The Height of Goth

It was 1984 and I was 18 years old. I was in a band

We were a bit Bauhaus, a bit Killing Joke, a bit crazy. I couldn’t afford an instrument so I was the singer. I wasn’t a very good singer, but we were a band

We used to go to the Xclusiv nightclub at the weekend. It was down by the railway station in Batley, the town where we lived in West Yorkshire

For sentimental reasons the couple who ran the nightclub, Ann and Pete Swallow, got someone to make a video to capture a typical night at the club. VHS cassettes of the final film were sold for £2 each to regulars. I think there were 50 copies in total, but can’t be sure. I never bought one, £2 was a stretch, there were bigger priorities

I’m in the film dancing away along along with the rest of the band, my sister Nancy and even a couple of my teenage flames, Karen and Michelle. If I remember it right it was actually filmed on a Sunday night (with ridiculously bright lights!) so as not to disturb the usual Fridays and Saturdays. It was a ticket only affair for the regulars, although some interlopers did make it in too

Over the years those cassettes eventually got recorded over, broken, lost or thrown away. Everyone forgot

Some 30 years later I’m living in London and by sheer fluke we came across one of the cassettes (this is a bizarre story in itself, but for another time). It was trashed. Mildewed. Beyond junk. My brother worked his magic, rescued it to digital and gave it to me as a gift (thanks Ed!)

I put it on YouTube

Since then it’s been viewed over a quarter of a million times. It was the subject of a Guardian Culture article (Alex Petridis on The Height of Goth), in which the writer described it as “At turns unwittingly hilarious, fascinating and incredibly boring, this 1984 nightclub documentary is a great British pop culture document”

It has been watched (and screened, especially for film clubs) all over the world. I’ve had emails from countless people who were affected or touched by it – they wanted to know the names of the songs and the artists that were played that night, they argued about the correct terminology when referring to the musical genres or ‘scenes’, they yawned, they choked, they laughed, they loved it

In the last few years film critics and film lovers from as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and New York have been watching a film of one night in one nightclub in Batley, West Yorkshire, in 1984. They took the time to contact me and tell me. How crazy is that

The film currently has 6 music copyright claims against it. Those claims were from WMG, SME (x2), [Merlin] Beggars, INgrooves and Pirames International Srl. This resulted in YouTube taking the film offline. I recently appealed and have been doing what I can through the annoyingly one-sided YouTube appeals process

So far I’ve lost 5 out of 6 of the (automated, it seems) ‘appeals’. Only Pirames International Srl has released its claim. Where does this leave the film? I don’t know. For now at least it seems the one released claim (thank you, Pirames) is keeping it online. If you do try watching it the first couple of minutes are a bit shaky and all over the place but the picture quality and sound settles down in time for the scenes in the club itself

I don’t know how long it has left, I guess nobody does. This is the film. It is 1984 and it is The Height of Goth

Full track list in the comments below

If the embedded video above doesn’t work (because of the copyright strikes/country restrictions), web search it or try it from one of the embedded players on the sites below that have written about it previously:

• Dangerous Minds
• The Ice Age
• poeTV