British punk-rock was flanked from the beginning by a "gothic" movement. The violence and the frenzy of the Sex Pistols were channeled by these "dark punks" into atmospheres and tones that were meant to evoke horror scenes and exoteric rituals. The Stranglers and Siouxsie Sioux (1) were among the bands that started the fire. It wasn't much of a fire, and even Siouxie's most innovative album, The Scream (1978), was mainly a catalog of embarrassing cliches.

Far more abrasive was the sound of X-Ray Spex (1) on their only album, Germfree Adolescents (1978), thanks to the barbaric screams of vocalist Poly Styrene (Marion Elliot) and to the dissonant saxophone of Lora Logic (Susan Whitby).

The more interesting acts of "dark punk" were the ones that sculpted a similarly gloomy and bleak sound but shunned the cartoonish, horror-movie overtones. Notably, the Cure (3) introduced existential anguish (the kind found in Camus' and Sartre's books) into rock'n'roll. Three Imaginary Boys (1979) actually features a deadly cocktail of cynical hyper-realism, macabre expressionism and morbid paranoia. Pornography (1982) capitalized on those premises with a philosophical journey to the center of a fragile, romantic soul (vocalist and guitarist Robert Smith). After the pop conversion of the sprawling but inferior Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987), the Cure reached their zenith of pathos on Disintegration (1989), that balances Smith's pedantic preaching with heavily arranged pieces that sound like symphonic poems.

The two albums cut by Joy Division (2), Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), before vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide and the band evolved into New Order, coined a new kind of gothic, decadent, futuristic and psychedelic rock, and offered an unlikely mixture of Doors, Kraftwerk and Black Sabbath. Eerie melodies, funereal tempos, electronic arrangements and otherworldly dissonances interpreted the industrial wasteland as a personal nightmare. Their career ended with Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980), which was the beginning of a new genre: synth-pop.

Despite its artistic limitations, the genre found a broad audience. Cavernous sound, icy voice, loud drums, martial pace, distorted guitars became as ubiquitous as the rants of the punk-rockers. Existential boredom and suicidal tendencies moved to the forefront, displacing rebellion as the main attraction of punk-rock. The same morbid sensibility inspired bands as different as the Passions, Theatre of Hate (who later evolved into Spear Of Destiny), and the Comsat Angels.

Thankfully, other musicians went beyond the "darkness" and coined new musical languages that were no less depressed but far more creative. They twisted the elements of rock music to manufacture a sense of loss and desolation.

The macabre, magniloquent psychodramas of Bauhaus (1), from the acid-tribal psychobilly Bela Lugosi's Dead (1979) to Lagartija Nick (1982) via the morbid sound effects of In The Flat Field (1980) and especially via the electronic dance pop of Mask (1981), painted the most suffocating atmospheres.

Killing Joke (2) were less mental and more physical than Bauhaus: the dissonant, tribal, apocalyptic spasms of their early singles, such as Requiem (1979) and Wardance (1979), and of their first album, Killing Joke (1980), were as powerful as Pere Ubu's "modern dance". Like the rest of the gothic contingent, during the 1980s Killing Joke wasted their talent setting their visions to a dance beat, but Martin Atkins eventually refounded and revitalized the band with the thundering and barbaric sound of Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions (1990).

The Psychedelic Furs (1) set the gothic element at the border between Roxy Music's decadent spleen, the Velvet Underground's acid threnodies and Van Der Graaf Generator's futuristic melodrama. The result, particularly on Talk Talk Talk (1981), was sophisticated as well as haunting.

All of this was easily topped by the most eccentric of all "dark" bands, the Virgin Prunes (2), that came from Ireland with a completely different approach to "gothic", an approach that mixed archaic rituals with avantgarde music. Their grotesque Grand Guignol regressed from the grotesque and hallucinated expressionistic theater of A New Form Of Beauty (1982) to the demonic rituals of Heresie (1982) to the pagan folk-rock of If I Die I Die (1982).

The idea peaked with the abstract, conceptual, dub-drenched sound of Public Image Ltd (21), the band formed by Johnny "Rotten" Lydon after the Sex Pistols split up, and featuring bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene. First Issue (1978) announced a new form of music: ponderous rhythm, distorted guitar, demented screams. Second Edition (1979) is the album that turned punk-rock into chamber music. By slowing down the tempo in a vein similar to dilated acid-rock, and sprinkling Lydon's psychotic monologues with deformed echoes of Jamaican, Middle Eastern and African music, the combo injected a disturbing sense of loneliness and fear into their extended, loosely-structured pieces. That praxis reached claustrophobic intensity on Flowers Of Romance (1981), an album featuring Martin Atkins on drums but lacking Wobble on bass. Lydon's muezzin-like invocations played a "call and response" game with an expanded ethnic instrumentation that felt equally at home with funk syncopation and found noise. The album's funereal lieder roamed Freudian and exoteric labyrinths. Lydon, bard of the psychic depression, set his nihilistic lyrics to a harrowing maelstrom of estranged sounds.

