The following is an online version of a presentation I made at the UK Ghost Story Festival on November 26th 2021. The festival was organised and hosted by Alex Davis, and held at QUAD in Derby. I was invited to give an hour-long illustrated lecture before a live audience, and elected to talk about the use of supernatural and ghostly content and themes in the song lyrics, music, image, and sleeve design of the post-punk era, roughly covering the period 1978 to 1983.
Hello, welcome to Post-Punk Phantoms. I’m Darrell, and I’m going to kick off our session by reading one of the best English horror stories of the past fifty years.
Some of you may recognise that, as being a slightly adapted and smoothed out spoken version of ‘The Impression of J. Temperance’, side two track one of ‘Grotesque (After the Gramme), the classic 1980 LP by The Fall. They have been my personal favourite group since the late 70s, and I’ll be talking more about their lead vocalist Mark E Smith and his ghostly obsessions later on.
My name is Darrell Buxton, for those who don’t know me. I’m from Derby, I’m a local film scriptwriter, I’m the editor of the BHF Books of Horror Stories series of paperback anthologies, I’m a freelance lecturer and a regular member of QUAD’s Cine-Lit podcast team. You may have attended my session on Ghost Stories adapted to film in the 2019 UK Ghost Story Festival, and Alex kindly asked me back to present something this year – so here we are. The subject of post-punk popped into my head and just wouldn’t go away when Alex suggested that I do an hour here this time round, and after dismissing it several times I finally concluded that it might after all make an intriguing topic.
I’m from the post-punk generation, very much my era, I was hearing and buying new LPs by Public Image Ltd, Joy Division, Echo & The Bunnymen and many others as they came out, reading NME almost like a Bible, listening to John Peel on school nights and work nights; I’d been a punk fan in my early teens, and I think that older generations, parents etc might have read all the outrage in the newspapers about punk and expected that to be full of violence and monstrosity, whereas in reality it was a particularly strong outlet for social and political ideas and statements. It was post-punk that took on a more ethereal, atmospheric, uncanny pallor, with the next generation of musicians and songwriters seemingly having precisely the same influences as the rest of us late 70s teens – we’d all watched Doctor Who, Children of the Stones, late night horror films on BBC2 on Saturday nights or on ATV on a Friday, and we even had our own post-punk spooky show, between 1979 and 1982 – didn’t Sapphire & Steel resemble a cool, unapproachable post-punk duo, pitched somewhere between Dollar and Sophie & Peter Johnston? And score a bonus point if you know who Sophie & Peter Johnston are.
We’re mainly talking about the era from about 1978 to 1983, but I will possibly stray beyond that on occasion. I’m going to play you a few brief song extracts from that time right now.
The connection between these four songs, all recorded between 1980 and early1982? They all have the same title. ‘Ghosts’. Yes, in almost every case the word is used metaphorically rather than overtly, but I use this to illustrate just how supernatural themes seeped into the post punk universe. And aren’t ghosts metaphors anyway? Don’t you writers use them as such in your fiction?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zzLU1ato2w Ghosts - Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAX2cWkKylA Ghosts - The Jam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXunDLMeP0Y Ghosts - Toyah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5VHuopWF6A Ghosts - Positive Noise
This of course is the UK Ghost Story festival, and you may have fixed ideas about what a ‘story’ constitutes. But punk and post-punk were all about challenging norms, adapting, changing the accepted nature of art and design, and music fans and journalists had already been telling us for years that Bob Dylan and John Lennon and any number of your own favourites were the new poets and storytellers, so the notion that a simple pop song could also be a ghost story was ripe for further exploration by the 80s. Perhaps I ought to even mention ‘Ernie the Fastest Milkman in the West’ by Benny Hill at this point! I have to confess, the rattling of Ernie’s crate creeped out nine-year-old me something awful in 1971! But right there is a great example of a pop tune that doubles as a fantastic ghost tale, and I use the word fantastic in every sense.
