When Shelly Bond asked me to write about British goth in the 1980s for a new book, I knew it meant writing about Newcastle, and about what it was like to grow up an outsider in a city where football was the religion and looking different marked you as a target.
The book is subCULTURE: On In-Crowds & Outliers, a 128-page, 8.5 inch x 11 inch “hardcover collection of comics, photos & essays from smoky clubs to secret raves by misfits & provocateurs”. It’s on Kickstarter now.
If you read comics, you’ll know Shelly’s work even if you don’t know her name. Across two decades at DC’s Vertigo she edited Fables, The Invisibles and the comics-to-TV hits iZombie, Bodies and Lucifer, along with the Eisner-winning Bitter Root at Image. These days she runs Off Register Press with her husband, the artist Philip Bond, publishes new comics and prints, and teaches comics editing. Filth & Grammar, her guide to making comics, is worth your time on its own. subCULTURE is her thirteenth crowdfunded book, so she knows how to get one made and into your hands.
We tend to tell the story of British subculture through London, through the capital’s clubs and the faces visible in them, but it was really the story of outsiders in every city, making art in the shadows. Let’s be honest, you only ever had to take one trip to Camden to see that outsiders have always had an easier time in the big cities, where they had strength in numbers, than in the regions, where you stuck out like a sore thumb. I wanted to tell the story of British subcultures far away from the capital.
Growing up in a former mining village outside Newcastle, the only cultural references anyone shared were football, and by the 1990s, rave and Britpop. Long hair on a boy counted as social deviance. During my teenage years, every trip out of the house came with someone shouting MMMBop at me, or singing “I wanna be a hippy and I wanna get stoned”, always with the implication that if I laughed along, they’d be right to kick my head in, and if I ignored them, they’d be justified in knocking my teeth out.
What changed everything for me was the summer of 1998: travelling to Ozzfest in June, my first festival, followed by my first trip to the Mayfair nightclub, where I met the people I’d spend the rest of my life with. Alternative music was the key that unlocked all of it, and wearing the band t-shirts that signalled where you belonged carried the same public risk the long hair did. That’s the world Shelly asked me to write about, which I hope will be recognisable to anyone who found their tribe through music, before we all lost ourselves in the endless scroll.
You can (and should) back subCULTURE on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sxbond/subculture
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Oh, great! I'm in this too. I toyed with the idea of doing something about punks in small northern towns, still doing it years after London decided it was done. I'm glad I didn't, now, and I can just read your firsthand account of being a goth in much the same environment instead.