Italian Goth Subculture: Kindred Creatures and Other Dark Enactments in Milan, 1982-1991 (Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music) 3030398102, 9783030398101

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF SUBCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC

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PALGRAVE STU HISTORY O DIES IN THE F SUBCULT URES AND P O P U LAR MUSIC

Italian Goth Su bcu

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Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music Series Editors

Keith Gildart University of Wolverhampton Wolverhampton, UK Anna Gough-Yates University of Roehampton London, UK Sian Lincoln Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool, UK Bill Osgerby London Metropolitan University London, UK Lucy Robinson University of Sussex Brighton, UK John Street University of East Anglia Norwich, UK Peter Webb University of the West of England Bristol, UK Matthew Worley University of Reading Reading, UK

From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers, beatniks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and bikers; 1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and punks; on to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber styles of the 1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion and music have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The Subcultures Network series is international in scope and designed to explore the social and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth and subcultures will be located in their historical, socio-economic and cultural context; the motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics, actions and manifestations of youth and subculture will be assessed. The objective is to facilitate a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational outlet for a burgeoning area of academic study. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14579

Simone Tosoni • Emanuela Zuccalà

Italian Goth Subculture Kindred Creatures and Other Dark Enactments in Milan, 1982–1991

Simone Tosoni Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy

Emanuela Zuccalà Freelance Journalist Milan, Italy

Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music ISBN 978-3-030-39810-1    ISBN 978-3-030-39811-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Dora Georgiadou / EyeEm Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is a partial translation and a thorough reworking of Creature Simili. Il Dark a Milano negli ottanta, published in Milan by Agenzia X.  We thank our former publishers and editors, Marco Philopat and Paoletta, for making this project possible. For the same reason, we also thank Matthew Worley and Giacomo Bottà. Section 2.3 of the book expands and reworks the article “Dark Enactments in Milan: A practice-­ centred exploration of an Italian post-punk subculture of the 1980s”, published in December 2019 in the Italian journal Sociologica. The translation of the book was curated by Francesca Povoledo, whom we thank for her incredible patience and helpfulness. We also wish to express our gratitude to all our interviewees, and to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript. Finally, we’d like to thank Trevor Pinch, for all we have learnt from him. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore supported the publication of this book as a result of a positive evaluation of our research.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Enacting Goth in Milan in the 1980s  1 2 The Research: Methods and Methodology 13 3 Der Himmel Über Milan: The City of Milan in the Early 1980s 41 4 Another No Future: From Anarcho-Punk to the Activist Enactment of Dark 53 5 A Batcave in Via Redi: The Music Club Enactment of Dark 87 6 Siberia: The Loner Enactment of Dark123 7 Dark Canon155 8 Conclusions: An Enactment Approach to Subcultures and Post-Subcultures207 References221 Index233 vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Enacting Goth in Milan in the 1980s

1.1   Dark Enactments in Milan The 4th of April 1984, Milan: the provincial government building Palazzo Isimbardi, a ten minutes’ walk from the Duomo, is hosting the conference titled Youth Gangs: A Reality in the Metropolis of the ‘80s. A team of sociologists is expected to present the preliminary results of a research study1 (Caioli et al. 1986) on the new forms of youth aggregation—mods, rockabillies, punks—that at the time were gaining visibility in the city and in the media (Frascangeli 2010). The symposium is part of a week of debates, press conferences, exhibitions and concerts organised by the Province of Milan, and dedicated to “spectacular youth gangs” (De Sario 2009). Yet, “as it may happen even in the best homes, at the very last moment an unexpected—and probably unwanted—guest shows up” (Punx Anarchici2 1984: 11). It is a small group of protesters: some of them are anarcho-­ punks, or ‘punx’—spelled with an x, the way they sign their leaflets and graffiti to mark their distance from non-politicised forms of punk—from the Virus squat3; others hang out at the Virus, but they do not consider themselves properly punks: they prefer to be called Creature Simili (Kindred Creatures), to underline their affinity and, at the same time, their distinction from punx. A few months later, the political reputation Creature Simili had acquired with what remained of the radical left in the city will earn them a permanent space at the Leoncavallo, at that time the most important squat run by Autonomia Operaia (Autonomism) still in activity © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_1

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in Milan (De Sario 2012). It will be called Helter Skelter, and it will soon become a reference point for the goth scene in Northern Italy. As soon as the sociologists begin their speeches, the small group stages its protest, shouting and yelling: “We are not guinea pigs! (…) I am a person, not a phenomenon!” Three of the demonstrators take their shirts off and start to scratch their chests with razor blades. Someone is videotaping them while they hand out blood splattered leaflets in which they accuse the researchers of being accessories to the repression of the anarcho-­ punk movement.4 “This is my blood: analyse that! Maybe you will find what my real needs are”, the leaflet starts (Punx Anarchici 1984: 11). It doesn’t matter if “the approach [of the research is] undoubtedly innovative, at least for the Italian context of those years, [as it draws on] the conceptual framework elaborated during the ‘60s and early ‘70s by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Birmingham, and formalized in 1976 with the publication of a key volume in the study of post-war British youth subcultures: Resistance Through Rituals [(Hall and Jefferson 1986)]” (De Sario 2009: 107). What punx and Creature Simili can’t really accept is the word ‘gangs’, because they feel it criminalises them, along with all the other Milanese spectacular subcultures, from the very title of the research. For the same reason, they further dislike the fact that the research was commissioned by the provincial government’s CSERDE, Centro Studi e Ricerche sulla Devianza e l’Emarginazione (Research and Study Centre on Deviancy and Social Exclusion).5 The conference is interrupted. Three days later, when the media buzz about the protest is still high, the Virusians (a name for the punx of the Virus) temporarily occupy the Porta Romana theatre. In a leaflet, they proclaim “the night of anarchy” (Punx Anarchici 1984: 11), as a response to the conference, as well as a way to raise awareness against the lack of non-commercial social venues in the city. Together with the Virus and many other collectives, the leaflet is also signed by Amen darkzine, the first and most important Italian goth fanzine of the 1980s. In those years, in fact, the collective that edited the fanzine (‘Quelli di Amen’—The People of Amen), and some of the Creature Simili, adopted a surprising appropriation of goth,6 or dark—as the subculture was, and is still known in Italy—centred on political engagement and activism. While goth in the UK and in other contexts has been described as involving, “no external political objectives” (Hodkinson 2002: 76), and characterised by a “self-reflexive, introspective, subjectivist rather than an activist, confrontational stance” (Brill 2008: 10), they organised concerts and cultural initiatives, but also political rallies, occupations and sit-ins, occasionally

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confronting the police. They also experimented with what they called ‘mental attacks’: sort of situationist demonstrative actions, usually staged during Saturday afternoons in Via Torino, one of the main shopping streets in Milan. Yet, this strongly politicised way of living the experience of subcultural belonging was not the only one in the city and its hinterland. Indeed, being dark in Milan in the 1980s took a plurality of forms. The subculture was experienced as an aesthetic phenomenon, but also as an attempt to publicly refuse the new hedonistic values of the historical phase known in Italy as ‘riflusso’ (the ebb, or the resignation) (Ginsborg 1990; Mudu and Piazza 2016): the years of the end of political engagement under the harsh repression of the state, in favour of a general retreat to the private sphere. And furthermore: dark was a solitary and imaginary escape from the city’s hinterlands ravaged by the spread of heroin, as well as a strategy to construct non-conformed identities and to experiment with gender and non-­ heteronormative forms of sexuality. For some, it was a retreat from politics, while for others it was exactly the opposite: a way to enrich and relaunch the experience of activist anarcho-punk. It is not possible to properly understand Milanese dark without accounting for this heterogeneous, and sometimes contradictory, complexity. As Hodkinson put it regarding the UK Goth in the mid- and late 1990s, “The functions, meanings and symbols of subcultural involvement [were] liable to vary between participants and to reflect complex processes of cultural choice and coincidence rather than an automatic shared reaction to circumstances” (Hodkinson 2002: 30). Yet, as we will show, Milanese dark resists postmodernist interpretations of subcultures as ‘free floating’ signifiers (Redhead 1993) “that enhance differentiation of individual experience” (Blackman 2005: 9). Its internal variations cannot be, in fact, attributed exclusively to the individual understandings of the participants, and cannot be reduced “to individual distinction, of tweaking a singular shared meaning so as to stand out as unique” (Hannerz 2015: 16). On the contrary, in the 1980s, internal heterogeneities were “structured and structuring” (ibidem) Milanese dark in a number of distinct and stabilised forms. In particular, the activist variation of the subculture, typical of Quelli di Amen and of the dark wing of Creature Simili, coexisted with two other discernible ones: the one typical of the alternative music club scene spread throughout northern Italy and beyond, that had its centre at the Hysterika club, in Milan; and a third one, where participants lived the experience of dark on their own, or in small, isolated groups, not rarely made up of members of different subcultures.

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These variations of dark had in common the same canon of subcultural symbolic resources (music, style, specific material artefacts, patterns of cultural consumption), usually—but not exclusively—tapped from the UK through mainstream and independent media and relational networks, defining “their relatively consistent adherence to an identifiable range of shared tastes” (Hodkinson 2002: 7). Nonetheless, they differed not only for their stance on activism or for having specific—while interconnected— subscenes, but also in other relevant aspects such as forms of socialisation, processes of identity construction and authentication, relationships with style and the use of public urban space. Borrowing a concept from the field of Science and Technology Studies, we will refer to these variations as different ‘enactments’ of dark, an enactment being the performative process in which something is actualised in the world through different practices (Lien and Law 2011; Law and Lien 2013). As we will clarify in the following chapter, an enactment approach entails a methodological focus centred on the different nexus of social practices (Schatzki 1996) in which participants translate, experience and are socialised to subcultural participation, urging the researcher to move beyond classical socio-semiotic approaches. In what follows, we aim to describe the different ways in which dark was enacted in Milan and its hinterland in the 1980s. In line with the literature on the reception of style-based subcultures outside their context of origin (for Italy, see for example, Wright 2000; Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003; Baldini 2010; Bottà 2012; Persello 2016; Tosoni 2017; Nigrisoli 2018), we don’t deem Milanese dark in the 1980s as a mere emulation of UK goth: on the contrary, we will try to highlight how, in the process of appropriation, dark was imbued with new and specific meanings deriving from the sociopolitical conditions of its local enactment. Still, in doing so, we will stress how an Italian, or even a Milanese, appropriation of goth did not exist as a homogeneous and monolithic phenomenon, nor as an unstructured plurality of individual appropriations, but as a set of heterogenous, stable and bounded (while porous, allowing the circulation of participants) enactments of the same subcultural canon. To do so, we will draw almost exclusively on the empirical materials of a three-year research study that we completed in 2012, focusing on Milanese dark in the decade that goes from 1982 to 1991, and that led to the publication of the Italian volume Creature Simili. Il dark a Milano negli anni ’80 (Tosoni and Zuccalà 2013) in 2013, currently the only academic book dedicated to Italian dark and one of the few dedicated to Italian subcultures.

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1.2   The Uncharted Waters of Italian Spectacular Subcultures of the 1980s (and Beyond) After the dire beginning at palazzo Isimbardi, the interest of the Italian academia for spectacular subcultures of the 1980s and beyond has indeed always been less than lukewarm. Notwithstanding some notable exceptions (Canevacci et  al. 1993; Canevacci 2003; Spaziante 2010), the attention devoted by historians, anthropologists, semiologists and sociologists on the topic has been, at best, episodic (Tosoni 2015). Paradoxically, while the work by Nick Hebdige and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Birmingham appear in every Italian syllabus in sociology and social sciences, scientific publications and empirical research on the theme are almost non-existent. No major Italian academic journal has, for example, ever dedicated a special issue to spectacular subcultures (or post-subcultures). The reasons behind this difficult academic legitimation of the research topic are not exclusively related to the reluctance of punx and kindred creatures to be studied. Hebdbige himself may have played a role, with the line he drew in the initial stage of his work between originals subculturalists— “the first-wave self-conscious innovators”—and hangers-on—those who embraced a subculture “after [it] had surfaced and been publicized”, and who therefore have only a limited understanding of it (1979: 122). Italian punks and darks, who intercepted the canons of their subcultures only after they were featured in niche and mass media (Thornton 1995), would inevitably fall into the second category, limiting the interest for their academic study. However, the same lack of interest also concerns the Italian—specifically Milanese in its origins—spectacular subculture of paninari7: the youth who celebrated the new hedonistic values of the 1980s flaunting their (often aspirational) upper middle-class lifestyles through a distinct choice of expensive, colourful and brand name clothing (Muscau 2009). In fact, the historian Beppe Di Sario imputes the academic desertion of spectacular subcultures and countercultures of the 1980s to a more general and rooted bias affecting Italian academic culture. This bias would derive from the “traumatic inextricability of the historical object from the subjects called upon to study it” (De Sario 2010: 3). The trauma, consisting in the dramatic end to the season of social movements of the 1970s by the harsh repression of the state, their terrorist drift, and the subsequent riflusso, would have led to an “obsession for the ‘70s, that has rigidly defined the boundaries, and the legitimacy, of doing history. This is certainly related to the generational position of many historians who, in an often-implicit

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syndrome of end of history, have hardly recognized in the ‘80s something more than the end of political engagement and of the utopian motivations of political movements” (De Sario 2010: 3). As we will show, it is indeed this same sense of an epoch-making defeat that informs the different enactments of Milanese dark (and punk). In light of this “traumatic inextricability”, it is therefore probably not a coincidence that, in sociology and cultural studies too, a timid rise in interest for the topic can be acknowledged only in the last few years, when the generation of researchers who lived their adolescence in the 1980s and early 1990s (like the authors of this book) began to occupy more independent academic positions. In this context, the task of accounting for, and preserving the memory of, Italian spectacular subcultures has been taken on by music journalists, independent researchers and, most prominently, participants or former participants to different scenes who have written extensively on their experiences in a wide range of genres, from memoirs and autobiographies to biographical novels, oral histories and photographic books. For example, the Italian skinhead scene was described by Flavio Frezza (2017), one of the founders of the Oi! punk band Razzapparte, and by Federico Pedrini (1996), a member of the Oi! punk band Nabat and former member of the collective of writers Wu Ming. More recently, Enrico Zanza documented in two photographic books the contemporary skin and punk scene in Rome (2012), and the participants’ working and everyday lives (Zanza and Scaricamazza 2017). Federico Pedrini also published a relevant history of punk in Bologna (1998), while the punk scene in Pordenone in the 1980s was documented in a book (and CD) edited by Oderso Rubini (2009), who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, played a key role for Italian alternative music as a producer. Regarding the Milanese anarcho-­ punk scene of the 1980s, we have already mentioned Punx. Creatività e rabbia, edited by Ermanno ‘Gomma’ Guarneri for the independent publisher ShaKe (2006).8 The same scene was also narrated by another of its protagonists, Marco Philopat, in the cult biographic novel Costretti a sanguinare (1997), originally published by ShaKe and recently re-edited by the independent publisher Agenzia X (2016),9 founded and directed by the author himself. These two independent publishers—ShaKe and Agenzia X—have their roots in the experience of the Milanese Helter Skelter10 and in the production of the cyberpunk-zine Decoder (Nacci 2016). Both the publishers played and are still playing a key role in reconstructing the history of subcultures in Italy, in updating the Italian context to subcultural studies beyond the classic work of Nick Hebdige, and in

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documenting (and promoting) contemporary countercultural scenes. Quoting some of the most pertinent examples from their vast catalogue, Matteo Guarnaccia for ShaKe published Ribelli con stile (2009), on suband countercultural scenes in the twentieth century, while Tommaso Tozzi edited Arte di opposizione (2008), focusing more in particular on the 1980s; for Agenzia X, the collective research group Moicana recently published Università della strada (2018), on 50 years of countercultures in Milan, while Beppe de Sario wrote Resistenze innaturali (2009), focusing in particular on Italian countercultural scenes in the 1980s. Yet, the activist vocation of both independent publishers has led them to focus mainly on the more politically engaged enactments of the subcultures they addressed, and to overlook cases and experiences whose countercultural vocation is less evident, or absent. In this context, Italian dark—generically held as unpolitical—has been left unexplored, with the exception of a few, often self-published, memoirs by participants and former participants (see for example, Emiliani 2012). Even in the only academic monograph dedicated to Italian subcultures that came out in the 1980s—that Bande: un modo di dire (Caioli et  al. 1986) that was contested by Milanese anarcho-punks—the phenomenon, mentioned as “positive punk”, is dismissed in a few lines as “ephemeral” and as “little more than a fashion trend born to fight boredom”, and described as a “mix between punk and hippy” prescribing “large clothes, but black; Indian necklaces, but ornate with skulls or crosses; Silk robes, yet secured by nailed belts” (151). The present book aims therefore at filling this gap as much as to contribute to the ongoing international debate on subcultures and post-­ subcultures, and it is structured as follows: the next chapter addresses the methods and methodology of the research, and it sketches the tenets of an enactment approach grounded on the so-called second-generation practice theories (Schatzki 2012; Hui et  al. 2017). The presentation of our material starts in the third chapter, where we address the social context of the enactment of dark: Milan and its hinterland at the beginning of the 1980s, as seen through the eyes of our interviewees. In the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, we address, respectively, the activist, the music club and the loner enactments of dark. In the seventh chapter, we will discuss deeper the concept of subcultural canon and present the main characteristics of the Milanese (and Italian) dark canon in the 1980s. In the conclusion, we will resume the main findings of our exploration, and the main potentialities of the approach we propose in the light of the current debate on subcultures and post-subcultures.

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Notes 1. “Le bande giovanili: una realtà nella metropoli degli anni ‘80”, Scientific Director Bianca Beccalli, coordinated by Carmen Leccardi and Anna Rita Calabrò, and published two years later (Caioli et al. 1986). If not otherwise specified, the quotations from Italian books and articles have been translated for this volume. 2. The Italian anarchic journal A-Rivista Anarchica (founded in 1971 and still in activity) published a report of the events in its 119th issue (May 1984), signed by the collective Punx Anarchici and featuring a partial transcription of the contention, together with an open letter of rebuttal from the sociologists. 3. Occupied at the end of 1981, the squat officially started its activities in an abandoned warehouse in Via Correggio 18, Milan, in February 1982. In May 1984, the location was cleared by the police and demolished. See Guarneri (2006). 4. This video was published in 2006, in Punx. Creatività e rabbia (Milano, ShaKe edizioni), edited by Ermanno ‘Gomma’ Guarneri, one of the protagonists of the contestation. 5. In their open letter of reply to punx’ accusations, the group of sociologists claimed their independency and refuted the additional allegation of not having directly involved the Virusians in their research. They stated that, while some punks were interviewed in a personal capacity, the Virus collective officially refused to be interviewed. They also accused punx of having instrumentally used the conference to gain public visibility for their political actions. See Punx Anarchici (1984). 6. For insiders’ overviews on the subcultural canon, see Baddeley (2006, 2010), Scharf (2011). 7. Paninari, whose name was coined from the bar ‘Al Panino’ in Piazzetta Liberty in Milan, where the first group used to gather, were celebrated— and sympathetically mocked—in the song Paninaro by the British band Pet Shop Boys. The videoclip of the song, originally released in 1986 as the B-side of the single Suburbia, showed examples of the typical paninaro outfit and the iconic places in Milan where they used to gather (see https://youtu.be/ov7riaL5Fbw, last accessed 10/15/2018). 8. See Note 4. 9. In 2006, an edition of the book was also published by the major publisher Einaudi. 10. See Chap. 3.

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Scharf, N. (2011). Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe. Shropshire: Independent Music Press. Schatzki, T.  R. (1996). Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge, New  York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. (2012). A Primer on Practices. Theory and Research. In J.  Higgs, R.  Barnett, S.  Billett, M.  Hutchings, & F.  Trede (Eds.), Practice-Based Education: Perspectives and Strategies (pp. 13–26). Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Spaziante, L. (2010). Dai beat alla generazione dell’ipod: le culture musicali giovanili. Roma: Carocci. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tosoni, S. (2015). Subculture giovanili, in Italia terra incognita. Vita & Pensiero, 3, 114–119. Tosoni, S. (2017). Of Goths and Salmons: A Practice-Based Exploration of Subcultural Enactments in 1980s Milan. In P. Guerra & T. Moreira (Eds.), Keep It Simple, Make It Fast. An Approach to Underground Music Scenes (Vol. 3, pp. 279–288). Faculdade de Letras/Porto: Universidade do Porto. Tosoni, S., & Zuccalà, E. (2013). Creature Simili. Il dark a milano negli anni ’80. Milano: Agenzia X. Tozzi, T. (Ed.). (2008). Arte di opposizione. Stili di vita, situazioni e documenti degli anni Ottanta. Milano: ShaKe. Wright, S. (2000). ‘A Love Born of Hate’: Autonomist Rap in Italy. Theory, Culture & Society, 17(3), 117–135. Zanza, E. (2012). Roma siamo n’Oi! Scatti e racconti dalla scena skinhead, punk e mod dell’ultimo decennio. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Zanza, E., & Scaricamazza, F. (2017). Come rondini in gabbia. Punk e skin fotografati sul lavoro e nella vita quotidiana. Red Star Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Research: Methods and Methodology

2.1   The Research: Approach and Methods Our research aimed at shedding light on the forms and meanings assumed by goth in a specific local context, Milan, and in a specific time frame, the 1980s. Therefore, our preliminary methodological concerns were, in line with David Muggleton, to “take seriously the subjective meanings of subculturalists, for these provide the motivation for their conduct” (Muggleton 2000: 10), and, with Kirsty Lohman, to broaden the narrow focus that commonly informs empirical research on subcultures and post-­subcultures, extending it to “the everyday whole practices of participants, recognizing their connectedness to wider society” (Lohman 2017: 7). We thus adopted an approach based on biographical methods (Chamberlayne et  al. 2000; Merrill and West 2009), and in particular on life stories: unstructured, in-­depth interviews, where interviewees collaborate with the interviewer engaged in reflective listening1 in order to produce an account of their whole lives or—as in our case— of a segment of them.2 Life stories, in fact, are commonly used to “inquire into lived experience and to re-present that experience in a narrative form that provides rich detail and context about the life (or lives) in question” (Gough 2008: 484). The stress on life experiences and on subjective meanings of the method is not in opposition to our interests in the relevance of local social, economic and political conditions in shaping the experience of subcultural © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_2

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participation. Citing Franco Ferrarotti—a pioneer in biographic methods in Italian sociology—a biographical account always conveys, in fact, “a totalizing image of a social system” (Ferrarotti 2003: 29): a synthesis of the structural factors that inform a life and of the cultural perspective and subjective meanings from which those factors are interpreted and reconnected to life’s events and choices. As Ferrarotti further clarifies: the notion of totalizing human practice (which [is taken] from Sartre, but which we find still more rigorously formulated in Tarde and Simmel, to speak only of sociologists) refuses to consider human behaviour (actions, biographies) as the passive reflexes of a conditioning which comes from the general-that is, from society. This behaviour on the contrary expresses a synthetic practice which de- and restructures social determinisms. It is not the mechanical result of external influences, though these are appropriated through a synthetic activity which retranslates them into individual actions which are not reducible to their determining factors. (30)

In this respect, structural factors always appear in life stories as already ‘appropriated’ and translated by social actors in their biographic storytelling: when investigating the relationship of subcultural participation with its social, economic, and political context, structural factors can be therefore addressed without taking on board any form of that structural determinism that postmodernist scholars attribute—not always fairly—to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ classical take on youth subcultures (Blackman 2005). In order to “privilege subjective meanings of subculturalists rather than deriving these from a pre-given totalizing theory” (Muggleton 2000: 9), for the analysis of life stories we adopted a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1998): we  started our research trying to bracket as much as possible our theoretical assumptions, being led more by general sensitising concepts (Blumer 1954) derived from the literature than by narrowly formulated hypothesis. At the beginning of our research, we therefore used reflective listening techniques to guide our interviewees to deepen their narrations of issues related to subcultural identity, authenticity, gender, cultural production and consumption practices, socialisation, style and fashion, and their relationships with the broader social context. This initial set of sensitising concepts was enriched and better specified during the progress of the analysis, and circularly used to orient both our ongoing theoretical

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sampling3 and each new interview. Our theoretical saturation (the moment in which new interviews stop enriching the analysis with new relevant information) was reached after collecting—from 2011 to 2013—24 life stories, each lasting from two to six hours, in one, two or three sessions. During the process, we pinned down the time frame of our investigations more precisely: from 1982—when the first issue of the darkzine Amen was published—to 1991—when the Hysterika, the main stage of the music club enactment of the 1980s, closed. The adoption of grounded theory and the attention for subculturalists’ perspectives do not mean that our final results uncritically reflect interviewees’ accounts: the broader perspective granted by our theoretical sampling led us (as researchers and as former participants) not only to enrich our own understanding of the subculture in unexpected ways, but also to adjust a conceptual framework (starting with the concept of ‘enactment’), that is, from different points of view, unfamiliar to our interviewees. For example (and in particular), subculturalists engaged in an enactment were not always aware of the existence of other enactments or, when aware, they were rarely ready to acknowledge them an equal status. In concordance with Muggleton, we therefore adopted a criterion of validity “that is based, not on recognition, but on compatibility—the degree of ‘fit’ between the social scientific constructs and the common-sense reality of social actors” (Muggleton 2000: 11). In any case, none of the 14 interviewees we consulted after the publication of Creature Simili refused our interpretation of the subculture.4 One of the main objections raised in life stories as a method, especially when used—as in our case—to explore experiences that were lived 30 years earlier, is that their “presentation is (…) affected by processes of memory, (…) which are themselves shaped by perceptions then and later [by] retrospective interpretations and current concerns of the teller” (Cortazzi 2001: 388–389). This sort of ‘hindsight bias’ is intrinsic to any form of biographical narration, and as such cannot be methodologically ruled out: a narrative always “concerns both interpretations made at the time of the events and those made later in or through the telling” (389). Yet, it can be reflexively controlled both at the level of sampling—through the collection and the joint interrogation of more life stories from the same social milieu (Bertaux 1995)—and when the interview is conducted. Regarding the last point, while there are not any all-encompassing and always-valid techniques to help the subjects regain the perspective they had at the time of the narrated events, during our fieldwork we learned the advantages of

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orienting our interviewees towards the narration of events and situations rather than toward the formulation of general opinions, especially at the beginning of the interview; of dividing the collection of a life story in more sessions, so as to give the subjects time to work on their memory; and of not narrowing down the focus of the interview to subcultural participation, keeping it open to the complexity of the interviewee’s life. Moreover, we asked interviewees to bring personal pictures to the interview, which we used as visual stimuli.5 Finally, it must be noted how, in contrast with most of the academic publications on subcultures, in this book we try to leave as much space as possible to our interviewees, publishing large thematically organised excerpts of their life stories.6 In this way we intend to account in a fine-­ grained way for the everyday life experience of subcultural belonging within each enactment, including its emotional tones—at least as recalled by our interviewees. In this sense, excerpts must be regarded as an essential part of the text. What is important to underline here is that this methodological choice—quite common when employing biographical methods—must not be read as a naive attempt to limit the role of the researchers in order to provide a ‘neutral’ account of the subculture in the 1980s. Nor it must be misunderstood as a sort of ‘renounce to the analysis’ (Ferrarotti 1981) to let interviewees speak for themselves. On the contrary, our theoretical interests inform the very way in which the materials have been selected and organised, exactly as they informed each single unedited life story through reflective listening techniques: our analysis is therefore performed not only in our explicit comments to the narratives, but also in the narratives’ production, selection, editing and organisation. Indeed, the book itself is structured following thematic criteria—in particular, enactments and canon—that derive from our analysis and that, as already mentioned, are unfamiliar to the interviewees themselves. Furthermore, according large space to interviews’ excerpts does not mean taking interviewees’ opinions as facts. Actually, factual information reported in the interviews has always been double-checked through external sources, and is examined more in depth and commented in the notes. On the other hand, when not explicitly taken on board in our comments, opinions must be attributed to the interviewee or, when resonating with those of other interviewees, must be regarded as shared within each enactment. Selecting excerpts that presented recurring themes was actually our way to pursue internal validation, especially since we couldn’t triangulate

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our biographical interviews with other methodologies, like, for example, ethnographic observation. Yet, we have been attentive to include in the text also excerpts that exposed possible dissonances and contradictions in interviewees’ accounts. An example of this methodological choice in the selection of the excerpts can be found in the section addressing issues of style and gender construction in the subculture,7 where one interviewee mentions a case of domestic violence, and who underlines its dissonance with the radicality of the values of dark aiming at deconstructing gender stereotypes and at renegotiating unbalanced gender relationships. With our interview (Roxy), we are inclined to interpret that episode as an example of individual violation of shared social norms and values, that remains always possible—however deprecated—in every environment and culture—however radical it may be. Yet, in this case, and more in general with all the main points of the book, our ambition is to have granted to our readers access to enough of our empirical materials to allow them to formulate alternative readings and interpretations. As a final note, we need to point out how our main aim in this book is to describe dark’s internal variations probing the conceptual lenses of enactment, practices and canon. In doing so, we address several topics discussed in the literature on subcultures and goth, like, for example, gender and sexuality, or subcultural fanzines. Yet, the way in which we address these subsidiary themes cannot compete with the in-depth analysis of more focalised monographs—like, for example, Dunja Brill’s book on gender and sexuality (2008) and Stephen Duncombe’s monograph on fanzines—and would require a more focused discussion, when not further empirical investigation.

2.2   Theoretical Sampling: Introducing Our Protagonists As already observed in several other studies (Muggleton 2000; Pilkington 2012; Lohman 2017, among others), our interviewees by and large resist (as, in their words, they resisted back in the 1980s) a simple definition of themselves as ‘dark’. As they clarify: No dark defined themselves as dark, we all snubbed the label. At a certain point they called us “new wave”, something made up in an article in the newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera.’ There was a period of time where newspapers published

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studies on trends and youth tribes that were totally misguiding and based purely on rumours. (Roberto Schieppati) To call yourself dark was a bit tricky even if you were part of the scene. You didn’t do that. (…) We started using the word gothic around ’87 or ’88, when we went to London and discovered that the exact term in the UK was gothic-­ punk. So, when people asked me, “Are you dark?”, to cut the conversation short I’d answer, “No, I’m gothic-punk.” The term dark sounded devoid of meaning, whereas gothic-punk underlined you came from punk and you had a dark side that marked the difference.” (Sergio di Meda) When people asked, “Are you a dark?” I’d answer, “No, I’m an existentialist.” (Emanuela Zini)

Therefore, we selected our sample by asking different informants, and later the interviewees themselves, to point us to “somebody who was in the dark scene in the ‘80s”, and among them we chose those to interview following criteria of typological variation and theoretical sampling: at the beginning of our research, we differentiated our interviewees by gender, place of residence (Milan or hinterland) and role in the scene (organisers, musicians, DJs, fanzine publishers or ‘simple’ participants). Proceeding with the analysis and the sampling, we introduced three further levels of variation: ‘generation’ (participation in the scene in the first or second half of the 1980s), present affiliation (still hanging out in the dark scene or not) and, finally, enactment (activist, music club or loner enactment). We let our interviewees decide whether they wanted to appear in the text with their real names or not, but we agreed to use any pseudonyms (or nicknames used in the 1980s) consistently throughout and within the excerpts. Our ambition is to keep each voice as recognisable as possible to the reader. For this same reason, we gave our protagonists the task of briefly introducing themselves: First Generation Angela Valcavi (1958) lived in Milan. In the early 1980s, struck by punk, she founded the fanzine Fame and soon after, in 1982, Amen and the multimedia project Thx 1138. From 1989 to 1992 she published the magnificent art and revolution magazine Informe. Since then, with unfaltering insistence, her collages and writings have been a continuous work in progress. Inspired by the book Creature Simili, in 2017 she

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published the biographical novel FAME (Agenzia X), on the years in which, with a bunch of friends, she published the eponymous punkzine. Dave (Davide Pietro Rossi, 1966) lived in Agrate Brianza, about ten miles from Milan, but his home was the Hysterika, the Viridis and other clubs frequented by the dark movement like Motion Unlimited in Madone, the Condor in Modena, the Onyria in Carpenedolo and the Express in Turin. Currently, he lives in Milan and is co-owner of the Mono Bar in Via Lecco. Eleonora Mosca (1964) lived in Arese, about ten miles from Milan. She often went to the Hysterika on Sunday afternoons and began playing keyboards and singing in various new wave bands. Currently, she is a professional singer specialised in ancient and sacred music as well as a teacher. Emanuela Zini (1967) has always lived in Milan. Adam & The Ants opened her eyes at the age of 13 and she hasn’t closed them since. She was a regular at Leoncavallo until it was bulldozed to the ground; she could always be found in Via Torino until it became a street like any other; she went to all the dark clubs until there was only one left; she played with the Camerata Mediolanense and founded the experimental-­ industrial music fanzine Batty’s Tears, which she left when the timing was right. Currently, she takes photos. Next… Garbo (1958), Renato Abate’s stage name, was born in Milan but has always lived in the Province of Como. He is considered one of the leading figures in 1980s Italian new wave. His first album, A Berlino… Va bene was released in 1981; his last, Fine (with Luca Urbani), in 2015. In 2006, a group of Italian musicians (including Francesco Bianconi from Baustelle and Mauro Ermanno Giovanardi) dedicated the tribute album ConGarbo to him. In 2013, a biography of the same name by Michele Monina for Crac Edizioni was published. His record label is Discipline. Joykix (1964) lived and lives in Milan. An activist for the local underground movement at the Virus and the Helter Skelter, in 1984 he published the single issue of the fanzine Hydra Mentale. Author of “psychological terrorism” and industrial music including the songs “Acciaio” and “Ambienti saturi”, he produced a series of photographs and Super 8 films in Bovisa, an industrial zone in Milan, and did the artwork for ShaKe Publishing and the magazine Decoder. Since 2008, he has focused on visual art. He is still active in the squat movement.