Punk itself did offer the occasional genre themed outing amid all of the inner city angst and social comment – there’s Gary Gilmore’s Eyes by the Adverts, for instance, which author and critic Kim Newman recently compared to the 1924 movie The Hands of Orlac, with its theme of transplanted body parts taking control of their new recipient – in this case, the eyes of executed American murderer Gilmore being donated but the newly-sighted owner pondering whether they will be able to witness what the killer saw.
As always with new musical or artistic movements, it’s difficult to say when they begin. You could argue that groups like Van der Graaf Generator or King Crimson were playing exactly the same sort of material as the post-punk acts, seven or eight years before punk. The first band I’ll take a look at, then, are firmly associated with the first wave of punk rock and even had Sid Vicious as a member for a while, but famously didn’t get a record deal until 1978, and markedly played music and presented lyrics that were decidedly different to the competition. Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Think about that band name. Think about the titles of their first two LPs, The Scream and Join Hands, with possible séance associations and certainly with a horror sensibility. By 1981 they were recording a thoroughly voodoo/tribal themed album, again with the telling title Ju-Ju, and their singles, b-sides, and album tracks included titles such as The Staircase (Mystery), Voices, Halloween, Voodoo Dolly, Spellbound, and plenty more in the same vein. Siouxsie’s look was widely imitated, initially mainly by female fans or music scene copyists, but eventually by guys too – by 1979 we had Bauhaus recording ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, the prototype for what became known as ‘goth’ although oddly that movement didn’t really explode until around 1983-84, and Bauhaus’ Pete Murphy as well as the later likes of Andrew Eldritch from the Sisters of Mercy were raiding the same make-up box as Siouxsie.
But the Banshees offered something besides the spooky song titles and the Addams Family eyeliner. And I’m going to diverge at this point and talk about the John Peel radio show in the mid 1970s. Peely was renowned for playing the music that other DJs didn’t, and it was largely down to him that Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Faces, Black Sabbath etc got a foothold in the music biz. By about 1975 Peel started to get a bit fed up with playing so called progressive music, and was vocal about it too. He began searching for other material, and this coincided with the rise of reggae music in Jamaica, which he took to with great fervour, despite alienating a huge percentage of his listeners!
Undaunted, he continued to play reggae records for the remainder of his life and broadcasting career – and I’d suggest that the stripped down dub versions of reggae tracks caught on with a younger white audience, loving the spacious, echoing, skeletal feel of this new music. In fact, that happened to me, so I’m sure other listeners responded in the same way. Reggae lyrics weren’t averse to the supernatural either, so the combination of ghostly or monstrous themes with the dank dungeon sound of dub really caught on with us Ghost Story For Christmas and Children of the Stones fans. Here’s a couple of quick spooky-themed excerpts for you, the Lee Perry-produced Vampire by Devon Irons, and Bob Marley’s use of ghost-hunting as a metaphor for a sense of personal achievement, escape, fighting against adversity, freedom, in Duppy Conqueror..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RposLTwQHfg Vampire - Devon Irons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yy29XUsceU Duppy Conqueror - Bob Marley
The Banshees, certainly in their early line up featuring Steve Severin’s doomy bass, Kenny Morriss’ thumping drums, and John McKay on guitar, were one of the late 70s acts that seemed to pick up on Jamaican dub, not in an overt way but by developing its mannerisms and codes into their own scratchy, skeletal European style. McKay is the best guitarist I’ve ever heard, and something of an enigma – he and Morriss walked out on the Banshees before the end of the seventies, and were barely heard from again. John McKay’s style of playing is utterly unique to my ears, not that I’m a musician or have a professional understanding, but I know what I like – and he achieves a particularly weird, uncanny feel within the sparseness and sometimes repetitive nature of his playing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv2tG2Pm8vQ - Voices - Siouxsie & The Banshees
The Staircase (Mystery) - Siouxsie & The Banshees
Wouldn’t Voices be great on the soundtrack of something like The Legend of Hell House? And doesn’t The Staircase evoke that 1930s style of horror? You can imagine this music on an old black and white cartoon with Betty Boop being haunted by spooks. Not too far removed from ‘Ghost Town’, The Specials’ 1981 chart topping hit, in that respect.