As dance clubs around the country adopted the depressed mood and the freakish look, a more danceable sound was concocted by the new generation of gothic punk-rockers.

The Sisters Of Mercy (1) were probably the greatest and the most influential of this generation. Their lugubrious, demonic voodoobilly, inspired by Suicide and Cramps but propelled by panzer machines, had no equals. Coupled with that instrumental frenzy, Andrew Eldritch's Morrison-ian vocals created a tension that was both stately and devastating. The culmination of their career and the culmination of gothic rock was Temple Of Love (1983), their most visionary and propulsive ceremony. Floodland (1987) added a futuristic and oppressive sound, courtesy of Jim Steinman.

Other horror bands included: Alien Sex Fiend (1), whose album Who's Been Sleeping In My Brain (1983) was more demented than macabre rockabilly, the catastrophic Fields Of The Nephilim, the romantic Gene Loves Jezebel, the savage Sex Gang Children .

Gothic 1984-86

Ian Astbury's Cult and Wayne Hussey's Mission wed the sinister overtones of dark-punk with Led Zeppelin's old-fashioned hard-rock. The former were derivative of AC/DC, Cream, Free, Led Zeppelin, Doors and Rolling Stones, although the symbiosis worked wonders in Spiritwalker (1984), She Sells Sanctuary (1985) and Love Removal Machine (1987), and eventually became stars of heavy-metal.

In The Nursery (2), i.e. twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone, were unique in that they interpreted gothic in the tradition of classical music and electronic music. The duo mixed Klaus Schulze's cosmic music and Constance Demby's new-age music and progressed, over a number of formative works, notably the EPs Temper (1985) and Trinity (1987) and the single Compulsion (1987), plus two albums, towards a synthesis of old-fashioned musical idioms, such as teutonic romanticism and central European decadence. Their favorite form, perfected and streamlined on their third album, Koda (1988), used a synthetic orchestra to emulate Wagner's magniloquence over a martial tempo a` la Holst's Mars. The music, clearly more inspired by the classical than the rock tradition, had a melancholy, visionary and sometimes nostalgic quality. Their symphonic staccatos, that indulged in horns and strings, were embellished with collages of samples. Further simplifying their compositions, In The Nursery produced more accessible works such as L'Esprit (1990), and eventually became a case of pompous synth-pop.

Theomania (1988) by the Cassandra Complex offered vehement psychobilly halfway between Suicide and the Velvet Underground.

While mostly a British genre, dark-punk eventually spread to continental Europe too (for example, La Muerte in Belgium and Brighter Death Now in Sweden).

The terror expressed by these bands was the other side of the cynical rage of the punk-rockers. They were two different perspectives on the same vision of life, on the same nervous breakdown. Except that "dark punk" focused on loneliness, apathy, claustrophobia, paranoia, and, ultimately, on the need for a cathartic apocalypse.

Gothic hardcore 1980-86

Los Angeles' punk-rock scene briefly experienced a gothic resurgence which paralleled British dark-punk. While it did not amount to much, bands such as Urinals, 45 Grave, Alex Gibson's Bpeople, T.S.O.L. (True Sounds Of Liberty), Kommunity Fk dusted off the graveyards visited a few years earlier by the likes of Joy Division and Siouxsie Sioux.

Few albums stood out. One of the earliest gothic bands, the Flesh Eaters (1), led by the literate and visionary Chris Dejardins (the "Divine Horseman"), recorded A Minute To Pray A Second To Die (1981), featuring the Blasters's Dave Alvin and X's John Doe, an album that sounds more like Poe-like poetry set to roots-rock than a punk album.

Christian Death (1), the sinister creature of vocalist Rozz Williams, penned the arcane, atmospheric ballads of Only Theatre Of Pain (1982), which would be influential on the future of gothic rock.

Gothic music was virtually reinvented by Black Tape For A Blue Girl (13), the brainchild of keyboardist Sam Rosenthal. Mesmerized By The Sirens (1987) was the manifesto of his electronic chamber music, while Ashes In The Brittle Air (1989) signaled Rosenthal's increasing reliance on electronic keyboards. A Chaos Of Desire (1991) was the first full realization of his vision, a magical balance of orchestration and voices, of pathos and contemplation, a cycle of baroque ballads for chamber ensemble and atmospheric electronics that was appropriate for both Freudian nightmares and Greek tragedies. As the music became more ethereal and displayed a stronger neoclassical quality on This Lush Garden Within (1993), Rosenthal coined an art of mental paintings with the imposing Remnants Of A Deeper Purity (1996). Its melancholy madrigals, set in bleak and desolate landscapes, and performed with the austere aplomb of sacred music, downplayed the litanies and emphasized the drones replacing the sense of eternal damnation with a sense of eternal mystery. The experiment begun with this album's five-movement concerto For You Will Burn Your Wings Upon The Sun was pursued on As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire (1998), which reached even deeper into the human psyche. The sumptuous beauty of The Scavenger Bride (2002) marked a culmination of this program of progressive emancipation from musical conventions.