Goths: they were right all along. Photograph: Rex Features
I had it all wrong about goths.
In my youth, I dismissed them as the moody freaks who sat around the stone cider press just off the High Street (which was as close as they could get to a gravestone and had the added bonus of being dedicated to their tipple of choice). But I was far too quick to judge. It takes a degree of maturity to realise we're all moody freaks anyway, to accept it and move on. And their music was bloody brilliant.
I never really got into Bauhaus until after they'd split (being 11 at the time, I was more into Wham!). But after hearing Bela Lugosi's Dead in a nightclub, I found myself having to reassess my lazy preconceptions. This wasn't the doom and gloom dirge I'd expected of them: this was something thrilling and entirely new, even if I was hearing it almost 10 years after it was recorded.
While Ashes to Ashes and endless reality TV shows are giving us a rosy-eyed false memory of the early 80s, it's worth remembering how much depth there was to popular culture at the time. It's little wonder that Bauhaus inspired not only a generation of musicians, but also a generation of pretentious journalists as well. Now, after a lengthy reunion tour, the band has finally recorded a new album, Go Away White, which is released today. Previews have been available on their MySpace page, with exclusive videos available through iTunes and a fancy new landing page to their official website that looks like it was inspired by a resurrection scene in World of Warcraft.
It's all terribly exciting. But that's just the half of it. The return of Bauhaus also heralds the return of another great 80s tradition: the "Cathedral of Sound" school of journalism. At least if the copy from this ad - which appeared over the weekend in the national papers - is anything to go by:
"Bauhaus unintentionally birthed a genre (Goth), moved on, moved forward and surged mercurial through the post-punk music scene, tearing into tense, stark, dub-bass driven new-wave, T-Rex-esque glam, and swirling, clattering, orchestral atmospherics, whilst churning it all into a grand velvet, Rimbaudian hallucination. It was a wild, inspired, enthralling sound. And it still is..."
To paraphrase someone else who was big in 1982; let's just rejoice in that fact.
