Gothic BC

On May 25 I was on Bad Vibes on CFRO (you can listen to it here.) 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. This is the third in a series of posts where I run through those choices, including the ones that we didn't get to, and talk about why I picked them. 

So after Sheena's in a Goth Gang Now referencing 1977 and talking about the roots of goth in punk, it made sense to jump back to 1977 with this pre-goth Easy Cure demo. Once upon a time (before the Internet made everything available to everyone) this was truly rare. I had a copy of this on a flexi-disc from, I think, Smash Hits or some other British music magazine. 

In the 80s and early 90s I used to have a shit-ton of pen-pals from all over. At the high-pont of my pen-pal days I had over 70 people that I regularly corresponded with. We'd meet through fanzines and by passing around things called "friendship books". Many of my pen-pals came via a Cure fanzine out of Norman, Oklahoma called "Other Voices". Among this goth pen-pal network it was commonplace to share music on cassette along with the letters. I ended up sending this rare flexi-disc to a pen-pal who was a much more ardent Cure fan than I was. 

In hindsight I kind of reget that, but then again what would I do with it now? I'd never play it. I have an mp3. Frame it, hang it on the wall, and venerate it as a holy relic, I guess.  

I lost touch with almost all my pen-pals with the rise of the Internet. A small few are facebook friends, but there isn't much to that. Occasional laconic status updates and pictures of food and cats does not compare with long, handwritten letters and a well-planned mix-tape. So it goes.