Lesung: John Rob “Goth - Die dunkle Seite des Punk”

In the organizer's words:

Admission: 7 pm

Start: 8 pm

A comprehensive overview of Goth music and subculture.
John Robb's latest work provides a comprehensive overview of Goth music and subculture and its continuing relevance today.
In this fundamental work, Robb describes the social, political and pop-cultural contexts from which a new, independent youth culture developed in Great Britain from the late 1970s and then in the early mid-1980s after and parallel to punk and post-punk. This initially remained nameless and was then referred to as Goth. As a contemporary companion of this subculture, Robb describes the peculiarities of this "art of darkness", which on the one hand - consciously or unconsciously - drew on cultural influences, some of which went back a long way, and on the other hand drew on glam, psychedelic, rock'n'roll, punk and post-punk, thus establishing its own tradition.

Robb writes about the distant origins of the Goth phenomenon: the fall of Rome and the Goths, Lord Byron and the Romantic poets, European folk tales, vampires, Gothic architecture and painting, the occult and spans the arc to today's Instagram and TikTok phenomena.

As a music journalist, Robb can draw on a huge pool of original material and, in individual chapters based on interviews, describes in detail the key bands such as The Sisters Of Mercy, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cult, Joy Divsision, The Cramps, New Model Army, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Damned, Einstürzende Neubauten, Laibach, The Cure, Theatre Of Hate, Virgin Prunes, Fields Of The Nephilim, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and many others.

Although Goth in its origins was primarily a British phenomenon with worldwide appeal, Robb also goes into detail about how Goth gained a foothold in other European countries (Germany, France, Yugoslavia ...) and the slightly delayed triumph of Goth in the USA and the footsteps followed by the bands there.

"Goth - Die dunkle Seite des Punk" (Goth - The Dark Side of Punk) is an enormously detailed basic work for anyone who wants to know more about a pop-culture phenomenon that is still omnipresent today.

To be published by Ventil Verlag in spring 2025.