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Nino La Loggia (1957) has always lived in Milan with the exception of a year in Japan. He played guitar with HCN, Sunset Boulevard and 2+2=5. He published two albums and three 12” singles over the course of 20 years. The first album by 2+2=5, Into the Future, has recently been rereleased on CD, and many of their songs have been included in compilations such as Italia New Wave (2012), Italia Synthetica (2013) and Mutazione (2013). As a DJ, he worked alongside Randy, Lukas, Lenny Dee, Marco Passarani, Umek, Marco Lenzi, Laurent Ho, Kenny Larkin and D’Arcangelo. In 1999, he produced Ketracell White Ep, a 12” techno single that sold out almost immediately. He was one of the partners of the legendary record store Ice Age, in Corso di Porta Ticinese, Milan. Pino Carafa (1965) lived and still lives in Milan. From 1986 to the spring of 1989, when he was still known as DJ Lupo, he made two generations of darks dance at the Hysterika on Sunday afternoons. Afterwards, he wrote and arranged music for various projects including the Camerata Mediolanense and the Rosa Rubea. Currently, he works on independent music projects. Riccardo Slavik (1967) lived in small towns in Tuscany and Sardinia before studying for a year in Los Angeles and then settling in Milan in 1985. He studied at the Istituto Marangoni and worked at the Plastic and other clubs for about 15 years. Currently, he collaborates as editor and stylist for Italian and International fashion magazines. Rieko (Cha-Cha) Hagiwara (1959, the same year Barbie was born) made her first appearance on keyboards with Jeunesse D’Ivoire’s recordings of “A Gift of Tears” and “Silent Imagery”. In 1983, she joined 2+2=5 and played with them until the band broke up. In 2006, she conceived and developed Bear in Mind, the first Italian urban toy project. Roberto Schieppati (1967) was born and raised in Milan, in the Bovisasca neighborhood, until he moved to Bollate. He hung around the Belle Époque, the Hysterika and the Viridis until he was drawn to the Helter Skelter, the Leoncavallo and the Virus in Piazza Bonomelli. Currently, he teaches Art in London. Roxie (Rossella Moratto, 1965) lived in Novate Milanese, about six miles from Milan. She was an active participant in squat movements (Virus, Helter Skelter, Leoncavallo and Cox 18, where she still goes) even if she sometimes went to the Plastic disco—in addition to going to watch a huge number of movies. Currently, she is a contemporary art critic and curator.

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Roy (1967) lived in Cesano Maderno, 14 miles from Milan. He was the legendary DJ at the Rainbow (the former Odissea 2001) from 1995 to 2005 and DJ at the best Depeche Mode parties in Milan (Alcatraz, Rolling Stone, Propaganda). He still provides the entertainment for the alternative scene in Milan during the wee hours of the night. His latest regular evening event is Going Underground at the Rock’n’Roll in Via Bruschetti. Second Generation Andrea (1969) lived in a small town in the province of Varese, about 37 miles from Milan. He was still a minor when he became fascinated by the new wave and post-punk movement in Varese and Milan, and he soon began to go to clubs like the Muro, the Motion and the Hysterika. His obsessive passion for music, concerts and collecting records and memorabilia (his friends called him “Vinyl Junkie”) were more important to him than the way he looked. He loves film and Northern Europe and works in IT training. Andy (1971) lived in Monza, 11 miles from Milan. He sang and played keyboards and sax with Bluvertigo, which he co-founded with Morgan in the early 1990s. Currently, he focuses on painting and his new musical project FluOn, which gets its name from his headquarters: a former textile factory in Monza where he has found the free and creative space he always dreamed of as a teen. Antonella Pala (1970) lived and still lives in Milan. She went to the Hysterika, the Belle Époque, Le Cinéma, the American Disaster, the Linus, the Rainbow, as well as the Motion and less frequently to the Daho in Dalmine, the Muro in Varese and the Condor in Modena. Currently, she works in the Division of Vascular Surgery in a hospital in Milan, and has never really gotten over the 1980s. Donatella Bartolomei (1972) lived in Parabiago, 17 miles from Milan. She was a lone dark who never belonged to a group and didn’t hang out at clubs except for in London on holidays. Currently, she is an actor, singer, singing and acting teacher, and poetry and monologue writer. With her group TeatrObliO, she staged a tribute to The Rocky Horror Show. In 2013, she published an album on vocal experimentation, Voce sacra, and in 2016 she released the album Sacra Dea with the German music label Atemwerft. Gabriele Trezzi (1971) lived in Milan and is a zealous fan of night life in general. After the dark period, he worked for several years in the most

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popular Italian clubs such as the Cocoricò, the Echos and the Kama Kama. He has been working as a hairstylist since he was 17 years old and now works in fashion in Milan, Paris and New York. Gp (Giampaolo Calcaterra, 1969) lived in Fino Mornasco, in the province of Como, 26 miles from Milan. He has never stopped his forays into the post-punk scene at squats and dark clubs. Orietta Drago (1973) lived in Urgnano, in the flatlands of the Province of Bergamo, about 37 miles from Milan. She was dark before becoming punk: one of the few who took the path backwards to the origins. She has been a professional tattoo artist since 1998 (a job she loves), but she is also experimenting with painting and artistic assemblages. Paola (1972) lived in Vimodrone, about six miles from Milan. She loved the Hysterika as well as other clubs like the Black Out in Brescia, the Condor in Modena and the Viridis in San Giuliano Milanese. Currently, she is CFO for a software development company in the field of digital media, and her dark side lies quietly in a shut drawer, although it is still alive and breathing. Sara (1972) lived in a town 12 miles from Milan and was a hardcore dark, in all its aspects: isolated and ill-tempered. Today she teaches at a high school, yet she still cannot conceive of any other color than black. She still listens to The Cure and Christian Death. Sergio di Meda (Sergio Stagni, 1969) was and still is known for the city in which he lived (Meda, 17 miles from Milan), notwithstanding that he has lived in Milan for the last 20 years. He works with his brother in Brianza in their car repair shop. Once one of the most assiduous presences in all the alternative clubs in Milan, he still visits them and he still loves music, film, and horror and sci-fi literature in addition to his new passions, vintage cars and custom motorcycles. Silvia (1972) lived in Bergamo, 33 miles from Milan. After pure passion led her to being a regular at alternative clubs, she abandoned the scene to work in more “normal” clubs to pay for university. She earned a degree in History of Art and tried her hand at running a business with catastrophic results. Currently, she is waiting for inspiration to strike. The possibility of recognising each voice throughout the text should help the reader appreciate the specificity of the perspectives from which events are narrated and opinions are expressed.

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2.3   Towards a Grounded Theory: Practices, Subcultural Canon and Enactments The first and main concern we were faced with in our attempt to develop a grounded theory from the life stories we collected was related to issues of similarities and differences concerning subcultural identities. Addressing this same problem in his study on punk in Sweden and Indonesia, Erik Hannerz (2015) talks about a “fallacy within subcultural theory to deal with plural authenticities and plural structures of meanings within the same subculture” (13). In this regard, the author noted how “the postmodern approach conceals similarities through a focus on difference, [while] the ‘new’ subcultural theorists all too often substitute difference for similarity, arguing that the heterogeneity of style is a matter of individual interpretation of the collectively shared” (15). In line with these observations by Hannerz, both these approaches seemed to us ill-suited in depicting Milanese dark. On the one hand, in fact, our protagonists describe their experience in subcultural participation in ways that deeply resonate with one another, and that are considerably distant from the ephemeral and individual affiliations of the 1990s described by postmodernist theorists of neo-tribes and lifestyles (Bennett 1999, 2000; Miles 2000). As we will show, in fact, they invariably portray the experience as intense and persistent in time, as pertaining to the whole of their everyday lives, and as revolving around the appropriation of one common set of symbolic and cultural resources (in music, style, but also in cinema, theatre, literature and art) that were passed on through their relational networks, or could be accessed through media or specialised, non-mainstream shops (like libraries, record shops, clothes shops and even hairdressers). In this respect, Milanese dark in the 1980s—as UK goth in the 1990s (Hodkinson 2002)—shows high indicators of what Hodkinson’s ‘new’ subcultural approach defines ‘subcultural substance’: consistent distinctiveness (“the existence of a set of shared tastes and values which is distinctive from those of other groups and reasonably consistent”, 30); commitment (the “tendency for concentrated and continuous practical involvement among participants”, so as “to influence extensively the everyday lives of participants”, 31); and autonomy (indicating that “a good proportion of the productive or organizational activities which underpin [a subculture] are liable to be undertaken by and for enthusiasts”, 32).

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On the other hand, however, when addressing identity—Hodkinson’s fourth and last indicator of subcultural substance—things become more ambiguous. The fact that all the interviewees “hold a perception that they are involved in a distinct cultural grouping and share feelings of identity with one another” (pp. 30–31), does not prevent them from presenting significant differences in how their participation in the dark subculture is expressed in their daily lives. Moreover, they not rarely take their distance from ways of ‘being dark’ that they regard as different from their own.8 In contrast with the UK goth in the 1990s described by Hodkinson, these differences cannot be accounted for uniquely in terms of individual preferences within a shared (sub)culture (Hodkinson 2002), since they recur coherently in different life stories—nor were we able to trace them back to one of the variables we used for our initial theoretical sampling, like gender or role played in the scene. This does not mean that our interviewees do not have personal interpretations of subcultural values, or their own tastes and preferences in cultural consumption and style. In fact, what we want to underline is that, in Milanese dark, a marked similarity in values and tastes goes side by side with equally marked differences in the way subculturalists translate these values and tastes in the conduct of their daily lives. What marks these differences are, in particular, the different bundles of interconnected activities in which subcultural participation unfolds: in line with Schatzki (1996), we define these interconnected bundles of activities as social practices. Moreover, we define the common set of cultural and symbolic resources, tastes and values in which the consistent distinctiveness of Milanese dark consists as subcultural canon, and the translation of this canon in different social practices as enactment. Our point is that different enactments generate from the same subcultural canon different forms of subcultural identity. This point led us to develop a practice-centred approach, whose main aspects will be addressed in the following sections: discussing the key concepts of “practice” and “enactment”, we will clarify the affinities and divergences of our approach from other approaches focusing on subculturalist practices and on (subcultural) identity construction as a performative endeavour. The discussion of the concept of “canon” will be postponed to Chap. 7.

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2.3.1  What Is a Practice, Anyhow? From the 1990s onwards, one of the main criticisms advanced to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ classic take on subcultures underlined how this approach was “primarily grounded in semiotic analyses of style. The semiotician’s job was to deconstruct the taken-for-granted meanings that were attributed to subcultural objects and practices” (Williams 2007: 576). While these meanings “arose through hegemony as the ruling and working classes struggled over definitions of reality (…), subcultures appropriated and inverted (…) [them], often through the consumption of clothing, music, and other leisure commodities” (ibidem). For its critics, therefore, “the CCCS tended to ignore what subcultural participants actually said or did, focusing instead on ‘reading’ their resistance through style and ritual” (577). From the 1990s onwards, scholars have thus progressively integrated their research agendas with growing attention not only on practitioners’ subjective meanings, but also on subcultural practices, investigated through qualitative interviews and ethnographic observation. Regarding punk, Kirsty Lohman (2017) reviews ‘a second wave’ of studies, following the semiotic one, with a line of inquiry focusing on the ways punk ideology “manifested itself in DIY and anti-capitalist or anti-­ corporate economic practices”, and another “on the social practices of punk” (133). In the former, the author includes studies by Dale (2012), Gosling (2004), Moore (2004, 2010), O’Connor (2008) and Thompson (2004), while in the latter she enlists works by Gololobov et al. (2014), Haenfler (2006), Leblanc (1999), O’Connor (2002, 2003, 2004) and Wallach (2008). Regarding goth, whose academic study was undertaken concomitantly to Lohman’s second wave in punk studies, from the very beginning researchers devoted a great deal of attention to subculturalists’ doings. In the not-so-vast literature available, scholars have addressed practices as diverse as subcultural events attendance (Brill 2007; Hodkinson 2002; Spracklen and Spracklen 2018); stylistic practices (Hodkinson 2002), especially in relation to gender construction (Brill 2007, 2008; Goulding and Saren 2009); media-related practices (Hodkinson 2002, 2003; Spracklen and Spracklen 2018); religious and parareligious practices (Powell 2007; Healey and Fraser 2017). Some of these authors have deployed quite sophisticated takes on subcultural practices. Paul Hodkinson (2002), for example, addresses

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‘practical involvement’ in the goth scene at different levels. First of all, focusing on the logic and rules that inform subcultural practices. Regarding stylistic practices, for example, Hodkinson highlights how they are characterised by a high level of “creativity and appropriation”. Goths, in fact frequently made use of goods purchased from market stalls, high street chain stores and retailers of second-hand goods, all of which being outside the internal networks of their subculture. (…) They partook in a creative assembly of subcultural style, through selecting, sometimes altering and combining a variety of objects from external sources, into their own individual version of the goth style. (133)

At the same time, he clarifies how the rules of stylistic practices are to be conceived as dynamic in time, up to the point that by the late 1990s they admitted transgressions of the emphasis on dark imagery than there had been in the 1980s. Most notably, although black remained predominant, brighter colours had clearly become more acceptable in terms of hair, clothing and make-up. What began as a somewhat humorous and deliberate transgression by certain individuals had resulted in the growing translocal acceptance of the previously detested colour pink, as a complement to black, among goths in Britain. (46)

In the second instance, the author devotes a great deal of attention on the ‘infrastructure’ that makes possible and sustains subcultural practices, even if he focuses more on practices’ economic and organisational aspects, than on the material arrangements that enable and contribute to shape practices9—the typical take on infrastructures by practice theorists (Schatzki 2002). Such is the case, for example, of participation at subcultural events like festivals and dance nights: in this regard, Hodkinson draws a “subcultural/non-subcultural distinction (…) in order (…) to distinguish between those elements of this infrastructure which could be regarded as largely internal and autonomous and those which overlapped considerably with society outside” (85–86). As already mentioned, the goth scene presented a high level of autonomy, even if “mixed events [were] of greatest significance (…) as a cultural route for individuals into a relatively long-term, committed involvement with the goth scene’s exclusive subcultural networks of events, commerce and media” (87). Finally, the author clarifies how a relevant part of subcultural practices are media-related (Couldry 2004), involving both traditional and online media. These practices, that

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include socialisation and information exchange, are of key relevance in strengthening a shared sense of belonging, and must not be conceived as separate from, but as intertwined with, ‘real life’ practices. In this respect, media are an essential part of the infrastructure sustaining the ‘translocal’ goth scene. More recently, Spracklen and Spracklen (2018) adopted a more microsociological take in their case study on the Whitby Goth Weekend, one of the most important goth festivals started in Whitby in 1994. Among other things, the authors interrogate the shifting practice of taking pictures that has assumed a central role at the festival, attracting more and more enthusiast outsiders. For Spracklen & Spracklen, the logic of aspirational modelling and of amatorial photography creates new tensions with the locals, due to the disrespectful use of every spot in the city—especially the cemetery—as a temporary photographic set. Moreover, it endangers the ‘communicative alternativity’ of goth, grafting in its space practices similar to cosplaying, as revealed by the massive presence of steampunk outfits at the event. What is interesting to note here is how for the authors specific and pre-existing practices can be adopted within a subculture, contributing to its transformation and eventually—in Spracklen & Spracklen’s intentionally evaluative approach—to its decline. Notwithstanding this new attention to subcultural practices, however, “a wide variety of theorists today use the expressions ‘practices’ or ‘social practices’ in the absence of an elaborated or even explicit conception of practices”, as underlined by Theodor Schatzki (2012: 14). For the author, “these expressions are also often used almost unreflectively, in a way that suggests that the writer or speaker believes that his/her subject matter is a form of, or rooted in, human activities” (14). Albeit with a few exceptions,10 in a large part of these studies—on goth, punk or other subcultures—the concept of practices is indeed under-discussed and assumed in a taken-for-granted way as a generic synonym of ‘things that subculturalists do’. Surprisingly, ‘practice’ doesn’t appear with ‘style’, ‘resistance’, ‘space and media’, ‘societal reaction’ and ‘identity and authenticity’ among the core concepts in youth subcultural studies critically reviewed by Patrick Williams (2007), while it is recurrently used to discuss the others. The problem here is that differently defined, methodological concepts as ‘practice’ drive scholars to focus on different aspects of the reality under study, and to frame their research objects differently. Even if the attention to the ‘things that subculturalists do’ has enriched our understanding on the experience of subcultural and post-subcultural participation, this lack of

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reflexivity risks hindering the disciplinary dialogue on subcultural practices, and to undermine the attempt to really move beyond the classical semiotic approach. In this last regard, Christopher Driver notices how, in studies from the 1990s onwards, “there are a number of underlying epistemological assumptions that need to be re-evaluated, not the least of which is the conceptualisation of youth cultural practice as a fundamentally symbolic phenomenon” (2011: 975). “The assumption that subcultural practice is significant because it is symbolic of social and cultural identities” (976) would have led scholars to overlook the relevance of practices as embodied performances, and as a consequence to miss “the significance of the affective impact of human experience so central to the production of both selves and scenes” (976). Drawing on a case study on hardcore dancing known as ‘moshing’, the author points out how issues of affection and of bodily competences would ‘anchor’ the self of subculturalists, limiting their possibilities of nomadism through temporary subcultural affiliations depicted by theorists of post-subcultures.11 While we side with Driver’s methodological and epistemological concerns, for our own specific purposes we find it more problematic to concur with his proposal to address the practices of subcultural participation adopting Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Driver 2011). Habitus, in fact, is “the kind of practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation” (Bourdieu 1998: 25), consisting in an embodied configuration of dispositions, that “are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices (…) [and at the same time] also classificatory schemes” (8) for their evaluation. What is relevant here is that for Bourdieu the habitus is strictly related to the subjects’ material conditions and ultimately to class, and is “not only a structuring structure, which organises practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organises the perception of the social world is in itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes” (Bourdieu 1984: 170).12 From the perspective of Bourdieu, as clarified by John B. Thompson, practices should be seen as the product of an encounter between a habitus and a field which are, to varying degrees, ‘compatible’ or ‘congruent’ with one another, in such a way that, on occasions when there is a lack of congruence (e.g. a student from a working-class background who finds himself or herself in an elite educational establishment), an individual may not know how to act and may literally be lost for words. (Thompson 1991: 17)

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The adoption of this sort of Bourdieusian approach in addressing goth’s religious and parareligious practices has, for example, driven Anna Powell to admit that “from the vantage of Bourdieu’s class-based analysis, goth might well be read as an aestheticized lifestyle (…) of the economically advantaged ‘baby bourgeois’, who refuse complicity with their parents’ values yet acknowledge their centrality by transgression” (Powell 2007: 372). These assumptions are quite problematic to be taken methodologically on board by us, not only because of the heterogeneity of social classes that appear in our sample (working class, lower middle-class and middleclass), but also because participation in different ‘enactments’ of goth do not correspond to possible class divisions internal to the subculture. In this respect, the Milanese dark of the 1980s differ from the early UK punk scene addressed through a Bourdieusian approach by Andrew Branch (2014), where class habitus seemed to shape different styles of participation. This difference confirms that the relationship between class habitus and forms of subcultural participation must be empirically investigated, and not assumed through the methodological concepts adopted for the analysis. We tried to circumvent these methodological problems drawing on the work of a second wave of practice theorists who, starting from the 1990s, inspired the so-called practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001) in disciplines and research fields as diverse as sociology, social and political anthropology, media studies, science and technology studies, organisational studies, leisure studies, consumption studies and others. Inspired by theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and, of course, Pierre Bourdieu, authors like Theodore Schatzki (1996), Andreas Reckwitz (2002) and Elizabeth Shove (2012) have deployed what must be regarded as a practice-­centred social ontology that conceives “the social (…) [as] a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organised around shared practical understandings. This conception contrasts with accounts that privilege individuals, (inter)actions, language, signifying systems, the life world, institutions/roles, structures, or systems in defining the social” (Schatzki 2001: 12). What is at stake here is the reversal of the perspective of all alternative approaches—including class-based approaches: the primacy goes in fact to the nexus of practices in which a specific portion of a social reality consists, while all the other theoretical issues are to be interrogated in relation to said nexus. For our specific concerns, this meant employing primary focus on the practices in which subcultural participation unfolds and interrogating all the issues typical of the research

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field in relation to them, including issues of subcultural identity construction and authenticity. In this respect, a rigorous definition of ‘practice’ is methodologically of pivotal relevance. While “social theorists agree that there is no such thing as a coherent, unified ‘practice theory’” (Postill 2010: 6), all practice theorists “uphold (…) that practices consist in organised sets of actions, that practices link to form complexes and constellations—a nexus—and that this nexus forms the ‘basic domain of study of the social sciences’ (Giddens 1984: 2)” (Hui et al. 2017: 1). Moreover, they all conceive practices as double articulations: “of activities [or actions] as tasks with a function in an overall teleological architecture; and of activities as bodily performances, coordinated in their enactment in complex choreographies” (Tosoni and Turrini 2018: 286). Finally, all theorists agree on the relevance of material ‘objects, infrastructures, tools, hardware and the body itself’ (Shove et al. 2012: 23) in the organisation and unfolding of a practice, even if there is disagreement on conceiving these socio-material elements as basic constituents of social practices (e.g. Shove et al. 2012, pro; Schatzki 2002, contra). More specifically, Theodor Schatzki maintains that the organisation of a practice depends on four ‘types of items’: “(1) action understandings, which are abilities to carry out, recognize and respond to particular actions; (2) rules, which are formulated instructions, directives, admonishments, and the like; (3) teleoaffective structures, which contain enjoined and acceptable ends, enjoined and acceptable projects and actions to carry out for those ends, and enjoined and acceptable emotions; and (4) general understandings—of matters germane to the practice” (Schatzki 2009: 39). This definition of practice seemed particularly apt to us in making sense of our life stories, and, in particular, of the aforementioned issues of similarities and differences regarding the construction of subcultural identities. First, because it underlines how practices are always inherently social, whether they are undertaken alone or with other people.13 The general understandings, the action understandings, the rules and the teleoaffective structures that organise them are in fact always shared among practitioners, and do not depend on the idiosyncrasies of the individual practitioner. This does not imply that each single practitioner cannot hold individual interpretations of the practice, or that they cannot eventually break its rules: yet, in light of the overall organisation of the practice, to expert practitioners these interpretations appear indeed as individual interpretations, and

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these behaviours as transgressions (or as innovations) of the practice. In this respect, by adopting the aforementioned definition of practice we can account for the presence of individual interpretations of the subculture and, at the same time, for its consistent distinctiveness. Secondly, because it underlines how tastes, values and meanings that define a culture (or a subculture) are not ‘free-floating’, but are always ‘embedded’ in specific social practices: (sub-)cultures are always accessed through, and mediated by, social practices—including practices of media consumption. The engagement in different nexus of practices, therefore, mediate (sub-)cultures differently. Moreover, this conceptualisation also underlines how practices are characterised both by specific action understandings and teleoaffective structures and by ‘general understandings’, which “in Schatzki’s (2002) formulation, [can be] (…) common to many practices” (Welch and Warde 2017: 184). In this respect, it also allows us to account for the consistent distinctiveness of a subculture (to be acknowledged in its canon of symbolic and cultural resources, tastes and values) and, at the same time, for a plurality of forms of subcultural identity (deriving from the specific understanding, rules and teleoaffective structures of a practice or of a nexus of practices). 2.3.2  Enactments David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (2003) have underlined how “different applications of the work of both Bourdieu and Butler have helped to establish a resolutely anti-essentialist approach to subcultural theory” (11): since the late 1990s, the idea that subcultural “identities are not ontologically distinct or pre-existent, but are brought into being, constructed and replayed through every day actions, dress, adornment and other cultural practices” (Evans 1997: 181), has become a tenet in (post-) subcultural studies. Since then, several authors have generically termed ‘enactment’ the process of performative or discursive subcultural identity construction, authentication or invalidation (e.g. Piano 2003; Stahl 2003; Goulding and Saren 2009; Hannerz 2015). While adopting this same term, we give to the concept a more restrictive meaning, strictly reconnecting it to the practice-centred approach we have outlined so far, where “fixed social concepts, such as nation or gender (…) [are reformulated] as processes of enactment and (specific) categories of practice (e.g. Brubaker 1996; Butler 1993)” (Welch and Warde 2017: 184).

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We base this conceptualisation of enactment on the ground of John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien’s investigations into empirical ontology (Lien and Law 2011; Law and Lien 2013), in the context of what some scholars have defined as the ‘turn to ontology’ in Science and Technology Studies (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013; for more sceptical positions, see Heur et al. 2013; Sismondo 2015). Law and Lien’s empirical ontology moves, in fact, from concerns that are very close to our own, consisting in “handl[ing] empirical difference” (Law and Lien 2013: 364) in ‘entities’: salmons in their case, subcultural identities in ours. Their approach addresses these differences by “focusing on practices rather than people or groups” (364), and it entails—as they clarify in their case study on the Atlantic Salmon—two key ‘methodological moves’: A salmon is not general but specific. It depends on how ‘it’ is being done in practice. We do without the assumption that there are salmon out there with a definite form, in existence outside the practices in which they are being done. That is the first move. And then, here’s the second, it follows that since those practices aren’t the same, different and multiple salmon subsist in different and multiple worlds. This, then, follows once we study ontology empirically. There is no ordered ground separate from practices and their relations. If there is order, it is a provisional and specific effect of practices and their ordering relations. There is no ‘salmon’ behind the various practices that do salmon. (366)

Basically, the point we are making here is that what works for salmons, will also work for darks (Tosoni 2017). We think that these methodological moves, in fact, represent a valuable leverage in order to take our distance from what Alan O’Connor defines as ‘substantive thinking’ (2016) on subcultural identities, that on his opinion still characterises (post-)subcultural studies, notwithstanding the aforementioned anti-essentialist turn. In substantive thinking, as O’Connor clarifies in regard to punk, “the author (…) seeks to describe and typify punk subculture. (…) [E]xamples or instances that do not fit the author’s model are written off as exceptions or anomalies. Much academic writing on punk in effect constructs an ideal type (in Max Weber’s sense) that might be useful as a thought experiment, but that completely sets aside the diversity within actual punk scenes” (O’Connor 2016: 68). Along the same lines, Erik Hannerz (2015) laments that “even when different kinds of participants are included [in a sample] they are nevertheless ordered according to commitment and authenticity, with one group of participants being (…) given the privilege of defining the others” (192–193).

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In our approach, on the contrary, we do not start by constructing an ideal type, or endowing one ‘group’ with the privilege of defining the authenticity of the others: instead, we do without the assumption that ‘dark’ have a definite form outside the social practices in which the subcultural identity is enacted mobilising the subcultural canon, and since these practices aren’t the same, we assume that there are different and multiple darks. Under a methodological point of view, this entails starting from mapping the main practices in which the subcultural canon is put into play—going dancing, consuming, being politically active and so on and so forth. From our sample, three different kinds of practices emerge: (1) practices that are common to all our interviewees and that are deemed of key relevance for subcultural participation: basically, practices of cultural consumption and stylistic practices; (2) practices that are common to a section of our sample, and that are deemed of key relevance for subcultural participation: as we will show, these practices define the differences among enactments. For example, political participation is deemed of key relevance within the activist enactment, while going dancing is one of the core practices of the music club enactment; and finally (3), other practices, that subjects do not deem as of key relevance for subcultural participation (and yet, as we will see, they are in any case shaped by subcultural participation). In sum, each enactment unfolds in a nexus of practices of the three kinds, where practices of the second kind mark the difference among enactments. Here, three further observations are needed: first, a practice of the second kind—deemed as of key relevance in an enactment—can appear as a practice of the third kind in other enactment: for example, as we will see, political participation can appear in the life stories of subjects engaged in the music club enactment, and, in the same way, subjects engaged in the activist enactment may go to dance, yet these practices are held as ‘individual’ and ‘personal’, and as irrelevant for subcultural participation. Second, ‘deeming a practice of key relevance’ it is not a matter of just individual perception, because it is also related to social criteria for authentication or invalidation of subcultural identities within each enactment. Or rather, for social criteria of attribution of subcultural capital (Thornton 1995)14 since, as we will see, the only subcultural identities that are invalidated throughout our sample are the ones of weekenders and ‘part-time’ darks.15 This implies a relevant theoretical point: subcultural capital is acquired in different ways within different enactments—and hold within each enactment. Finally, while we find his practice-centred approach

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very inspiring, we resist O’Connor’s proposal in considering a subculture—in his case, punk—as a field in Bourdieu’s sense, or “a relatively autonomous area in which specialized activities take place” (O’Connor 2016: 69). As pointed out by Hodkinson, in fact: Goths may dress and dance in different ways from others, may listen to different sorts of music. Yet, there remain key elements to their enjoyment of and identification with such activities which are comparable to their equivalents in the case of punks, metallers, garage fans, northern soul participants and, to some degree at least, a range of more casual clubbers. This brings us onto a further point—that, for all their unusualness in some respects, aspects of subcultural motivation, practice, understanding and identity connect to broader equivalents across so-called ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ society. (Hodkinson 2016: 569)

From our perspective, therefore, a subcultural enactment depends on the engagement in a nexus of practices, each of them belonging to different fields as ‘relatively autonomous areas of specialized activities’—like, for example, political activism—and to everyday life common practices. To account for these everyday and specialised practices, we will start from the sociopolitical context that hosted—and shaped—them all: the city of Milan at the beginning of the 1980s, as seen through the eyes of our interviewees.

Notes 1. Inspired by the work of the psychologist Carl Rogers (1951), when applied to the life story method, these techniques consist basically in orienting the subjects’ storytelling on themes of interest using only the speakers’ own words to summarise their narrative, or to request clarifications. These techniques aim at avoiding to introduce in the narrative themes or concepts that are alien to the interviewees. 2. In Denzin’s terms (1978: 218), these are “topical life histories”. 3. For more details on our sample, see Sect. 1.2. 4. Our interpretation was also not refused by any of the 20 non-Milanese readers of the book we reached with a questionnaire in order to obtain some insights on the generalisability of our results outside the Milanese context. 5. Together with pictures, in occasion of the interviews we also collected copies of fanzines and other cultural artefacts belonging to the interviewees. 6. All the interviewees reviewed and approved their excerpts after they were edited for readability, and before their translation.

