[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or listening to us on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll talk about the new HBO Max docuseries, Savior Complex, about controversial white evangelical missionaries who go to Africa or maybe, on a lighter note, maybe you have a kid away at school and you're thinking, how can I use a care package right now? What should I put in it? We'll get inspiration from The New York Times Wirecutter gifts writer, Samantha Schoech, and we'll learn about the inaugural West Side Festival happening this Saturday. More than 18 institutions and arts groups have gotten together to plan a day of fun, free cultural events. That is our plan. Let's get this started with a little goth.

[music]

Who better to write a book about the history of goth than co-founder of the band The Cure, Lol Tolhurst, my next guest? In its infancy, goth music and culture was shocking to the establishment. It was an extension of punk and a response to the dreary years of austerity under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Goth culture was born in the industrial towns and suburbs of England, then ballooned into London clubs like the Batcave, pioneered by bands like Bauhaus, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Cure. The Cure combined the gorgeous goth gloom with often energetic production. Here's a little bit of one of their early hits, Boys Don't Cry from '79.

[MUSIC - The Cure: Boys Don't Cry]

I would say I'm sorry

If I thought that it would change your mind

But I know that this time

I have said too much

Been too unkind

I tried to laugh about it

Cover it all up with lies

I tried to laugh about it

Hiding the tears in my eyes

'Cause boys don't cry

Boys don't cry

Alison Stewart: 13-year-old me listened to that a lot in my bedroom. Lol Tolhurst was childhood friends with bandleader Robert Smith, founder of The Cure in 1978 after being in bands together since '76, and joined us today to talk about his new book Goth: A History, which connects the goth dots from David Bowie to Nico to The Damned and everything else in between, including how The Cure fits in all of it. Lol will be speaking tonight at POWERHOUSE Arena in Brooklyn at 7:00 PM, but first, he joins us here in the WNYC Studios. It is so nice to have you.

Lol Tolhurst: Thank you, Alison. I'm glad to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to get you in on this conversation. Were you a goth kid? Are you still a goth kid? If so, what bands lured you in or maybe you consider yourself a goth? What about the music and the culture appeals to you? What does goth mean to you? Give us a call 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on air. You can also text us at that number as well. Social media is available to you as well @allofitwnyc. The subject today is goth. Before we get into the book, how do you define goth?

Lol Tolhurst: Well, it's not the way you look or the music you listen to. I'm going to say what it's not, first of all. It's not that. It's not even a subculture. It's more a way of looking at life and a way of dealing with the world. That's how I define it.

Alison Stewart: Like a philosophy?

Lol Tolhurst: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Goth music started in the UK in the '70s and '80s, but as you write in your book, obviously there's gothic architecture, there are the Goths who invaded the Roman Empire, there's gothic literature you write about. For folks who are interested in reading some of the forebearers of goth, as we think about it, who are some authors or works you think people could read?

Lol Tolhurst: Well, I make a list of the culprits that I particularly like. There are obvious things like Frankenstein with Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley, I found more fascinating than her more famous husband because she was like a proto-feminist back then and only really got recognized, I think, for that in the '80s. The first scholarly work about her came out in the '80s, but I think [unintelligible 00:04:48] it's like the themes of alienation you can find in people like Camus and Sartre and even with one of my personal favorites, Sylvia Plath, who wrote some brilliant poetry, but also, her only novel, The Bell Jar, was also a book that I found a lot of connection with. That's where I would start. That's where I did start, actually. I can't speak in the other terms, but yes, that's where I did start.

Alison Stewart: We interviewed the woman who wrote that 1,000-page biography of Sylvia Plath. She was a fascinating woman.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, totally, absolutely. Back in the early days of The Cure, I used to spend all my time, when I would be around here or in Boston something and tell Robert, hey, I think I saw her daughter. I'm sure, in the elevator, I saw her daughter. They go, no, no, no, Lol. It was just another one of my illusions. Yes, no, fascinating person in lots of ways.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure, we're discussing his book and other things, author of Goth: A History. Give us a call 212-433-9692. If you were someone who was lured in by goth music, what did it mean to you? How did it appeal to you? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also talk to us on social media @allofitwnyc. Goth music and culture was in part a response to Margaret Thatcher. What were people responding to, Lol?

