Leeds Gothic (2025)
Saturday 25th October. I’m off to Leeds to see Psychedelic Furs with the curious support of Anja Huwe – fleetingly advertised as Xmal Deutschland. Starting the day Scarborough, it’s not an ideal preparation. The local forecast warned against storms, high winds and strong waves, and to take extra care in and around the sea. I assumed this applied exclusively to surfers, autumn swimmers and sailors, and thought a quick walk around Marine Drive that links North and South Bays would be invigorating and spectacular.
The waves were towering, hitting the protective rocks below the promenade with an unrelenting and droning ferocity. The spray was manageable, captivating even, but I was thinking if a big wave hit the border on its cyclical sweetspot (I’m sure there’s a word for it), then the power, volume and reach of the spray would be something else. About three seconds before thinking it might be a good idea to retreat the inevitable happened. A thorough drenching, top to bottom, front to back - gig-ready hair and curated clothes, flattened and soaked.
By the time I’d climbed Castle Hill to get dry at haste (not wanting to miss the Leeds train) I was shivering to boot. The neighbours were amused, declaring that I had now been “christened”. Ho ho.
Two hours later, sartorially reset and ferried via a coach replacement between York and Leeds, I’m in the spiritual home of goth with a few hours to kill. My intention was to seek out an exhibition on Leeds music which I assumed was at the city’s Art Gallery. This was not the case, but it meant I wandered into the adjoining Henry Moore Gallery to encounter Fragment and Form. I’m not someone who gets enthused about sculpture (sorry Henry) but some of the most inspiring exhibitions on this form of art have been curated at this gallery.
Fragment and Form wasn’t quite doing it for me until I turned into the main room and encountered Dominique White’s The domination of Nothing (2023). My first reaction is to envisage a burnt-out ‘TWOC’ed car, twisted metal, burnt rubber entwined with wires, charcoal shadows. This is more-or-less what it is, but the vehicle in question is a boat, leading to a broader artist statement on seaborne legacies of slavery and displacement.
I’m resisting a proper discussion of this, and I want to focus what was on my mind, and how this formed a masthead to a wider concept of Leeds Gothic lumbering through time to the present moment. The brutally burnt nature of the piece reminded me of the harrowing passage in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet when the corrupt police force evict and raze the gypsy encampment set out at the end of the M1. It was a site we knew from our own hitching up and down the M1 to gigs at Leeds.
Peace acknowledges a goth and post-punk spirit that informs the trilogy, even though it commences before the time of even punk with the first novel set in and titled 1974. It feels as if goth was always the ultimate outcome of Leeds, something that I have subscribed to, and covered in an earlier series of SUB>SUMED articles. Following the truncated serialisation of the quartet by Channel 4, the covers of the books were rebranded with screengrabs – for 1974 we have Andrew Garfield playing a young reporter who is on the immediate scene after the gypsy camp is burnt out. The charcoal and twisted structures loom large.
The artist’s descriptive beckoning of nothingness also struck home. I have a body of writing, sitting like an unlanced boil as a series of frantic notes, around Malevich’s Black Square, the theories of nihilism, and early punk. It will come (eventually). But here was another nihilist prod, coming at the same time as I’d just been reading a Karl Ove Knausgaard collection of essays on the journey over. In these short pieces Knausgaard, whose new novel School of Night is due any day (night) now, reflects on writers who touch on nothingness like fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun, Dante, Dostoevsky, and errant philosopher Martin Heidegger…
Away from nothingness, the Leeds music exhibition was around the corner at the city museum, on the top floor. Again, I’m not offering a formal review of it. The conception was clearly of a type that attempted a straight timeline with vitrines of tickets and records and wall displays of flyers and posters which is the go-to format. I guess this is what people expect, but it feels a little formulaic and unless you are super-invested in the city-scene itself it can slacken attention and impact. They had tried to present a few off-piste and immersive aspects, so they deserve credit there.
