page_title: Gothic rock
section_title: Origins and early development
hierarchical_section_title: Gothic rock / History / Origins and early development
caption_attribution_description: English: Bauhaus performing, August 2006
context_page_description: Gothic rock is a style of rock music that emerged from post-punk in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. The first post-punk bands which shifted towards dark music with gothic overtones include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus, and the Cure.
  The genre itself was defined as a separate movement from post-punk. Gothic rock stood out due to its more dark sound, with minor or bass chords, reverbs, dark arrangements or dramatic and melancholic melodies, having inspirations in gothic literature allied with themes such as sadness, existentialism, nihilism, dark romanticism, tragedy, melancholy and morbidity. These themes are often approached in a poetic way. The sensibilities of the genre led the lyrics to represent the evil of the century and the romantic idealization of death and the supernatural imagination. Gothic rock then gave rise to a broader goth subculture that included clubs, fashion and publications in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
context_section_description: Critic John Stickney used the term "gothic rock" to describe the music of the Doors in October 1967, in a review published in The Williams Record. Stickney wrote that the band met the journalists "in the gloomy vaulted wine cellar of the Delmonico hotel, the perfect room to honor the gothic rock of the Doors". The author noted that contrary to the "pleasant, amusing hippies", there was "violence" in their music and a dark atmosphere on stage during their concerts.
  In the late 1970s, the word "gothic" was used to describe the atmosphere of post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine and Joy Division. In a live review about a Siouxsie and the Banshees' concert in July 1978, critic Nick Kent wrote that concerning their performance, "parallels and comparisons can now be drawn with gothic rock architects like the Doors and, certainly, early Velvet Underground". In March 1979, Kent used the gothic adjective in his review of Magazine's second album, Secondhand Daylight. Kent noted that there was "a new austere sense of authority" to their music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound". The second Siouxsie and the Banshees album, also released in 1979, was a precursor in several aspects. For journalist Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, "A lot of musical signifiers [...] – scything, effects-laden guitar, pounding tribal drums – are audible, on [...] Join Hands". In September, Joy Division's manager Tony Wilson described their music as "gothic" on the television show Something Else, and their producer Martin Hannett described their style as "dancing music with gothic overtones". In 1980, Melody Maker wrote that "Joy Division are masters of this gothic gloom". When their final album Closer came out a couple of months after the death of their singer, Sounds noted in its review that there were "dark strokes of gothic rock".
  Not long after, this appellation "became a critical term of abuse" for a band like Bauhaus, who had arrived on the music scene in 1979. At the time, NME considered that "Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam and the Ants and even by Joy Division" opened up "a potentially massive market" for newcomers like Bauhaus and Killing Joke: however, critic Andy Gill separated these two groups of bands, pointing out that there was a difference "between art and artifice". 
  However, Bauhaus's debut single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", released in late 1979, was retrospectively considered to be the beginning of the gothic rock genre. According to Peter Murphy, the song was written to be tongue-in-cheek, but since the group performed it with "naive seriousness", that is how the audience understood it. In the early 1980s, post-punk bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure included more gothic characteristics in their music. According to Reynolds, with their fourth album, 1981's Juju, the Banshees introduced several gothic qualities, lyrically and sonically, whereas according to The Guardian, Juju was art rock on certain album tracks and pop on the singles. Their bassist, Steven Severin, attributed the aesthetic used by the Banshees around that time to the influence of the Cramps. The Cure’s "oppressively dispirited" trio of albums, Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982), cemented that group's stature in the genre. The line "It doesn't matter if we all die" began the Pornography album, which is considered as "the Cure's gothic piece de resistance". They would later become the most commercially successful of these groups. The Cure's style was "withdrawn", contrasting with their contemporaries like Nick Cave's first band, the Birthday Party, who drew on blues and spastic, violent turmoil. With the Birthday Party's Junkyard album, Nick Cave combined "sacred and profane" things, using Old Testament imagery with stories about sin, curses and damnation. Their 1981 single "Release the Bats" was particularly influential in the scene.
  Killing Joke were originally inspired by Public Image Ltd., borrowing from funk, disco, dub and, later, heavy metal. Calling their style "tension music", Killing Joke distorted these 
caption: Gothic rock band Bauhaus performing live in August 2006
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