Lol Tolhurst: Well, just before that really, it was punk. Punk was the thing that was the response to Thatcher, but there was a lot of social deprivation and everything in the late '70s. I can remember going with my mother to the post office every week to see the schedule for when the electricity was going to be turned off. This is in a modern society because things were getting very bad. There wasn't much to do for us, so out of that came punk. Punk was great because it knocked down all the doors, but then afterwards we were thinking, well, what else do we bring with us to make something different?

That's where goth and post-punk came in. That's where all the influences from literature and other art sources that we liked before punk and that-- we didn't throw those away, we brought those with us and made something different. There's some connections there that people don't often think about. For instance, 1977, the same year that The Clash put out their first album, was also the same year that Bowie put out Low, which is a pivotal album.

Alison Stewart: We actually have that queued up, we can talk about it a little bit.

Lol Tolhurst: Okay.

Alison Stewart: Let's play a little bit of Low, and we can talk about it on the other side. This is David Bowie.

[MUSIC - David Bowie: Always Crashing in the Same Car]

Every chance,

Every chance that I take

I take it on the road

Those kilometers and the red lights

I was always looking left and right

Oh, but I'm always crashing

In the same car

Alison Stewart: That's Always Crashing in the Same Car from the album Low, I should say.

Lol Tolhurst: Right.

Alison Stewart: How do you connect that track to the emergence of goth or the album?

Lol Tolhurst: There's several things in there. I listen to that record maybe at least still now once a month.

Alison Stewart: Oh really?

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, yes, and I get something from it different every time. I love Dennis Davis' drumming, for a start. That's something that influenced the sound I had on several records. Also, it's the lyrics, the lyrics on that album are sometimes obtuse because of the way that Bowie wrote, but they're also very vulnerable. That one particularly is a vulnerable song and Be My Wife. They're all songs that went against the grain of 1970s prog rock, natural lyrics, and misogynistic stuff. That was the change and that fed in from there. You combine that with the stuff that was coming out from The Clash and other bands in a similar vein, it was a real melting pot that brought everything together and allowed us to go somewhere different.

Alison Stewart: You also devote some time in the book to The Doors in a chapter called Prototype.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How are The Doors a prototype for the goth music that would come?

Lol Tolhurst: I live in California, I live in Los Angeles, have done for about 30 years now, which blows my mind. About two miles from where I live, there's a wall that goes around and the irony of it is not lost on me. It's a wall around the police station on Venice Beach, and it has Jim Morrison's poetry on the walls inscribed.

Alison Stewart: I know exactly what you mean.

Lol Tolhurst: Somebody said to me earlier today, I think it was your assistant, said to me about, oh well, is California goth? Absolutely, that's where I get the whole idea. Goth is not really about a place or a way of looking. It's about a way of being. To me, you listen to some of the early Doors stuff, well, there is only early Doors stuff, but you listen to The Doors and you can see the seeds of where things were going to go. Because he was a literate person, Jim Morrison. There's lots of connections. Where I live, I went to see a concert up in the Topanga Canyon and John Densmore was introducing it. He's still around and doing, and I could see he's still this wildly counterculture character, which is what I like. That's what I look in the music of goth. It's very alternative in the right way and counterculture, which is what I like.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure. The name of his new book is Goth: A History. Someone has texted to us, to me Goth is visceral, sonic exploration of the dark, depth of the human experience. It should give you goosebumps like the bass in early Cure does to me. I didn't understand the hype behind Bela Lugosi's Dead until I woke up in Paris with it stuck in my head. I've never listened to it the same again.

Lol Tolhurst: They don't say why they woke up in Paris with it stuck in their head.

Alison Stewart: I really do feel like there's another part of that story.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, that's a bit scary actually itself as you think about it, but no, they're right. A visceral reaction to something is better than no reaction. It sums it up in lots of ways.

Alison Stewart: You write about Bela Lugosi's Dead Bauhaus, and you said it's the first true gothic rock record?

Lol Tolhurst: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What makes this the one?

Lol Tolhurst: Well, because it does include things that are gothic like Peter Murphy is an extrapolation of this sort of gothic, campy character, but also, there's dub effects in it, which were very much a part of punk at the time because punk was mixed in, especially in London, with dub. It just came from the same source of music, so we understood that.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Sarah has called in from South Orange, New Jersey. Hi, Sarah. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Sarah: Hi. Thanks for having me. I've never called in, but I saw The Cure this Summer and it was the best show I think I've ever seen.

