There's no doubt about it; Goth is Dead. A corpse, one might say. And, of course, that's the way most people want it nowadays; although its spirit, shrouded in our misconceptions, still occasionally walks abroad. We pay to see it; we have guided tours around its ancestral mansion, while the real-life vampires, the magnates, suck us dry of our worldly life-blood. The Munsters are confined to the television, H. P. Lovecraft to the anthologies and ghosts to the suprtstitious, and so everyone, on the face of it, is happy - there is no threat from the unpleasant; merely titillation, a unifying mass entertainment. In an age when death is Taboo Number One, this compartmentalisation of that which is unknown, and potentially belittling to the Supreme Being, Man, corresponds with the confinement of our failures in the quest for immortality in funeral parlours and hospitals - in one of the most important aspects of life, we are surrendering ourselves to a corporate destiny. Of course, this is not to say that we ought to be "much obsessed by death", but, like Eliot's Webster, we must not ignore the "skull beneath the skin" - it is something we must face for ourselves, in order to redress the imbalance of our overtly self-defensive Western society. Yes, if we dare ourselves to look, it seems there's something of the True Gothic left in us yet - just dying, to get out.

In starting to exhume the truth, we can trace the development of gothic ideas from the more savage architecture of the Romantic countries, immortalised in the books of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, where the key metaphor is that we must escape from our ignorant and oppressive ancestry. So far, gothic sentiments have been all to the good - however, the realisation that we cannot so easily abandon our darknesses and perversions to the past was the next point to be vividly brought home, by such as Poe and Lovecraft - an important insight, which, far from being benefited from, has mutated into the present-day genre of Horror. This enjoyment of effects, the cause of, which we have forgotten, has led to our misconceptions, and the blanket pigeon­holing of such works as Mervyn Peake's books, which are basically one man's attempt to exorcise an overtly fecund imagination from a domestic love-nest. Likewise, in musical spheres, we must look not to the self-indulgent histrionics of "gothic" bands for the expression of the truth, but rather to the likes of John Cale, who, when not challenging convention by decapitating live chickens on stage, wrote such lines as "Life and death are things you just do when you're bored... Fear is a man's best friend"­ - re-establishing this lost link in terms no-one can fail to understand. However, when the message is too clear for comfort, or even compliance, such as when Joy Division told you to "Take a chance and step outside", it must therefore be no part of the relative harmlessness of "Goth".

This is where the distinction between truth and illusion lies- the Truly Gothic is that which we must run away from; but it is nevertheless a tool by which we can appreciate life all the more, due to our contact with that which is not life. Like any tool, we can manipulate it to best use; but this in itself is no guarantee that the lessons will be learnt. For instance, does this mean that, from now on, our promising youth will crave after job training in mortuaries? Or, better still, that the small-town back-combers will start holding cultural meetings in derelict houses?.. A ghost of a chance, really.

DB