Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s
One of the most influential British females of the rock era was born Susan Janet Dallion in London, England, on May 27, 1957. The music of this pioneering punk princess married gothic tones to world rhythms within a chilly new-romantic framework. At age 19, Siouxsie Sioux appeared at the 100 Club Punk Festival, singing the Bay City Rollers'... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 70s, 80s, 90s
Bauhaus are the founding fathers of goth rock, creating a minimalistic, overbearingly gloomy style of post-punk rock driven by jagged guitar chords and cold, distant synthesizers. Throughout their brief career, the band explored all the variations on their bleak musical ideas, adding elements of glam rock, experimental electronic rock, funk, and... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 80s
While punk rock was always supposed to be about pushing the envelope, few post-punk bands seemed willing to go quite so far to creatively confront their audience as Big Black. The group's guitars alternately sliced like a machete and ground like a dentist's drill, creating a groundbreaking and monolithic dissonance in the process. Their use of a... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 80s, 90s
Discordant, elusive and utterly hypnotic, Loop conjured a dark, trance-like spell that contrasted sharply with the prevailing British pop music trends of their time. Equal parts the Stooges, Can and Hawkwind, in tandem with fellow travellers Spacemen 3 they resurrected the concept of space-rock for a new era, creating droning soundscapes of... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 70s, 80s, 90s
Siouxsie and the Banshees were among the longest-lived and most successful acts to emerge from the London punk community; over the course of a career that lasted two decades, they evolved from an abrasive, primitive art punk band into a stylish, sophisticated unit that even notched a left-field Top 40 hit.
Throughout its numerous...
[+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s
Out of all the bands that emerged in the immediate aftermath of punk rock in the late '70s, the Cure was one of the most enduring and popular. Led through numerous incarnations by guitarist/vocalist Robert Smith (born April 21, 1959), the band became notorious for their slow, gloomy dirges and Smith's ghoulish appearance. But the public image... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 80s, 90s
One of England's leading "goth" bands of the 1980s, the Sisters of Mercy play a slow, gloomy, ponderous hybrid of metal and psychedelia, often incorporating dance beats; the one constant in the band's career has been deep-voiced singer Andrew Eldritch. (There is some disagreement as to whether the group took its name from an order of Catholic... [+] Read More
Genre: Rock/Pop
Decades Active: 80s, 90s
A side group started in 1982 by Mekons co-founder Jon Langford, the Three Johns, originally made up of Langford, John Hyatt, Phillip "John" Brennan, and a drum machine, specialized in abrasive, politically charged, danceable rock. Sounding almost nothing like Langford's main band, the Johns were a silly-serious bunch of political and cultural... [+] Read More