Lol Tolhurst: Wow.

Sarah: I went with my 17-year-old. I was interested because, I'm in my late 40s, as a kid, I was much more attracted to punk than goth, but none of the punk has stayed with me. The Cure always has, and what I noticed at that show was how they crosscut genres in a way that I don't think I appreciated as a kid. The other thing I noticed about that show is how many people there were my age with their kids, and my kid is 17. It was just a fantastic experience.

Alison Stewart: Sarah, thank you for calling in. See, we've been talking about punk a lot. You obviously loved punk as a kid, but you write in your book, personally, I was looking for something with a more spiritual, perhaps even mystical sensibility than the straight nihilism of punk.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What was it you were looking for in terms of the mystical? What was it about?

Lol Tolhurst: Well, I grew up as all of the kid did. I grew up Catholic, and that's a very heavy theatrical religion for those that don't know. To me, I still had a belief in something outside of myself, but I wasn't really struck with the religion. Therefore, it was a case of looking for something to believe in. That came through existentialism, that came through goth really, and post-punk thing. Like I said, the straight nihilism of punk was fine for getting things stirred up and starting again, but it didn't really take you any further. That's what I was after, and that's what we were after, to create something that meant something to us.

Alison Stewart: The punk was sort of the jump-starting of the car, but you needed fuel.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: You needed emotional and philosophical fuel.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, you needed something to base your reasons on.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Anne, calling in from Peekskill. Hi, Anne. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Anne: Oh, you're welcome. Love this show. I'm originally from Britain and I used to listen to David Bowie, he was my favorite, and then I got into The Clash. In 1976, my daughter was born, that was my first child. I had a boy a couple of years later. By the time we came to live here in the '80s, I was still listening to a lot of this music. My husband was traveling and loved The Doors. Anyway, by the time my daughter, who's now well into her 40s, when she got into high school, she became a huge Cure fan. We would both sit there listening to this stuff, and I just felt so proud that I had given my daughter the means to listen to this music and to enjoy it and really have the attitude that goes with it.

I think you're correct. Even though my son wore all the goth stuff and went to Nine Inch Nails concerts and stuff with his friends, she has the attitude, always has done. Now she's a professor and doing all the stuff. I hope she's talking about some of this stuff in her class, and that music that we listened to changed so many lives. I had lived under Thatcher, and it was just so good to get punk first and then your music. I still have Cure CDs that I still play, even though I'm 76.

Lol Tolhurst: Wow. Well, thank you very much.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for sharing that. That was so eloquent. My guest is Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure. We're talking about goth, we're talking about his book, Goth: A History. Lol will be at POWERHOUSE Arena in Brooklyn tonight at 7:00 PM. We'll continue this conversation if you'd like to join us about what goth has meant to you, what goth music's meant to you. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll have more with Lol after a quick break, and we'll go out on Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus.

[MUSIC - Bauhaus: Bela Lugosi's Dead]

White on white translucent black capes

Back on the rack

Bela Lugosi's dead

The bats have left the bell tower

The victims have been bled

Red velvet lines the black box

Bela Lugosi's dead

[music]

You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure, and the author of the new book, Goth: A History. Lol will be at POWERHOUSE Arena in Brooklyn tonight at 7:00 PM, but he's here with us now taking some questions, answering questions from me, and as from you as well. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, goth is the subject. In the book, you mentioned BBC host John Peel who played a lot of early punk, post-punk, goth rock. For people who don't know about John Peel, would you explain his role in bringing this music to the forefront?

Lol Tolhurst: Okay. I don't know how many people would know about it and that, but like Rodney Bingenheimer, who's still going and stuff, and that, there's a very similar kind of character. Peel just brought stuff to the fore that nobody else was going to play. Before punk he was playing things like Roxy Music and Bowie and stuff, which were avant-garde for then. No, he was just like, hey, here's the new music. Here's what you need to listen to. He'd play anything. People would send him cassettes, and he'd play them and stuff. Very pivotal figure.

Alison Stewart: Let's see, we got a text. I'm an elder goth who grew up on Long Island, who agrees completely that goth is a perspective on life as opposed to personal fashion. For me, being goth means living with a consistent awareness and respect for the looming presence of death in a culture that is hell-bent on denying its inevitability.

