Gothic BC

Last week I was on Bad Vibes on CFRO. This is the set-list from that show. My bit starts with The Vampire Club by Voltaire, and you can listen to it here. From that point on Marc Godfrey and I were picking from a list of music that I brought with me depending on how the conversation went. I came armed with almost three hours of music for a one hour interview, with everything picked for a reason. What I want to do for the next little while is run through those choices, including the ones that we didn't get to, and talk about why I picked them. 

So let's start with The Vampire Club.

This is classic Voltaire. It's a comedic song about a bunch of Pirate-LARP/SCA types showing up at club for Vampire LARPers. As I mentioned on the air this reminds me of people I know and, as I mentioned on-air, one person in particular who at times has been pretty heavily involved on both sides of the false dichotomy in the song. A game I have played when visiting other cities is to look over the locals to find the local incarnations of people I know here. Certain people gravitate to certain facets of gothiness and those traits and intrests tend to manifest themselves in similar ways.  

Later in the show I mention what I call allied scenes, which are those other subcultures that have their own existence independed of the goth scene but also overlap or are "goth friendly". Vampire LARPing is not necessarily goth, but I think it's safe to say that if one were to draw a Venn diagram the area of the Vampire LARP circle outside the goth circle would be a pretty thin crescent.

[ view gallery ]

Convergence C11 - San Diego 4th & B (San Diego) 2005-04-24

There are a lot more SCA aficionados outside the goth circle, but the cross-over is significant enough that Convergence 11 was Pirate themed.

The concept of allied scenes is important in the history of goth in British Columbia and elsewhere. Once upon a time, and still in some of the some less-enlightened conservative strongholds, being a "freak" of any stripe was a recipe for getting your ass kicked. I can tell you a story about being egged while walking down the street in Nanaimo, Valerian has a story about a beer can being pitched at her from a moving car—there are no shortage of examples. Places and groups where one could existist without feeling threatened were important. The long-running Vancouver club night "Sanctuary" holds no special claim to that name, it was a pretty common name for goth nights and clubs all over. Before there was Sanctuary, or anything going on that was specifically targeted at goths, safe places for goths included punk show and venues like the Smiling Buddha, gay-bars like Luv-a-Fair, Celebrities, The Odyssey and the various names 23 West Cordova went by in Vancouver, and Numbers/Rumours in Victoria. 

These "safe place" relationships have had a lasting influence on goth culture and the crossovers to allied scenes.