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7. See Sect. 6.4. 8. The following excerpt, more extensively presented in Chap. 6, clarifies this apparent contradiction between the feeling of a shared identity and the ­perceived distance from some life conducts: “I remember seeing groups of darks drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon near the Colonne di San Lorenzo. I never liked that. I was not a prig: I just didn’t see the ‘dark path’ as compatible with certain behaviour. I’d say, ‘Look at these guys, they’re making all of us lose face!” (Donatella Bartolomei). The drunk darks are accepted as being part of ‘us’, and yet they are criticised for the way they enact dark in public. 9. For an example of the analysis of the relationship between material arrangements and the practice of live gigs, in light of conflicts in canon between Milanese anarcho-punks and Creature Simili, see Chap. 3. 10. The work of Pierre Bourdieu represents the main reference for the few attempts in establishing practice theory for the analysis of subculturalists’ doings. These attempts generally consist in the appropriation of one of the key concepts of the Bourdueisian theoretical framework, like habitus (Powell 2007; Driver 2011; Branch 2014), field (O’Connor 2008, 2016) or (sub-)cultural capital (Thornton 1995; Brill 2007; Jensen 2006). 11. On the opportunity, and yet the difficulty of addressing the embodied and affective dimensions of subcultural practices, see Hodkinson (2012). 12. In our view, other concepts—like, for example, tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1958, 1966; Collins 2011)—would have served Driver’s needs to address embodied knowledge equally well, without the class implications of habitus. 13. Among others, Kirsty Lohman (2017) gives the word ‘social’ in ‘social practices’ the meaning of ‘implying socialization with other members’, and distinguishes punk’s social and individual practices. 14. For Thornton, subcultural capital is the ideological resource through which subculturalists acquire a respected status in a scene. 15. It’s the reason why we have not considered it a fourth, distinct enactment of dark.

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Miles, S. (2000). Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Moore, R. (2004). Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction. The Communication Review, 7(3), 305–327. Moore, R. (2010). Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis. New York, London: NYU Press. Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford, New York: Berg. Muggleton, D., & Weinzierl, R. (2003). What Is ‘Post-Subcultural Studies’ Anyway? In D. Muggleton & R. Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 3–23). Oxford: Berg. O’Connor, A. (2002). Local Scenes and Dangerous Crossroads: Punk and Theories of Cultural Hybridity. Popular Music, 21(2), 225–236. O’Connor, A. (2003). Punk Subculture in Mexico and the Anti-Globalization Movement: A Report from the Front. New Political Science, 25(1), 43–53. O’Connor, A. (2004). Punk and Globalization: Spain and Mexico. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(2), 175–195. O’Connor, A. (2008). Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DIY. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. O’Connor, A. (2016). Towards a Field Theory of Punk. Punk & Post Punk, 5(1), 67–81. Piano, D. (2003). Resisting Subjects: DIY Feminism and the Politics of Style in Subcultural Production. In D.  Muggleton & R.  Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-­ Subcultures Reader (pp. 253–265). Oxford: Berg. Pilkington, H. (2012). Punk  – But not as We Know It: Punk in Post-Socialist Space. Punk & Post Punk, 1(3), 253–266. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Postill, J. (2010). Introduction: Theorising Media and Practice. In B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (Eds.), Theorising Media and Practice (pp. 1–32). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Powell, A. (2007). God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in U.K. Goth Culture. In M. Bibby & L. M. E. Goodlad (Eds.), Goth: Undead Subculture (pp. 357–374). Durham, London: Duke University Press. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263. Schatzki, T.  R. (1996). Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge, New  York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. (2001). Introduction: Practice Theory. In T. R. Schatzki, K. KnorrCetina, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 10–23). New York: Routledge.

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Schatzki, T.  R. (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. (2009). Timespace and the Organization of Social Life. In E. Shove, F.  Trentmann, & R.  R. Wilk (Eds.), Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (pp. 35–48). New York: Berg. Schatzki, T. (2012). A Primer on Practices. Theory and Research. In J.  Higgs, R.  Barnett, S.  Billett, M.  Hutchings, & F.  Trede (Eds.), Practice-Based Education: Perspectives and Strategies (pp. 13–26). Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr-Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London, New York: Routledge. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and how it Changes. London, Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications. Sismondo, S. (2015). Ontological Turns, Turnoffs and Roundabouts. Social Studies of Science, 45(3), 441–448. Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, B. (2018). The Evolution of Goth Culture: The Origins and Deeds of the New Goths. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Stahl, G. (2003). Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory: Making Space for a New Model. In D.  Muggleton & R.  Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 27–40). Oxford: Berg. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of Qualitative Research – Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications. Thompson, J.  B. (1991). Editor’s Introduction. In J.  B. Thompson (Ed.), P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (pp. 1–31). Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, S. (2004). Punk Productions: Unfinished Business. Albany: SUNY Press. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tosoni, S. (2017). Of Goths and Salmons: A Practice-Based Exploration of Subcultural Enactments in 1980s Milan. In P. Guerra & T. Moreira (Eds.), Keep It Simple, Make It Fast. An Approach to Underground Music Scenes (Vol. 3, pp. 279–288). Faculdade de Letras/Porto: Universidade do Porto. Tosoni, S., & Turrini, V. (2018). Controlled Disconnections: A Practice-Centred Approach to Media Activities in Women’s Solo Travelling. In L.  Peja, N. Carpentier, F. Colombo, M. F. Murru, S. Tosoni, R. Kilborn, L. Kramp, R.  Kunelius, A.  McNicholas, H.  Nieminen, & P.  Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt (Eds.), Current Perspectives on Communication and Media Research (pp. 283–302). Bremen: Edition Lumière. Wallach, J. (2008). Living the Punk Lifestyle in Jakarta. Ethnomusicology, 52(1), 98–116.

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Welch, D., & Warde, A. (2017). How Should We Understand ‘General Understandings’? In A.  Hui, T.  Schatzki, & E.  Shove (Eds.), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 183–196). New York: Routledge. Williams, J.  P. (2007). Youth-Subcultural Studies: Sociological Traditions and Core Concepts. Sociology Compass, 1(2), 572–593. Woolgar, S., & Lezaun, J. (2013). The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies? Social Studies of Science, 43(3), 321–340.

CHAPTER 3

Der Himmel Über Milan: The City of Milan in the Early 1980s

The late 1970s and early 1980s are known, in Italy, as ‘the years of the riflusso’ (the ebb, or the resignation) (De Michele 2003; Mudu and Piazza 2016; Masini 2018): under the tension of terrorism and harsh repression by the state, the experience of the radical movements of the previous decade came to an abrupt end (Ginsborg 1990). At the same time, a new culture of hedonism took shape, celebrating the neoliberal values of private fulfilment and success, of wealth, leisure and blustering consumerism. This disengagement from politics, and the consequent retreat into the private sphere (Galli della Loggia 1980), profoundly transformed the country from a social, cultural and political point of view and, especially in the larger cities, also at the level of everyday life. As Mudu and Piazza (2016) note: By the end of the 1970s, the presence of the radical left in public spaces, squares and streets—as well as semi-public spaces as bookshops, cinemas and bars— decreased until it had almost disappeared entirely, thus leaving a new generation of activists, students, proletarian youths and unemployed, mostly young people between 16 and 25 years, with almost no spaces or links to previous experiences. (p. 112)

Milan was a prime example and, at the same time, the spearhead of these tendencies (Foot 2001). The city was governed by rampant socialism: Carlo Tognoli was the mayor from 1976 to 1986, followed by Paolo © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_3

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Pillitteri until 1992. Deindustrialisation was proceeding at an accelerated pace, and so was real estate speculation, while the city was reinventing itself, cooling off from the spirit of solidarity it had traditionally boasted of, to embrace a new culture of success and unbridled competition (Foot 1999). Cutting-edge sectors like fashion, finance, design, television and advertisement offered new opportunities to those who were ready to grab them. Fashion was foregoing a dizzying boom, with tailors who became internationally famous fashion designers (Merlo and Polese 2006): Giorgio Armani was celebrated on the cover of Time Magazine on 5 April, 1982,1 while the fashion houses on Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga launched Milan towards the conquest of the fashion industry against competitors like Paris and New York. Television commercials and private networks skyrocketed (Balbi and Prario 2010): in 1980, Silvio Berlusconi’s Telemilano became Canale 5. Two years later, the publisher Rusconi sold the television channel Italia 1 to the future prime minister’s Fininvest company, and the same occurred in 1984 to half of the TV channel Rete 4, when Berlusconi’s television broadcasting company had already overtaken Rai—the Italian public television—on the advertising market. Thanks to Berlusconi’s private media empire (Statham 1996; Ginsborg 2005), with headquarters in the city’s outskirts, Milan became the national symbol of the new desire of optimism, wealth and leisure that characterised the Italian mainstream culture of the 1980s. For the first time, the city could even imagine itself as a ‘European Capital’: in 1983 and 1984, Pope John Paul II visited Milan,2 as did the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikail Gorbachev, in 1989.3 And yet, in the meanwhile, behind the scenes of the brightly lit kermess, repression and resignation held the stage, and heroin, which had become a mass drug in the late 1970s,4 took a very hefty toll: That period was really hard. Political repression, widespread heroin use and terrorism had a brutal effect on political movements and even on everyday life. People wouldn’t leave their homes. There was a feeling of grey heaviness all over the city, on social spaces, and even on meeting places. After the enactment of the special laws—in particular after the Legge Reale (Reale Act) in 1975, and its exacerbation in ’775—police forces were given more power, including the use of firearms. The so-called ‘emergency’ period began. Personal freedom underwent drastic restrictions with the aim of exercising radical control over political movements. Stop-and-searches became more frequent and preventative

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detention was extended to forty-eight hours plus another forty-eight for ‘further investigation’. I am just drawing a rough sketch of what was happening, and the risk is I am making light of a very articulate and complex political event, but the arrests on 7 April, 19796—that the state justified as the need to fight terrorism even through the criminalization of thought—were aimed at the annihilation of the entire political movement in Italy, and decided its stagnation. The arrests followed investigations carried out by the Italian Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Republic, Pietro Calogero, who wanted to prove the existence of the Red Brigade’s subversive control over extra-parliamentary opposition groups mediated by the far-left Autonomia Operaia movement. An entire generation had been incapacitated. People that were engaged in the radical left-wing constellation paid a steep price for their political militancy: there were many cases of preventative detention that ended in release, even after long periods of time, without any charges made. In the fanzine Fame,7 edited at that time by our small resistance group, we had a column called ‘Letters from Prison’ that reported on the absurdity of it all. As a matter of fact, I’d say we lived in a sort of police state. Milan was changing. It was difficult to move around freely because we were certain we’d be stopped by the police once, twice, three or four times. That’s when what would later be called “resignation” began: people wouldn’t leave their homes, political commitment decreased, and everyone minded their own business. Anyone who didn’t want to acknowledge the end of that experience, or take refuge within a political party, had to keep their guard up. The younger generation that didn’t grow up in the seventies felt the weight of repression not by seeing it from a political point of view, but by living it as a limit to their personal freedom. (Angela Valcavi) In the spring of 1984 we tried to occupy the Miele theatre, just before the Virus was cleared out. We Creature Simili, the name we gave our group, held our meetings at the Virus, and therefore the squat was seen by authorities as an ‘accomplice’ to the occupation and this was probably a further motive for its closure.8 There weren’t many of us: twenty, thirty people. Twenty armoured cars came! That adds up to almost one per each of us! It was pointless. And there was zero communication, zero negotiation. We were subdued. We weren’t pro-­ terrorism or anything like that. It was frightening. All the free spaces were being closed down. And there were continuous police checks. They would stop you, frisk you, search your car. You couldn’t do anything, never mind occupy a place. It was like they didn’t have anything better to do but follow you around. And it got even worse when we connected with the Leoncavallo and Primo Moroni’s9 bookstore, Calusca. That’s where we heard some incredible stories about the generation before us: people who committed suicide in jail, heavy-duty repression, torture… There was a noxious cloak hovering over us that ended in ’87 with total destruction. That’s the year when Helter Skelter,10 the space we

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self-managed inside the Leoncavallo, waned; the Virus didn’t exist anymore, because after Viale Piave and Piazza Bonomelli that experience also came to an end, and so we would hang out in public squares and streets, where anything could happen to you. That was the worst year: 1987. (Joykix)

In 1987, to all intents and purposes, Milan was schizophrenic. Along with the repression of movements suffocating the city, another Milan seemed to emerge: it was the Milan “to be lived, dreamt, relished and… to be sipped”, as suggested by the popular Amaro Ramazzotti television commercial created by the advertiser Marco Mignani.11 It reflected the mood the city wanted to portray, and reinforced the idea of Milan as a little New  York where dreams of success could come true. In 1987, Mignani also authored the ‘Forza Italia’ campaign, originally launched for Democrazia Cristiana (the Christian Democratic Party), and recycled six years later by Silvio Berlusconi’s first political party. Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that repression concerned only those actively involved in political militancy: the repressive atmosphere affected the city as a whole. Milan became a laboratory where a new social and political ‘normalization’ formula was fine-tuned: it put an end to the cycle of protests of the 1970s and, with some adjustments, it gradually set the course for the years to come. The city’s schizophrenia was in fact only a façade: in reality, there was a twofold game in play. The first was the direct repression that struck active political militancy violently and led to the systematic intimidation of anything that appeared as ‘alternative’ and not aligned. The discriminating factor could simply have been appearance: whoever looked unconventional, underaged or not, underwent repeated police checks, searches and even preventative detentions: Once I was stopped by the police only because I was wearing ripped jeans: they asked me if I had run away from home. Not that I was so radical in my look, but I wore skirts over leggings that I made with my own little hands at the Istituto Marangoni.12 The police couldn’t do anything, but they stopped you. I haven’t been asked to show my ID for over twenty years now, but during that period they asked me at least two hundred times. Once, as I was leaving a store in Via della Spiga, there was a squad car. I made a face as if to say, ‘What’s this?’. They told me to show them my ID and asked, ‘Why did you look at us like that?’ (Riccardo Slavik)

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We used to hang out at Burger One for a while, between Piazza San Babila and the Duomo, in this courtyard off Corso Vittorio Emanuele. It’s still there. It used to be an open space with an above-ground garden, but now there are clothing stores there. We would meet with others from the Hysterika, a club that was the centre of the dark scene. One day there was a crazy police raid: we were just hanging out and the police arrived and brought us all to the police station and kept us there until night. It was a Saturday afternoon I think, and I’m pretty sure it was summer. We were just talking, not doing anything wrong, and suddenly the police arrived with loads of vans and cars. They practically surrounded the area, there was no escape. We were all stunned, ‘What the fuck do these guys want?’ They took us to the station and kept us from, like, five in the afternoon until midnight. Since most of us were minors, they kept us until a time our parents were inevitably going to find it out. Me and a friend had it even worse because we didn’t live in Milan: his dad had to pick us up in his car. I still can’t figure out the reason for a police raid like that. There was no political justification because we weren’t rioting, we weren’t doing anything, we were just there. Maybe the shopkeepers in the area called them in: we were in a very fashionable area and our, let’s say, ‘different’ group bothered them. Another thing that made the whole thing weird was that some rappers hung out there too, they had their skateboards and danced on their heads, and we got along really well. There were a few run-ins with the Paninari but I never got involved in those. So, that’s what it was like at that time: I remember there was a similar police raid at the Colonne di San Lorenzo a few weeks earlier, even though they were mainly punks. (Roberto Schieppati)

It was a period of round-ups in a big way. Like the one on 26 May 1984, in Piazza San Babila, that was presumably brought on by an anonymous call.13 The police later stated that they had found knives, chains, rods and sticks in parked cars and garbage bins in the area: standing on their declarations, it was an entire urban guerrilla arsenal. At the same time, near the Ticinese neighbourhood, 80 punks were stopped before they could even begin their protest against the closure of the Virus in Via Correggio. A police officer even fired two shots in the air to intimidate them. Yet, one of the most spectacular joint actions between the police and carabinieri (the military police corp) at the time, occurred on 21 September 198514: 400 teenagers, many of them minors, were taken to the police station in Piazza San Sepolcro for identification. No one was charged. In that case, it had been the local shopkeepers who complained about the noise on a Saturday afternoon. The round-up did not exclude anyone: darks, punks, paninari, rockabillies, hard rockers and skinheads.

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Everyone from Via Torino, Carrobbio, Colonne di San Lorenzo and Piazza San Babila was taken in. Practically, from the entire historical centre of Milan up to Sempione Park. “The majority don’t go beyond the folkloristic”, an official at police headquarters stated to the newspaper Corriere della Sera,15 “but there are disreputable types nesting in the bunch, and we have to defend our citizens from them”. Yet, direct repression didn’t work on its own, but it was accomplished in teams with the other side of the game in play: assimilation that led to a normalisation. The movements in the 1960s and 1970s were in fact exceptional schools of communication. Independent radio stations, fanzines, small publishing houses and political activism brought about new forms of expression that hit the right notes for dreams and desires. For those who were less compromised and who were ready to take a step back from activism, the doors of cultural industry, advertising, publishing and journalism opened up. Many of those who had once participated in the counterculture contributed therefore to shape the new image of the 1980s characterised by success, pleasure and the illusion of consumerism: the promise of pleasure for everyone, provided it was pursued individually. It was the home-made version of Reaganian hedonism, and its soundtrack was the more carefree Italo disco (Verrina 2015), launched by Claudio Cecchetto and his successful radio station Radio Deejay, founded in Milan in 1982. In the early 1980s, the ‘repression + assimilation’ formula was still in its early stages: notwithstanding Milan was ahead of the game, apart from the limited circles that could actually live the dream, what was perceived was a sudden setback, a return to order and conformity after the experimentations of the 1970s. The individual freedoms related to leisure and consumption and the subsequent liberalisation of lifestyles were in large part still to come. For those who were there in the 1970s, it was the ebb: the return to the private sphere and the disintegration of the forms of sociality experimented in the previous decade. For the younger generation, it was a suffocating normality: a stalemate between a course of life that seemed already written, along with the absence of any viable alternative: It’s hard to explain. It was like something in the air, an atmosphere that I could feel. It was heavy, suffocating. I felt that the only way I could live was one day at a time: I couldn’t see much of a future ahead. And there was no explanation for this, nothing I could put my finger on. It was as if school were a compulsory passage after which a wall would rise. It held you back, it made you feel suspended. (Andrea)

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I grew up when Pillitteri was mayor of Milan, while Craxi16 was pulling all the strings. On one hand you had this ‘Milan to be sipped’ that was continuously flaunted at you, where everyone was having fun and was going out for aperitifs, all happy and smiling. And then there was us, teenagers who didn’t share that vision, because we felt that everything was going to pot. I remember talking about this a lot with my friends because, as the years went by, I started to realize what was happening. I’m an anti-fascist. I can’t stand right-wing regimes. The impression I—we all—had then was that we were on a slippery slope, because there really was some sort of political and police control over everything we did. I remember saying, ‘I’m scared. I’m scared we’re going from a relatively transparent form of fascism to a hidden one, where everything will be kept under control, but with the pretence that we’re all in peace and harmony, democratic, and ultimately free to do whatever we want.’ Maybe at that time we were starting to get a glimpse of the situation we’re living right now. The problem wasn’t just the police, but also the bourgeois, or the ‘regulars’, as we called them. One of the sayings we used a lot was ‘fucking bourgeois’. But what we meant with bourgeois was not actually the middle class, the social class we were taught about in school. A bourgeois for us could come from a working-class background, or be a small business owner, an artisan who scraped by, or an office worker raising a family. Bourgeois for us was anybody that wouldn’t accept that someone could be different from them. The one who is prisoner of the taken for granted, of schemes. The bourgeois for us was the close-minded: you have to study, then you have to get a job. That’s the life you have to lead: then you have to get married, have kids, submit to what the law and the church demand. That’s who the fucking bourgeois were: conformists, basically. (Sergio di Meda) I really felt the need for a change, to find something other than what I had, even just at an intellectual level. Naturally, the fact that we are the country with the Catholic Church had its influence and pulled its weight on the atmosphere, because we grew up following a predetermined path. There was a rigid separation between what they told you was right and what they told you was wrong: as if there was a set of train tracks you couldn’t deviate from. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but on a historic and social level, you really felt the need to blow up a few tracks. And punk, but also dark, was a way to do it. Sure, the whole subculture was a lot more established in the UK, and here in Italy we somehow copied their way of living social unrest, adapting it to our own situation. Basically, what we wanted was to blow up the tracks and find a path that was different from the one of the ‘regulars’. We called ‘regulars’ anyone who accepted the track, or maybe who didn’t even see it—or at least that’s what it looked like to us: mindless people, all dressed alike, without the least bit of personal touch. Yes: this thing of everyone dressing the same way was really important to us back then, because you felt the need to take your distance, to identify with something

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else, and because of this, appearance was very important. It was simple, straightforward. It was direct, there was no need to explain. The regulars were the personification of the masses, the staunch believers, even if anonymous and insignificant, who agreed with mom and dad’s politics without questioning them. (Roberto Schieppati) The regulars conformed to what existed. They were the silent majority. For us, these people made up Milan. In Bologna, the mood was still different, while in Turin the atmosphere was frightening. I remember Turin very well: a heavy weight hovered over the city. In fact, Italian hardcore punk in Turin was devastating: Contrazione, Quinto Braccio, Blue Vomit, Declino, Negazione, Nerorgasmo… I’d get up the courage and go to concerts to sell my fanzine Hydra Mentale where they gave me shit because they were all punks. (Joykix) The regulars lived in a predetermined track and settled for whatever was available. They were like lambs to the slaughter, they didn’t have any power over their lives. We thought we had it somehow, power. We were under the illusion of, ‘not us: we’ll create our own space, our own music, our own market. Our revolution is here and now.’ Maybe it was more like a secession than a revolution, in the sense that you do something else even if you stay there: you create your own heterotopia, but real. In your life, you have the will to say, ‘this is the way I am and I’ll create my own world’, in comparison to others who didn’t have their own world, or maybe who were simply disillusioned. (Roxie)

Resisting the pull to conform to the combination of repression and assimilation, coming up with a different path even when there seemed to be no accessible ones left: this was the frame of mind shared by all the youth countercultures in Milan at the time. In this context, dark marked its own specific path, different from all the others.

Notes 1. Time Magazine, 5 April 1982, cover with the title: “Giorgio’s Gorgeous Style”. Available online at http://content.time.com/time/covers/ 0,16641,19820405,00.html. Last accessed 1/9/2019. 2. Pope John Paul II visited Milan twice. The first time was from 20 to 22 May 1983, at the end of the 20th National Eucharistic Congress; the second time (November 2–4, 1984) on the occasion of the fourth centenary of St. Charles Borromeo’s death. (Available online at the website of the Holy See, in John Paul II’s speeches section: https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/speeches/1983/may/documents/hf_jp-ii_ spe_19830520_benvenuto-milano.html and https://w2.vatican.va/

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content/john-paul-ii/it/speeches/1984/november/documents/hf_ jp-ii_spe_19841104_arrivo-milano.html, last accessed 1/9/2019). 3. A short journalistic report of the Soviet leader’s visit to Milan can be found in Bonsanti, S. (1989). “Occhetto soddisfatto: Gorbaciov è con noi”. La Repubblica, December 1, 1989. Available online at: http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1989/12/01/occhetto-soddisfatto-gorbaciov-con-noi.html. Last accessed 1/9/2019. 4. A report on the progress of drug use throughout Italy, published in 1992 by the British Journal of Addiction, estimated that there were 28,000 opiate users in Italy in 1977. This figure rose to 92,000 in 1982. During their study period (1985–1989), the authors found that the number of subjects who went to drug addiction recovery centres increased from 13,905 to 61,689: an increase which was due to a rise in heroin consumption. Unlike countries like the United Kingdom—where the increase in heroin consumption in the 1980s was mainly due to its spread to areas most affected by the economic recession—the increase in Italy occurred in a period of relative prosperity. According to the study, this phenomenon struck northern Italy above all. Large cities such as Milan recorded the highest level of drug addicts coming from different social environments. See Rezza et al. (1992). 5. The law of the Italian Republic n. 152 of 22 May 1975, Provisions for the protection of public order, was known as the ‘Reale Act’, a name derived from its promoter Oronzo Reale, who was minister of justice between November 1974 and February 1976. The law sanctioned the right of police forces to use firearms when necessary to maintain public order. The use of preventive custody in jail was extended even in the absence of flagrante delicto: the preventive detention could last for four days, within which the judge had to decree a validation by the judicial authority. The Reale Act, amended in 1977 by law 533, was widely contested because it was considered excessive, and was subjected to an abrogative referendum in June 1978: but 76.5% of voters decided not to abrogate the law. Later, over the years, the law underwent some changes and was partly ‘weakened’. In 1990, a research paper was published on the cases of death and injuries due to the introduction of the Reale Act: between June 1975 and mid-1989, 254 people were killed and 371 were injured. In 90% of the cases, the victims did not possess a firearm when confronted with the police. See Libro bianco sulla Legge Reale, curated by Centro di iniziativa Luca Rossi, available online at www.ecn.org/lucarossi/625/625/. Last accessed 1/9/2019. 6. “On April 7, 1979, [Professor Antonio] Negri and other activists and former activists in Autonomia and Potere Operaio were arrested on orders from the Padua state attorney, Pietro Calogero. They were accused of

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being the leaders of the Red Brigades, and (through the legal front of Autonomia and Potere Operaio) of being the organizers and instigators of the wave of terrorism that had spread through Italy in the late ‘70’s. On the same day, Negri was also indicted by a Rome judge for the murder of Aldo Moro” (Portelli 1985: 6). 7. Angela Valcavi, one of our interviewees, wrote an eponymous biographical novel on the punkzine Fame (Valcavi 2017). 8. In May 1984. See chapter 1, note 3. 9. Primo Moroni (1936–1998) was a Milanese intellectual, considered “the richest walking human historical archive that the movement [had] at its disposal” (Bianchi 1998: 51). On Moroni and the bookshop Calusca, see Wright (2011). By Moroni, see Balestrini and Moroni (1988). 10. See Chap. 3. 11. “Yes, Milan. The city of Amaro Ramazzotti. Milan that is born again every morning, that beats like a heart, positive, optimistic, efficient. The city of Amaro Ramazzotti, that was born here 170 years ago. And that today still takes this Milan to be lived, dreamt, relished. This Milan to be sipped”, is the full script of the spot. A portrait of the famous Italian advertiser Marco Mignani was published by the newspaper Corriere della Sera on 1 April 2008, on the occasion of his death. Available online at: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/08_aprile_01/mignani_creativo_ramazzotti_f0a020eeffc7-11dc-be96-00144f486ba6.shtml. Last accessed 1/9/2019. 12. Founded in 1935, it’s a famous Milanese school of fashion and design. 13. With the title Youth gangs in Milan: police interventions, the Italian press agency Ansa wrote on 26 May 1984: “It was probably a clash between rival youth gangs, but police checks in two areas of the city avoided accidents. An anonymous phone call to 113, in fact, caused a police intervention in San Babila square where, in front of a well-known bar, there were about 40 young people. Personal searches gave no results, but in some cars and garbage bins chains, knives, sprays, sticks and metal bars were found. All the youths were brought to the central police station for inspection. Meanwhile, in the Ticinese area, a flier campaign was announced by a group of punks who were apparently protesting against the recent closure of the squat in via Correggio, that has been occupied for 8-years. When the patrols to control the area arrived, there was a massive getaway and a police agent shot two bullets in the air for intimidating purposes. Eighty people were arrested and also in this case police found chains and other blunt objects. Everybody was brought to the central police station for inspection.” 14. Corriere della Sera, September 22, 1985: “Tamarri and metallari hoovered up in the centre of the town. Parental reprimands remain unheard”. 15. Ibidem. 16. Bettino Craxi (1934–2000) was prime minister from 1983 to 1987, and leader of the Italian Socialist party from 1976 to 1993.

