Ah! Mid May… the sun is out, the barbies are sizzling at the weekends and the summer wardrobe is finally dusted down to expose legs the shades of slabbed corpses. What better time of year is there, then, to done your blackest clothes, paint your faced white, apply liberal amounts of kohl eyeliner and celebrate Goth, the genre that refuses to die?

Believe it or not, 22 May is World Goth Day and here at Gigwise we’re cocking a snook at the glorious weather by drawing the blinds, shunning the sun and celebrating the blackest and darkest of musical genres.

Join us, then, as we guide you through the murkiest recesses of the genre that refuses to die with 10 of the best Goth tracks to have emerged from their coffin to spread across the earth like the uncontrollable bacteria that it is. Or something…

Siouxsie And The Banshees – ‘Israel’

Siouxsie Sioux will go to her grave denying that she’s a goth and in many ways she’s right. But in others she’s not. The Banshees were spawned from punk’s original snotty blast – the band’s original line-up featured the talent vacuum that was Sid Vicious on drums – before they mutated into something quite special.

Despite various line-ups that briefly included The Cure’s Robert Smith on live guitar duties, for many fans the band’s best configuration was based around bassist Steven Severin and John McGeogh and Budgie on guitar and drums respectively. Their fourth album, Juju, is where the Goth ball started rolling. Focusing on darker lyrical themes than before and fusing them with McGeogh’s sparkling guitar playing with the rhythm section pushed to the fore, Juju was an exercise in mood and atmosphere that set the bar high.

Bauhaus – ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’

The undisputed mac daddies of Goth and formed in 1978, Bauhaus hailed from decidedly not-so-creepy environs of Northampton. Named after the German art school, their choice of moniker proved wise. Following the theory of Gesamtkunstwerk – the synthesis of the arts – Bauhaus drew from a number of musical influences including David Bowie’s glam rock era, psychedelia, funk and, probably most crucially, dub reggae, bunged them into a witch’s cauldron and concocted a brew that’s left its hangover lingering to this very day.

Fronted by the chisel-cheeked and slender figure of singer Peter Murphy and ably assisted by Daniel Ash on guitar and brothers David J and Kevin Haskins on bass and drums respectively, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ was recorded just six weeks after the band’s formation. Released by Walthamstow’s influential independent label Small Wonder Records in 1979, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ set the template for what was to follow: a visual aesthetic based on tainted glamour, horror movies and deviant sex. So a bit like a swinger’s party in Rotherham, then.

The Cure – ‘One Hundred Years/The Figurehead’

Despite the nest that sits atop of Robert Smith’s head, The Cure were only really Goths in the accepted sense during that peerless three album run of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography.

Of the three (and arguably their entire career), Pornography is the band’s absolute peak. The sound of abject misery and existential angst, the album’s recording was fuelled by a steady diet of alcohol and LSD. And while that might make for a pretty decent Saturday night by anybody’s standards, it would soon take its toll on The Cure who split at the end of the Pornography tour in a miasma of frayed tempers and flying fists.

The split wasn’t to last and here’s a briefly reconstituted line-up bringing the fabulously miserable dirges of ‘One Hundred Years’ and ‘The Figurehead’ into the living rooms of the nation.

The Sisters Of Mercy – ‘Alice’

There are three distinct phases of The Sisters Of Mercy: the independent years made up of the classic line-up of singer Andrew Eldritch, guitarists Gary Marx and Ben Gunn, bassist Craig Adams and drum machine Dr Avalanche; the major label phase in which Gunn was replaced by former Dead Or Alive plankspanker Wayne Hussey; and the rest of the career wherein Andrew Eldritch hired various hands, went on strike with his label and has been touring pretty much the same set for the almost 30 years.

But it’s to the independent years we must turn. Formed in Leeds and drawing on such disparate threads as Leonard Cohen, Suicide, Gary Glitter, The Stooges and Motorhead, The Sisters Of Mercy became the uber goth band of their time. Even though they behaved like a child caught with its hand in a biscuit tin by denying they were goths. Little footage exists of their golden age so let us allow Wednesday Addams to display how to groove to those spidery guitar lines, throbbing bass, Eldritch’s stentorian vocals and Dr Avalanche’s mutant beats.