Lol Tolhurst: He's got a point there. Is it a he or a she?

Alison Stewart: Does not say.

Lol Tolhurst: Doesn't say. Okay, gender fluid, that's fine. I did a book event in Peru. I got invited to speak at this arts festival, and I met a woman, Kathryn Mannix, who's written a book-- well, several books about that very thing, that we avoid that question of it's going to happen to all of us, every single person. I said that. It was funny, the other night I did an event similar to the one I'm going to do tonight, and then I did one in London at Rough Trade, and I posited that question. I said, well, look, nobody in this room is getting out of here alive. It was this dead--

Alison Stewart: Dead silence.

Lol Tolhurst: Dead silence, yes. Sorry to make the pun, but it was like that. Everybody realized, yes, that's coming. One has to consider it. Getting back to goth, that's the reason that goth's important because it gets people to consider the darker sides of things. Once you see something and you can name it, it takes away its power. It takes away its fear element. That's what I'm interested in more than anything else. Take away the fear. Hey, this is going to happen to us all, so let's talk about it. Let's see what's going on here.

Alison Stewart: Can we talk to Christina on line two from Astoria? Hi, Christina. Thank you so much for calling in.

Christina: Hi. Wow, thanks for having me. This is a huge honor to be on for this show. First of all, I sent that text about Bella Lugosi in Paris. No more to that story, other than it was the sheer drama of it that I never really felt beforehand that just clicked. What I want to say in relation to that is that the bass in goth music, I feel like became really important. I feel like before goth came out, the bass didn't really play that same role. With punk, it's so treble and it's just guitar-driven or you have the drive on the bass, but then you have things like Bauhaus' Rosegarden Funeral of Sores and everything on 17 seconds. That bass is just unbelievable and was hugely influential to me as a bassist. I just don't know any other genre that's really used the bass like that. None has done it.

Lol Tolhurst: There is a connection with some punk, though. If you think about The Stranglers and Jean-Jacques Burnel, there's a place where it came from and then just got adapted a bit. I agree with you by and large.

Alison Stewart: We've got, Texas is listening to Alison Show. Just wanted to add that Dennis Davis, the drummer on David Bowie's Low, lived in Harlem and was an indelible part of Uptown Manhattan for many, many years. So was Edgar Allan Poe.

Lol Tolhurst: Wow.

Alison Stewart: Wait, you write about having a girlfriend named the Raven in the book.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes. I was having a slurp of coffee at that point, and it nearly ended up over the cup. That was not her real name, and I have no idea what her real name was, but we all called her the Raven because she looked like a raven. That was it.

Alison Stewart: There's a memoir-esque part of this book, very much so. Why did you want to bring that into the story?

Lol Tolhurst: Mainly because I struggled for the first year with this book trying to find my voice for it because I'm not a journalist and I don't want to be and I'm not a completist. I didn't want to make an encyclopedia of the thing. I wanted to explain. On my tours, I've met people and what they want to understand is the experience of being there. That's what I had to write about. That comes forth in my first book, Cured, the Memoir, but it also comes with this. I had to find a way to mingle the real stories with my opinions and thoughts as well. The other stories are not maybe so widely known.

Where I got that from was a Californian novelist and writer, Joan Didion. She wrote about a lot of counterculture things in the '60s and '70s. She did it in a way-- What was it called? New journalism. It was telling a story but in a much more interesting way to me. That's really the template I modeled some of my stuff on. She wrote some great stuff. I read a story about her and a dentist in San Bernardino that got killed by his wife. This reads like a noir novel.

Alison Stewart: There's a new Joan Didion book coming out. That's what I was just looking up. I think it might have just come out, in fact. I did want to talk about Siouxsie and the Banshees and Siouxsie Sioux. You write that she had to put up with so much as a woman in the music business. What did she have to contend with?

Lol Tolhurst: A lot of the late '70s, rock was a very chest-thumping misogynistic stuff, nonsense. I was thinking of another word I was going to say there, but I didn't say it.

Alison Stewart: Bless you.

