The Guardian just published an entertaining, if meandering, story on the enduring strength of current Gothic culture. The pop culture piece is done in the partial guise of and interview with Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim on how they manage to keep selling out gigs, but branches out into a more cohesive cultural investigation with additional interview bits from various characters within the scene. It talks about parenting and social class and style in a more reasonable and open minded tone than we usually see. Sure, there are still a few quips about aging less than gracefully, gaining weight, and losing hair (because we all know newspaper writers and editors always maintain the height of fitness and appearance – so they obviously have room to judge, right?) I liked that Goth was presented as something people could be into as a facet of their life, without being pitched as an all encompassing lifestyle dogma.
…But there’s one topic on which McCoy becomes positively voluble: the band’s fans, who have seen Fields of the Nephilim through a turbulent history – McCoy is currently the only surviving member of the original lineup – and who still pack out the Ceromonies. No, he says, he doesn’t mind Fields of the Nephilim being labelled a goth band. “I see that as a label the followers have given themselves. It’s a brilliant following. We’re quite lucky, they’ve stayed with us and grown. We do this festival in Leipzig in Germany and the whole town is taken over for a week – the whole town – by these people draped in black, wonderful, massive, dramatic clothes. It’s fantastic.”
Read the full story here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/26/goth-life-fields-nephilim
Posted by
You must be logged in to post a comment Login