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References Balbi, G., & Prario, B. (2010). The History of Fininvest/Mediaset’s Media Strategy: 30  Years of Politics, the Market, Technology and Italian Society. Media, Culture & Society, 32(3), 391–409. Balestrini, N., & Moroni, P. (1988). L’orda d’oro. 1968–1977: la grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale. Milano: Sugarco. Bianchi S. (1998). Mescolando il riso alle lacrime. In memoria di Primo Moroni. DeriveApprodi, 16. Cataldo Verrina, F. (2015). The History of Italo Disco. Lulu International Publishing. De Michele, S. (2003). I magnifici anni del riflusso. Come eravamo negli anni ottanta. Venezia: Marsilio. Foot, J.  M. (1999). From Boomtown to Bribesville: The Images of the City, Milan, 1980–97. Urban History, 26(3), 393–412. Foot, J. (2001). Milan Since the Miracle. City, Culture, Identity. Oxford, New York: Berg. Galli della Loggia, E. (Ed.). (1980). Il trionfo del privato. Bari: Laterza. Ginsborg, P. (1990). A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ginsborg, P. (2005). Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony. New York: Verso. Masini, A. (2018). L’Italia del «riflusso» e del punk (1977–84). Meridiana, 92, 187–210. Merlo, E., & Polese, F. (2006). Turning Fashion into Business: The Emergence of Milan as an International Fashion Hub. Business History Review, 80(3), 415–447. Mudu, P., & Piazza, G. (2016). Not Only Riflusso: The Repression and Transformation of Radical Movements in Italy Between 1978 and 1985. In K. Andresen & B. van der Steen (Eds.), A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s (pp. 112–126). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Portelli, A. (1985). Oral Testimony, the Law and the Making of History: The ‘April 7’ Murder Trial. History Workshop Journal, 20(1), 5–35. Rezza, G., Dorrucci, M., & Filibeck, U. (1992). Estimating the Trend of the Epidemic of Drug Use in Italy, 1985–89. British Journal of Addiction, 87(12), 1643–1648. Statham, P. (1996). Berlusconi, the Media, and the New Right in Italy. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 1(1), 87–105. Valcavi, A. (2017). Fame: il romanzo di una fanzine. Milano: Agenzia X. Wright, S. (2011). Cattivi Maestri: Some Reflections on the Legacy of Guido Bianchini, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, and Primo Moroni. In P.  Lamarche, D. Sherman, & M. Rosenkrantz (Eds.), Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire (pp. 21–56). Chicago: Carus Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 4

Another No Future: From Anarcho-Punk to the Activist Enactment of Dark

4.1   Enacting Anarcho-Punk at the Virus Crossing the desert of the 1980s, every youth subculture at the time gambled on which path to follow in order to succeed in this endeavour, each of them trying to trace its own route. In the early 1980s, in Milan, the most visible and organised alternative to normalisation was punk, and in particular the line of frontal political contraposition chosen by the anarcho-­ punks1 at the Virus. The squat officially started its activities in early 1982 in Via Correggio 18, even though the youths who hung out there had already been active in the nearby Vidicon for some time (De Sario 2009). Following the eviction demanded by the hard-line policies of the Carlo Tognoli administration, the squat moved first to Viale Piave in 1984, and then to Piazza Bonomelli, where it remained until its permanent closure in 1987, the ‘black year’ for Milanese countercultures. The Virus was the hub of a network of anarcho-punk collectives that extended all over Italy, with connections and contacts throughout Europe. For the Offensiva di Primavera (‘Spring Offensive’) music festival in April 1982, the Virus invited over 50 bands for a three-day event that gathered thousands of people, confirming the squat as the undisputed point of reference for the new Milanese countercultures of the 1980s. The line adopted by the Virus was radical political activism, even though its idea of ‘political activism’ distinguished it from what remained of the galaxy of left-wing extra-parliamentary groups that were still active in the city. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_4

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Actually, at the beginning the friction between punx and other left-wing groups and collectives was no small matter: The people who hung out at the Virus were not looked upon very highly by the left-wing groups, probably because they saw them as loose cannons. The left-wing squats didn’t consider them organised enough. They believed in ‘united we stand, divided we fall’, with the proletarian ideology as a bond and guideline, whereas at the Virus they did whatever the fuck they wanted, and everyone wanted to crusade in their own way. (Sergio di Meda)

At a first and immediate level, it was an issue of communicative codes. Punks did not speak the same language as the movements of the 1970s: their music and aesthetic were different, as was their use of visual languages—first and foremost style—as a form of provocation. In the fall of 1977 I was eighteen years old. I happened to read a copy of Re Nudo,2 the magazine the youth counterculture adopted as their point of reference, and there was an article from London. It was entitled Il movimento dell’oltraggio (“The Outrage Movement”) and it described punk as the reality of “unemployed, alienated, angry kids. The triumph of the wretched, of the poor, of the outraged.” I had seen the light! After reading it, my life would never be the same. I cut my hair really short with my mother’s sewing scissors; I started wearing clothes like the ones in the magazine photos. I had decided that clothing was a form of self-presentation, and so that’s how I presented myself at the occupied Casermetta in Baggio.3 The result was an immediate meeting of the occupation committee, and a political trial. “What’s gotten into you? That’s what the fascists are wearing! Make up your mind and decide whose side you’re on!” Up to 1980, there was a witch-hunt against punks in Via Torino: during demonstrations, those in charge of security often went after punks because they identified them as fascists. This went on for a long time because Italy, a little bit like Germany, was very politicized. In England, on the contrary, they didn’t have problems of political beliefs being forced upon youth cultures.4 In Italy, photos of punks in London were interpreted in the only way the political sphere could understand them: at face value, without any reinterpretation and without understanding the way in which symbols were deconstructed. They simply judged a swastika for what it was: the symbol of a political viewpoint. Tunnel vision and closemindedness did the rest. Of course, the reprimand I was given, “Get it together because this is unacceptable”, decided the beginning of my transformation. From then on, I was in constant search for other people I could identify with. At the Accademia di Brera (‘The Academy of Fine Arts of Brera’) I met extraordinary people and I discovered the Vidicon that really resonated with my personal artistic tendencies. It was located where the Virus would open later, in Via Correggio. (Angela Valcavi)

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On another level, however, the suspects of ideological ambiguity regarding punk hid much deeper differences, rooted in the very concept of the ‘politics’ the squat adopted. The punx that gathered at the Virus, in fact, refused any given ideological system, and placed their everyday lives at the roots of political action. This implied the unmediated reaction against everything that was felt as oppressing, the conquest of spaces when needed, and the attempt to build their own world by taking anything that was necessary here and now, giving up all hopes of a revolution to come. Philopat romanticised it a little in his novel Costretti a sanguinare,5 but the scene was exactly as he described it. When the Virus was still open in Via Correggio, I came from the political scene, from the so-called Circoli del Proletariato Giovanile (‘Proletarian Youth Clubs’),6 but I was pretty much fed up. So, going to the Virus made me happy. For me the breakthrough of ’77 punk was exactly that: breaking away from that form of politicisation. Sure, having a strong political identity was ok, but without overdoing it, or at least keeping it at bay. And at the Virus there was more colour, literally. More leopard-skin, more shocking pink. Then, with the arrival of Crass,7 punk started to advocate for the environment, ecology, veganism, and it became an integrated part of the political movement. But it wasn’t easy at the beginning. HCN, the band I used to play with, was sort of a group of outcasts, and we couldn’t find places where we could play: the problem was music genre; punk could only be played in Via Correggio or in very few other squats. We weren’t welcome to perform at left-wing youth social centres: they considered punks extremely right-wing. They thought we were all fascists. They broke my balls more times than I can tell; have you heard about the Banda Bellini, the antifascist group from Casoretto about which Philopat writes in one of his other books?8 Well, the Banda Bellini had been up my ass because the idea was: punk is the same as fascist, leather pants is the same as fascist. It was a matter of our ‘look’. One night, HCN played a gig in Segrate in the fall of 1979. It was me, Marco Philopat and Limbo, and all three of us wore a Destroy T-shirt and leather jackets and all hell broke loose! Looking back now, I guess we were sort of asking for it: everyone was out to get us, and they beat the fucking shit out of us! The guy at the mixing board, who was Jewish, was really pissed off about the Destroy T-shirts. Well, ok, I admit we were trying to provoke. The T-shirt was a sort of insignia because Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols had one. But basically, they hated us. Luckily, things slowly started to change: people began to see that we were politically engaged, we worked hard, we protested, and they finally understood that we were on the same side. But at that point, I didn’t feel that strong political commitment anymore, and so I decided to break away: I’d had enough. I started a new band that lasted for a summer, and then I left for Japan. (Nino La Loggia)

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The attempt to put everyday life, and its demand for spaces and self-­ expression, at the roots of political action inevitably exposed the Virus to accusations of revolutionary spontaneism and poor organisation. Yet, this sort of spontaneism, far from being naive, was in fact the result of a grim and clear interpretation of the present, and the logical consequence of the short-term perspective resumed in the No Future slogan. Dismissing all hopes of a revolution to come, Milanese punx were fiercely engaged in a fight they knew they couldn’t win, and yet they refused to concede defeat without putting up a battle. In this sense, political struggle took on an ethical value in itself, and had to be pursued even without hope of victory. In the city, it was all about social climbers, easy money and “Milan to be sipped”. It was the resignation following the seventies. The Canale 5 TV network had just been launched.9 From our perspective, the situation was pretty disastrous. You felt left out. You could feel that an incredible mass of people was moving in that direction and it made you sick. Even snobbishly so: we’re different! Leave us alone! In fact, the search for social spaces wasn’t aiming at hegemony and proselytism at all, like in the ’70s. On the contrary: we wanted there to be few of us, and fuck the others. We wanted our own spaces and our own clubs. We never officially used the word ‘club’, but amongst ourselves we did use that word. Anyway, it was the place where we did our own things and lived separately from the rest of the world. We were surrounded by shit and we fought for a space where we could live however we wanted, and do whatever we wanted and fuck everyone else: they could die for all we cared. Then, a whole bunch of people would come to something we organised, and we didn’t expect it at all. We called them ‘regulars’ and all of [a] sudden, you’d discover that deep down they were following what we were doing closely, and new scenarios opened up and you thought, “Shit, we’re doing things that could be interesting for other people.” Nowadays, there’s a sort of rediscovery, a posthumous interest for what we did at that time, because, regardless, the situation back then was more stimulating, radical and fascinating than it is now. I meet a lot of young people who tell me, “Shit, I just discovered that band! You’re so lucky to have grown up in the eighties!” But guys! We were really fucked up!! Half of us died: AIDS, heroin, car accidents, suicide. … It was not cool at all! What is true, I have to admit, is that there was another vibe back then. We had to make everything up as we went along. From scratch! I remember the slogans inside the Virus: “No future”, “Destroy your illusions, not your life”, “No more heroes”. They are still my ideals. No Future: you couldn’t internalise repression more than that. Not seeing any possibilities. We lost all the battles we fought, but we had to fight them anyhow. We even protested against the American cruise missiles in Comiso, in Sicily.10 It was the summer of 1983: besides the unbearable

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heat, they beat the shit out of us! And it was so obvious that it was going to go the way it did; that it was completely futile and there were only a handful of us! The traffic cops alone could have crushed us easily. Yet, knowing we didn’t have any hope also gave us strength. In some respects, the dark scene was similar, even if everything was internalised. It was not the same thing. After the political and social expansion of the seventies, the common ideals and the huge collective participation in battles to change the world, we returned to solitude, introspection and dark pessimism. They were all products of shattered hopes. (Joykix) I remember the summer of Comiso, the protests against the NATO Air Base in Sicily. Everyone went and I was supposed to go too but—shit!—my parents caught me: they literally took me by an ear and told me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going? You don’t even have a dime!” My intention was to go at all costs to protest, and of course to get massacred by the police. (Roy)

This attribution of ethical value to political action also had relevant consequences for the criteria of authentication that the Virusians applied to subcultural identities. It’s what Erik Hannerz (2015) defines as a “concave pattern of authentication” that aims at defining symbolic borders against a mainstream ‘other’ that is conceived as internal to the subcultural (while in a “convex” pattern, the mainstream ‘other’ is conceived as external). For Milanese punx, since political action had to stem directly from everyday life as a whole, everyday life itself acquired political relevance in each of its aspects, and became informed by the ethics of conflict. Demonstrations, protests, occupations, but also social relationships, music, forms of cultural consumption and even what to wear became parts of a whole, where each tile provided meaning to all the others, and therefore demanded ‘coherence’. Consequently, look and style were regarded as empty and fake unless their authenticity was testified by political activism. Otherwise, from the standpoint of the concave pattern of authentication, subculturalists were looked down on as ‘posers’, or ‘fashionists’. This applied first of all to enactments of punk not directly engaged in political activism, with which the squat came easily into contact: I hung around at the Virus but there’s something you need to understand. Punks were divided into two branches: the first was the politicised anarchist punk. At the Virus, this thing was lived first-hand. A lot of the members of the collective lived in a squat. I admired them: they had made a radical lifestyle choice. They were committed, they organised concerts, they took it upon t­ hemselves to bring bands from other countries, pay them, have them play, and give them

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food and a place to sleep at the Virus. That’s how they supported the squat. Then there were punks like me who lived at home and were ‘supported’ by their parents. Punks who went to school, and on Saturday and Sunday would take their little train to Milan to buy records and clothes. Creepers shoes had just come into style and I immediately bought a pair. Pants with zippers, plaid pants, ripped jeans, studded leather jackets. The thing you had to think about was how to personalise your leather jacket. So, the only difference between punk and goth was this: besides the politicised punks, all the others were part of a youth lifestyle where you wanted to belong to a group and call yourself punk, rockabilly, mod, new wave or dark. And everyone had a normal social life, a job, and at night they went out and had fun. Maybe even at the Virus. Even though, as I said before, this is why we never really belonged at the Virus. (Roy) It wasn’t easy to belong at the Virus. It was a fortress. There was a great news report about it on Tg2. We didn’t let the cameras inside so the reporters shot from outside, hidden and getting out-of-focus shots like it was the Soviet Union at its worst. It wasn’t easy to get in and to relate to the people there. And I have to admit I had my own personal difficulties. There were internal dynamics, several subgroups. It was an extremely restricted group, incredibly selective. It was obvious even from the bands they let play there. If you had played even once in a commercial club, you could forget about playing at the Virus. Being accepted by the collective meant participating, getting down to brass tacks and being engaged in all the things that were required in the self-management of the squat. It also meant sharing highly politicised ideas. Having spiky hair wasn’t enough. I went to Comiso, I went to the Chaostage,11 the anti-fascist punk gathering in Hannover. I was an active participant. The bands that played at the squat were mostly Italian: there was a time when if you didn’t sing in Italian you were looked down upon. But what else could you do back then? In Milan in ’83, what could you identify with if you had an antagonist spirit? The political scene and the aftermath of the seventies were devasted: repression was brutal. There were various collectives of comrades we connected with: some of them showed interest in what we were doing, others didn’t get it at all. So, we identified with the only thing we could identify with. (Joykix)

These selective criteria of authentication were inevitably applied also to dark, which started to make its appearance in the city, and within the squat itself, in the early 1980s. To Virusian punx, in fact, dark appeared politically ambiguous, both as a music genre and as a lifestyle: it seemed too far from political activism to be regarded otherwise than as a fashion phenomenon.

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Some people at the Virus started to play with the codes of dark, but let’s say not everyone appreciated this. In fact, I had the feeling I wasn’t really well-liked by some of the squatters. When I met them, I found their positions interesting, but for me, because of the way I was, I found them too extreme. I could never go and live in the squat, without my own room and all my things! I was in high school, I had my plans. In fact, with many of them I actually bonded only later. At that time, they were justifiably suspicious. They had to be pure and tough. Some of them would say to me, “You’re not a punk, you’re a kindred creature,” an expression used by the people at the Helter Skelter to define those who had a certain type of attitude, but didn’t completely identify with the more politicised punx. Kindred creatures had a lot in common with punks, but they weren’t activist punks. It wasn’t a derogatory definition, but it was clearly meant to stress a difference that you felt when relating to other people. You were a satellite, a passing comet. The truth is that compared to more politicised punx, there was no frontal assault in dark: it was more about creating a parallel world. It was a secession: from active to passive resistance. Dark was a cultural tendency, sometimes only aesthetic, shared by people that were very heterogeneous in many other respects. (…) Obviously, there were some people who were more or less politicised, but, in fact, what we were experiencing was mainly a revolution in cultural attitudes. (Roxie)∗∗

This rigid position was actually exacerbated by the contingent situation: the squat had always been under siege by the municipality, and if it resisted month after month it was because of its intransigence, and to the committed engagement of the Virusians. Furthermore, at the Virus they were also aware of having succeeded in creating a solid and lively independent network that attracted many people and bands who had very little to do with its way of conceiving punk as political struggle. While a very strict ‘authenticity’ filter was therefore a way to defend the squat’s identity (and existence), it ended up rigidly characterising all its activities. Everything that was organised at the Virus had to mandatorily revolve around few topics: resistance to ongoing repression, anti-capitalist protests, defence of the squat and of other ‘freed spaces’. Regarding music, for example, all the bands that were invited to play (like Wretched and Negazione12) addressed in their lyrics the same political themes that were of concern to punx, and reflected the squat’s cultural and political line, its rage and its confrontational attitude. Taking a microphone and getting up on stage at the Virus was actually inconceivable without the credibility granted by personal participation to the squat’s political battles.

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I remember Nino at the Virus. He later evolved to new wave and opened the great record shop Ice Age, where you could find all the best stuff. But people from the Virus were not really into that kind of thing. They only wanted bands who were politically engaged, so they’d only talk about Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Anti Cimex: anarchist bands that resonated with their experiences. And this was because punx were undoubtedly interested in music, but they were interested in politics even more. If you spoke with someone who hung out at the Virus, of course they knew Siouxsie and the Banshees. Or Joy Division. Or Killing Joke. But these bands didn’t fit very well with their way of seeing things. I mean … Bauhaus never sung about anarchy, occupations or protesting nuclear weapons and war. In any case, I remember that at the Virus you could buy an incredible fanzine, Amen, that was published by a group of people that was into dark music. (Roy)

Other cultural issues did not receive much attention, including those related to the exploration of identity, to gender relationships, to the body and to sexuality. Notwithstanding the presence of a feminist collective and band within the squat (Anti Genesi), for example, a macho and sexist attitude was far from uncommon, often implying a certain discomfort with homosexuality. The feminist collective itself complained about this in a leaflet dated 1983: Anti Genesi is a group of women that has be constituted because a sexist division has also come into place within the punk situation; and in social relationships women are regarded inferior to men. We can’t understand how slogans with which we completely agree, like ‘against the system … for anarchy’, can go side by side with others like ‘beer and cunt … the system is like a woman: you have to fuck it’. […] We therefore advocate for more cooperation, and a reciprocal agreement to create an antagonist alliance against power. (transcribed in De Sario 2009: 105)

In a similar way, while punx could privately ‘indulge’ in forms of expression like art, literature or theatre, these activities were by and large perceived as not relevant to political struggle, and therefore dismissed as of secondary relevance, when not viewed with suspicion as forms of political disengagement. As the aforementioned issues, and these forms of expression, were at the core of the “revolution in cultural attitudes” of darks and kindred creatures, this led to internal tensions and to a cohabitation of different souls within the squat that became increasingly problematic. The cultural

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interests of darks who were politically active within the squat, and their resistance to embracing the totalising life conduct that was requested by full participation in the occupation, put them on the margins of the collective as unreliable “satellites” and “passing comets”: kindred creatures could have been similar to punx but, at the end, they were not ‘real’ punx. The kindred creatures, for their part, found the formula proposed by punx not fully adequate from a cultural and existential point of view: the interpretation of “no future” elaborated at the Virus was too narrow to embrace all the new anxieties, suggestions and ways of experimenting with identity that were becoming of primary cultural and political relevance for them, and that were resonating with post-punk music coming from the UK at the time. The exasperated rage that defined the emotional attitude of the squat started to resonate less and less within the lives and the ideals of many who started looking elsewhere for their kindred spirits. Punk had sanctioned the end of an era by offering, paradoxically, a new vision of life. But everything moved too fast, and within a handful of years, after the transformation took place and all the necessary choices were made, all hell broke loose in keeping up with the transformations in music. Punk became hardcore, and meanwhile new wave came along encompassing a little bit of everything, and so did post-punk. From the moment Joy Division blew my ears out, everything else became a blur. (Angela Valcavi) I don’t know if I can say I have been a dark, but I often got bored at hardcore concerts and would leave after a while. We would meet up in a car, four or five of us, to listen to audiotapes. The five of us were the most heretic fringe of the Virus, so you can just imagine how many of us there actually were. But there were others like us floating around in Via Torino, in disco clubs and in other meeting places where I didn’t actually hang out at because, at the time, I thought of them as places for posers. I hung out at the Virus because it was a squat, an occupied site, a self-managed space—and blah, blah, blah—where other things were done besides only listening to music and set fashion trends. Or rather: style, and not fashion, because at that time dark was about style, and not about fashion. Not that I felt I fit in at the Virus, especially in the beginning. In fact, I felt I didn’t fit in at all. But there was a fringe group I felt in harmony with, the group that at first rotated around the Indigesti,13 a band from Vercelli. They were outsiders too, you know? The fact is that I totally agreed with the political ideas of the Virus, I was fully committed, music or not, dark or not: that’s what I was there for. I began to develop my political conscience there. But in the end, the situation at the Virus was heavily guarded. Sure, that was a form of self-defence, that’s true, but nonetheless it was always impermeable

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to other tensions that could resonate with the ones of the squat, but that were not totally in line with their formula. For example, the magazine Decoder14 looked in other directions. And this was very important because at a certain point, what you could find at the Virus wasn’t enough anymore. In the end, punk was quite rough and limited. Yes, at the beginning it had been a real blast, with the Sex Pistols, but that was all. I admit that after a while, even in punk, things got more refined, but I didn’t like it so much: I thought it was boring. Musically, I had a wider range of tastes, and obviously I kept on looking around for new things. In the beginning, it was Siouxsie and Bauhaus: I loved them! Even though the album that led me to say, “this is a whole other kind of music!” was PiL’s Second Edition.15 But it was not just a matter of music. With my friend Angie, who was a super dark, incredibly radical in her look, we went to see Lindsay Kemp16 at the theatre, and she would do anything to get her photo taken with him. In addition to music, there was very extensive exploration: to go and see what kind of things were happening around that might interest us, broaden our horizons and somehow enrich us. The ‘uber-punks’ didn’t seem to be interested in these things at all. Consider also that we generally came from a higher social class than punks. It’s not like punx were only proles, but a lot of us came from middle- and upper-middle class families: so, all of us had more or less studied and read about things, and we were interested in art and painting. We liked studying and trying to understand things. Punk’s attitude was more, “fuck this, fuck that, fuck everything.” In reality, there was an element of adapting one’s behaviour to what was considered punk: if you’re a punk this is the way you have to be, otherwise you’re not punk. Afterwards, the path followed by many in their lives revealed that things didn’t actually stand that way. For example, some became journalists, musicians, and artists, unearthing interests that they kept well-hidden at the time. In our little group, and at the Helter Skelter, we were really interested in publications and fanzines that were generally very refined, from both an aesthetic and political point of view. There were even university graduates among us. (Joykix) The people I initially went to the Virus with actually emphasised their distinctiveness by standing on the sidelines. There were automatic mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion pointed at all of us, seen as transitory meteors both on a relational and a cultural level. This world didn’t jibe with me a hundred percent and the same was true of others who hung out there. The experience lived at the Virus was totalizing, up to the point of excluding any other world and attitude. If at the Virus you said you were going to the Plastic,17 people were going to label you as a coolist, and so you lied: no, that night you were at home reading Baudelaire! There was a certain rigidity, and even if the things that went on at the Virus were interesting and you kept going because you felt like you were part of a common perspective, there were interesting things happening

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elsewhere, too, in more commercial places. Music, for example. What they offered at the Plastic was more interesting. The Virus only had hardcore bands, as a political choice based on supporting DIY punk bands. “Who’s playing tonight?”, “Negazione,” “No way!! AGAIN?!?” So, the whole scene, especially at the first Virus location, was stimulating, but at the same time also entrenched in itself. After the Virus was cleared out, and it moved to Viale Piave and then to Piazza Bonomelli, you could still find Negazione playing there! Enough already, this is too much! If you weren’t that involved in the project or in the organisation, you ended up wanting for a lot of things, so you looked for them somewhere else. You’d explore other spaces, other scenes. At the time of the Virus in Piazza Bonomelli, I didn’t feel like I was on the same wavelength as the hardcore people there anymore, who were completely totalized by the project. So, I stopped going, and like me so did many others that used to go to Via Correggio, and who in the meanwhile had occupied Cox 18.18 A lot of people who hung out in the squat scene, like me, started to have a sort of dark side in common that included certain books, and even films. It was a cultural background that took shape through personal contacts and recommendations, so we started to share books, films, artists, theatre. Some poets started to be essential, like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, William Blake, the French and Italian Decadent Movement. One of my personal favourites was Gabriele d’Annunzio, but this was impossible to admit! A lot of the things I was reading were related to art. I had read the Dada Manifesto, and with it a lot of stuff on twentieth century avant-garde. We were all really into Surrealism and Dadaism. What we had in common with punks was DIY, the desire to self-produce our art, “We are the ones who produce our own culture; we meet our personal needs ourselves.” But that meant continuously looking for inspiration—that was actually pretty easy to access for anyone who studied. From a political point of view, early Dadaism was basically anarchy: it shared the same attitude with punk, and even their artistic techniques were similar. Fanzines and punk graphic, for example, were designed using decontextualized and recombined fragments. It’s a practice that you can find in avant-garde movements like Dada and Surrealism, in its highest level of expression. So that’s what we were drawn to. (Roxie)

These differences and tensions were exposed, and actually exacerbated, by several events: for example, the Bauhaus concert in 1982 at the Odissea 2001 disco that was attended by many kindred creatures and harshly contested outside by punx protesting against the commodification of music. It was even more markedly the case of the ‘CCCP incident’ in February 1984, when the band was invited by kindred creatures to play at the Virus, and were sabotaged by punx.

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4.2   Conflicts of Canon and of Enactment: CCCP at the Virus CCCP—Fedeli alla linea are today acknowledged as one of the most important Italian punk, and actually also post-punk bands of the 1980s. Founded in 1981 by Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Massimo Zamboni, who were soon joined by Umberto Negri on bass guitar, they defined themselves as a “pro-Soviet punk” band that played “melodic Emilian music” (Campo 2005; Negri 2007; Contiero 2015). By 1984, when they were invited to play at the Virus, the band had two extended play (EPs) out on Attack Punks Records, the most important Italian punk label at that time. If we fail to keep in mind the coexistence of two different souls within the Virus, the squat’s conduct on that occasion would seem at best contradictory: the gig by CCCP, in fact, was not only deserted, but also systematically disturbed and spoiled by the Virusians who burped in the microphones, teased the band and messed up on purpose with the volumes at the mixer: At the first CCCP concert at the Virus, there were practically two of us standing in front of the stage. There were attempts of sabotage by punx at the mixer: they kept lowering the volume to zero. But CCCP were fantastic because they kept playing for just the two of us. There really were only two of us. (Joykix)

This incident exposed the distance between the Virus and the new post-­ punk attitudes that were slowly surfacing in the Milanese underground and were starting to make their appearance within the squat, even though in a backseat, orbital manner. As a matter of fact, CCCP had in fact all it took to be disapproved of by punks, who refused them as inauthentic, and to be loved by kindred creatures. Indeed, there were at least five different points that marked the distance between CCCP from Virusian punk. The first two concerned an incompatibility with the shared tastes of punx: there was a conflict of subcultural canon. The other three were more related to the enactment of this canon, especially during the social practice of the live show. First of all, there was an issue of genre: even if CCCP were published by an independent punk label, and they ironically adopted a punk musical and visual style, the sound of the band differed radically from the hardcore punk that was at home at the Virus. In their songs, they clashed punk riffs with Italian folk tradition, political and religious hymns, slogans, “melodic

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Emilian music” and advertisement jingles, in a nervous and innovative mix that didn’t exclude the declamation of poems. Moreover, they often used a drum machine: a choice that was quite outrageous for Virusian punx. These stylistic choices deflected the punk’s rage into “states of agitation”—which was also a title of one of the band’s songs19—that were more disoriented and disorienting than enraged. For punx, CCCP’s music was therefore not real punk, while kindred creatures appreciated the band’s originality as a sign of the authenticity of its artistic proposal. Second, the band’s lyrics depicted a complex imaginary that was completely extraneous to the political themes of hardcore punk. As for the recent analysis by Vincenzo Romania (2016), the studio songs of the band presented three main thematic levels, each with several sub-dimensions: a. The meta-discursive level, featuring 11 times in the lyrics, which consists of the following sub-dimensions: discourse on punk in terms of differentiation (6); discourse on punk in terms of identisation (5); b. The socio-political level—representing the largest isotopy, coded 81 times in the 52 sets of lyrics. It consists of the following sub-dimensions: the objectification of social relationships (19); the celebration of Sovietism (14) and religion (23) as alternative sources of meaning, in opposition to the dystopian vision of present capitalism; the philosophy of history and politics (35); c. The existential level, an isotopy which appears 37 times in the lyrics. It consists of the following sub-dimensions: the anomie of modern society (13); the psychological and psychiatric disorders of individuals (12); fatalism and boredom (10 poems); love and sexuality (7).

In their songs, CCCP sketched quick vignettes of life in the north central region of Italy—where the band came from—depleted of meaning, and imaginary journeys to a transfigured Middle East, described as a mythical elsewhere. They juxtaposed psychotic repetitions of advertisement slogans and rallying cries of pro-Soviet propaganda. They combined popular and high culture, with quotations and references to Mao Tze Tung, Majakowsky, Mishima and prayers to the Virgin Mary. We could say that they depicted the world, and Italy, in the 1980s, as seen through the lenses of a nervous breakdown. In this sense, at the core of their poetics, CCCP replaced the political struggles of a collective with the explorations of a subject’s ‘interiority’. Yet, the band never indulged in a crepuscular intimism or in autobiographism. The subject whose interiority was explored was conceived more as an abstract product of their times than as a specific person—a perspective that was truly appreciated by kindred creatures, but

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that could only be seen as a sign of inauthenticity from the concave pattern of punx authentication. The third point was more closely related to the band’s take on politics, and is strongly connected to the previous point. It was in fact clear that the exasperated repetition of pro-Soviet political slogans by the band was not to be taken at face value. Actually, it had the same role as the repetition of TV advertisement slogans and of prayers: as pointed out by Romania (2016), it represented the ironic, and somehow desperate, grabbing on to the stability of an obsolete belief, that made up for the radical loss of orientation of present times. In this sense, the exasperated faith in communism that they purported was just part of the nervous breakdown CCCP were depicting in their lyrics, and did not imply the actual engagement in politics requested by the enactment of Milanese anarcho-punk. The fourth point also regarded a conflict of enactment, even if this time it was strictly related to gigs as social events, and in particular to the band’s relationship with the audience during its performances. ‘Authentic’ punx bands, in fact, aimed at overcoming any separation from their audience, both under a symbolic and a physical point of view: the real punk band was part of the collective, and was engaged, together with its audience, in a common political struggle. For this reason, the distance between band and audience had to be symbolically overcome through the systematic violation of the borders of the stage: the public accessed it to sing and dance with the band, while the band left it when possible, to perform in the middle of the public. Conversely, CCCP had a very theatrical stage presence and from 1984, their line-up included Annarella Giudici, (“the Worthy Soubrette of the Italian People”) as a singer, dancer and showgirl (Giudici et  al. 2014), and the performer Danilo Fatur (“the People’s Artist”). CCCP concerts presented powerful artistic performances that included poetry, tribal dances, gymnastic exploits, costume changes and stage designs that became more and more delirious. Their performances were without precedent in the genre at the time: yet, they brought back that separation between stage and audience, band and spectator, which Virusian punk had overcome. Finally, we must add how in those performances the body, and in particular the male body, was abundantly shown: the “People’s Artist”, with his muscular physicality, performed half-naked, sweating, often in chains. In light of the different attitudes towards issues related to the body and alternative sexualities, it comes as no surprise that CCCP were refused by

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Virusians, and celebrated by kindred creatures as one of the most important Italian bands of their times. The subsequent career of the band exasperated the contrast: soon after the contestation at the Virus, the band made several television appearances, and in 1985 they left Attack Punk Records for a major label, Virgin Records. This move led them into the mainstream spotlight and confirmed the Virusians’ worst suspects. On 1 June 1985, they protested the band again in Milan when they played at the Leoncavallo20 squat, accusing CCCP of having cynically exploited the punk scene to climb their way up the ladder of Italian stardom. Every once in a while, popular concerts were held at the Leoncavallo. I remember the CCCP concert and Philopat throwing vegetables at them. It was a great concert. Really powerful. At a certain point, Philopat and the others started protesting because CCCP had signed with a major label, betraying the punk spirit. CCCP kept playing and mouthed off the people yelling at them from the floor. The Virus had a very radical set of rules; you had to refuse major labels and not have anything to do with show business. At the Helter Skelter,21 that organised events within the Leoncavallo, things were different. That’s what created disorder at the CCCP concert. Nothing terrible happened: no fights broke out. But different territories were established, and different lines of action emerged, and these lines didn’t coincide. (Roxie)

The band responded to the accusations of giving in to an unforgiveable commercial compromise by handing out a furious flyer during their concert.22 It read as follows: You get used to everything, even to a burden that is too heavy: obese people carry thirty extra kilos around and they manage. You get used to everything, to reading made-up news, to gossip against you, false in spirit and content. You get used to everything, to the misunderstanding-hate-payback of punx. You get used to everything, almost. We have no intention of getting used to the ‘desire for purity’ that currently heats up the relics of nobody knows anymore which movement. Nazi concentration camps were filled and then emptied of the desire for racial purity, and the shanty towns in South Africa are still full of it. The desire for religious purity has lit fires under heretics, and have burned for centuries. The desire for ideological purity has filled graves dug out by regimes all over the world. Cambodia has been torn apart in the name of the desire for pure purity, and finally, the purest of the pure from the ‘70s are now the most remorseful in the ’80s. The world is rotten because of the desire for purity. We aren’t pure. We don’t want to be. You get used to everything, almost. We have no

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intention of getting used to clichés, explanations that don’t explain, of falling back on a passing ideology that is more and more mediocre, more and more vague. “Self-managed” is the key word that every kid or doddering idiot uses to get for free and with contempt what others have struggled to produce. “Self-­ managed”: the word should speak for itself. Bullshit! Every shopkeeper self-­ manages his own shop, every politician and businessman self-manages their own career, every housewife self-manages her own kitchen. Words don’t speak anymore. The Leoncavallo is a self-managed social centre: its history proves it; its activities determine it. Learn who wants to learn, change things if you want to change things, but please, don’t do it with words. Having said that, you get used to everything. Even to a burden you never asked to carry in the first place, a quarrel we have always rejected because it’s absurd. CCCP doesn’t need to be legitimized by anyone, we are legitimated on our own behalf, like everyone else. CCCP carries the weight of insults from the Virus and from many others, and they manage just fine.