So yeah, I want to emphasize here that music and sound can tell ‘a ghost story’ just as well as words and song lyrics can, and post-punk recognised that – you could create an eerie air out of tom-tom style percussion, heavy bass, sparse use of guitar, odd unusual instrumentation – experimental musicians began introducing elements such as childrens’ toys to create sound, the Banshees’ own very disturbing track ‘Mother’ features just Siouxsie’s voice, some weird reverberating background noises, and a tinkling music box that gradually and terrifyingly winds down and gets slower and slower. Suddenly, you didn’t need to be MR James to raise the hair on the back of the collective public’s neck. You could achieve the effect wordlessly, with a tambourine or clanking wood blocks or a detuned guitar or a synthesiser.
Banshees copyists were surprisingly thin on the ground, but the early work of the Scottish pop group Altered Images was immersed in their sound. They began as Banshees copyists who became TOTP friendly popsters, but this debut single is thrilling – a truly strange theme about forgotten teenage idol posters on the bedroom walls of adolescents, crying and calling from the ether in desperation not to be dismissed or cast into the past. A unique piece of horror fiction in which the ghost is not the ghost of a dead person, but that of a former fan’s now-dead idolization, which is an utterly extraordinary take on afterlife themes – that an emotion can die just as a physical being can, and that it is capable of protest and wailing lamentation – via this song, though of course not in the head of the fan who has ditched or outgrown their ex-favourite pop singer. Brilliantly co-opts the line ‘hello hello I’m back again’ from the Gary Glitter song of the same name – turning it from a brash fanfare of an announcement into something altogether more anxious and distressed; and of course, with the passage of forty years and what we know now, that all also takes on a creepiness and an insidious quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO37FT2gT20 Dead Pop Stars - Altered Images
Joy Division were another band who messed around with conventional structure. Yes, they were a traditional four piece, singer, drummer, guitarist and bass player – but, sonically taking tips from Black Sabbath, the Groundhogs, and immediate peers like the Banshees, they aimed for a sound apart from that of their contemporaries, and achieved it simply by reversing the roles of the bass guitar and the so-called ‘lead guitar’. Peter Hook’s rumbling bass became the core of their music, the driving force – it was him playing the ‘tunes’, the main riffs and motifs, while Bernard Sumner, never the world’s most technically gifted guitarist even to this day, used that inexperience to his own vast advantage by taking inspiration from dub reggae and often staying out of Hooky’s way, stabbing in occasionally with jarring, disquieting chords that could pop up unexpectedly at any time. Add yet another of post-punk’s thumping drummers, another Morris - Stephen - and Ian Curtis on doom-laden vocals and lyrics, and we had the group that became the face of post-punk, its poster boys, and ultimately its central tragedy. Their second and final LP is called ‘Closer’, but I wonder whether we’ve been pronouncing that correctly over the years. Maybe it should have a harder ‘S’ and read ‘Clozer’.
Post-punk, by its very nature, as a commentator on a changing British landscape amid starkness and desolation, almost demanded a sacrifice, and in Ian Curtis, dead by the age of 23, we got one. As often pointed out, the lyrics of ‘New Dawn Fades’ – and what a giveaway title that is – almost acted as a suicide note. Joy Division could play in a strident manner, even confident at times, but there was always a sense of unease and something uncontrollable and bleak lurking within, again giving their material the air of a classic ghost tale, maybe with a bit of futuristic joylessness a la a JG Ballard or Philip K Dick added in. This is all best exemplified on their song ‘Dead Souls’, seemingly rampant and yet with a nagging air of doubt laced through it, an ever-present feeling of something haunting and not-quite-as-it-should-be, and that worryingly repetitive chorus where Curtis states over and over again “they keep calling me”. Following Curtis’ suicide, the band members reconvened as New Order and set off on a fresh pathway of Ibiza-friendly electronica, quite a surprise shift from the previous doom and gloom, almost a complete 180 degree reaction to the tragedy. However, on their 1985 Low-Life LP, opening track ‘Love Vigilantes’ actually has a proper story narrative – the lyrics tell of a soldier returning from Vietnam, revealing that his wife has been sent a letter informing her that he has been killed in combat. She in turn kills herself and he finds her body when he arrives home. Is he a ghost? Or has the news of his death been sent in error? The song is left purposely ambiguous, in terms of his death and also whether his wife is dead or is simply on the floor crying. Give it a listen at home and decide for yourselves.