Fields Of The Nephilim – ‘Preacher Man’

After Andrew Eldrtich decided that Cliff Richard’s ‘Wired For Sound’ era was the basis for his sartorial styling, it was left to Stevenage’s Fields Of The Nephilim to pick up where The Sisters Of Mercy left off.

Turning to the violent spaghetti westerns of director Sergio Leone for their tailoring inspiration, Fields Of The Nephilim favoured cowboy hats, boots and dusters and finished off their weather-beaten look by covering themselves in Homepride flour. This led to an unfortunate incident with the Nottinghamshire constabulary who arrested the band during a tour in May 1988 on suspicion of possessing a controlled substance.

‘Preacher Man’ is the moment when the band broke through to a wider audience thanks to a combination of superb guitar riffing, Carl McCoy’s vocal delivery that made Eldritch sound like a soprano and video containing nuclear contamination, mutants and an execution. What’s not to like?

X-Mal Deutschland – ‘Incubus Succubus II’

Proving that Goth wasn’t the sole preserve of pasty-faced white boys from suburban towns, Hamburg’s X-Mal Deutschland were originally an all-female group until settling on the longest lasting line-up of singer Anja Huwe, guitarist Manuela Rickers, keyboardist Fiona Sangster, bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock and drummer Pettrer Bellendir.

‘Incubus Succubus II’ is the track that not only took the band out of Germany but also into the UK independent charts whilst helping define the early aesthetic of the 4AD label. Though leaning heavily on the influence of Siouxsie and the Banshees, X-Mal Deutschland soon developed enough of their own identity and continued to sing their songs in German while becoming the pin-ups of choice of pasty-faced white boys from suburban towns.

The Cult – ‘Spiritwalker’

Long before they discovered classic rock and the blues-based bands of the 70s, The Cult came roaring out of Brixton to delivery spiky-chicken dance classics like this. Formed from the ashes of positive punks Southern Death Cult by singer Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, the transplanted northeners set about recruiting bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Nigel Preston and renamed themselves The Cult after a short period of being Death Cult. Thankfully they curtailed the name shortening or else they would’ve simply been called The.

But check out this great live version, recorded during a performance on 80s rock show The Tube. Ian Astbury’s obsession with the tribes of Native Americans is in full evidence while guitarist Billy Duffy was yet to discover the joys of bleaching his hair. And though they went on to become full-on rock pigs, they never dropped this gem from their set.

Nine Inch Nails – ‘Head Like A Hole’

You might call it ‘Industrial’ but to anyone who’d lived their lives in black in the 80s, this was Goth With A Budget. And clearly, frontman and mastermind Trent Reznor had been paying attention to The Sisterhood’s 1986 album, The Gift, and pumped it full of steroids, given it a good smack upside the head and kicked it out snarling and frothing into an unsuspecting world.

With the benefit of hindsight, ‘Head Like A Hole’ was just the boot up the arse the genre needed. Muscular, lean and ready to take on all comers, this still sounds every bit as thrilling as it did at almost 30 years ago.

Marilyn Manson – ‘The Beautiful People’

Having become something of a figure of fun of late, it’s all too easy to forget quite what a shock to the system Marilyn Manson was when he and his freakshow scared the living shit out of middle America.

Holding up a mirror to the worst excesses of the American Dream, this is rock music doing exactly what it should. Challenging, exciting, threatening and fiercely intelligent, this is music that digs deep to expose the hypocrisy of surface level mores and values.

The Horrors – ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’

Long before they discovered Krautrock and Simple Minds and applied them to their own music, Southend’s The Horrors were seemingly on a mission to pull the stake out of the rotting corpse of Goth and give it one more go.

And good on ‘em. Before reverting their real names, the band were individually known as the none-more-goth Farris Rotter (vocals), Spider Webb (keys), Joshua Von Grimm (guitar), Coffin Joe (drums) and Tom Furse (bass) and they weren’t afraid of letting those Birthday Party and Bauhaus and Screaming Lord Sutch influences be known.

‘Sheena Is A Parasite’ is totally ace. Directed by Chris Cunningham, the man who made Aphex Twin even more creepy and menacing, the video to this explosion of sound is Goth in excelsis. Plenty of eyeliner? Check? Victorian clothing? Oh yes. Exploding stomachs? What do you think?