The allure of Ziggy, mixed with the magnetism of Dracula (namely Christopher Lee, Udo Keir, and of course, Bela Lugosi) helped to assemble the essential iconography of the subculture– at once dreadful and oozing with sex appeal.Īnd the sound? It’s atmospheric. The first batallion of dark 1970s post-punk bands fed off the energy of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, an androgynous creature who didn’t quite seem human. Vampires, Bowie, Bauhaus – it was the perfect trifecta, beautifully bound in an orgy of tragic eternity. ‘83 was also the year that vampire-thriller The Hunger, co-starring David Bowie, hit the big screens. There, the aesthetics of goth were cultivated-a love for horror movies and Gothic novels, a sickly pallor and a koosh ball of hair, pointy winklepickers and a mish-mash of fetish materials, and most of all, a romance with melancholy. A time when London’s Batcave club was in its infancy. And, still, neither could answer a question that has haunted people for decades: What is goth? Murphy’s Bauhaus had helped invent goth during the early Eighties Way had brought it to stripmalls and arenas in the 21st century.

There’s got to be more to it than that.” Way sheepishly chimes in: “Well, it’s very hard to categorize who and what is goth.” Thanks for the insight, jeez. “It can’t be just about a bit of makeup and a dark lyric. “I’m trying to work out what sums it up,” Murphy said when asked how he would define goth.

In 2006, Peter Murphy of Bauhaus sat down next to My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way for an MTV interview to promote a new CD collection titled Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box.

Gothic makeup