Cherry Red have just announced details of a gargantuan and possibly essential genre-defining study of the early days of goth, spread across five CDs.
There have bee plenty of goth compilations before of course, but Silhouettes and Statues – A Gothic Revolution 1978 -1986 smartly avoids all the cliched tracks, and unearths some obscure songs and performers as well as the familiar names (represented by less familiar tracks). While the hardened goth might know all this stuff only too well, for the rest of us, this looks like a fascinating bit of archeology.
Among the acts represented are the usual suspects – The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, The Damned, Joy Division, The Mission, Fields of the Nephilim, Bauhaus and the like – and lesser known acts like Rema-Rema, In the Nursery, Screaming Dead and Tabatha’s Nightmare. With over 80 tracks and an 18000 word book, this looks like the ultimate goth primer / nostalgia trip. We’ll be digging into it further in due course.
Release date: June 30th 2017.