CCCP annoyed the hardcore purists as much as they were able to give a voice to tensions that could no longer be contained within the confines of punk. It’s no wonder that their first albums soon became the main point of reference for Italian post-punk and, at the same time, for the dark scene. I recently read a book by Umberto Negri, Io e i CCCP,23 and I saw fantastic pictures of them singing Curami, and about the “sad erection” in Mi ami? in front of Emilian old ladies, sitting on wooden chairs with wicker seats, yelling in dialect, “Get a job!”. It was a breakthrough, an act of spontaneous rebellion: they took this from punk, but at that point it wasn’t really punk anymore. The generation that came right before mine started to decant what punk had achieved through rebellion. In the beginning, it was all about trashing everything, making a ‘tabula rasa’. A lot of people, for nostalgic reasons, never went beyond this while others started to ask themselves “Now what?”. When we arrived, those who preceded us had already done a lot of the work, and we owed them a lot. It probably took a lot of courage, and it helped us to realise that there was an alternative. This probably sounds really pre-war, because all you have to do today is Google something and you’ll find millions of alternatives. But it wasn’t like that then. All we had was Tg1, the news on the public TV channel. They didn’t talk about punk, so it was hard to imagine an alternative. So, they really did something great, even though, in my opinion, in the beginning it was all pure instinct, and not a conscious political operation. Everything that came after that break was a bit more rationalized, because we found ourselves asking ourselves, “After all this shit went down, what do we do now?”. This phase was more rationalised because you had to put up with a lot: we didn’t have the

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energy that punks had. We were also more frightened, and probably what you’d call nice kids. Not that punks weren’t nice and all, but they were definitely more able to enact guerrilla tactics. In the meantime, repression got more and more harsh. In that phase, I would say that the fire was going out, but there were still embers left and CCCP, whether they were considered punk or not, expressed it really well. At that point, we chose the path of—or at least we thought we chose the path of—“Well, after all the chaos, let’s find some alternative values.” And what started was a collective attempt to try to erase all preconceptions in order to get this idea across. I think it was then that we started to think, “Let’s build a network of people who feel the same way.” (Emanuela Zini)

What is even more relevant is that the protest against CCCP not only emphasised the presence of two very distinct souls within the Virus, but it also contributed to making differences precipitate: I remember one particular event that was emblematic of the rift between the Virus and the rest of the world. Stefania from Amen, and Fabrizia from the Tuwat squat in Carpi had organised a CCCP concert at the Virus in February 1984. We really liked CCCP: a band like that could only be formed in the province of Reggio Emilia because of its background in the Italian resistance movement, ballroom dancing and homemade tortellini made by women at the Festival dell’Unità.24 Pro-Soviet punk is an extraordinary idea because it turns the tables on both concepts: it invites you to think, and at the same time not to take yourself too seriously. Such a thing could not even be taken into consideration at the Virus, due to arrogance or ignorance. Anyway, the harassment started in the afternoon during the sound check. The guy at the mixer lowered the line levels, turned off the volume, burped into the microphone. During the concert, same thing. The Virus’s small private and ideological war started, and it reached its peak during the concert at the Leoncavallo on 1 June 1985, when CCCP distributed their flyers. The Virus was on the offensive again, throwing insults from under and even on the stage. The problem is that CCCP wasn’t punk. They didn’t get on stage to play hardcore. The artistic element of their performances bothered people because they thought it belonged to another world. Their physical expression was a driving force and that probably bothered people, too. Overly pronounced physical expression, with the exception of the extremely masculine pogo, was probably touching some taboos. And everyone thought that artistic elements were pointless. The CCCP concert at the Virus was met with anger and contempt: what I saw was the determination in teaching the preppies a lesson. On the other hand, the Virus protested throughout the entire season at the Odissea 2001. On the night of the Bauhaus concert, on 3 May 1982, I was inside, almost under the stage. I agreed with protesting the price of the ticket and music for profit, but I got to see Bauhaus! When Black Flag came, I didn’t

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have any money so I stayed outside selling our fanzine, Fame25 along with Virus regulars who were pissed off because people took the flyer and just walked in: “You’re not punks, you just want to see Black Flag and you don’t give a fuck!” The differences were obvious: The Virus represented the punks’ commitment, the pure punx essence; and then there was the rest of the world who were buttered up by profiteers and fell into their traps. CCCP belonged to the enemy for the same reason. Their sectarian attitude really annoyed me: they wanted to create diversity within diversity, looking for rifts in an already very tight-knit sphere where, back then, what was really needed was strong cohesiveness. The Virus had been the only point of reference since early 1982: there were few spaces in Milan, few interesting events, in very tight-knit spheres. At times, in some basement, you’d chance on a reading, a performance or a concert. But for the most part, Milan was a desert. We needed to create culture because in Milan at the time, nothing represented us, we were not part of anything. Resignation had destroyed everything. These, to a large extent, are the motivations that led to Creature Simili. (Angela Valcavi)

In fact, these divergences led the kindred creatures to leave the Virus, to create a new collective, and to call themselves with the same name— Creature Simili—that was used to address them in the squat. We liked the name Creature Simili because the word ‘Creature’ (creatures) makes you think of creation, something that didn’t exist before, but with a simple gesture, an action, it comes into existence. It makes you think of a path. Artistic and philosophical. ‘Simili’ (kindred), on the other hand, evokes similarities, an affinity with a path: the idea of identity and community. (Angela Valcavi)

A few months later they found another home in Leoncavallo, a squat occupied by Autonomia Operaia, where they ran a permanent space called the Helter Skelter. The Creature Simili collective traced a post-punk route that opened to dark, to its music, its aesthetic and to its unprecedented emotional tones: the Helter Skelter soon became one of the most important points of reference for the dark scene in Milan and Northern Italy.

4.3   Creature Simili and the Helter Skelter When the collective of Creature Simili left the Virus, they had already the experiences of the publication of Amen, the first and most important Italian darkzine,26 and of a series of concerts they organised at the

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Leoncavallo. These successful initiatives made it clear that the city was ready for a new course. The dark scene had been essentially non-existent in Milan until 1983, but by the end of the year, what unexpectedly crossed the threshold of Leoncavallo was a real “black tide”. Goth didn’t exist in Milan before 1983. Some people had been to London, saw something, and moved around alone, but I don’t remember there being a recognizable place or group. Sure, there were some pretty eccentric characters, and some of them occasionally hung out at the Virus, too. I remember this really bizarre girl. She was 6 feet tall, had long, red, curly hair that cascaded down her shoulders, wore pointed shoes, that we would all wear later, and a black tunic. … She was freakish. You’d expect to find someone like her in London but not in Milan. It’s a shame because I think she went nuts pretty quickly: she was probably already crazy. So, like, there were people like that hanging around Milan. You’d see them, but there wasn’t a real movement yet. It would take shape soon after with a series of events organised around the city, and that’s when you started seeing a lot of people like that. (Sergio di Meda) Amen was getting a lot of readers and so, inspired by the popularity of the darkzine, we decided to organise a concert. The only problem was: where? In the second issue of Fame, the fanzine we published with Lia, Atomo and Vincillo before Amen, there was an interview about the Strafalari, a coffee shop on Via Arquà where brilliant madmen wrote poetry and had readings that nobody gave a shit about. We liked them and so we went there every once in a while: it was very beat. The coffee shop was in front of the Leoncavallo that at the time had been wiped out by arrests. One night, we were passing by while distributing Fame. We were overwhelmed by the sadness it had been plunged into. So, the year after, when we got the bright idea to organise a concert, the first place we thought of was the Leoncavallo: “Let’s ask them and see what they say.” We had to put up with a meeting of the occupation committee in order to bring up our suggestion, and they gave us the go ahead as long as we organised everything. Part of the proceeds would go to inmates and part would go to the squat to keep it going. We threw ourselves into the adventure. We contacted the Milanese band Obscurity Age and Viridanse from Alessandria to play at the first concert; they were the bands on the cassette tape included with Amen. We made posters that were all black with images of very dark ruins that appeared out of a smoky background, and the phrase, “Concert for tormented souls” written on it. Roberto, one of the members of our group, really liked these desperate statements! However, the message was very clear. On 10 November 1983, about a thousand people came and the guys from Leoncavallo couldn’t believe their eyes. The place was packed. We decided to continue. We would invite bands that weren’t punk or new wave. We wanted to feature post-punk, dark music, and above all we

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didn’t want bands who played cover songs by legendary bands or who tried to imitate them. At the second concert, on 12 January 1984, Weimar Gesang and Faded Image played. The poster still addressed “tormented souls” and this time, a drawing by M.C. Escher emerged from the black background with a bishop lying in a catafalque in a crypt. The following month, on 2 February, there was another concert with The Art of Waiting from Bari and the Voices. All kinds of people showed up, not only punks, because the graphic design of the poster was very specific. We discovered an entire universe of loners dressed in black. The sensation that these people had finally found a place where they fit in was tangible. For the first time, we saw a lot of individuals who probably had a lot in common gathered in the same place. People who had developed interests privately, introspectively, and were relegated to closed environments; people who had developed a transformation of their inner selves through goth literature, with H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe as fundamental stops on their journey, and passing through the Milanese Scapigliatura27 to Romanticism to the French poètes maudits. There wasn’t a network or a scene then, so it was surprising to see so many people who identified with the same things aggregated for the first time. For them, the Leoncavallo was a relic. Some had heard about it, but most of them knew nothing about its history. They came for the concert, drawn in by the posters. Our three events went extremely well, maybe even the older members of the Leoncavallo began to see that the world was changing: their political prejudices against us were fading, the manhunt against the presumed fascist punks in Via Torino that had besieged the Saturday demonstrations since 1980 was over. Gradually, even those engaged in staunch politics realised that a profound social transformation was underway, and that they had to look elsewhere for the enemy. They didn’t really understand what was happening; many still spoke about resignation, others asked themselves, “Who are these guys?”. Creature Simili was the further evolution of a context that emerged from darkness, from the private sphere. We made ourselves known through Amen, through our concerts. We created a network and the network was expanding. We met a collective from San Giuliano who organised events under the acronym S.M.D.; there was Joykix and his fanzine, Hydra Mentale, and others who were single individuals in sync with what was taking shape. We all shared the sense of not fitting into the Virus, and we saw it as a common problem not having a common meeting place in order to give life to a consolidated social and cultural reality. So, we organised a fourth concert at Leoncavallo on 12 April 1984 and for the first time we put our names on it as the organisers: “Amen, Fame, Hydra Mentale, S.M.D. & Creature Simili. (Angela Valcavi)

The post-punk formula proposed by Creature Simile was eclectic and anti-­ dogmatic, and anything but politically disengaged. The year 1984, when the Virus in Via Correggio was cleared out, was particularly intense. It was

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the year of the attempted occupation of the Teatro Miele, which was blocked by the police within a few hours, and of the protest against the conference on Bande spettacolari giovanili organised by the Province of Milan.28 Moreover, Creature Simili were spontaneously, and at times extemporaneously, active through flash demonstrations they called ‘mental attacks’ in the main walking and shopping streets of the city. Above all, they showed their presence in the meeting areas of alternative Milan: via Torino, the Colonne di San Lorenzo, the Fiera di Sinigaglia. These activities unveiled how a city that seemed uninvolved was actually on the same wavelength as Creature Simili, and shared with the collective a common demand for spaces and social relationships. In the early ’80s the scenario had completely changed. There had been a generational passage. It struck this sort of desert left over by resignation and the absence of the leading subjectivities from the preceding decade. At demonstrations there were so few of us you could actually count us. In the meantime, Via Torino on Saturday afternoons would fill up with people that were there to buy records and clothes, and as time went on, the street became flooded by this black tide. All this happened very quickly. Over a six-month period, the first issue of Amen had come out and the fourth concert at the Leoncavallo had been held. We had succeeded in creating social aggregation. We weren’t just ‘the people from Amen’ anymore, and even the Leoncavallo started to feel too constricting for us. In the meantime, the people that gathered at the Fiera di Sinigaglia and the Colonne di San Lorenzo29 had evolved. New identities made their appearance: rockabilly, hard rockers, skinheads, redskins, dark, new wavers. So, at a certain point, Creature Simili came to a decision, “Why, on Saturdays … in Via Torino … when it’s full of people … don’t we start organising demonstrations, to bring attention to the lack of social spaces? We aren’t the Virus, but we exist, too.” So, in the beginning, we handed out flyers, starting from the Fiera di Sinigaglia. This thing was so spontaneous that one Saturday, Marco Schwartz made his own flyer picturing a harsh photo of a black man holding his dead child in his arms, and on it he had written, “Italy sells arms to the South African Nazi regime.” This was another interesting dynamic because it went beyond the centrality of the collectives, of the assemblies and of the mediation discussions to come to a common point and text. It was an extremely spontaneous and powerful idea. The end goal was to achieve the most powerful communication possible, with immediate impact. The following Saturday, we had the sensation that some expectation had been created. The flyers were read with interest. Shopping wasn’t the only thing going on in Via Torino anymore. It was a way of introducing ourselves, of revealing that something existed in the city, and we realised that people were listening. A spontaneous demonstration began

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along Via Torino, and as we made our way up the street, people joined us. We were stunned, amazed. I don’t even know how we carried it off since there was always a lot of police around there. Maybe they were taken by surprise by how quickly it happened and by the difficulties in handling public safety on a popular shopping street. The demonstration lasted the time it took to proceed for the 800 meters of Via Torino yelling to the beat, “Zulù, Zulù!”. After about half an hour, amidst a feeling of general amazement, we dispersed. It was a sensational success for us: proof that we weren’t alone. We had created an identity for ourselves and offered it to others. The Saturday after, we decided to repeat the experiment and it went more or less in the same way. The Saturday following that one, the street was full of police but we hadn’t planned anything. The result was that a whole bunch of people dressed in black were brought to the police station. The week after that, they placed a police bus at the Fiera di Sinigaglia, ready for a round up. We walked around the stalls shooting the shit, and to our surprise, as soon as we stopped to talk, we were accosted by the closest copper who asked us for our IDs and warned us that we could get charged for seditious assembly if we formed groups of more than three people. This was proof that we had become a true force. But the event that sanctioned the undeniable existence of Creature Simili as Milanese antagonists, was the demonstration at the conference on “youth gangs” at Palazzo Isimbardi,30 the headquarters of the Province of Milan. At an academic level, the fact that research on the theme of “spectacular youth gangs” had been commissioned to a group of sociologists received a lot of attention. The conference was somehow the conclusion of the research. In that period, a lot of newspapers were talking about clashes between gangs, criminalising them, or else trivialising the phenomena with folkloristic tones. We thought that the idea of a conference organised specifically to talk about us was a bit too much. During a couple of secret-revolutionary-society-­ style meetings, we decided not to let them get away with it. We had begun to meet at the Virus, all together, to organise the protest, and during this phase our relationship with the Virus became close, incredibly collaborative. We had finally become one body. I’m convinced that the Virus crowd saw ours as a kind of consciousness raising, as if we had passed from the superficiality of fashion to political awareness. So, on the morning of 4 April, at the press conference for the presentation of the conference in the Sala della Provincia, some of us met there, including Atomo Tinelli, Vincillo and Gomma, with the idea of distributing flyers. While the sociologists were talking, they took off their shirts. They began to walk up from the back of the room cutting themselves with razor blades, and as soon as blood surfaced, they rubbed the flyers on it and distributed them among the stunned audience. The flyer read, “This is my blood. Analyse it. Discover what my true needs are”. It created a sensational stir! After the bloody flyer event, we occupied the Porta Romana theatre, where the conference was to be held the following Saturday. All the antagonist fringes gathered for the protest

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and the event gained attention even outside Milan. This gave us strength, it made us feel united and capable of laying claim to our presence in the city and to demand our own space. (Angela Valcavi)

Public demonstrations continued with a sit-in at the Ottagono, in the Vittorio Emanuele Gallery31 and another attempt at occupation: Strengthened by the effectiveness of the demonstration against the sociologists, and with the echo-effect it had in particular on the radical left of the city, we continued our search for a space. We found it in the likes of the Teatro Miele in Via Gulli, in the west end suburbs. It was an abandoned cinema/theatre where I had seen great concerts by Area and the Skiantos in the ’70s. On the morning of 5 May 1984, we occupied it, but we were cleared out that same afternoon. We had gone too far, and payback was merciless. They decided to cripple us. On 24 May, the occupied building in Via Correggio 18 and the Virus were cleared out. (Angela Valcavi)

Creature Simili finally found hospitality at the Leoncavallo, where the Amen group had already given proof of their organisational skills and had also gained political credibility. This was how the Helter Skelter came to be: a self-managed space for concerts, theatrical performances, readings, and films. The programme included experimental theatre performances such as Étant Donnée and Staal Plaat, and bands like the Legendary Pink Dots, Borghesia, Art Deco, The Ex and even Henry Rollins and Sonic Youth. Until its closure in 1987, the Helter Skelter was one of the main points of reference for the underground movements in Milan, and in particular for the first generations of darks. Helter Skelter opened in late 1984, after the sequence of events I described before, to merge the objectives of punks and kindred creatures. We had in mind the models of Dutch cultural centres, like the Paradiso in Amsterdam, or squats like Kukuk in Berlin. Places that offered everything: music, artistic performances, art exhibits, film festivals. We wanted a space where we could take a broader approach to culture, which wasn’t possible at the Virus: musically, it was dominated by hardcore, and activities were restricted to the use of the stage. There weren’t many spaces in Milan and the only ‘alternative’ place was too different from what a lot of people were looking for. Proof that there were a lot [of] people on our same wavelength out there was the incredible turnout at the first three concerts organised at the Leoncavallo by “the people of Amen”—that’s what we called ourselves at the time—and under whose name we had also strengthened relationships with other people who gravitated in what was no

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man’s land. There was Gomma, Joykix, and Gianni “uvLSI”, who later joined the cyberpunk magazine Decoder; and Atomo and Vincillo who came from Fame. The era of the ’70s movements was finally behind us, and we realised that aggregation revolved around music, and our position was somewhere in the middle of these two models. The four concerts at the Leoncavallo established us as a group, and we needed a place where we could meet, so they gave us a room at the Virus. After the closure of the Virus, the Leoncavallo gave its ok to host us. It was the only place that could effectively accommodate the new antagonists. A series of city-wide activities to inform people of what had happened and what we wanted were organized. A concert was immediately organised at the Leoncavallo where Daniele from the Wretched gave a long introductory speech. In the days following the closure, people from the Virus received hospitality at the squat in Corso Garibaldi, and later they occupied a space in Viale Piave. At that point, we decided to ask, as Creature Simili, a space at the Leoncavallo that we knew was not being used. There was a small building behind the courtyard that could host us. In the meanwhile, we had organised a fifth concert for 10 May: it was the second one we signed as Creature Simili. After all the things that had happened from the first Amen concert to the closure of the Virus in via Correggio, the Leoncavallo had gotten a pretty good idea of our ‘political’ identity. They demanded a sort of pedigree to whoever asked for a space, but by that point they had understood who we were, even though they didn’t really understand what we were doing. During a film festival on Richard Kern,32 I remember seeing some pretty amazed and quizzical looks on people’s faces, but they let themselves get carried away by this new wave of youthful energy. In short, they gave us a space we could self-manage in the basement of the building off the courtyard. That’s how the Helter Skelter came to be. I can’t remember exactly why we called it that, but I remember we had a lot of discussions about the meaning: it was chaos, a confused state, the war of the worlds, it was Charles Manson, the cover song by Siouxsie, it symbolised chaotic and revolutionary expectations. It was perfect! We picked up brooms and paintbrushes and began working on the Helter Skelter. And we set up the stage, the most important part. We did some really great things there, great concerts, underground film festivals, meetings. Creature Simili finally had a home, a beautiful space that was active for about three years. Our best feature was that we didn’t have structure: we had one meeting a week, more or less, to organise the activities, and whoever had contacts or ideas would submit them. We worked hard and the stage was ready. With the experience of Punkaminazione33 our contacts increased. And we did a lot with Tribù Liberate (‘freed tribes’) in Bergamo: they were a very cohesive and well-organised group. Sometimes we organised more than one concert a week. When we had the possibility of doing something, we did it, even if it was mid-week. We had some very interesting contacts, for example with Slovenian bands. In Slovenia the scene was unimaginable for us, because the

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state financed cultural activities, art galleries and production studios by giving grants to artists and recognizing their profession. Their only problem, no small matter, was mobility: to leave Yugoslavia, they had to leave a sort of security deposit that would be paid back upon their return. A guarantee that they wouldn’t defect. Borghesia and the O!Kult played at the Helter, but other than the concerts and a few film festivals, one of the highest points was the screening of the film Decoder by Klaus Maeck.34 A booklet had been handed out containing the translation and presentation of the film, and Maeck himself was more than happy to come and present it. I remember that Marco Philopat from the Virus was one of the most enthusiastic people there. He was one of the curators of the booklet and had started to collaborate with the Helter Skelter. I remember him after the Chernobyl disaster, too. He was giving out red and blue pills at the door. They were just sugared candy but they represented the radioactive substances Iodine-131 and Caesium-137. On them was written “Iodine-131 for the paranoid” and “LSD-137 for an apocalyptic trip”. We counted around a dozen people by then: Joykix, Roberto who was part of Amen, Marco, Gomma, Stefania from Amen, too, Gianni. … This was more or less the group that ran the Helter Skelter: the fanzine Amen, the group from Decoder, Joykix and Hydra Mentale, and Vincillo and Atomo, on and off, with Fame. (Angela Valcavi) The Helter Skelter began because we realised that in that period there was no way to start a new occupation on our own: we were not strong enough to do it. It would have been a disaster considering that we were thrown out of the Teatro Miele in less than a day. Some of us had already organised concerts at the Leoncavallo, so a contact had already been established. We started going to the self-management assemblies and to the cultural committee meetings at the Leoncavallo, but we didn’t have a great relationship with them. They had a way of doing things that was different from ours. What’s more, they were having a really hard time then; there was a hell of a repression and many of them were in prison. The main initiative of the squat was the Prisons Commission, and we also got involved in it. We even went to one of the sessions of the Milanese Red Brigade ‘column’ trial, the Walter Alasia Column, held in the bunker-­ courthouse in Piazza Filangieri.35 But almost all of us were never really on the same wavelength with them, even though we always participated in their activities, like fund-raising and so on. It was obvious we were another generation, with another way of seeing things. We could organise our first activities by ourselves when we obtained self-management of the space in the basement that we fixed up. If we thought that attendance to some of our events would be too numerous for that space, that held 300 people tops, we were allowed to use the main hall by coming to an agreement in advance. In fact, we held the more important activities in the main hall of the Leoncavallo, filling it. They were

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amazed that we could draw such a large crowd, unheard of in those years, and this was because our approach was more inclusive. Take some of the bands we invited for example: we organised a Sonic Youth concert! They slept at our house in Rogoredo: the drummer slept in my bed and I slept on a mattress on the floor. See, you do something like that and people come, because even if they are well hidden in the underground, they exist, and they need things like that, that nobody else is offering. Sure, Milan had three or four disco clubs, but first of all, you either all had to chip in for the cover charge to get in, or else beg, or burst in: it was crazy and it happened at each concert! Our cover charge was low, everyone could afford it. (Joykix)

In the meanwhile, in Milan, a dark scene had started to take shape36 and the Helter Skelter placed Leoncavallo at the centre of a circuit of meeting places that included clubs—topping the list was the Hysterika in Via Redi—and record stores. This circuit crossed the borders between squats and commercial venues, inaugurating new forms of circulation and exchange. A prime example of this was the S.M.D. collective, founded at the Virdis disco club in San Giuliano Milanese. It wasn’t about the politicisation of the entire dark movement: rather, it was the birth of a network of heterogeneous realities, where everyone was free to move and explore until they found their own dimension. An extraordinary endeavour for a city like Milan, where social relationships—and worlds—had always travelled on parallel tracks that rarely communicated. It was obvious that the Helter Skelter had achieved something truly alternative. One look was all it took to notice the difference. At the Leoncavallo, you had on one hand the ‘nineteen seventies comrade’ type, and then there was this other world, varied, but above all, dark. Among these, there was a further distinction between who was ‘active’ and who wasn’t. There were guys from the Virus and the people that circled around Decoder that added a further direction to this attitude. Basically, there was a scene of kindred creatures that, in one way or another, identified with these experiences, and circulated in this network. There were always interesting things happening at the Helter Skelter. I remember a fantastic Polish dark band that whipped themselves, and the performance of Annie Anxiety. Even Lydia Lunch played there. The whole international experimental dark scene was there. The place was small, in the courtyard of the Leoncavallo, and it was incredible because to get there, you had to cross the main hall of the ‘Leonka’. Then you had to go back through there to get beer: you practically jumped from the ’80s to the ’70s, and everyone stared at you, bewildered. But a lot of people hung out there, even people you might meet at the Plastic, because the guys at the Helter Skelter managed to bring people and situations to

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Milan that would otherwise never have found a place to perform. That’s when the DIY production of cassettes and fanzines really took off: there was stuff that would have otherwise been impossible to find. But none of us defined ourselves as ‘dark’. Personally, I didn’t like the word. In fact, when that label, kindred creatures, became public domain, I adopted it. There was only one group, as I remember, who were regulars at the Hysterika and defined themselves as dark. In fact, some of those who hung out at clubs also came to the Helter Skelter, whereas I couldn’t stand commercial dark clubs. I believed that we had to create our own spaces and things alone, and not enrich others’ initiatives and consume pre-packaged products. I’ll admit some of us were snobs. I went to the Hysterika with Roberto, a comrade at the libertarian collective I hung out at in Novate, who later became my boyfriend, but it didn’t leave me with a great impression. It was really weird because I was used to squats where you had a feeling of belonging, a strong sense of identity, which was one of the reasons that dragged me on this path in the first place. The club, or at least that’s what I felt, was a much more exterior phenomenon: there was music, more thought into how you looked, a more clearly defined, orthodox, dark code in dressing. Their identity was based completely on music and aesthetics, whereas for us the cultural was also political: everyone was left-wing or an anarchist, including me. (Roxie) I became an assiduous regular at the Leoncavallo in my last year of high school: they held a lot of concerts. But I didn’t belong to that scene, even though there were a lot of different worlds mixed together. There were people from Autonomia Operaia, for example. And there were people from the Virus that had broken away from the more orthodox punk movement. I always thought that the punk movement and Autonomia Operaia squawked too condescendingly at each other. Personally, I kept my distance from Autonomia but it was the only place left after the Virus in Via Correggio and in Viale Piave had been dismantled, so there was co-habitation. We went to see concerts and that was it. Even though Roxie was more involved because she used to hang out with the collective in Viale Piave. The Helter Skelter was more lateral compared to the punk movement, tending more to the dark scene. In time, things moved forward. I felt the need for greater commitment, so I looked for a connection, even political, first with the Leoncavallo, and then with the Virus. At a certain point, I abandoned the Hysterika and moved towards a more politically compromised area. (Roberto Schieppati) You went to the Leoncavallo because it was an antagonistic scene and it offered things you couldn’t find anywhere else. Not only music. I remember watching some great documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio.37 Every once in a while, Casino Royale would play: they weren’t really our kind of music but it was antagonistic stuff. Obviously, we also went to dark clubs, like the Taxi that later became the Hysterika. (Emanuela Zini)

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The Helter Skelter programme resonated throughout a lot, and I mean a lot, of people. It got the same type of response as the first concerts at the Leoncavallo, because people were looking for new ideas. There were only a few clubs that offered music, especially the Odissea 2001 where they held an incredible number of concerts between 1982 and 1983. But not everyone could afford the cover charge. The Odissea, that later became the Prego, was in Baggio, in Via Forze Armate. The people who came to the Helter Skelter were part of the ‘black tide’. But there was more: an exchange between the antagonistic network and the less politicized clubs scene began. For example, we sold Amen whenever we could, especially at the end of concerts, and we would keep meeting the same people. We had made a lot of new contacts including two couples who were really into music, which was the most widespread form of bringing people together. They dressed in black, so they identified with a movement, but they wanted to feel more active. They became assiduous regulars at the Helter, and one of them joined Amen. The same dynamic was repeated with other people: even Pino Carafa, the legendary DJ at the Hysterika, collaborated with Amen. Some people started coming to the Helter Skelter because they had found a language akin to theirs in the leaflet. In time, things got bigger and it took off on its own: it is your basic model of human aggregation. (Angela Valcavi)

The year 1987 was one that marked the collapse of Milanese politicised punk and activist enactment of dark, and also the year the Helter Skelter experiment came to an end, not least for internal tensions. Yet, this didn’t imply the end of the first dark wave in the city, because in the meanwhile, a solid and extended scene of commercial clubs had taken shape, even if it hosted quite a different enactment of dark.

Notes 1. On anarcho-punk, see Dunn (2012), Dines and Worley (2016). 2. Re Nudo was the most relevant Italian countercultural magazine of the 1970s. Founded in Milan in 1970, it was published until 1980 and relaunched several times in the following decades. Its editorial line included topics as diverse as music, drugs, sexual liberation and comics. About Re Nudo Umberto Fiori writes, “the first step towards the political hegemonisation of rock by the Left was made not by a marxist organisation but by the hippie movement which started in the early seventies around the underground magazine Re Nudo in Milan” (Fiori 1984: 265). 3. The squat of the radical Marxist left was occupied in 1975 in Baggio, on the western outskirts of Milan. 4. On this topic, see Worley (2017).