Lol Tolhurst: She didn't really like that, but Sioux was great at just confounding people's expectations because they were expecting somebody very demure and she was far from demure. She would say what she thought, and if you didn't agree with her, you'd probably get thumped. She was great.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Cary is calling in from New York City. Hi, Cary. Thank you for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Cary: Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lol, for your career and all your work and the writing that you're doing to recount all these things. I grew up in a really small town in Texas in the '80s. It was so transformational to discover the music of The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cocteau Twins were another big favorite of mine. You have to stop for a moment and just imagine how remarkable it is that in the pre-internet age, how this kind of music would spread even in these small rural communities in the US like wildfire, and all of us who were outcasts looking for a community, and that we would find it through this music.

For me, it opened up my eyes in a way of saying, wow, if I've been missing out on this, in the top 40 music of the time, which you're led to believe in the radio world that that's maybe all that exists. When you find out that it's not, then all of a sudden you go on this journey in your life and you say, what else is out there that I'm not discovering? I think that's one of the reasons why for a lot of us that are fans today, it represents, in that sense, far more than just the music alone.

Lol Tolhurst: That was very eloquently put. I think that's exactly the truth. I remember talking to Trent Reznor. He grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, a little small town, he said, looking out over cornfields. The thing that gave him the wherewithal to want to do something was hearing this music come out of a college radio especially, and stuff. It is transformational.

Alison Stewart: We've got a text that says, interesting about religion, The Cure album and song that stay with you the most are Faith. The Cure brought the power of quiet, those very quiet sections of 10:15 Saturday Night were staring at the time. That and those four cores of a force so long copied still surface. Cure, Joy Division, early New Order, the philosophical side versus the Halloween side of goth were homeopathic for teen isolation.

Lol Tolhurst: Well, yes. The Halloween side, like I said in the book, I do actually know a guy in Portland who sleeps in a coffin and has bats flying around and that. That's the comic book side of it. It's not really what I identify with as goth.

Alison Stewart: I think I was watching an interview with your podcast host.

Lol Tolhurst: Oh, right, Budgie.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Budgie. Thank you, obviously. You made a comment I thought was so interesting. You said something along the lines that you think goth regenerates itself. How so? Where do you see it in 2023?

Lol Tolhurst: It is funny, I spent the last 40 years traveling around North America really a lot. I can go into any small town and I can spot the 5 or 10 kids that are going to be goth, or are goth, or about to become it. I think it regenerates itself because it's something that's going to happen to everybody going through that period, where you go from being a teen into an adult, and you start to question a lot of your beliefs and how you look at the world. Like your previous caller, it's something that helps you with those processes. That's why it keeps going and keeps regenerating. To me, there isn't another subculture genre, whatever you'd like to call it, that's gone on for as long, except maybe hip-hop.

Alison Stewart: There are parallels between goth and hip-hop, I think.

Lol Tolhurst: Right, exactly, there are. Therefore, I don't think it's going away anytime soon. It's going to just keep going and keep regenerating. It turns up everywhere, from Billie Eilish to who else, lots of things.

Alison Stewart: Your son helped research this book.

Lol Tolhurst: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Since we were talking about next generation, I'm curious what your conversations were like with him about that. Did he open your eyes to anything about goth that maybe you hadn't thought about before?

Lol Tolhurst: Yes, the thing is with, like if I talk to other people my age, some of them are open-minded still, and some of them go, oh, well, there's no good music around anymore, blah, blah, blah. I go, no, you're wrong. You just don't know where to look. You've forgotten where to find this stuff. I'm lucky, I can call my son up and go, hey, great. Tell me what I should be listening to. It works in the same way now as it worked before, except it's like, I don't know, not even more specific, but it's like, there's a slightly different route because there's the internet and everything else, but people still find it from their friends and bands. My son's been on the road a lot of last year and I went to a few of the shows and it's like, yes, it's the same thing getting transmitted along.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure. The name of the book is Goth: A History. Thank you so much for taking calls and for being in studio with us.

Lol Tolhurst: Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Charlotte Sometimes.

[MUSIC - The Cure: Charlotte Sometimes]

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Where all the other people dance

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Charlotte sometimes

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Expressionless the trance

Sometimes I'm dreaming

So many different names

Sometimes I'm dreaming

The sounds all stay the same

Sometimes I'm dreaming

She hopes to open shadowed eyes

On a different world

Come to me

Scared princess

Charlotte sometimes

On that bleak track

 

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