In 2002 director Michael Winterbottom and star Steve Coogan joined forces to tell the story of Tony Wilson’s Factory Records label in the film 24 Hour Party People. It often plays as a grand fantasy – we see Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks and Magazine time-travelling, we join Bez from Happy Mondays as he sees a UFO, we discover that God has been created in the image of Tony Wilson. But there’s a scene towards the end of the movie where we see a crowd of revellers cramming the heaving dance floor at the label’s famous Hacienda club. And among the throng, we see the ghost of Ian Curtis and the ghost of Joy Division’s maverick producer Martin Hannett. It’s a perfect image and sums up their sound, their legend, and their legacy.
It’s worth mentioning Chris Petit’s 1979 movie, RADIO ON, at this point – a stark black and white British road movie with a strong association with post-punk. There’s one particular scene in RADIO ON where guest star Sting plays a strange roadside garage employee who is obsessed with Eddie Cochran and works – or rather, spends all day playing the guitar when he should be working – very close to the spot where Cochran died in 1960. I’ve always thought that Sting might be playing the ghost of Cochran, or at least a man possessed by his restless spirit. Petit has suggested that RADIO ON would make a good double bill partner for THE INNOCENTS, and has said of his own film “RADIO ON was essentially a posthumous exercise, ghosts moving through haunted landscapes. Even the cast became ghosts of their own careers, myself included, with the exception of Sting, who vanished so far into the stratosphere that he became an unreal entity, even more ghostlike than the rest of us”.
Other groups on the Factory Records label dabbled in similar territory – the early work of A Certain Ratio is virtually interchangeable with that of Joy Division, and I refer you to their brilliant 1980 single ‘Flight’ which might just be the best record of the post punk era, again with a spacy, eerie, moody, howling-wind sort of feel to it; Section 25 are worth hearing too, another band whose style changed throughout the 80s and became quite poppy, but whose terrifying 1980 double A-side, featuring songs named ‘Haunted’ (which some claim is about Ian Curtis) and ‘Charnel Ground’, is so very doomy that you might think you’re playing it at the wrong speed. It invents ‘slowcore’ quite some time before anyone else, while adding in that same dubby, bass-driven, spacious feel heard in the best reggae records of the period.
Joy Division’s record covers were often designed by Peter Savile, and sleeve art is another area where post-punk developed its own identity, a mixture of past influences and forward thinking, and didn’t half put the willies up you at times as you browsed the shelves of your local record shop. Savile, as well as artists like Barney Bubbles and Vaughan Olliver, were again children of the Children of the Stones, and carried those formative experiences of things they had watched in films, tv, even adverts, through to their own work. More story-telling, again in a sense different to the familiar.
My favourite record sleeve of all time, which I’ve always found a terrifying image, is on 4AD and is for the single The Friend Catcher by The Birthday Party. For some it may look like a simple, basic shot of a cup cake. But examine that flickering flame, about to extinguish. Look at the rather sorry, soggy state of the cake itself, icing spiralling away from the centre and dripping off it as if rejected. Note that the picture is in black and white, with a slight blur. And note how the designer has used the name of the band almost as a chilling caption. Whose birthday party is this, and why is it so joyless and empty? If this isn’t a ghost story, I don’t know what is. Such a potent image that I could easily ask each one of you to write a spooky short tale based around it.