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5. Philopat (1997). 6. For an overview on proletarian youth clubs, see Piazza (2011), and in particular par. 3. 7. See The Free Association (2016). 8. Philopat (2002). 9. See Chap. 2. 10. The Magliocco airport in Comiso, Sicily (today named after the unionist Pio La Torre, assassinated by the mafia), in 1981 was designated as a NATO base by the Italian government. In 1983 it was equipped with 112 American cruise missiles to counter Soviet missiles: it was one of the main installations of NATO in Southern Europe during the cold war. In the summer of 1983, there was a protest against this decision: about 300 people arrived from all over Italy to demonstrate, including the punx from the Virus squat. As Marco Philopat writes in his book Costretti a sanguinare (1997), the occupation of the base was supposed to start on Friday, 22 July, and to end on Sunday, 24 July, with a concert of three German and two English musical bands, including the Crass, in Sicily for the occasion. But on Saturday, 23 July, police forces stifled the protest, after an actual battle with arrested, missing, fugitive and wanted people. See https:// www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2012/03/04/trentanni-fa-quando-comisoera-la-val-di-susa/6684/ and https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/ archivio/repubblica/2008/08/29/missili-comiso-arrivano-punk.html. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 11. In 1984, punks and skinheads from all over Europe went to Hannover for the annual ‘Chaos Days’ punk fest on 4 August. In 1982, after several punk meetings in Wuppertal, the first Chaostage occurred in Hanover, to protest the police plan to create a registry of photographs of punks. Official Chaostage festivals were held in 1983, 1984, 1985 and then revived in the mid-1990s. 12. On the experience of the Turinese band, see Negazione (2012). 13. Indigesti, founded in Vercelli in 1982, was one of the main Italian hardcore punk bands. 14. On this cyberpunk countercultural magazine, see Nacci (2016, 2018). 15. Metal Box, also known by the title Second Edition, is the second studio album by the British post-punk band Public Image Ltd., released in 1979 by Virgin Records. In 2003, the American music magazine Rolling Stone placed it 461st on its list of the 500 best albums of all time. 16. Lindsay Kemp (1938–2018) was a British choreographer, actor, dancer, mimer and director. Considered a schoolmaster of contemporary dance theatre, he also had a decisive influence on the history of rock, as is evident in the styles of artists such as Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and especially David Bowie. In fact, Kemp became well known in the mainstream audience

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thanks to his collaboration with the White Duke in the Ziggy Stardust version, for whom he performed during the famous concerts at the Rainbow Theatre in London in August 1972. The most iconic image of Kemp is probably his personal rendition of Pierrot. He particularly loved Italy, so much so that in his last ten years he lived in Livorno. In Milan he held various shows, including two in 1979: Flowers by Jean Genet and Salomé by Oscar Wilde, at the Manzoni Theatre and at the National Theatre. 17. The Plastic is a well-known alternative night club in Milan, open since 1980. The first flyer, dated 23 December 1980, recommended “a dark suit, heavy makeup, pomp—especially pomp.” It was frequented by internationally renowned artists such as Madonna, Elton John, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, before becoming a reference point especially for the fashion crowd. In 2012, from its historic headquarters in Viale Umbria 120, it moved to another area of the city. See https://zero.eu/it/ luoghi/3677-discoteca-plastic,milano/. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 18. Cox 18 is a socially oriented squat in Milan in the Navigli area that has been self-managed since 1976, and evacuated many times by the municipality. Its website describes the squat with these words: “The various collectives which take part refuse to recognise dominant ideologies or ideologies which would dominate. It does not accept any form of delegation and chooses meetings and self-confrontations as a means to decisionmaking and existence. It is interested in non-manipulative interpersonal relations and follows generalized self-management, creating and promoting social aggregation and solidarity networks.” Since 1992, Cox18 has hosted Primo Moroni’s Calusca City Lights bookshop and it has been the seat of the Primo Moroni Archive since 2002. See https://cox18.noblogs. org/. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 19. Stati di agitazione is a song by CCCP. It appears in their second album Socialismo e barbarie, released in 1987 for Virgin Records. 20. De Sario (2012). 21. See Sect. 4.3. 22. The text of the leaflet is available online in different music and punk blogs, for example http://stabiliturbolenze.blogspot.com/2008/11/fedeli-allalinea-che-non-c.html. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 23. Negri (2007). 24. The Festa dell’Unità was an annual summer festival originally organized by the Italian Communist Party to finance and distribute its official newspaper, l’Unità. 25. Valcavi (2017). 26. For an in-depth discussion of Amen, see Sect. 6.4. 27. The Scapigliatura was an artistic and literary movement born in Northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had its epicentre in

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Milan and was later established throughout the country. The name—created by the writer Cletto Arrighi—is a free translation of the French word bohème (Gypsy life), in reference to the disordered and nonconformist lifestyles of artists. The Scapigliati opposed Italian romanticism, preferring the international one, along with the nascent French naturalism and the poètes maudits like Baudelaire. According to Italian literary criticism, the Scapigliatura anticipated later well-known movements such as Verismo and Decadentism. See Del Principe (1996). 28. See Chap. 1. 29. The Sinigaglia Fair is the oldest flea market in Milano, established in the nineteenth century in the Ticinese neighbourhood. Over the years it has changed location a few times, but always within the same district, along the canals. During the 1980s it was the main gathering place for many alternative subcultures of the city, mainly punk and dark. Another important meeting point was by the Columns of San Lorenzo, between Via Torino and Corso di Porta Ticinese: an ancient building of the late Roman era, located in front of the church with the same name, near the medieval Ticinese gate. 30. See Sect. 1.1. 31. In the centre of Milan, next to the Duomo, the elegant Vittorio Emanuele Gallery offers many expensive shops and restaurants, and it is still the symbol of the wealth of the city. At the intersection of its arcades, there is a space surmounted by a dome called “the octagon” for its characteristic shape. 32. At this link, the flyer of the festival was dedicated to the American underground filmmaker Richard Kern: http://www.gomma.tv/photoz/ photogallery-da-pellicole-di-richard-kern/index.html. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 33. Punkaminazione was a bulletin of connection and coordination assembled by groups, labels and collectives of the Italian punk scene. It started in 1982 in order to share ideas and aims such as anti-militarism, squatting, anarchism and punk music as a political message. Contributions came from all over Italy, Milan included. The bulletin Punkaminazione was officially established on 1 August 1982 during a music festival in Feltre. A similar experience was experimented in the early 1990s with the name La Lega dei Furiosi. See http://www.gomma.tv/testi-e-materiali-vari/fanze/punkaminazione/index.html. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 34. Decoder (1984) is a cult movie by German director and producer Klaus Maeck. The soundtrack is by Soft Cell, Einstürzende Neubauten and The The, and has a cast of actors including William S. Burroughs, G.P. Orridge from Psychic TV, F.M. Einheit from Einstürzende Neubauten and the real Christiana F. (from the Berlin Zoo). The film talks about the transgressive

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innovation that punk brought to communication and predicts the cyberpunk revolution. Later, Klaus Maeck became the manager for Einstürzende Neubauten and he released the book Hör mit Schmerzen: Listen With Pain and the documentary Liebeslieder: Einstürzende Neubauten (1993) about the band. Decoder was screened at the Helter Skelter in May 1985: http:// decoder.cultd.net/stations.htm#stations. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 35. The Walter Alasia Column of the Italian Red Brigades was a terrorist organisation active between 1977 and 1983, especially in the area of Milan. The name came from the terrorist Walter Alasia, who died on 15 December 1976  in a shootout after killing two police officers. The trial took place in the bunker-courthouse opposite the Milanese prison of San Vittore. It lasted over nine months and ended in December 1984, when the Criminal Court of Milan inflicted 19 life sentences and 840 years in prison to 112 defendants. See https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/ archivio/repubblica/1984/12/07/per-la-alasia-19-ergastoli-pene-per. html. Last accessed 2 December 2019. 36. See Chap. 5. 37. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is an experimental movie by American director Godfrey Reggio. The first of his Qatsi trilogy, the film has no dialogue or actors, but only a combination of images punctuated by sounds and music by Philipp Glass—a minimalist style that exerted great influence both in cinema and in television advertising. In 2000, Koyaanisqatsi was chosen for conservation in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.

References Campo, A. (Ed.). (2005). Fedeli alla linea. Dai CCCP ai CSI. Firenze: Giunti Editore. Contiero, T. (Ed.). (2015). Fellegara. Dove sono nati i CCCP Fedeli alla linea. Ediz. illustrata. Rimini: NFC Edizioni. De Sario, B. (2009). Resistenze innaturali: attivismo radicale nell’Italia degli anni ’80. Milano: Agenzia X. De Sario, B. (2012). Cambiamento sociale e attivismo giovanile nell’Italia degli anni Ottanta: il caso dei centri sociali occupati e autogestiti. Cahiers D’études Italiennes, (14), 117–138. Del Principe, D. (1996). Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Dines, M., & Worley, M. (Eds.). (2016). The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-­ Punk, Politics and Music. New York: Autonomedia. Dunn, K. (2012). Anarcho-Punk and Resistance in Everyday Life. Punk & Post Punk, 1(2), 201–218.

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Fiori, U. (1984). Rock Music and Politics in Italy. Popular Music, 4, 261. Giudici, A., Ferretti, G. L., & Tagliati, R. (2014). Annarella benemerita soubrette. CCCP fedeli alla linea. Macerata: Quodlibet. Hannerz, E. (2015). Performing Punk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nacci, I. (2016). Tra ribellione e tecnologia: la storia editoriale di «decoder» e del cyberpunk a Milano (1986–1998). Storia Lombarda, 2, 58–92. Nacci, I. (2018). Cyberpunk e “Decoder”. In Moicana (Ed.), Università della strada. Mezzo secolo di controculture a Milano (pp.  137–150). Milano: Agenzia X. Negazione. (2012). Negazione. Il giorno del sole. Con CD Audio. Milano: ShaKe. Negri, U. (2007). Io e i CCCP. Da Carpi a Berlino. Una storia fotografica e orale. Ediz. illustrata. (E. Guarneri, Ed.). Milano: ShaKe. Philopat, M. (1997). Costretti a sanguinare: romanzo sul punk 1977–84. Milano: ShaKe (Torino: Einaudi, 2006; Milano: Agenzia X, 2016). Philopat, M. (2002). La banda Bellini: romanzo sugli anni Settanta. Milano: ShaKe (Torino: Einaudi, 2007; Milano: Agenzia X, 2015). Piazza, G. (2011). Which Models of Democracy? Internal and External Decision-­ Making Processes of Italian Social Centres in a Comparative Study. Center of Studies on Politics and Sociaety – Wp Series, 1(1), 3–54. Retrieved September 1, 2019, from http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/CSPS/issue/view/1043. Romania, V. (2016). Fedeli alla linea: CCCP and the Italian Way to Punk. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, (109), 63–82. The Free Association. (2016). The Kids Was Just Crass. In M. Worley & M. Dines (Eds.), The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music (pp. 299–310). New York: Autonomedia. Valcavi, A. (2017). Fame: il romanzo di una fanzine. Milano: Agenzia X. Worley, M. (2017). No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

A Batcave in Via Redi: The Music Club Enactment of Dark

5.1   The Dark Music Club Scene and the Hysterika In the same years in which Creature Simili were tracing the route to an activist enactment of dark within the squat scene, the circuit of goth music clubs took off. At a certain point, social centres and clubs co-existed. They developed parallel to each other. Many people had moved from squats to clubs, while others went the opposite way. In the early eighties, squats were almost always on the brink of survival, while clubs were popular because the music was good. I remember the Odissea 2001 and the Plastic in Milan, the Viridis in San Giuliano Milanese, the Tenax in Florence, Slego in Rimini, the Aleph in Gabicce Mare, the Psyco in Genoa, and the Big Club in Turin. (Angela Valcavi)

The process was quite quick: almost non-existent at the beginning of the 1980s, a few years later, the circuit was composed of a vast constellation of music clubs spread all over northern Italy—and all over the country. It developed in steps: at first, the new sound coming from the UK received lukewarm reactions from promoters, and the music they proposed was limited to the most commercial new wave. Until 1981–1982, darks who went to clubs were basically considered guests and not always welcomed. Back then, you had a hard time getting into clubs if you wore combat boots because it was assumed that if you wore them you wanted to create mayhem, © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_5

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smash things, wreck the place, make trouble. I tried to go to clubs with Sergio di Meda a few times but they didn’t let us in. (Antonella Pala)

However, things started to change within a few months. New wave and post-punk, even in their darkest declensions, seemed to gain a growing appreciation from customers, and clubs like the Viridis in San Giuliano Milanese, La Luna in Foro Buonaparte and the Pneumonia in Via Vittadini started to include those musical genres in their playlists on a regular basis. There were also places outside the city that attracted customers from all of northern Italy, like the Motion Unlimited in Madone, in the Province of Bergamo. In this second phase, clubs adopted an eclectic formula: windows of new wave were proposed together with other genres of music. The only thing those genres had in common was the fact that they were considered ‘alternative’: not only punk and new wave, but also ska, rockabilly and hard rock. The club I went to most often was the Plastic, a reference point for Milan at the time. It was divided into two rooms, and it remained exactly the same until the legendary location in Viale Umbria closed. There was a group of gay regulars, a few fashionistas, and various extravagant looking artists, but there were a few darks there, too. People from the television and music business went, so it was a trendy place. The Plastic was impartial. The music was new wave, dark, some punk. I have to admit that it was very cool, top quality, with DJs of an international level. (Roxie)

Cohabitation wasn’t always harmonious among the different groups that were waiting to dance to their own music. Frequently, in the less ‘trendy’ clubs, these eclectic events ended in altercations and fights, especially with the naziskins. At the Motion in Bergamo they played a lot of ska and you’d break your balls until they put on dark music. You finally danced a little, but you fought with the ska people. There was the Onyria in Brescia, too, and there were events here and there in various places. You went because it was a way to stay in touch with the scene. The truth is, a place like the Motion would not exist today because you either play one kind of music or you play another kind. You don’t break everybody’s balls with mishmash. At the time, eclectic situations were the most common. The fact that you could listen to things that weren’t commercial, even though they weren’t exactly your style, was enough to make you want to go. (Emanuela Zini)

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At the beginning, there were very few alternative clubs and there was a problem of territoriality. In San Giuliano Milanese, the Viridis held events on Friday evening: it was a great place. But it was war, in the sense that every time you went, you found someone who hated your fucking guts. I was beat up all the time! I remember one skinhead in particular: Lino the Skin. He was ugly, mean. I really got on his nerves. He caught me once. He slapped me hard and said, “No reason. Simply, I hate your fucking guts.” All I did was answer, “All right, since you’ve really hurt me, I’ll leave. I don’t even want to know why you did it, otherwise you’ll just hit me again.” I remember the Motion, too. It was halfway between Milan and Bergamo. It was a great place, but fights always broke out there. (…) Up to 1985–’86 there was war in these mixed places. And in the city, too. Going out to have fun meant coming home hurt. Not dead: I don’t want to exaggerate, but hurt, yeah. It happened to me lots of times. In addition to stab wounds and punches, I can’t even count the times I got slapped hard. My face is still rubbery because of all the slaps in the face I got! Things started to calm down a little at the end of the eighties: you could really tell something was changing in the alternative scene. At a later point, I started to hang out at the Cave in Segrate and it was fantastic: but that was properly a goth-punk club. I met people I still hang out with today. (…) It’s not like there weren’t skinheads, rockabillies and punks, but the aim wasn’t to hurt others anymore. We had fun, we got drunk. In the end, enjoying yourself prevailed over clashing with others. (Roy) The Motion made history. People came from Milan, Novara and other provinces. I risked my life at the Motion! I was there with a friend once, and we started singing against the skinheads outside the club, “Che ne faremo delle camice nere? Tutte un fascio e poi le brucerem!”1 We were taken away because things started to get dangerous. We were asking for it. The Motion had a larger variety of people than the Hysterika, and there were areas of the disco where the skinheads and rockabillies sat. You couldn’t go there, because there was a lot of rivalry between factions. It was crazy. (Orietta Drago)

Around the mid-1980s, in addition to these eclectic nights, several disco clubs started to organise more focused events, targeting specific subcultural audiences, including darks. A map of goth regular events had been drawn all over northern Italy and beyond, and people went to one place or another depending on the day of the week. The network of clubs provided what Hodkinson (2002) calls “the infrastructure” for an enactment of dark that differed relevantly from the activist one. The scene of the squats and that of the clubs remained by and large distinct, even if there was exchange and circulation between them:

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not only because many hung out at both, depending on particular events (for example a concert at the Helter Skelter), but also because members could move from one enactment to another depending on their needs and interests. This was the case, for example, for darks leaving the music club scene for the squat scene in search of more active political engagement: My friend Fabio and I broke off from the crowd of trendy new wavers from Novate Milanese and made new friends at the Hysterika. There was a sense of rebellion; we were especially disgusted by the paninari who all dressed exactly the same. They wore Timberlands, had orange tans the colour of Halloween pumpkins, and Invicta knapsacks. I found them repulsive so I started hanging out at the Hysterika. My hair was like Robert Smith of The Cure. People said I looked like him but I was never obsessed with it. At the Hysterika we further explored the musical element, but slowly we started to approach the political one. It was connected to punk: there was this satellite group among punks that was very influenced by the dark scene. So, slowly, we met other people, and began to go with them regularly. (Roberto Schieppati)

In any case, in this second enactment of dark, the fundamental role for socialisation was played by clubs: meeting up in the same disco time after time gave rise to subcultural groups and larger cliques between habitués. At a certain point, the dark-goth scene prevailed. We only went to these kinds of clubs, and there were two or three events a week. The Motion had begun to organise regular evenings, on Thursdays and Saturdays, and we went to the Hysterika every Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we went to all three and it took a lot of energy, but we were young then, so it was easier. You’d begin by joining a group, meet lots of people, decide who to hang out with and who not to. Groups formed pretty quickly. I hooked up with people who are now old friends I still hang out with, like Sergio di Meda and many others. I had finally found people who I could relate to and talk about music, without being seen as an alien or made fun of because I wore Dr. Martens. (…) In the meantime, the legendary squats had entered a crisis. A lot of places closed down or moved to other locations, and this had a huge impact. The punk scene was losing ground while the dark scene continued living in other circuits. (Gp) My social relationships always started inside the clubs. Friendships were created inside and cultivated outside. Milan wasn’t the only place we used to hang around: we went to Varese, Como, Modena, and Brescia a lot, too. To go to the Condor, we would all meet at Lambrate station around ten o’clock at night, hop on a train, dance until the next morning, then go back on the first train

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from Modena. Later, there was also a period of time when we went to the Express in Turin. It was less goth and more EBM. And there were parties in Switzerland, in Lausanne and Zurich. We were a very nomadic group. I remember a party in Chiasso. The guy didn’t have permits. He had invited loads of people from all over Italy; about two or three hundred people. I had helped to make the selection for the playlist and it came out really good. Everyone arrived at around eleven o’clock. We met in front of the club, went in and started to party. A short time later, the Swiss Gendarmerie arrived, made us turn off the music and told us the place didn’t have authorisation []or a license. You can imagine the reaction of three hundred people whose evening had been ruined just as it was taking off; it was only 12:30 at night, so the crazier ones started to smash everything. But the really ridiculous part was that the Gendarmerie didn’t lift a finger to stop them. On the contrary. They said, “Do whatever you want so we can teach this gentleman a lesson. He’ll never open the club again.” I remember people ripping the sink out of the wall, stealing the speakers, the amplifier, the turntable, everything! Forget punk: I couldn’t believe my eyes! I think the guy never opened another club in his life. The DJs at the Condor, the Onyria, and the Hysterika often held private parties organised through word of mouth. They would have them in rented spaces and sometimes in a farmstead with a tavern owned by friends of theirs. But they were parties for thirty-five people, tops. (Dave)

At the same time, word of mouth drove habitués to explore new places and events, establishing new connections. Even without Internet, information about club nights and concerts circulated rapidly, and transfers outside the city expanded the sense of belonging beyond the confines of Milan. This implied a nomadic attitude: darks in the music club enactment used to travel a lot to go dancing, at the weekend but also during the week. Sometimes they organised carpools, but most of the time they travelled by train so they could move in groups. We were drifters. All we needed was to hear about places where they dressed in black and off we’d go. For example, once a friend of mine told me about a place in Viareggio, La Superficie, “It’s really cool. Two areas. We have to go!” We went in a flash, by train. La Superficie was three miles from Viareggio so we had to walk from the station! Our idea was, “We’ll get there by train and then hitchhike: no problem. Someone will pick us up for sure.” A classic: we walked all the way there and back! We would have done anything to go, even walk for six miles. You did it for the sense of adventure, to get to know people who were part of your crowd but you hadn’t met yet. The atmosphere was always a little different wherever you went, and that made us very curious. I remember going to Turin a couple of times in 1986. People told me about Balôn, a famous flea

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market near Porta Palazzo. They said, “Come, there’s a great dark night in a club every Friday.” So, my girlfriend at the time and I decided to go. We took the train to Turin, got to the club, and the first thing I did was go to the bathroom to fix my hair. A girl in there asked me for eyeliner. We got to talking and right away she said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to a few people.” I came from another city and they welcomed me immediately, they made me feel at home. The club was called The Charming and in 1986 they were already playing almost exclusively industrial music. I remember entering and saying, “Shit!” These guys were ahead of us by five or six years, no question. We had fun. They kept me there until five thirty in the morning. In addition to broadening my horizons on music, I began to notice that every scene had its own way of working. Sure, the group from Turin had its flaws, just like us; they were split into different groups depending on where they lived, but they had a completely different attitude. If you were from another city or a newcomer, you were nevertheless welcome as a guest. They would come up to us and ask, “Who are you? Where are you from?” People from all over the place came to our club, the Hysterika, too; they came from the Province of Milan, from Como, Varese, Piacenza, and some even from Pavia. You’d also get people visiting from Genoa or Turin: sometimes groups of fifteen people would come to take a look. But the crowd in Turin had a different approach. They were more open minded, more welcoming. It wasn’t easy to become part of the crowd in Milan. In any case, the others moved around a lot less than us. People from Turin were easy to spot if you went to their haunts, but they seldom went to others. In the end, our eagerness to move around put us at the centre of things: we knew everybody, and everybody knew us, more or less. Whereas others didn’t know each other. For example, there wasn’t a connection between people from Alessandria and Vercelli and people from Turin. It was absurd because they were closer to each other than to us. The only people we didn’t really connect with, even though we went a couple of times, were the ones from Veneto. They were probably less acceptant than us. Veneto was a world apart. (Sergio di Meda)

Through meticulous networking activities, other cities began to connect with Milan, which became the centre of gravity for most of northern Italy. In fact, the Hysterika club opened in the city in 1984: a disco completely devoted to goth music that soon became—somewhat unintentionally— the hearth of the Milanese dark music club scene. I remember the owner, Salvatore, who everyone had a love-hate relationship with. I think the club had swayed towards that scene unintentionally. I don’t think he had actually planned to open a club for darks. I’m sure it was the result of a sequence of events he hadn’t planned. He opened the place, ready to take

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money from whoever was going to come. (…) Basically all he cared about was how much he was making at the door. He realised a lot of people were coming in with alcohol in their bags, but he didn’t care much. (Paola)

The Hysterika was a small venue in the basement of Il Teatrino, the most popular strip club in Milan, located in Via Redi, 2, near the corner of Corso Buenos Aires: one of the main shopping streets in the city. Another club had been there since the beginning of the 1970s, called Piccola Broadway: it was forced to close down in October 1977 after violent brawls between punks and left-wing groups broke out when a concert by Enrico Ruggeri and the Decibel was falsely announced.2 In 1979, The Taxi opened up in its place. The habitués described it as a family-run business: the owners’ mother knit at the coat check, and initially the music was somewhat confusing, like it happened in the ‘eclectic’ event formula: pop music and Italo-disco alongside a more daring selection that ranged from David Bowie to Lou Reed, from Talking Heads to early British new wave. Nevertheless, the visual impact was quite impressive: a dark room, smoke, white flashing lights, huge mirrors in front of which marionette-like figures danced dressed in a way that, at that time, had only been glimpsed in music magazines or in pictures from abroad. There was also a real traffic light that flashed red, amber and green. The resident DJ, Renato Ruggero, a.k.a. René, was responsible for creating the atmosphere and selecting the playlists. He was a friend of the Italian new wave duo Chrisma,3 and had appeared in the video of their song “Lola” in 1978. He used to deejay at the club La Luna, where he played Gary Numan and Simple Minds, and where he launched the new romantic style asking customers to go dressed as pirates like Adam Ant. When he moved to Via Redi in 1979, René brought this first alternative crowd with him: people whose style ranged from elegant new wave to rockabilly and new romantic. Those present remember that the throng of people waiting to get in was so surprisingly large that it blocked traffic in Corso Buenos Aires. Many remember the Halloween party in 1982, a time when Italy was only familiar with the 1978 horror movie of the same name,4 and above all the Funeral Party in November 1983, which was the first official dark party ever held in Italy. Enrico Ruggeri, Depeche Mode, Visage and Christian Death all made appearances at the club. The Taxi closed temporarily and reopened in 1984 with the new name Hysterika, the club that habitués liked—and still like—to imagine as the Milanese equivalent of the legendary Batcave in London.5

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For a while, the club tried to appeal to a gay clientele. In an interview with Radio Popolare, René declared he was bisexual and wanted a place where teens could also feel free to express their sexuality. The following Sunday, many gay youths arrived, attracted more by the open-minded mentality than the music. The attempt at transforming the club didn’t work, and the gay customers who continued going to the Hysterika were those who were into alternative music. Nonetheless, in a way that was quite uncommon in Italy at that time, the club remained characterised throughout its history by its open-minded attitude towards any sexual orientation, and by a mixed gay and heterosexual clientele.6 For everybody, entering the Milanese Batcave for the first time was an experience they never forgot. I started going to the Taxi in ’83–’84. I loved the first album by Depeche Mode, Speak & Spell. I was told the Taxi played them as well as Culture Club, Soft Cell and other bands of that genre. I went to listen to music and to dance. There was a London vibe there. I usually went to another club in Milan called Biberon with a friend of mine who was new romantic. We went every Sunday afternoon. A group of us went there all the time, but as soon as the Taxi opened, I knew right away that there was something different about it. You went down steep stairs and entered a real hole of a place. The stairs had ugly grey carpeting and I remember the colour red, maybe a trim on the walls. There was an old lady at the coat check who quickly learned all our names, simple tables, and the DJ booth in front of the bar. The bathrooms were horrible—they had huge doors— but lots of interesting things went on in there: shared secrets between friends, covert counselling, and people who took huge hairspray cans out of their bags and flipped their heads down to scrunch up their hair when it had gone flat. As we chatted, people kneaded white flour into their hair amongst the toxic cloud of hairspray. There were kids who wore lots of makeup and told you what they had done that day as they sprayed and teased their hair while you were nearly choking to death. All this was mixed in with people drinking a lot and then of course vomiting. I remember I went alone the first time on a Sunday afternoon, dressed normally. There wasn’t a song that day that I didn’t like. I danced alone, without approaching anyone, and I didn’t even drink. I think I went to the Taxi a couple of times, then I stopped for a while. In the meantime, I had enrolled in university where I met some guys who played music. The bass player listened to The Cure from morning until night and I started going back with them. I wasn’t alone anymore, and a miracle happened at the Hysterika: I, who had always felt out of place everywhere, felt at ease and everyone thought I was nice. (Eleonora Mosca)

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Some new friends I met at the place we called ‘il muretto’ (the low wall), where we used to meet, told me about the Hysterika, which I knew about because my sister had gone there for a short period of time. The Hysterika was a sort of mirage for a fifteen-year-old girl like me. One Sunday I decided to go, and while I was on the subway, a girl sitting in front of me, dressed like me, came up and said, “Excuse me, I’m going to the Hysterika for the first time, I’m guessing you’re going there, too. Can you tell me how to get there?” I answered, “It’s my first time, too. I know we have to get off at the Lima underground station. Do you want to go together?” That’s how I met her friends, and she met mine, and that’s how I got into the scene. I met my first real friends at the Hysterika, some of which lasted for years, and still last. The people that came after us envied us a little, because the Hysterika was the true essence of everything. I still remember the entrance: narrow, dark, all black with a steel door. It was the cellar of the place upstairs and there was a porno movie theatre next door. The dance floor was behind the bar and there were couches all around it. In front of the bar was a mirrored wall—covered in handprints, writings and lipstick kisses—that reflected our swaying, back-and-forth style of dancing. On the left, raised off the ground, was the DJ booth. Behind it, next to the dancefloor, was the bathroom where something was always happening. And to the right of the dancefloor there were the emergency stairs that were often used for anything but escape. (Antonella Pala) I still remember the song that was playing when I went down the first time: She’s in Parties by Bauhaus. I feel like I’m there right now. I just had a flashback. In the second phase of the Hysterika, everyone was definitely friends with everyone else. There were less people, too, but in the beginning, you could feel the buzz of the movement. There were so many people. It was awesome! Maybe it was because we were more authentically eighties compared to the second phase that, in my opinion, already bordered on nostalgia. By then a lot of dark and new wave bands had become commercial. (Gabriele Trezzi)

Hysterika held regular club-nights on Friday and Saturday, even if the most jam-packed event was on Sunday afternoons with DJs Lupo (Pino Carafa) and Alex. A lot of the habitués were in fact minors and they could only get around with public transportation. The arrival of DJ Lupo in September 1986 determined the definitive goth trait at the Hysterika. We went to the Taxi when René was spinning records, but they were way too commercial for our tastes. Depeche Mode were among the most extreme things he played. We got fed up, so we left the Taxi and began going to the basement hall under the Disco Zam, at Ravizza Park. It was a huge tavern frequented

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by rockabillies. (…) They left, and one of the guys from my group said, “I’ve got a friend who has two thousand records at home. Let’s start our own place!” That was Steve Di Rico, the first true alternative DJ in Milan. I was inspired by him. When I saw him, I wanted to do the same things, and shortly after I asked for and got half an hour where I played new releases. You’re going to laugh now because the new releases were Christian Death, Death in June … [w]hereas Steve played more danceable tunes. Not like the stuff René played, it was wave: Visage, to be clear, and Dead or Alive. René even played Den Harrow,7 stuff like that—totally unacceptable—which is why we went to the hall Sunday afternoons. I remember I bought my first Christian Death record, Only Theatre of Pain, released in 1982, at Zabriskie Point and I had to get it imported because nobody had ever heard of them. I also got The Guilty Have No Pride by Death in June at the same time. During my half hour, I presented Current 93 and similar music: definitely more sophisticated things. The year after, I became resident DJ, evidently because people liked what I did. We called the hall ‘Heaven Gate’. It doesn’t exist anymore, there’s a new building there today. The only problem was that to get in, you had to walk through the grease heads from the disco upstairs and the way we were dressed meant trouble, so they let us in half an hour earlier, to avoid disorder. We stayed there for two years until, in 1986, “madam” Gina, the owner of the tavern, said to me, “Unfortunately, they’re demolishing the whole place.” It was a tenement with communal balconies built in the 19th century. I had heard that the Taxi had recently changed DJ: René was gone, replaced by a guy from Mestre, but not a lot of people went there anymore. I went and spoke to Salvatore, the owner, and told him, “Look, we’ve got two hundred people at the tavern. I’m leaving it. Let me know if you’re interested. That place is not going to be there much longer so it would not be unfair if I bring people here.” He answered, “Go talk to the other DJ.” The other DJ was Alex, Alessandro Carrone. Unfortunately, he took off later, he went to India, disappeared. … We became good friends right away and we decided the success of the Hysterika because we had chemistry. There was never any rivalry between us. He worked as much as I did; we were on the same wavelength. “What are you going to play? Oh, yeah, put that on!”. For example, I’d put on Spara Jurij by CCCP: I’d play the riff first, then I’d stop. We’d play jokes on each other. We had a lot of fun. One of us did the lights and the other spun records. The synergy between us two DJs made the Hysterika a success. We filled the venue every Sunday from 1986 until the spring of 1989. It was insane. We played really alternative music: The Cramps, Alien Sex Fiend, Fields of the Nephilim, The Sisters of Mercy, the darkest stuff. The youth scene was beginning to get contaminated by personalities like Madonna and her crucifixes and all that, generating a lot of confusion, so we tried to find more extreme situations in which to take refuge. (Pino Carafa)

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The Hysterika played a pivotal role in shaping the Milanese music club enactment. At the disco, a strong sense of belonging went side by side with an exclusivist attitude, and sometimes with snob elitism. On the one hand, in fact, darks could find kindred spirits in the club, somebody with whom to share the “consistent distinctiveness” of the subculture (Hodkinson 2002), and with whom to enrich and refine their competences on the subcultural canon. The cool thing was that in a club you could listen to the same music you listened to at home. A song by CCCP ended and one by The Sisters of Mercy began. There were beautiful people there, not only from an aesthetic viewpoint: they were also cultured in music and cinema, and simply had style. (…) I felt I belonged. (…) There was a sense of community even if some (…) tried to force an identity on themselves that wasn’t really a part of them, and after a couple of months you’d see them dressed normally saying they never felt they fit in with the dark scene. I saw hundreds of people coming to the Hysterika and then disappearing into the normality they had tried to escape. (Gp)

On the other hand, like at the Virus, fitting in was not easy, and newcomers were looked down upon by habitués, especially when they came from suburbia and from the belt of small cities neighbouring Milan. Some [of the people there] looked a little too perfect, very into their roles, going as far as creating a false persona, posing as stars, demigods. A very charismatic guy I met right from the start was Sergio di Meda: he had the perfect look but at the same time he was nice and kind as opposed to a lot of people who lingered in semi-darkness or stood on a pedestal and wouldn’t give you the time of day. (Gp) Some people were more ostentatious and stuck up. It was hard to get into their good graces and talk to them. They were unapproachable, older than us, between eighteen and twenty years old. I tried to work my way up to them but I was too flaky for them. Then I met Gabriele, (…) who was only a year older than me, and Elisa who was my age, and we formed a little group. We raised hell, we wanted to have fun. But the Hysterika was the kind of place where you’d arrive and the same girl would try to cut her wrists in the bathroom every single Sunday. She’d open cans of Coca Cola, shut herself in the bathroom, and everyone would run after her yelling “No, nooo!”. She cried and everyone cried with her, then she’d come out and we had saved her life. That’s the kind of place it was. If there was tragedy, you were part of the tragedy. The three of us (…) liked

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having fun and sometimes we made sarcastic remarks about the atmosphere in there, to the point where we were considered disrespectful. (Paola) At the time, I was fascinated by those guys and I was looking for people to hang around with. It was nice being part of a clique. I went with my girlfriend, Adriana. We were a small group of friends that went from Monza to Milan and we’d meet up with others there. Some even came from Piedmont; Roberto from Vercelli, and others from Como. I remember there was a girl, Debora. She was a sort of veteran there and saw me standing alone and looking disoriented, so she came up to say hi and asked, “Is this your first time? Come on! Do up your hair, like this…” She was a rare example of someone who welcomed me and paved the way into the scene on my first afternoon there. Some of the guys sized you up because they belonged to an older crowd. (…) Yet, sometimes these defences were just a superficial mask, and as soon as you walked up to someone and started talking, the wall crumbled. I remember Gp, who looked like a scary punk covered in chains and studs—I think he had “Exploited” written on the back of his jean jacket—but he was actually a very nice guy. At first, I kept my distance: I was young and I’d always been really shy. Then I dove right in and met lots of people. (Andy) You couldn’t go to the Hysterika and do whatever the fuck you wanted to. You had to stay cool and wait to be invited into the inner circle. It wasn’t hazing, it was a sign of respect: as a stranger entering my home, you have to behave well, you know? And most of all, you had to prove that you were someone, that you had something to say, something to bring to the movement. (…) Anyone who came, even if they were dressed in black, even if they knew someone and became part of a certain crowd, had to prove they had the right stuff to stay. (Sergio di Meda)

However relevant, the level of seniority and an assiduous participation were not the only criteria “to prove you were someone”: newcomers also had to show they had something “to say” and “to bring to the movement”. In Thornton’s (1995) and Brill’s (2007, 2008) terms, this is a matter of gaining “subcultural capital” within the scene: the criteria to attain it are strictly related to the rules of authentication of subcultural identities. As we will see, the way in which authenticity was proved and a status was gained in the music club enactment differed from the one in the activist enactment, and was primarily related to competences regarding the subcultural canon, especially music and style.