Though goth asserted itself with a visible chunk of the timeline, and we get a rather sad replication of the mirrored pillar at Le Phonographique which led to the mopey two-step-forward-two-step-back goth dance, the best image in the museum for me was on the floor below with a secondary permanent display on goth. We have Leeds music mogul and all-round good guy John Keenan standing in front of the posters for Futurama 5, the final event at the cavernous Queens Hall in the cold September of 1983. This year was the title of Peace’s culmination of the Quartet… a coincidence?
It was an event I attended for the second day – a Sunday. I was serving time on the first Death Cult tour which had already visited Leeds in the preceding week – a memorable gig at the Warehouse in which frontman Ian Astbury launched into a spontaneous tirade against posing goths which were starting to establish themselves as a dedicated Leeds scene just as the word ‘goth’ was coming in to usage via magazines like Vague.
From Leeds we had headed south down the lugubrious M1 for more dates and a Saturday night special at Brixton Ace, sold out well in advance with tickets at 50p. We piled out of the Ace, got the tube towards Brent Cross to do an overnight hitch back to Leeds to be ready for the Sunday event midday opening. I recall we were offered a place to stay by some fellow Death Cult fans who were on the tube, but we thought we could power on through the night. Who needs a warm bed… I wonder how that turned out?
We eventually got a lift to the gloriously named Scratchwood Services on the edge of London and were then stuck there all night. We gave up and tried to kip in the (all-night) services, but were not allowed into the warm embrace of the premises. A compromise agreement was reached, and we were allowed to kip in the foyer area between two sets of automatic sliding doors. It was cold, the doors kept opening, then closing, then opening… a bit like trying to sleep in a Martin Creed artwork.
We resumed hitching at dawn and got to Leeds in a very tired state around midday. I then crashed out in Queens Hall, slumped against a girder on top of my travel bag, woken now and again by a blast of noise from Killing Joke, Play Dead, and so on. I revived in time to witness headliners Death Cult, and that was that. Unlike Peace’s characters, I survived my 1983.
In 2025 I’m significantly older but somewhat more prepared as I arrive in time at the Uni to see Anja Huwe opening for Psychedelic Furs. It has been over 40 years since I’d seen Xmal Deutschland and the spellbinding beauty of their gothic female ensemble with crimped bobs of hair. Admittedly, a teenage crush. It’s not really Xmal in 2025, just Anja who has been in the business since the dissolution of the band in 1989. The set is a mix of her own her work (of which I know nothing) and a few Xmal classics to wind up the short performance.
It’s a full venue, maybe a tad too small for ‘The Furs’ who still pack a post-punk punch in the UK away from the college-rock fandom in the USA. An old crowd (obviously), dressed in black, beers and vapes at the ready. There’s a few ex-Xmal fans who have dug out (or repurchased) classic tee-shirts. It doesn’t feel good, just old. Inevitably Anja has lost that youthful pizazz – she looks hardened, slightly bored, going through the motions as best as possible. It’s an impossible task when the main attraction was a beauty of youth and adventure.
To make matters worse, the new band are more bumptious in a bad MTV 90s metal style, riffing out and cranking up the noise. The spacey, clonky and eerie Teutonic sound of Xmal is nowhere to be seen or heard. This sounds like a bad thing to say, but it feels like a care home onboard a cruise ship. And here I implicate myself, having to sit down and adjust my shoes due to arthritic feet.
The Furs are accomplished. I don’t need to write about them. They played the Forever Now festival I attended in summer 2025, and it’s the same here. Fluid and faultless, performed to within an inch of its life.
Sunday 26th October, back in Scarborough. I’m writing this in the dark, trying to fire it off as an experimental ‘one draft only’ piece of writing (oops, it’s already been edited three times since publishing).
The train ride back was again split into a bus replacement leg. It felt like the old days of 1983, when the hitching failed and you’d bail out and spend on a National Express ticket. There’s someone behind me coughing non-stop, I can feel the blasts of air rushing around the seat. Clocks adjusted, I’m back at midday in the cold house, rucksack down, ODing on toast and peanut butter - keeping the illusion of 1983 alive. It’s still wild out there and I venture another walk around Marine Drive, arthritic feet withstanding. Thankfully I avoid a soaking.
I do love PF and DC and David Peace’s books. The sea can be terrifying and wet. A fun read Ian.