Mention of The Birthday Party brings us on to their charismatic, prowling, Southern gothic-like lead singer and lyricist Nick Cave. Cave by rights ought to have died of a heroin overdose at any one of several points during the post punk era, but like Keith Richards he just keeps on going, and has developed into a sort of darling of the Sunday supplements. That’s not to say that his music has diluted any, though – he’s currently producing some of the greatest material of his career, and it all fits right into what we’re discussing here today. Unlike most of the subtler post punk acts, Cave has often gone for the all-out, horror-rock, Screaming Lord Sutch/Cramps style boogey-boogey stuff, through Birthday Party numbers like Release the Bats or Deep in the Woods, through to Bad Seeds fare such as the 1996 LP Murder Ballads, during which he killed Kylie Minogue (who retorted, wraith-like, from beyond on Where the Wild Roses Grow) and shot up a bar with his version of the black-hearted musical myth Stagger Lee. As I’m sure you know, Cave suffered an unthinkable bereavement a few years ago when his teenage son Arthur was accidentally killed – and his music since then has taken on a contemplative, quiet mixture of mourning, melancholia, and catharsis. It is plaintive, it is gossamer thin, barely there, and quite brilliant, though intensely personal. As to whether he believes in an afterlife, or ghosts or signs or presences, Cave is a fiercely religious man, often referring to his own particular version of God in his songs – but he recently released a single called Grief, including a piece called Letter to Cynthia, where he responded to a letter from a similarly bereaved fan who had asked him if he took comfort in believing that his son’s spirit was still with him, as she claimed she was making comforting contact with her own deceased relatives via her dreams. In no uncertain terms Cave denied this, but in doing so said that the experiences of fans like Cynthia had helped him enormously in coming to terms with his immense loss – his very denial of such supernatural suggestions helping him to focus. Letter to Cynthia is almost an anti-ghost poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBgb6pVHGuE Letter to Cynthia - Nick Cave
And so we return to where we came in. Mark E Smith is my Lennon, The Fall are my Beatles. I’m obsessed with them, and have been since 1978. It isn’t simply the macabre or spooky associations that appeal, I could be here all weekend telling you what I love about them in various divergent areas; but for the few minutes I have available, let’s concentrate on Mark E as a ghost story connoisseur. Notoriously irascible and opinionated and not a man you would have wanted to cross, Mark was nevertheless nice as pie whenever dealing with the small handful of people he liked. And this included the Arthur Machen Society, an organisation of which he was a member and seemingly highly appreciative of the work done to preserve the memory and work of his favourite author. Smith was also a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft, MR James and many of the classic authors of ghostly, ghastly fiction. And it showed in his own writing. I’ve already delivered you my version of the lyrics to the utterly terrifying ‘Impression of J Temperance’ – right from the start The Fall had the supernatural running through their core, their debut LP was entitled Live at the Witch Trials and contained a track named Frightened, while 1979’s Dragnet is essential listening for horror fans, notably for opening track ‘Psychic Dancehall’, the really scary ‘A Figure Walks’ which references the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas ‘The Ice House’, and the 7-minute plus beast of a song, ‘Spectre vs Rector’, which namechecks MR James, Medusa Touch author Peter van Greenaway, horror movie director Roger Corman, Corman actor Ray Milland and specifically his role in the 1962 film Premature Burial (which also inspired a magnificent Siouxsie and the Banshees song in 1979), and Yog Sothoth, in the saga of an attempted exorcism where the titular clergyman is possessed by the evil spirit, only for a detective and a heroic exorcist to take command, the latter charging in with the refrain “I have saved a thousand souls, They cannot even save their own, I'm soaked in blood but always good, It's like I drunk myself sober, I get better as I get older."