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5.2   Constructing Dark Identities in the Music Club Enactment Just as punx initially looked down on Creature Simili, they both looked down on people that enacted dark in music clubs, considering them interested only in the most superficial aspects of the subculture. At the beginning, we kinda laughed at them, because it seemed just fashion to us: something very superficial. (Nino La Loggia)

For punx and Creature Simili, in fact, the authenticity of subcultural identities had to be testified with coherence between style and involvement in political activism,8 while the Hysterika and most of the other music clubs didn’t relate at all to it.9 In contrast to the approach that prevailed at the Helter Skelter, people went to Via Redi just to dance, listen to music, meet friends and stay in contact with their group. Not everyone was completely politically disengaged, but involvement in activism was regarded as an individual choice (what we have defined a practice of the third kind), and not as a part of the common experience of subcultural belonging: We didn’t always get along with the punks. As Philopat writes in Costretti a sanguinare,10 they looked down on us because we didn’t have the same political views. Or rather: we weren’t politically active, so they thought of us as fashionistas, posers. But there is a passage in the book where Philopat writes: “This is a dead society—we’re like corpses—and that’s exactly what darks want to communicate.” One of his characters says so, and when somebody answers to her that darks are not as much of a concern for mainstream society as punks are, she adds, “What the hell are you talking about? They look like they’ve just left a cemetery! But in fact, they leave their homes, their normal houses, and their parents and conformists go nuts because of it! They just don’t get it!” Well, this may be one of the few perfectly clear-headed views on what our movement was all about. We were looked on negatively because, for example, we really didn’t care about squats. Sure, you’d end up at the Leoncavallo through a friend sometimes, but they looked at us like, “What the fuck are these guys doing here?” We never felt like we were on the same wavelength, and it wasn’t so much about politics: we had similar points of view on that. The problem was that we were not politically active, in their opinion: we didn’t go around putting up posters; we didn’t organise concerts. We did participate at demonstrations, though: many of us did. But we didn’t go as a group. We also had a different attitude with people: punks used to annoy people on the streets, pretty aggressively, and to provoke. We believed we had to provoke visually, create disorder through the way we

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presented ourselves. They lived anarchy as, “I want to destroy what is destroying me,” whereas we were more, “I don’t like things the way they are but I don’t think we can change them, nor that they can be destroyed.” Furthermore, punks, at least the ones I knew at the Leoncavallo, often left home, squatted, begged for money to get by, and they didn’t worry about where they were going to sleep. They lived day-by-day and that was it. Most of them didn’t have projects for their future. We, on the other hand, tried to remain where we were in society, always on the brink of being rejected but never bending to it. Because you couldn’t fit in a lot of the time. (Sergio di Meda)

What dark in the music club enactment had in common with punx and Creature Simili was a similar interpretation of the present times, seen as marked by an epoch-making defeat, which was political and cultural at the same time. Political, because the repression of the radical movements of the 1970s had put an end to any hope of changing society: Both punks and darks had internalised repression, but while punks screamed outwardly, darks screamed inwardly. Darks were more self-destructive than openly aggressive. I don’t know which one was better or worse. However, it represented a very strong criticism against the dominant models. (Joykix) My parent’s values weren’t abstract: they were values they lived day after day, together with their friends. As a child, they sometimes took me to their discussion groups. It was something quite common at the time. So, when I hear talk about commitment, I associate it with that way of being involved in society, working together to try and change things. We didn’t have that kind of incentive. My parents and I lived two very different realities: I appreciated theirs and I really admired them, but that approach wasn’t open to me anymore. On the other hand, my father thought my music and look were depressing. My mother probably understood my search for belonging. For me, for us, striving all together for a common good was a dead end. The only thing I could do was to find shelter in a niche individualism and take a distance from the hedonistic explosion of the “Milan to be sipped” that was annihilating the idea of society and community. (Paola)

Indeed, the defeat was also cultural, because the new hedonist values of the 1980s, which were seen as characterising the mainstream culture, seemed to go uncontested: I went to a few punk concerts, but they weren’t exactly what I was looking for: very violent. I didn’t like it and above all, at the time, it was overly politicised.

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I was scared sometimes because a lot of shit happened; fights would break out, bottles were thrown, people got hurt. … But out of necessity, I started out as a punk. The two scenes overlapped easily and we had something fundamental in common: the desire not to conform to the cultural trends of the times; the paninari, designer clothes, showing off how much money you had, right-wing political ideology, machismo. (Dave)

The defeat was held as a given by darks in both the enactments: what really differed was the response given. As we have seen, punx and Creature Simili chose the path of an irreducible resistance to dignify the defeat. Political activism was attributed an ethical value in itself, and became a relevant aspect of identity: it certified the subcultural authenticity. From the viewpoint of darks in this second enactment, if nothing could be changed and much less be destroyed, there was no point in paying the high personal price of political activism in the years of harsh repression. Activism required a totalising engagement that these darks refused to undertake. The positions taken against compulsory military service is a clear example of this difference. Punx retreated completely from society and undertook their battles from there: from outside. They refused integration. They did not try to mediate their difference with normality. They took their refusal to its extreme consequences, often paying a very high personal price for it. On the contrary, we tried to bring that sort of ‘outside’ inside: we tried to integrate our difference with normality, and we weren’t about to pay the price for a battle as an end in itself, because we had other concerns. For example, at school, I was on the student council with my friend Antonio. We always participated in political demonstrations together. We were both conscientious objectors, and one of the reasons was that we didn’t want to cut our hair, in addition to not wanting to wear a uniform and have anything to do with the army. I was an antimilitarist, so I couldn’t accept wearing a uniform: it would have meant surrendering to a mainstream system I didn’t want and I considered wrong. At the time, conscientious objection was a year and a half long and a lot of us couldn’t afford losing a year and a half of work. So not everyone could make that choice, but a lot of us did. There was a grapevine that explained how to present the request: it was the only way to know how to do it, because they did all they could to discourage you. It was legal, but nobody officially gave out the information, right? So it was all word-of-mouth. There was only one request form circulating, you’d copy it down, change it a little and present it. This kind of antimilitarist action was something we had in common with punks. But they were often total objectors: they refused to go to the army, but they also didn’t want to present any documentation, or be forced

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to do one and a half years of civil service. This implied getting caught up in crazy hassles, ending up in jail, and it was hard to get out of that shit because once they let you out of jail, you had to do your military service. And if you still refused, you were arrested again and it started all over. Some guys were stuck in that shit for five or six years. I remember the newspaper for total objectors, Senzapatria.11 It explained the whole procedure. Punks knew the price they had to pay to fight against something they couldn’t change. We didn’t want to get caught up in all that shit because then your whole life became that shit and nothing else. (Sergio di Meda)

Dark from the music clubs wasn’t about accepting what existed: rather it was about finding a way of living in what was held as a hostile territory, even if this implied a sort of exodus in an imaginary dimension, a somewhere else. Resistance had to be carried out through identity politics (Bernstein 2005), and at a cultural level. A common ground between punks and darks developed throughout the years, but it didn’t exist in the beginning. At a certain point, the two lifestyles crossed because of our styles. I often had a punk look but I listened to legendary dark bands because punk sounded monotonous to me; not many facets, little contamination, and I picked up on its limitations. Then we had the Italian hardcore punk explosion: you heard two songs and you’d heard them all. But some people belonged to both worlds and I would see the same people at the Hysterika and the Leoncavallo. There was mostly, like, a difference in emotional moods, two different attitudes: for punks it was a matter of pure rage that led to destruction, sabotage, chaos, revolt, so they were more likely to externalise their feelings; darks internalised more. They were fascinated by decline but they had a romantic streak. Basically, darks were distinguished by a more inner anger that, however, came from the same refusal for everything around them. And this was externalised by the ‘dark’ look and macabre style. (Gp)

As already seen for Creature Simili, this cultural resistance took the form of the exploration of identity and of the inner self, mediated not only by music, but also by poetry, theatre and the arts.12 The insistence on themes connected to death and decay, typical of the subcultural canon, was interpreted as a refusal for the ephemeral optimism praised by the mainstream culture, and in particular by the brightly coloured Italo-disco that in those years was booming in the media and in clubs. It was a way to play the repressed collective unconscious against the new hedonist and cheerful culture, to emphasise how vacuous the new path sounded.

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Clearly, this strategy resonated very closely with the wave of resignation that in those years was leading to a general desertion of public engagement in favour of a return to the private sphere (Ginsborg 1990; Mudu and Piazza 2016). However, it differed from the wave of riflusso for two essential points: first of all, because this sort of retreat wasn’t private and individual, but collective and shared. It opened up social relations and ties, instead of closing people off in their own private dimension. One of the things we had in common was a sort of ‘misery loves company’ thing. We all felt out of place. Some of us because we couldn’t make friends, others didn’t want friends because they felt different. We never had it easy: we always had a million problems. The term ‘borderline’ wasn’t common yet, but I’d say a lot of us were. There were exhibitionists, people who had a violent streak and tried to control it, those who had family issues, those who felt the weight of the entire world on their shoulders. I saw the first cases of anorexia in that context. It became a widespread disease in the nineties but even back then, psychological problems that triggered these kinds of things were emerging. This also meant that everyone was different, because everyone had their own stories and journeys. We gathered under one label, but in fact we weren’t a homogen[e]ous group: we didn’t have the same ideas []or only one belief to drive us forward. The only thing we had in common was the idea of not making it, or not wanting to make it, and a likeness to identify with; a marked boundary that kept us together. (Sergio di Meda) Having to face the world like that, every day, wasn’t easy. You had to want to do it and have the strength to do it. It became demanding and people were always asking you, “Why are you doing this? Why do you dress like that?” Being avoided by everyone every day is demanding. When you’re already pissed off and you have to take a tram, it gets pretty heavy. So, you really have to want it. And doing it with someone like you makes it easier and it helps. (Gabriele Trezzi)

Second, if dark as enacted in music clubs withdrew from an open political opposition simply taking its distance from mainstream values, it did so in an openly showy, theatrical way, as a sort of passive-aggressive accusation. Darks voluntarily took on the role of the ‘other’, visually overemphasising their difference. The silent refusal to adopt the new values of hedonism and consumerism had to be publicly exhibited through the visual shock provoked by clothes, make-up and hairstyles. This often implied a conflict at home, in the workplace or at school:

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You’d fight with your parents, if you went to school you’d fight with your teachers; if you worked, with your boss. I knew people who lost their jobs because they refused to cut their hair. One of my friends from Como, Gp, worked as a salesclerk and they were always breaking his balls, “Cut your hair, you can’t look like that, we have customers.” And things just got worse. He had a mohawk; he shaved the sides of his head and it was short and spiky on top. There were no complaints on how he did his job, he even liked it, but these guys kept insisting he cut his hair. At a certain point, he had had enough so he quit, “I don’t give a shit. I quit because I’m not going to cut my hair.” It was important to externalise who you were, to express it, avoid being confused with all the rest. It was a declaration of one’s own self: cutting your hair meant giving in to the system, adapting, integrating. The reasoning was, “If I have to work to get by, I’ll work, but don’t ask me for anything else. Don’t ask me to believe in your system, nor to change myself.” This was the difference with punk. (Sergio di Meda)

This sort of identity politics overheated the relevance of fashion and style, and—as we will see13—of urban space (in particular, the city centre) as a sort of theatre: a stage to show off the refusal of mainstream values. Not surprisingly, within this enactment, style was by far more spectacular than in the activist one, and for this reason it was seen with some suspect by Creature Simili. While adopting similar visual codes, they in fact found it too formulaic, and too groomed. For darks in the activist enactment, urban space was considered more as a space for political action than a stage on which to be seen. For this second enactment, on the contrary, style was at the centre of the criteria of subcultural identity validation: a poser was not a politically disengaged person but someone who changed their style depending on the occasion, shifting to a conventional way of dressing to avoid conflict at school, with family or in the workplace. Since aesthetics assumed an ethical value, a chameleon-like attitude was deprecated as a sort of betrayal. I was conscious of the fact that you had to eat, wear clothes and have contact with other people to stay alive, so you tried to negotiate a compromise: I’ll go to work but I’ll do it without giving up who I am; I’ll go to school but I’ll dress the way I want to and if someone has something to say about it, they’re wrong. That’s why not cutting our hair became more important than having a job. And why it was important not to stop dressing in black all the time: it wasn’t as if I went to clubs all gothed up and then dressed normal all week. What would be the point? There are kids today that have like fifty piercings on their faces and it’s no big deal. They have absurd hair and tattoos everywhere. And

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this is a result of what we did in the ’80s. If it wasn’t for us and punks, they wouldn’t be able to do that stuff today. But in the end, the system accepted them. They became mass by-products and lost their original significance: dismantle ordinary people’s stereotypes, restructure the concepts of family and the work environment by restructuring yourself, starting from not caring what other people think about you. And above all, have your own ideals, or better yet, create them, because we couldn’t find them in any political movement. I used the word ‘movement’ a couple of times, but more than a movement, we were simply a group of people. (Sergio di Meda)

Moreover, and in a way that was completely unknown within the enactment of Creature Simili, being able to dress properly, with taste and creativity, was actually a way to gather subcultural capital (Thornton 1995; Brill 2007). Botched attire could even imply marginalisation from the group: There were differences in style, but in any case, style mattered. I remember there were some guys we called ‘the prodigies’ because of their look. In our opinion, their style was very coarse. In our view they were kinda (…) boorish, because of their style, basically. (Paola)

Admittedly, in this enactment the way of dressing also changed depending on the situation, and on the specific practice in which subculturalists were involved: in discos and at concerts especially, clothes were more sophisticated. Getting ‘gothed up’, after leaving the public space of the city or the private space of the home, to enter the third place (Oldenburg 1989) of the disco, which was somehow in between public and private, was actually common—as long as the transformation was from dark to darker. On Sundays we went to the Hysterika en masse from Varese. There were at least fifteen of us. Everyone there was really stuck up. Our group of friends was very naïve, so going to Milan, at first, was pretty traumatic. It didn’t mean going to meet up with people, have a beer, talk mostly about music, laugh and joke around. Going to Milan and seeing these phony, fancy-pansy, well-dressed people was weird. I remember huge transformations taking place in the bathroom; people changed the way they dressed, did their hair, teased it and painted their faces: men and women, and anyone in between. We, on the other hand, weren’t particularly exacting in our look: we wore black jeans, combat boots, a frock-­ coat or studded leather jacket. In contrast, everyone else was all dolled up and wore pointy-toed shoes. We were country bumpkins, and the contrast between our ways and theirs was very clear-cut. The first times you went, you found

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people who were fully conscious of being lords and masters of the house so they looked down on people from outside Milan. And it took a long time before they would talk to you. But we basically made fun of them; we didn’t regard them as myths to be revered. Let’s say that, ultimately, getting drunk was what brought us all together. The lobby at the Hysterika led to a fire escape with two flights of stairs where we frequently sat to talk and do other things. We’d gather there to drink, too. But I have absolutely no recollection of anyone doing drugs: I remember drinking crappy shit, wine and cheap melon vodka: disgusting. There were bizarre individuals who moved on the dance floor like they had ants in their pants, while others tried to climb the mirror. I remember a girl from Marche who danced as if she were possessed, running circles around everyone; others who did a rough pogo, and people dressed randomly, completely out of context. (Andrea)

More in general, subcultural capital was gained showing expertise over the subcultural canon: the same rigid rules of authentication that applied to style also required darks in the music club enactment to show refined competencies in cultural consumption, especially in music. Being always up to date and in the know about bands inside the dark canon was in fact an important way to gain a reputation. I had found my flow and the possibility of discovering a lot of new music. Some of them tested your knowledge about music by asking you if you knew such and such a band. They usually said, “You only know Depeche Mode and The Cure, right?” They’d test your character. And some of them, just to show off their knowledge, wrote the names of bands nobody had ever heard of on their studded leather jackets. (Gp) There was a sort of filter, and you only got accepted if you were very interested in exploring things in-depth. You had to prove you were a person with independence, your own views and personality: you had to show you were not just one of the masses. By and large, all of us listened to The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Sisters of Mercy. The first band that made you take a leap in quality was Virgin Prunes: older people listened to them. They were more extreme, they started to force the limits of the genre. I remember I started to talk to this girl about them, and after a while she told me, “You know, I thought you were just a pretty boy. I was wrong.” To convince her I was not a moron, I had to talk about a certain kind of music, make her understand that, even if I had feathered hair I was not just about… The Cure, you know. I gave this sort of exam to other people, at a later point, when I started listening to industrial music: if you listened to it, you were probably less stupid than the others, because you

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couldn’t stay stuck in the music from ’82, ’83, ’84. You had to move beyond. (Sergio Di Meda)

Not least, in fact, in years during which cultural resources could be accessed almost exclusively through fanzines and word of mouth, being up to date was evidence of being firmly rooted in subcultural social networks.14 Notwithstanding this secession strategy implied renouncing activism, its political overtones didn’t go unnoticed from the outside. Sometimes naziskin caused trouble because they considered darks as political enemies. More often, the Hysterika was raided by the police, officially looking for drugs, even if heroin had been by and large refused by the second generation of darks,15 and cocaine was still to make its mass appearance in the music club scene. Actually, raids in the disco were part of the law enforcement operations that, at the time,16 aimed to keep the “breeding grounds for transgression” throughout the city at bay. Some rockabilly, psychobilly, and skinhead hung around outside. Twice they threw anti-rape spray into the club. Really dangerous stuff: the fumes made your eyes water without making smoke. It was invisible but it burned your throat. I never found out who threw it in, but it was a big joke on the darks who had heavy makeup and were forced to leave in tears as their mascara flowed down their faces and their throats were in flames. There were a couple of skinhead ambushes, too. They attacked in groups, never alone. (Andy) [At the Hysterika] not one brawl ever broke out, at least as far as I can remember. With the exception of a few heated arguments. We were united by our fear of skinheads. When you caught them hanging around, you’d run away, fast. Then there was a period when the police would suddenly show up. I remember one night I had a fever but I went to the Hysterika with my friends anyway. I took a couple of aspirin because I would rather have shot myself than not go. Around two o’clock in the morning, the police came down. Maybe they were looking for a dealer, even though I’d never seen anyone on drugs: the place was pretty straight under that point of view. We’d drink a lot, though: coke and whisky and anything else, and on Halloween the barman invented blood-red coloured cocktails. Anyway, that night the police was looking for something or someone. My fever had gone up and I asked a couple of friends to take me home. I was going up the stairs to leave when one cop said, “Go back downstairs.” I was calm and polite and answered, “Look, I have a fever, I have to go…” And he said, “I don’t give a shit, go downstairs”. We had to stay a couple of hours while they checked everyone’s I.D. cards, lifted pillows and didn’t find shit. They even searched all the coats after they turned on the lights and the music off. It

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was like they were trying to scare us. At the time, the police used to do a lot of searches. There were riots at the Colonne di San Lorenzo and evidently the police saw the Hysterika as the natural continuation. I didn’t like hanging out at the Colonne because the police associated the movement, and even our look, with drugs. They’d go to the Colonne and round-up everyone and I didn’t want to run that risk. It usually happened on Saturday nights, and they’d beat people up, too. It happened more than once. I remember one particular Saturday: hardly anyone showed up at the Hysterika. They had been picked up that afternoon and freed the day after, covered in bruises—they had been beaten—but you could hardly see the marks because they had a way of doing things. I think the police was really confused back then about the difference between darks, skinheads and other groups. They thought the Hysterika was saturated in politics like other places; drugs and alcohol everywhere. If you went there, you were marked as rebellious in any case. (Eleonora Mosca)

As seen, what was clear to law enforcement was that the Hysterika was “the natural continuation” of other meeting places in the city. Notwithstanding the centrality of the practice of going to clubs to dance and hang out for this enactment of dark, the subculture was in fact by no means an exclusively club culture. On the contrary, many of its key practices took place in urban spaces, making style a form of urban communication.

5.3   Enacting Dark in Public Space While clubs played a key role only in the music club enactment of dark, a plurality of hangouts in the city were of pivotal relevance for all the enactments, and actually for all the spectacular subcultures that were taking hold in Milan in those years. These hangouts were places of consumption and trade, often managed by someone who was in the alternative scene: cafés, pubs, sandwich shops, record and clothing stores and hair salons. Together with specific spots in public spaces, they were important meeting points, as well as significant sites where promoting events, selling fanzines and also, for Creature Simili, for distributing political leaflets and performing ‘mental attacks’. In Milan, these locations were clustered along the axis that went from Piazza Duomo, the heart of the city, down Via Torino, passing through the Colonne di San Lorenzo and down Corso di Porta Ticinese to the Darsena, near the waterways and beyond. This was the epicentre of

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alternative Milan, where the various groups that identified with a subculture gravitated. One went there to purchase things, but also to get a sense of the scene and keep up to date on the latest trends, events and happenings. It was also where one went to find people they met in other places. There was no need to make plans to meet: if you were part of ‘a certain crowd’, sooner or later you would end up in the same places. This is fundamental in understanding the mechanisms of socialising in those years. The interesting thing was that there were places where only a certain type of person went. Milan was more compartmentalised than it is now. There was a specific geography to the city. There were places where like-­ minded people circulated. (Roxie) I was around sixteen years old and Gabriele was seventeen when we met, even though we had seen each other a lot of times in Via Torino. We would meet at the Duomo on Saturday afternoons, in the underground. And when a group of us had formed, we’d go to Via Torino to spend our allowance on records, especially at Supporti Fonografici. We’d walk up and down the street to see people. Even if you didn’t know someone personally, you would always see them there. We all went there every Saturday afternoon just to go up and down, up and down the street. (Paola) We didn’t have cell phones yet, we didn’t call each other. You’d make plans to meet someone on the fly, like, “See you on Wednesday,” but you didn’t need to specify the time because if you said, “See you at three-thirty,” one of you would get there at three and the other one at five. If someone didn’t show up, you didn’t ask yourself, “Where the fuck is he?” You’d just wait, or do your own things. Someone else would always pass by in the meantime and they would stop. A lot of times you didn’t even have somebody’s home number. In fact, I didn’t even know some of my friends’ family names. But I always knew where to find them. (Sergio di Meda) Since music was the cornerstone of the subculture, record stores fulfilled a strategically important role. Store managers carried out the essential activity of disseminating new sounds and trends. A function similar to the best DJs and fanzines that used the record stores for distribution. The legendary store New Kary, in Piazzetta San Giorgio-Via Torino, was one of the first meeting points for punks. Even Stevone and another guy from the Virus, who created the fanzine T.V.O.R., opened a record store in Via Santa Maria Valle. A lot of alternative people I knew hung out at the Calusca bookstore in Piazza Sant’Eustorgio. Gomma17 worked there and it was one of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ that was

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part of our Saturday afternoon procession. In fact, Via Torino was all alternative. Absolutely everyone went. (Roxie)

Hair salons were also popular meeting points. There weren’t many in the centre of the city, but people were willing to travel further to reach them. About half a dozen salons were cult spots in which subculturalists could relive the sociable climate of traditional barber shops, but obviously specialised in black hair dyes and alternative cuts. Anyone in our crowd from Brianza had practically one and only hairstylist: Tato in Seregno. He could create the most impossible hairdos and styled them exactly how you wanted. He was strange: you’d go in the morning and he’d get there at one o’clock because he had woken up at noon. Often there were eight people ahead of you, but it wasn’t a big deal, we were all a huge family. He’d put on records by The Cure. He liked that kind of music. Once, some guys from Desio came and we all became friends, “Tato, Tato, we’ve got the latest album by Christian Death! Play it!” (Sergio di Meda) When I returned from my first trip to London, I was obsessed. “Something has to be done!” The first thing I did was get my hair cut. They used to be long and chestnut brown, my natural colour. I went to Hair for Heroes that was really popular at the time. It was in Corso Concordia and the hairdresser was Ringo, who later became a famous DJ. He worked with another guy who was well-­ known in the alternative scene because he created weird hair styles, mohawks and so on. I told Ringo, “Do whatever you want,” so he cut my hair short and dyed the tips orange. (Roxie)

Via Torino–Ticinese was also the artery along which everyone bought clothes that were in style at the time: Corneil’s near the Colonne; Eliogabalo in Ripa di Porta Ticinese; Bela Lugosi, specialised in shoes, and USA Shop. At Via Torino 64, inside a small arcade, Giò Taranto’s Inferno & Suicidio opened. It also sold through mail order and soon became a small chain store with other locations in Turin and Florence. There were other shops next to these, even very small ones, that imported their products directly from London. Others sold used clothes, or manufactured their own products and established microbrands. When people in the dark scene didn’t own these shops, they easily found work there as clerks. Inferno & Suicidio came later. Corneil’s was there first. It sold clothes and shoes from London. (…) There were places that made clothes sold to so-called

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alternative stores and people who imported stock merchandise on consignment. One of the coolest stores was Eliogabalo in Piazza XXIV Maggio, where McDonald’s is today. It carried English stylists and Zeus. I went shopping there with my super trendy gay friends from Bologna who were always on top of the new styles. (Roxie) Nowadays, there’s nothing particular in Via Torino anymore, but at the time all the cult shops were there. I still have clothes I bought in the eighties at Inferno & Suicidio that I keep as mementos and still wear every once in a while. Corneil’s, on the other hand, was too expensive for us, and there was another store with an area for used clothing. The prices were lower than in regular stores. And a lot of us worked in these stores, like the Inferno, as salespersons. (Antonella Pala)

Cafés, pubs and sandwich shops completed this archipelago. Each had a specific subcultural clientele: the territory of each group was clearly defined, and urban space was practically parcelled out. We went to the Pois, at the Colonne, to have drinks. For a while it was run by Jo Squillo18 when she was still an activist. The pub was big, really nice and had a lot of rooms: nice lighting, nice tables, nothing chic but perfect for us. It was a very normal place but it was very trendy because all the dark went drinking there when they didn’t feel like dancing. (Eleonora Mosca) The Simposio was around there, too. It was a skinhead bar. A friend of ours took us once and it was terrible. “Where the fuck did you bring us!” We were wearing leather jackets and our hair was all done up. It looked as though we were provoking them on purpose. We had a quick drink and left. I was there with Rieko and our friend. We couldn’t look at anyone in the eyes otherwise they would have pounded us. It was as if we were asking for it, but we really didn’t know. (Nino La Loggia) We lived the city a lot, even though it was dangerous to pass by Italy & Italy and the Oktober Fest pub in Corso di Porta Ticinese dressed like I was: people actually chased you. I remember there was an ambush by skinheads at Italy & Italy: I had already left and was told about it later. Once I had to run for it in Corso di Porta Ticinese: I was wearing pointy-toed shoes. I used to roller skate then, so I was fast. I got lucky. If a skinhead was pissed off, he’d take it out on you for no particular reason. He’d say, “I’m gonna bust you up.” It would happen simply because you ended up on the wrong side of the street. But we went anyway. We liked leaving the club and getting a sandwich at Italy & Italy. You went in

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and saw a long black table, and everyone had mascara flowing down their faces. (Andy)

It was not just a matter of venues and shops: actually, the entire perimeter of the ‘alternative’ Milan, Via Torino in particular, was rigidly partitioned. Public space was a vital element for social dynamics: all the subcultures at the time demanded public visibility, and the city centre was where everybody put themselves on display. Each subculture carved out corners, small piazzas and parts of sidewalks from the urban fabric of the city centre and claimed them as their own territories. Paninari, skinheads, punks, rockabillies, metalheads, and obviously darks: each one had fixed and established turfs, which they shared only with groups that were more or less akin to them. You also had the Colonne di San Lorenzo and the bars in the area. There was a hybrid of people who hung out there: not so much hardcore and pure punks who were pretty isolated, but kindred creatures for sure. We’d meet there in the evenings. (Roxie) When I was around sixteen years old, the girl I shared my desk at school with was mad about new romantic and Adam Ant who called the shots on the look. At the time we went to the area around Corsia dei Servi in Milan, near Corso Vittorio Emanuele, where a huge new romantic crowd hung around dressed in frilled collars, loose-fitting shirts and ruffles on the cuff. (Eleonora Mosca) When you talk about the muretto in Milan, it can mean two different places. One was the low wall behind the stairway in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, where the darks from the early Hysterika period sat, even though they weren’t really a group. Later, in 1986, when people started to take their own paths, some of them moved to the wall I’m talking about, the one under the Duomo underground stop. I started going there in 1985. I met a guy, and then I met another one and so on. We formed what was probably the only goth clique in Milan with the same people who went to the Hysterika. Compared to others, we were younger, about fifteen-sixteen years old, someone maybe seventeen or eighteen. (…) We’d all meet there without setting a specific time; you got there when you could. Then, at a certain point, we’d all get up and take a walk down Via Torino, stop at the Standa,19 get something to drink, then we’d go back and everyone went their own way. These huge happenings lasted for a year and a half, maybe two. Whereas, with the group of ten, fifteen people, the tighter one, we met two or three times midweek. The others came and went. We were always there. We all studied, so we were free in the afternoon. (Sergio di Meda)

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As was the case with eclectic events in clubs, cohabitation in public spaces was not always idyllic. What was taking place was a sort of micro-political management of subcultural turfs, delineated by friction, temporary alliances and sometimes even direct confrontation. At the beginning it was only light harassment and a few insults, but things started to turn progressively worse in the mid-1980s when crossing over into someone else’s turf created tension and meant the risk of getting beat up and, in certain phases, even knifed. Those who could—rarely the case for darks— responded with retaliations and punitive raids, triggering a spiral of hostility masqueraded by political motivation. In particular, darks became a target for naziskins and paninari, since they were considered left-wing and affiliated with the gay scene. However, the contrast was marked above all by the look. It comes as no surprise, then, that there were also clashes between groups with similar political affiliations. The city was divided into territories by 1985. There were networks of distinct places, groups of different people. We thought the animosity between factions was childish. We already considered the paninari banal and typically Italian, not just Milanese. In fact, they had no convictions and didn’t leave any mark. Anyway, Rieko and I went to Japan and when we returned in late November, I realised the city had changed and had been divided into turfs. (Nino La Loggia) You could actually draw a map on how Milan was divided in the mid ’80s. We hung out at the muretto. At one end of Via Torino there was a hangout at the Standa and another in front of Wendy’s, a fast-food joint. Punks were at the Standa and there were some scattered darks, rockabillies, a couple of skinheads in front of Wendy’s: a mix of people. At first, punks had it in for us and they took the piss out of us. They’d call us, “fags”, “ravenettes”, stuff like that. Nothing serious ever happened, but rather than being hassled by the punks, you’d walk on the skinheads’ side. Things were completely different two years later: the skinheads kicked you, called you “commies”, so you couldn’t pass by them anymore. The skate punks, the first break dancers, hung out at the old muretto in Corso Vittorio Emanuele and so did the paninari, a little further on. The metalheads had their place in a narrow alley behind Palazzo Reale, at the Transex store. In Via Torino, where the bookstore before the pharmacy is now, there were the rockabillies, and just before the Colonne, on the right, where there’s a wine shop now, there was the Oktober Fest pub where the really bad skinheads hung out, the ones who did some serious beating up so you had to go all the way around to get to the stores. You couldn’t pass by there. If you walked on the other side, they

