in 2011

It's on their Wikipedia page

But for the most part

However big that chorused bass may throb

You and me and all of us

Are gonna have to find a job

Because the world will never know or understand

The suffocated splendor

Of the once and future goth band

This is all rather like those Luke Haines records 

vamp in sunlight

 

Rare sighting of a Goth at the beach - shield your eyes from the pasty white glare!

Still, sensibly, Sioux seems to be applying sunscreem

Can you imagine the Ice Queen burned and raw? Wouldn't be very a-peeling. 

Judging by the quality of sand, and a faint memory of the caption when I stole this, it's a LA beach, not the kind of gravelly job you get in England.  Possibly Venice Beach. (Well I suppose it could be somewhere Mediterranean)

Goths - and industrials - are a big subculture in LA (hence the Cruel Worlds festivals) and I think it's got something to do with dissent against the Sun itself - and the attached culture of tans and muscles and blonde hair and surfers.

McLaren was making a film - or trying to make a film - about Nazi surfers. Can you imagine a Goth on a surfboard? 

who's a pretty boy then

One moderately intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if John McKay and Kenny Morris had not quit the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop

This advertisement unfortunately appeared in the same issue that the split was front pages news - the bottom half of the band in this illustration already flown the coop! 

But what if they'd managed to patch up their differences? If the manager had brokered a rapprochement? Or if Morris and McKay had not been carried away by the impish cackling glee of doing a runner and leaving the others in the lurch... 

For sure, you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the John McGeoch and Budgie version of the band generated.

But equally a bit more of the severe (yet pop punchy, often) early sound would also have been nice.

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

I inadvertently left on the subtitle function when playing this video and before the lyrics start it says "intense postpunk music" - quite!

Well, look, here's a turn-up: some music made by McKay (who, like Morris, more or less disappeared from music after their abrupt departure) - a "lost album", Sixes and Sevens, made not long after leaving the Banshees. You can hear a track now but the whole release is not out until May. 

Release irrationale: 

"The Scream", Siouxsie & the Banshees' first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of 'punk' lingering) and enough hints of what had come even earlier to be, paradoxically, new.

Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, with her unique vocal style and lyrics, but the real star, we've always known, was John McKay, who wrote most of the album's music (as well as singles like "Hong Kong Garden"), creating a wholly new guitar sound - harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating . . . best articulated by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini years later ". . . only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs".

McKay's influence lives on; many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credit him as a major influence - Geordie from Killing Joke, Jim Reid of The Jesus And Mary Chain, U2's The Edge, Thurston Moore, Johnny Marr and even the two guitarists - The Cure's Robert Smith and Magazine's John McGeoch - who followed him in The Banshees. 

McKay's burgeoning status as the anti-guitar hero was halted when he and Banshees drummer Kenny Morris - at odds with Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin - fled the band just after the start of a tour supporting the group's second album, Join Hands. It was a weekly music paper scandal, later the subject of a BBC documentary, and Siouxsie's vitriol working its way into the lyrics of a later Banshees b-side, "Drop Dead / Celebration". Aside from a solitary single on Marc Riley's In Tape label nearly a decade later, no music was heard from McKay again.

So it comes as a major surprise to learn of a pile of excellent recordings made in the years just after he left The Banshees, unheard by all but a very few, some of which feature drummer Kenny Morris, plus Mick Allen from Rema Rema, Matthew Seligman of the Soft Boys and longer-term collaborator Graham Dowdall and John's wife Linda . . . the latter three of whom are now sadly deceased.

Sixes And Sevens is an historic lost album. Brazenly genius and bearing fair claim as the lost treasure of the post-punk era, the album collects eleven studio tracks, carefully mastered from original tapes. It's a masterpiece which best speaks for itself. 

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Severin's good looking and Siouxsie of course is a forbidding goddess, but in many ways, if you were going to point to a potential pin-up in the original Banshees it would be McKay.  

 

Those lips, that chin, the intense gaze, the Byronic hair. Moody and magnificent. 

If not pop, then - if he'd had more of a voice - McKay could probably have given Pete Murphy or Ian Astbury a run for their money in Goth's idol-atrous stakes.

In the second photo in this 1979 Sounds feature, McKay is placed right behind Siouxsie in the hierarchy of eye-catching, although that may also reflect the hierarchy of instrumentation in the band.

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from an argument I had with someone about the Banshees: 

....in many ways it's as much sense to see them as a second-wave glam group as it is a postpunk group. 

In that perspective, the Banshees's real peers would not be PiL or Joy Division, but Japan and the John Foxx-era Ultravox - what could be called "late glam". And also Adam and the Ants.

Siouxsie and Severin are intensely invested in the visual and theatrical sides of music. 

I's also interesting that Siouxsie has on at least occasions situated herself in a larger tradition of glamour and showbiz - with the brassy cover of the Mel Torme standard "Right Now" in the Creatures, and then with "Kiss Them For Me" with all the Hollywood glamour goddess references.

.... The two core members met at a Roxy Music concert; their second B-side was a cover of a T. Rex song. When they did Through the Looking Glass, several of the songs covered were from glam-aligned artists. Glam was at their core....