The spooks kept a coming – The Fall covered R Dean Taylor’s Motown classic ‘There’s a Ghost in My House’ in 1987, releasing the record in a hologrammatic 3D cover with a screaming spirit on the front; early b-side City Hobgoblins referred to weird entities “ten times my age, one tenth my height” while the a-side of that record, How I wrote Elastic Man, took an incisive look at the real life horrors suffered by mega authors such as Stephen King, so very successful that they had reached the point where they could barely step outside their front door, for fear of being mobbed by dangerously obsessive fans. Smith often rooted his horrors in places familiar to him – Lucifer Over Lancashire, for instance – and his frequent claims of what he referred to as ‘pre-cog’, i.e. precognitive abilities of prediction and foresight, seemed to be confirmed via tracks like Terry Waite Sez, released just before the kidnap of Mr Waite, or Powder Keg, which anticipated the 1996 bombing of the Arndale centre in Manchester, with the Fall LP on which the track appeared released just five days earlier. Fall fans and Smith himself always played down the notion of any crystal ball psychic powers, but it’s such a part of the Mark E myth that it’s worth mentioning here. That namecheck for Peter Van Greenaway in 1979 might be a further example – in 2007 a guitarist named Peter Greenway joined The Fall and remained part of their line up until Smith’s death 11 years later. For what its worth, and seemingly unconnected to any of the above, bear in mind that in 1980 the British film director Peter Greenaway made a three hour movie entitled The Falls…
Mark E Smith was often cited as someone who might have made a great horror writer had he not poured all of his energies into his group. The closest he came was in collaborating with the comedy scriptwriter Graham Duff – Duff and MES planned a Twilight Zone-like series of short horror tv episodes, which sadly came to nothing; earlier this year, Strange Attractor Press published The Otherwise, a brilliant feature length horror script credited to Smith and Duff, set in a Rockfield-like rural middle of nowhere recording studio where The Fall are planning to demo tracks for a new EP, but encounter occult goings on, satanic bikers, and figures who may be an historical battle re-enactment society or may just be ghosts from the Jacobite era. I’d love to see this filmed, and there has been talk that the team of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, directors of some previous exciting music projects, may be involved in bringing it to the screen.
So that brings us to the close. The Fall and post punk continue to exert a huge influence over modern British art and culture – new bands like Black Country New Road, Squid, and Dry Cleaning have released albums this year and seem to fit into that rather vague and nebulous category, ‘hauntology’; and if you listen to the soundtracks of the artier end of British horror movie production, you’ll hear something akin to post-punk all over films such as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric, Matthew Holness’ Possum, and others. Ben Wheatley’s version of JG Ballard’s High Rise climaxed with The Fall’s Industrial Estate blasting out of the speakers; and Rose Glass’ brilliant Saint Maud from last year used lots of punk/funk sounds by the cult New York act from the early 80s, ESG. The connections between post-punk and worlds beyond our own seem set to continue. I’ve been Darrell Buxton and I’m off to vanish into the ether myself.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL YOU MAY WISH TO EXPLORE
CRAMPS - love of kitsch/exotica/b-movie horror
NEIL YOUNG – aligned himself with the post-punk movement and later the experimental American indie scene, where his use of extreme guitar feedback continues the idea of creating otherworldly music. Powderfinger is a song sung from the grave, a la the later New Order track I mentioned. A tradition going back to the days of John Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me.
VIOLENT FEMMES – folk-horror-rock, Country Death Song is particularly recommended.
JULIAN COPE – heavily entrenched in folklore, ancient monuments, ancient British history.
KATE BUSH - English landscape, literature, folklore, erotica, the supernatural.
CABARET VOLTAIRE, THROBBING GRISTLE – 'post-punk' before punk even happened. Soundscapes, tape loops, vocals and sounds fading in and out of the mix like radio static or voices from beyond, occasional grotesque or creepy subject matter – non-guitar bands who achieve that same sense of ‘telling a ghost story via their music’
Horror Rock – JOE MEEK, SCREAMING LORD SUTCH, ALICE COOPER
TOYAH – songs with titles like Ghosts, Mummies, Vision, Angels and Demons, It’s a Mystery etc. Instrumental track ‘Sphinx’ is very sparse and spooky a la the Banshees’ sound.
Films – THE FALL's Hip Priest in Silence of The Lambs, JOY DIVISION's Atmosphere used at end of Hounds of Love. COIL's unused soundtrack for Hellraiser, BILL NELSON's soundtrack for Dream Demon. THE BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP got there in the early 70s with The Legend of Hell House and there are similar electronic burblings on American films of the 70s such as Messiah of Evil
GORKY’S ZYGOTIC MYNCI - Welsh psychedelic revivalists. Their Bwyd Time LP is essential listening for horror/folklore fans, tracks such as Blood Chant and The Man with Salt Hair.
OF ARROWE HILL - the self-styled 'most haunted band in England'. Psychedelic rock and acoustica with a bluesy edge, they have been described as 'M.R. James meets Elmore James'. Frequent supernatural content within song lyrics and music.
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