The Comedy of Errors: Bauhaus - Dark Entries (29 May 1992)

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If you were going to choose a year to write a book about Gothic Rock, then 1991/92 would have been an ideally timed choice.  With Grunge as the ascendant form of guitar-rooted music at the time, it made sense to look at a scene with which it shared a lot in common on a thematic basis, if not a sartorial one.  We’re still a year or so away from I Hate Myself and I Want to Die at this point, but it was a message which Goth rock bands had been extolling well over a decade earlier, and just as with Nirvana, the best of them had been doing it with a touch of flair and exuberance that made the material more intoxicating than it otherwise may have seemed when set down on the back of a record sleeve.  And while Kurt Cobain may, on the face of it, have little in common with Bauhaus’s lead singer, Peter Murphy - described by Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 as “teeteringly tall, gaunt, with a bruised pout and perfect cheekbones..a Goth pin-up, the ultimate erotic enigma.” (Reynolds, page 432), what was Courtney Love but Grunge’s repackaging of Siouxsie Sioux? Which leads us to the question, when is a Goth not a Goth?  As far as Reynolds was concerned, Siouxsie and the Banshees were Goth rock, but not everyone seemed to agree with this and that is where Peel’s play of Bauhaus’s Dark Entries on 29/5/92 comes in.

Mick Mercer’s book, Gothic Rock: All You Ever Wanted to Know....But Were Too Gormless to Ask was released through Cleopatra, with an accompanying compilation album released through Jungle Records.  The book pre-dated the album by a few months and Peel made reference to the fact that he had played some records earlier in the year based on bands/artists covered in the book and was now turning his attention to the album. He mentioned the sleevenotes to the album, which opened with a quote from a letter written by Tim Collins, the manager of Siouxsie and the Banshees to the label putting the record together, “Many thanks for your wonderful offer to be included in a cavalcade of Goth-geek.  I’m frankly amazed that some of the bands listed have agreed, however I can understand why others have.  I’m afraid we will decline this wonderful opportunity on the grounds of Mick’s comment that Siouxsie and the Banshees were not part of the Goth movement. We’ll just have to hope that our exclusion from this project won’t reflect too badly upon us.”  Peel felt that it did, but he didn’t read out Mercer’s response to Collins as set down in the sleevenotes, “How could it? Nobody even thinks of you anymore.  The Banshees, Showaddywaddy, Baccarah (sic)...all legends in their own time but sadly no longer with us.” (Mercer). What’s most surprising to me, as someone used to bands rejecting that they were part of any scene, is to hear a representative of one displaying such petulance at having not been thought to be part of it, especially when considering that, by 1992, Goth rock suggested the likes of The Cult and The Sisters of Mercy trying to ape mid-80s U2, rather than its then contemporary exemplars, Rosetta Stone or Creaming Jesus.

Bauhaus’s 1980 single, Dark Entries was the opening track on the compilation, and having spent most of yesterday’s England-Tonga match working through the tracklisting by navigating YouTube, it was very much the best track on there, though I’d give an honourable mention to The Danse Society.  The lyrics are psychosexual bollocks, albeit delivered with a passion and conviction that pins the listener back in their seat but it’s the arrangement that really scores - all skittering drums, descending Hammer Horror style guitar lines and distortion effects suggesting frantic sexual encounters in street alleys and hovels.

Video courtesy of Mindkid