Nowadays they’re part of society’s furniture – out and about in shops and pubs as well as in graveyards – but in the 1980s the Goth subculture was new and striking.
And while trendy West Berlin attracted Nick Cave, and London’s New Romantics (and chart superstar Adam Ant) mixed up high fashion and punk rock, it was in the unlikely city of Hamburg a gang of five women formed Xmal Deutschland, and unwittingly pioneered the movement we now know as goth.
40 years later, alongside better-known acts like Siouxsie Sioux, Bauhaus and even The Cure, they are cited as an integral influence for countless bands, despite having never achieved the mainstream success of their peers.
Two releases may redress this balance however – a reissue of long out-of-print music in the form of compilation arrives in tandem with the debut solo album, ‘Codes’ from the band’s frontwoman Anja Huwe.
Invited by her long-time friend and bandmate Mona Mur, Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music and decided to join Mur in her studio in Berlin. Together, they worked for a year and a half, composing, performing and producing the tracks from scratch which eventually became the album ‘Codes’.
Integral to the overall sound experience was the input of Manuela Rickers who added her famed signature guitar style. The collaboration was relentless: “Mona and I have a similar artistic background since the 1980s. We hung out together, and we sport a similar attitude towards life and art. We don’t have to explain ourselves to one another,” says Huwe. Mur adds: “Anja’s voice is like a spear, her appearance a torch in the darkness.”
This may be as close as we get to a reunion – Caro May, Rita Simon, bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock who, for a while jokingly, became the token man of the group) in a period where they enjoyed more success in the UK, supporting the Cocteau Twins and releasing two albums on legendary label 4AD which reached the UK Indie Charts.
“Since the split in the early 1990s, I have been haunted by the ‘Legend of Xmal Deutschland’ and never-ending requests from all over the world, all of which I always turned down,” Huwe says.
And while the singles album shines a light on Goth’s past, it’s the unexpected but long overdue ‘Codes’ that’s the missing page from post-punk’s history books.
This article originally appeared in the Portsmouth News.
Also chief newshound at Jockrock
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