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ignored you, but if you walked past them, at the very least you’d get slapped. At the very least. Then, around 1986–’87, things started getting even worse. Bad things had already happened. In 1985, for example, skinheads from Zurich went to the old muretto and sent a couple of kids to the hospital, pretty banged up. They split a couple of heads: in my opinion, things like that contributed to disbanding the first clique. When the skinheads arrived, people went there less often because you always risked getting beat up. In 1986, I remember I was with two friends one day. One of them was going out with a rockabilly I knew, too. She said to me, “Let’s see if he’s there. We’ll take a walk,” and we crossed paths with a group of skinheads. There were seven of them and they were real ball busters. One of them said to me, “Gimme a cigarette.” “I don’t have any.” “You don’t have any, eh?” I played it cool but I had some in my pocket. They started fucking with us. We left and, as we were walking past the last of them, he elbowed me in the nose: he broke it. I didn’t even stop. I blocked the blood with my hand and kept walking because, if I had stopped, they would have killed me. It was always like that with the skinheads. You had to change streets, you couldn’t do anything else. We were all fags to them, people without a rightful place in the world. Today, when I hear darks saying they’re right-wing, it makes me laugh, and angry. We were always hated by the right-wingers. All right-wing movements considered us the enemy. We even had trouble with rockabillies sometimes, but that was mainly taking the piss. On the other hand, we had no problems with the bikers. Some of them liked kraut-rock, German electronic music, so they’d come to the Hysterika sometimes and kept mostly to themselves. You didn’t break their balls, otherwise it meant trouble. But they didn’t come to make trouble. The same was true of the metalheads. You’d go to the Transex to buy a couple of studs for your jacket. They didn’t actually see you in the best eye, but we never had any problems with metalheads. On Vittorio Emanuele, on the left, about halfway down, there was a videogame arcade where a large group from Milan hung out: they were known as the Chinese, the China. We knew some of them. They didn’t have anything against us but they didn’t like the sanbabilini, who were fascists. They couldn’t stand them. Every time they crossed paths, there was a fight. They’d beat the shit out of each other. I saw some crazy shit. It was a big movement at the time. In fact, I don’t think I am even able to define what a China was exactly. They were like hippies transported into the eighties; they had long hair but wore desert boots because they were left-wing. And they wore tight jeans. There weren’t many mods. Some of them hung out with the skinheads because they got along, but the big Italian mod scene was in Turin. (Sergio di Meda) Piazza Duomo was mainstream, but as soon as you stepped into Via Torino, the situation changed completely and you met up with the people you wanted

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to. For better or worse, because of the paninari. They beat up a lot of my friends in the underground. Today, younger kids ask me what it was like back then, and when I tell them, they’re stunned, “But that’s crazy!” In fact, when I think about it now, yeah, people dividing up in gangs was crazy. We women weren’t worried about getting beaten up, but it was a real problem for the guys. If you were a dark male, you actually did run the risk of getting beaten up, so it was better if you were never alone. The point is that the paninari were fascists. They can be compared to the guys who hang out in Corso Como today: trendy, rich, and all dolled up. Darks were pretty alternative so they were considered left-wing. Being dark was enough to get jumped. (Emanuela Zini) It was 1984, and it was May, and I remember it well because I still have the medical chart for the tetanus shots I got because of the knifing. It was a bad time because when I started hanging out with alternative crowds like punks, darks, rockabillies and metalheads, there was already a lot of bad blood and at the time bad blood simply meant that if you crossed them on the street, they wanted to fight. Around 1982–83, the paninari arrived and they acted as a sort of binding agent for all the other different groups. Simply, most of the others became united against them because they annoyed everybody with their arrogance and started picking fights with everyone right from the start. Anyway, it was a Sunday afternoon during the clearing out of the Virus. There was already a lot of tension with demonstrations and so on. I was seventeen years old and I’d go dancing with friends in the evenings. The truth is, we didn’t actually go dancing, we went where all the punks in the area hung out, the Odissea 2001. It was pretty shitty but everyone went. On Sunday we went to Milan. It was me and two of my friends. They were more normal-looking than me because they had long hair and wore jeans and sneakers. As we were walking down Via Torino, I heard some noise and thought it was the demonstration against the closing down of the Virus, so I said to my friends, “Come on, let’s go. I’m sure the others will be there.” We used to go to the Virus, too. So, we started walking towards a closed-off square where all the ruckus was coming from. I went in first because my friends were a little behind me. As soon as I got there, I saw like thirty paninari, both male and female, and a dozen of them were already coming towards me. My friends stopped, but I stayed because I wasn’t really sure what was happening. I didn’t have the presence of mind to run. Also, I thought, “Whatever. What the hell could they possibly want from me? They don’t even know me.” Then a guy came up to me and said, “Are you one of those rockabillies from Wendy’s?” I was wearing a studded leather jacket, my hair was combed back, the sides of my head were shaved, with a rockabilly banana, I had jeans and Creepers. He didn’t even give me the chance to say “No” and he punched me hard in the face. Since then, my nose is still a little crooked. It

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stayed smashed for twenty days. After the punch, they beat me up, even the girls. I was absolutely out of it for five minutes. I got a flurry of punches. Sure, I tried to kick back, but I only weighed 110 pounds then, I was skinny, how the fuck was I going to defend myself? They knocked me down with two punches. I looked at my friends: one of them was trying to hail someone down on the street, and the other one didn’t know what to do. Rightly so, he couldn’t come in because they would have beaten the shit out of him, too. But I saw him pointing towards a street. He was trying to tell me there was a way out, so I started to run. I got away. As soon as I reached him, he said, “What’s that on your pants?” I looked down and saw a blood stain on the side of my leg and on a butt cheek. I hadn’t felt a thing. I began running down Via Torino and saw the police arriving because someone must have called them, but they didn’t realise I was the victim. I ran to the Colonne di San Lorenzo and entered a doorway where a guy took me up to his place because he had figured out what was happening. I later got to know him. He was one of the guys who stole Moncler jackets from the paninari, so he was cool. He gave me first aid. I was terrified and got on a tram, reached the Cardona stop, and filed a report with the Transit Police. It was absurd. They asked me, “What did they hurt you with?” “Well, seeing as they knifed me, I assume they used a knife.” “No, no. You can’t say a knife, otherwise it becomes dangerous. Say it was an umbrella.” How the fuck can an umbrella stab me here and here? I don’t know. I felt like I was watching the Theatre of the Absurd. At that point, I called my dad who took me to the hospital where I got three stitches on one side and two on the other side of my ass. I actually got off lucky because they probably had a pocketknife and were aiming at my legs. They could have struck me somewhere else. I don’t think they wanted to kill me because you might be a delinquent, but at the time, you didn’t kill. Even though a little while later another episode made it clear that I’d better stay away from the area for a while. It had become dangerous going around dressed in a certain way between 1984 and 1985. It was all because of some sort of war being fought. The problem was this: the battle began between the paninari from the Panino Giusto in Piazza San Babila and the rockabillies from Wendy’s. It was like a gang war. It wasn’t political or anything, because the paninari were right-wing and the rockabillies were not left-wing in the least. They just wanted to take it out on each other. A few people were beaten up, including me, obviously. Plus, the incident of my knifing had made tensions rise: not because I was anybody special, I was just some normal Joe, but word had gotten around. That’s when this sort of armistice between everyone against the paninari began. If I think about it now, it makes me laugh because today you go into a club in Milan and find anything and everything, from punks to metalheads. Back then, it was dangerous. It was like the real-life version of The Warriors.20 When I walked around Via Torino or the Fiera di Sinigaglia, I had four eyes,

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two in front and two in the back because I was scared shitless. I’m not sure why I even bothered going. It made no sense. It’s true. I liked going to buy my records, my fanzines, my clothes. When I got back home to my friends, they’d say, “You’re fucking crazy! You’re risking your life. Why do you bother?” Yeah! I asked myself the same question! When I ended up in hospital, I stayed away for fifteen days. After that, I went out with friends. I’m not a violent person, but I was holding a grudge. I was hungry for revenge over what had happened to me because, you know … come on! When you’ve got thirty guys ganging up on you, it sucks. I felt the punches, I even felt the girls kicking me, and all because I was wearing a studded jacket. That’s why you have to beat me up? Fuck you! Anyway, I was with some friends walking down Via Torino and we saw a paninaro; the kind of guy who wore bomber jackets, though. There were two categories of paninari: the fancy-schmancy ones who wore Moncler jackets and Armani jeans, and the more fascist kind with bomber jackets and shaved heads who rooted for Inter,21 many of whom later became white power skinheads. Anyway, it was me and two friends who were pretty mean, they knew how to fight. We caught sight of this paninaro and we started following him. At first, he pretended like nothing was happening, then he noticed us and he turned off into a side street. As soon as he turned, I saw one of my friends running after him. He took off his belt, and started to beat him. The guy fell to the ground. I saw my moment for revenge. I was about to jump him, yelling, “You fucking son of a bitch!” when he pulled out a gun from his jacket and pointed it at us. I shit my pants! You know Via Torino well, right? I reached the Cadorna underground station in three seconds! I was out of there in a flash! Sure, it may only have been a cap gun, but it was scary. Lots of them went around carrying pocket knives. In that moment, I said to myself: enough. I’m not going back to Milan for at least a month. As long as you go to have fun, listen to concerts, meet people, then I’m good with that. But if it’s dangerous, I could give a shit. I’m seventeen, I don’t want to die because I was taking revenge for something that, yeah it was serious, but not that serious. I got two stitches here and three stitches there. I don’t even have scars. They didn’t disfigure me. Sure, my nose was swollen for twenty days because, shit, they beat me up badly. But not enough to die out of hunger for revenge. In fact, I waited for the gang war to blow over before going back. Everyone had started to join forces and gang up on anyone they saw. It was two months of holy terror! (Roy)

Notwithstanding the highs and lows, the tension in the air was felt for the better part of the 1980s. It began to abate only when public spaces in the city started to lose their symbolic relevance, and subcultures began to veer towards the club phenomenon.

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5.4   Towards a New Enactment of Dark The trajectories of the Hysterika in the 1980s reflected the rise, heyday and fall of the whole music club enactment of dark. It survived the end of the activist enactment for a few years that can be dated to 1987 with the closure of the Helter Skelter. The basement club in Via Redi was still thriving in 1988; yet, by the end of the year, it started to lose more and more customers. As the orthodox dark bands switched to more commercial sounds, the microcosm seemed to suffer the blow of the decline. DJ Lupo left the Hysterika in April 1989. After that, a series of quick openings and closings followed: a hodgepodge of events was organised to attract a more diversified crowd. The owners tried to turn it into a gay bar again. It had become a gay bar, warding off anyone who wasn’t part of that scene. I distinctly remember because, even though I had a lot of friends there, one night my boyfriend and I were completely taken aback. The music had changed, too. They played a lot of Grace Jones. Not only were there people dressed in ornate black, there were also designer clothes, really flashy clothes, jackets decorated with 45s, long men’s skirts. The dark essence had toned down and been corrupted. It was as if the dark movement was getting wiped out: there were less and less extreme individuals. (Eleonora Mosca) There was a feeling that everyone knew everybody else too well. It was always the same crowd. Sure, there were a few fleeting newcomers, but the habitués were always the same. I remember when the new young bloods arrived, like Paola, Gabriele, Elisa, Charlie. They were a couple of years younger than us and had a different spirit, bringing a whiff of mockery with them, not taking themselves too seriously, gossiping. The deeply intense element was missing. It wasn’t so much the music you listened to or what you wore, but something you felt inside: unrest, the moral decay you expressed by crossing your arms and leaning against a pillar. And they made fun of that. (Gp) We started going to the Viridis because, let’s just say, the experience at the Hysterika had fallen apart in the end. Even the paninari were disappearing. We were entering a system of uniformity in the way we looked. In my day, we had paninari, darks, new wavers, rockabillies, rappers. … The division in looks and attitudes was very evident. Afterwards, the stark differences slowly dissolved. (Roberto Schieppati)

In 1990, Saturday nights were abolished at the Hysterika and then, in 1991, the venue was closed. This date can also be symbolically regarded as

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the end of this second enactment of dark.22 Even though new clubs opened in Milan and its hinterland in the 1990s, dark was enacted in a new and different way: practices performed in urban spaces—like socialising and ‘shocking’—became less relevant, and a strict coherence in style less mandatory. The political and existential significance of style was toned down, and aesthetic and ethic progressively lost their close connection. Dark became mainly a club culture, and the stylistic hybridisation with fetish, which in Milan was a 1990s phenomenon, hypersexualised clothing. Even a new relationship with drugs was established, with cocaine taking ground and heroin—avoided by the second generation of darks—making its return, usually sniffed or smoked.23 Many of the people who in the 1980s were engaged in the music club scene enactment moved to the new rave scene, either as participants or organisers.

Notes 1. “What shall we do with all the black shirts? Just one bundle, and then we will set them [on] fire!” This is a famous anti-fascist song from the 1970s. 2. The Italian singer Enrico Ruggeri himself publicised the phantom concert. In an interview with Io donna, a weekly newspaper of Corriere della Sera, he remembers: “My life changed. It was October 4, 1977. One evening a friend and I put up two thousand posters that announced there would be a Decibel punk concert in a Milanese disco, the Piccola Broadway. We put them up at night near schools and squats. On the night of the non-concert, we enjoyed the scene from the terrace of his house, which looked right onto the venue. 200 or 300 punks arrived, then the anti-fascists, the militants, guys from Avanguardia Operaia arrived and they fought; there were wounded. I knew it would end like that. The next day the newspapers spoke about unrest at the Decibel concert, and two months later we recorded our first album.” See https://www.iodonna.it/personaggi/ interviste-gallery/2017/03/20/enrico-ruggeri-e-la-reunion-con-i-decibel-facevamo-canzoni-per-far-incazzare/. Last accessed 28 March 2019. 3. Chrisma were an Italian musical duo formed in 1976 by Christina Moser and Maurizio Arcieri. They were considered pioneers of Italian new wave. In 1980 they changed their name to Krisma. “Lola” was the single from their first album Chinese Restaurant, released in 1977. 4. Halloween, directed by John Carpenter (US, 1978). 5. “According to legend, goth originated in the Batcave club in Soho, London, which existed in the brief period between 1982 and 1985” (Elferen 2018: 22). 6. See Sect. 7.4.

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7. Den Harrow was a well-known exponent of Italo-disco. 8. See Chap. 4. 9. An interesting exception is the Viridis in San Giuliano Mianese where the S.D.M. collective was founded. It actively collaborated in Creature Simili activities. See Chap. 4. 10. Philopat (1997). 11. Senzapatria. Per lo sviluppo della lotta antimilitarista e antiautoritaria (Without a Homeland. For the development of the anti-militarist and anti-­ authoritarian struggle) was a magazine published with a variable frequency. Founded in Sondrio, in the north of Italy, it was distributed throughout the country. It was published from September 1978, and in 1992 it fused together with the magazine Anarres. It lived on militant subscriptions. 12. See Chap. 7. 13. See Sect. 5.3. 14. See Sect. 7.2. 15. See Chap. 8. 16. See Chap. 3. 17. Ermanno ‘Gomma’ Guarneri, one of the participants in the contestation against the sociologists in 1984 (see Chap. 1), organizer at the Helter Skelter (see Chap. 4) and later founder of the publishing house Shake Edizioni. 18. Jo Squillo (Giovanna Coletti’s stage name), a Milanese singer born in 1962, was an exponent of the punk movement with her all-female band, Kandeggina Gang, formed in the Santa Marta squat during the early 1980s. Their live performance in March 1980 in Piazza Duomo in Milan was famous: the musicians launched red-stained Tampax on the audience as a radical feminist message. Later Jo Squillo changed various musical genres, including new wave, Italo-disco and finally pop. 19. Standa (Società Anonima Magazzini Standard) was a chain of department stores, founded in 1931 and closed in 2010. 20. The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill (US, 1979). 21. With A.C. Milan, one of the two football teams in town. 22. See Chap. 8. 23. See Chap. 8.

References Bernstein, M. (2005). Identity Politics. Annual Review of Sociology, 31(1), 47–74. Brill, D. (2007). Gender, Status and Subcultural Capital in the Goth Scene. In P.  Hodkinson & W.  Deicke (Eds.), Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes (pp. 111–128). New York: Taylor & Francis. Brill, D. (2008). Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. Bloomsbury Academic.

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Ginsborg, P. (1990). A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Mudu, P., & Piazza, G. (2016). Not Only Riflusso: The Repression and Transformation of Radical Movements in Italy Between 1978 and 1985. In K. Andresen & B. van der Steen (Eds.), A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s (pp. 112–126). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Oldenburg, R. (1989). The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon. Philopat, M. (1997). Costretti a sanguinare: romanzo sul punk 1977–84. Milano: ShaKe (Torino: Einaudi, 2006; Milano: Agenzia X, 2016). Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Van Elferen, I. (2018). Dark Timbre: The Aesthetics of Tone Colour in Goth Music. Popular Music, 37(1), 22–39.

CHAPTER 6

Siberia: The Loner Enactment of Dark

6.1   Dark as a Bedroom Culture In the activist and music club enactments of dark, participating in the subculture was not a solitary endeavour: these enactments could not be performed but with other people taking part in social groups of different sorts. In the activist enactment, these groups were structured in networks of collectives, each one composed of restricted core members, and a larger number of affiliates loosely and temporarily gravitating around them. In Milan, in contrast to other Italian cities, like Turin for example, these groups were quite homogeneous in terms of subcultural belonging: I was a dark but I hung out with the punx from the Virus, so I was always a little out of place. When I started going to Turin, I realised that things worked in a different way there: it was easier to find people [in the squat scene] who didn’t fit in with the punk style, who had a darker sensibility. Or even worse! I have to say that at the time I thought some of them were crazy, psychotic. … People in Turin were really strange. People with different attitudes were all mixed together, definitely more than we were. I think the reason was that there were so few meeting points in Turin so in the end, everybody was connected to everybody else. They were smaller in number, and the situation in the city was

Diaframma, Siberia, I.R.A. Records, 1984. The band, founded in Florence in 1980, was one of the landmarks in Italian Darkwave. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_6

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devastating. It’s no coincidence that later Turin became the city with the most squats in Italy. It was packed with evil squatters! All of them extremely radical. I loved it. It was my absolutely favourite city, and it still is. (Joykix)

Moreover, being in the Milanese activist scene implied connecting, in a more or less systematic relationship, with other groups with different subcultural affiliations—or with no subcultural affiliations at all—as was the case with the relationship between Creature Simili and Autonomia Operaia at the Leoncavallo.1 In the music club enactment, discos and clubs were key hubs of socialisation, together with other places located in the ‘alternative’ areas of Milan: commercial venues and shops, and meeting points in public spaces. Social relationships and friendships crossed the borders of clubs and became part of the subculturalists’ daily lives. The neighbourhoods, and the residential towns in the suburban belt, determined the development of different subgroups that fed into larger groups and social formations creating a broader ‘clique’ to which everybody felt connected. Ours was a clique made up of groups of three, four, or five people from the same area or suburb outside Milan who used to go to the city on Saturdays and Sundays. We were from the Brianza area, a couple of guys were from Cologno Monzese, and others were from Como and other suburban areas of Milan, like Barona and Quarto Oggiaro. At one point, there were about seventy of us. (Sergio di Meda)

Within the larger ‘clique’, each one enjoyed a different level of visibility and popularity, depending on their own subcultural capital (Thornton 1995; Brill 2008). In Milan in the 1980s, however, there was also a third distinct way to enact dark that diverged from these first two because it entailed very different practices of socialisation. In this case, in fact, dark was mainly enacted alone, or in small and ‘isolated’ groups—in the sense of not being connected to broader subcultural ‘cliques’—often heterogeneous in terms of subcultural affiliation. My town was full of middle and upper-middle class families, and all the kids dressed the same. The paninari weren’t the only ones to do that: there was literally an obsession for designer clothes and a clean-cut look. Just the thought of being part of these masses made me sick. I wanted something that would set me apart, even by way of visual impact. I know: I was pretty arrogant. I felt intel-

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lectually superior, but I think I didn’t express it in a nasty way. I wasn’t full of myself. But I was very anti-social. I nurtured the desire to be isolated and I didn’t crave to be part of a group. I was one of the only two darks in my town. The other was a guy that later became a really good friend of mine. The only group I had as a reference was negative, in opposition: they were all rich kids who flaunted money, success, even if they probably failed school a thousand times and had never opened a book in their lives. Taking a walk in the centre of town was our way of daring them: a half mile on the main street, back and forth for hours. I really enjoyed it because everyone turned to stare at me and they seemed to be thinking, “What the fuck is she doing dressed like that?” I loved shocking the ladies and their daughters who were my age and already wore skirts and jackets like they were in their forties. There wasn’t anything else to do. The only fun I remember having was a party we organized at a friend’s empty house. We had rounded up all kinds of people, purely for numeric reasons. Basically, we gathered all the more alternatives among the regulars, and even a few darks and new wavers that we had picked up somewhere, I don’t have any idea where and how. In other towns, in any case. (Sara)

In what we have termed “the loner enactment of dark”, in fact, the “perception [of being] (…) involved in a distinct cultural grouping and share feelings of identity”, as Hodkinson defines subcultural identity (2002: 30–31), didn’t stem from consorting with broader groups of darks, but was mainly sustained through practices of cultural consumption—and production—within the subcultural canon: in particular, in addition to music, there was also literature and the arts.2 I lived in Novate Milanese. I listened to dark music and a little punk. I used to read the legendary Rockerilla magazine and watched a show on Telereporter TV channel called Punk a capo, presented by the musician Franz Di Cioccio. Before hearing about the Virus and squats, I was pretty isolated. That was your fate in the suburbs: solitude, autism. (Roxie)

Clues of the diffusion of this way to enact dark, otherwise impossible to be quantified, are suggested by the surprisingly large “black tide”3 of people attending dark gigs organised in Milan by Quelli di Amen and Creature Simili, or by commercial organisers before and after the circuits of clubs had fully taken shape. The numbers were enough to make people in other enactments aware of the existence and of the specificities of this solitary form of constructing subcultural identities:

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All kinds of people, not only punks, showed up at the concerts we organised at Leoncavallo as ‘Quelli di Amen’ because the graphic design of the posters was very specific. We discovered an entire universe of loners dressed in black. The sensation that these people had finally found a place where they fit in was tangible. For the first time, we saw a lot of individuals who probably had a lot in common gathering in the same place. People who had developed interests privately, introspectively, and were relegated to closed environments; people who had developed a transformation of their inner selves through gothic literature, with H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe as fundamental stops on their journey, and passing through the Milanese Scapigliatura4 to Romanticism, and to the French poètes maudits. There wasn’t a network or a scene then, so it was surprising to see so many people who identified with the same things aggregated for the first time. (Angela Valcavi)5

In fact, while the religious-like devotion with which loner darks attended gigs was shared within all the enactments, for them it took on the specific meaning of a sort of rite during which the (subcultural) community, otherwise only imagined and symbolic, became temporarily embodied: I was almost fifteen and I didn’t go dancing in dark clubs, so attending a concert was something essential and unique, (…) it meant feeling part of a community, of a movement. When everybody was singing the lyrics to a song by The Cure together, me among them, I finally felt that it wasn’t just me, secluded in my room, obsessively listening to the albums Faith and Pornography. It was a sort of liberating rite. (Sara) Concerts were a religious moment for me: the apotheosis of my dark being. I was fourteen the first time I went to a concert in 1986. I went to San Siro stadium to see a concert with various bands including the Doctor and the Medics and a band I didn’t know at that time, the Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. It was a small audience in a corner of the stadium. But the most emotional moment came shortly later at a concert of the Damned in the club called Prego at the time, the former Odissea 2001. It was an amazing night: apart from the atmosphere in the place, the lights, the staunch dark audience, the concert in a small place like that produced a cave effect that was unusual for me at the time. I felt emotions that later, as an adult, even at really great concerts, I never felt again. (Donatella Bartolomei)

In this respect, the loner enactment of dark can be likened to the “cultures of the bedroom” described by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1976), where affiliation “require[ed] only a bedroom and a record player

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and permission to invite friends” (220). As the authors wrote, “here the element of fantasisation and fetishisation which is present, at all times, to some degree in the heavy involvement—boys and girls—with the presentational images of commercial pop culture, is raised to a peculiarly high and powerfully charged pitch” (1976: 221): There were people who owned a lot of stuff—vinyl records, books, clothes—and the desire to accumulate was important. It was something new and different from the previous cultures. It was the construction of a personal world, to be furnished piece by piece, as well as the longing to create a sort of shelter that was not directly conflictual. (Roxie) At home, I couldn’t stand the fact that I couldn’t play Who’s Been Sleeping in My Brain anytime I wanted to. I dreamt of living where I live today, where I can rehearse a DJ set at three o’clock in the morning if I want to. Where I don’t have a doorman or neighbours who complain. I dreamt that kind of domestic bliss when I was young. My room was plastered with newspaper clippings up to the ceiling. I had some pseudo religious stuff: crosses, confessionals, purple curtains. I decorated my room like a theatre set. I had created my own space and had a collection of photographs of my idols from alternative magazines; my idols weren’t soccer players or showgirls, they were Depeche Mode. My imaginary world let me dream of escaping my reality, my city, my home. (Andy)

Yet, the loner enactment of dark diverged from McRobbie and Garber’s bedroom cultures because of two fundamental aspects: first of all, because the enactment was not principally feminine, but involved boys and girls equally; and secondly, because—as we will discuss in the next section—it attributed a primary relevance to visibility in public space. Regarding the first point, the loner enactment was more connected to subculturalists’ places of residence than to their gender. In fact, while similarly involving boys and girls, it was more typical of the suburbs and the belt of small towns surrounding the city of Milan, even if it was not restricted to them. Enacting dark alone or in small groups appears in the narratives of our interviewees in two different ways: firstly, as a step in their subcultural careers, typically the initial one. In this case, enacting dark alone is described as a temporary and forced condition, linked to the lack of clubs or squats, but also of other darks in places of residence. The situation in Como was depressing. There weren’t any clubs where you could listen to our kind of music, with the exception of a couple of places that played a song or two at the end of the evening, just to make the few of us dressed in black

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happy. We were completely out of place. At most, you’d find a black sheep like you, but when you dug deeper, you’d discover you had very little in common. You might meet a guy who had a mohawk because it was trendy then, and then he’d go back to normality a month later. There were a lot of transient individuals like these in Como. (…) We’d meet at Piazza del Popolo, on the benches. There were three of us: me, Sergio and Andrea. Sometimes we went to the Mediterranée discotheque in Castellanza where there were other alternatives who still hadn’t made the leap to Milan. (…) We were surrounded by hardcore paninari, but at least they’d play PiL, The Cure and Depeche Mode before closing time. At the beginning, I hung out with some guys who were into different kinds of music, like metal or Jim Morrison: people you could find at the Nautilus club in Cardano al Campo, near Varese. The only thing I had in common with them was the desire to be against: against “regulars”, against paninari. But that was all. When I started to go to Milan, and to the Motion, I finally had a moment of real liberation in which I could get rid of all these people at last and hang out with people like me who were really into it, into dark. (…) My first excursions to clubs took place when I was around sixteen, seventeen years old: in 1985–86. I started going to these places with my older friends from Como who had cars, finally. We went to the Hysterika, the Motion, Helter Skelter and also to the Virus. I could escape the drama of life in the suburbs and go to the big city that opened its doors wide to an extraordinary world. Going to the city at night was already an incredible novelty for us. We didn’t know the streets well and sometimes we’d drive around a long time, completely lost. But that had its appeal, too, because the city seemed endless and beautiful, and it gave us country boys exactly what we were looking for: places where we could listen to music and live an existence that was parallel to our lives in a small town. We could wear makeup without being laughed at. We could also find girls, because in Como, when you went around looking like the Beasts of Satan,6 no one would get near you. I walked into Milan life on tiptoe because I both feared and admired people who were older than me. At the Hysterika, I kept going up to the DJ and asking him what he was playing, and at the Leoncavallo, I would stand on the side-lines admiring everyone, because they all seemed so alluring to me. Incredibly charismatic. (Gp) I wasn’t going to waste my Sundays at the bars in Meda. I wanted to meet people who were different, who had the same tastes as me. At a certain point, I started hearing about the Hysterika. I was sort of going out with a girl, and one day she said, “Listen, we can’t see each other anymore because I met another guy. He goes to a club in Milan called the Hysterika. He’s taking me next Sunday.” I started going out with another girl and she tells me, “I used to go to the Hysterika.” She had stopped being a dark because it created problems with her family, but she wanted to go back to the Hysterika. The two of us left with

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another friend. As soon as I walked in, I thought, “Shit! Look at this place! Everyone’s dressed in black and we’ve never even heard most of this music. We can learn a lot here.” We had somewhere to go on Sunday afternoons. On the train, I met a guy from another town who drove by on his motorcycle every morning to go to work. He was a bit strange. We became friends and in time, the train turned into a dark train and we had a railway car all to ourselves. We left from Meda at five minutes past one, skipping lunch because we had to do our hair. We started bringing friends from town, and during the trip, we helped them do their hair. Two really young girls got on in Seveso, they must have been fourteen or fifteen years old. We introduced ourselves, made friends and they came with us. Another guy got on in Cesano. We invited him to sit with us, and then some girls at Paderno Dugnano got on. Normal people opened the door to our train car, looked at us, and closed it right away because they didn’t have the guts to come in. Maybe it was because of the cloud of hairspray! So, we basically had a reserved car to go dancing, and we all knew someone else at the Hysterika so you met a lot of people. For example, I met Gp’s sister before I met him because she was friends with the girl who got on the train at Seveso. Then I started going out with a girl from Sesto who said to me, “Come to the local hangout on Saturday. That’s where we all meet!” And that’s how it started. (Sergio di Meda)

Yet, being engaged in the loner enactment of dark is also described by other interviewees in another and different way: not as a temporary phase, but as an embraced and permanent choice, related to the refusal of attending discos and clubs. In this case, hanging out at discos was in fact seen as a ‘mainstream’ practice in itself, in spite of the music that was played. Like what happened in the activist enactment, going dancing was regarded, at best, as an activity in which to sporadically indulge, but not as a practice that could be the linchpin of subcultural participation. The reasons given indicate impoverished sociability, the forced superficiality of conversations in clubs and the repetitive nature of the encounters. Considering that in the music club enactment gaining subcultural capital required time and assiduous attendance, sporadic visits by loner darks to the Hysterika and other clubs were not enough to integrate them into broader cliques. At first, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, my mom would take me to buy records and clothes at Inferno & Suicidio, in Milan. At sixteen, I finally started going out on Saturdays by myself. I even went to the Hysterika on Sunday once, but it had just closed down. I was really upset. There were some darks hanging around outside and they looked at me like I was an idiot. I gave a bad impression of being the country hick that missed the boat completely. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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These loner darks, on the other hand, were not particularly eager to become familiar with music club darks. The contacts they had in their weekly shopping visits to the alternative area of Milan—a ritual they had in common—revealed differences that were regarded as clues of subcultural inauthenticity. We thought of Milan as the big city. No one stared at you. You could walk around dressed the way you wanted, no problem. In Via Torino, we did the exact same things we used to do in the suburbs: walk up and down the street. There, we found all these groups of darks, but we never really hung out with them: they looked fake, like posers. Or sometimes they looked totally wrecked. I remember they were older than us, and probably that was another reason we never really connected. In the suburbs, seeing someone in the streets with your same style was enough to make you feel somehow similar, kindred, and to get in contact. But this mechanism didn’t work with those guys.7 They didn’t give a shit about us. They didn’t even look down at us: they completely ignored us. What is most relevant is that we couldn’t find in them the allure we were striving for: the idea of being a cultural, moral, and political élite. If their look was too extreme or looked after, we became immediately suspicious because it was not likely that they were going to dress like that in their everyday lives, day-in and day-out. So, you started thinking of them as part-time goths and you automatically scorned them. (Sara)

These clues concerned, first of all, the attitude and forms of visibility in public space: being drunk in public, or looking too “wrecked”, mismatched with the fantasised idea of being a “cultural, moral and political élite” that these darks were nurturing. As we will see, in fact, adopting this sort of imagined identities helped loner darks to face the hostile social context of the suburbia. At the same time, this subcultural ideal could be sustained through time only within a loner enactment, where its imagined nature was very rarely challenged by personal contacts with other ‘real-life’ darks. Not surprisingly, in fact, real encounters could rarely match expectations. I remember seeing groups of darks who were drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon near the Colonne di San Lorenzo. I never liked that. I was not a prig: I just didn’t see the ‘dark path’ as compatible with certain behaviours. I’d say, “Look at these guys, they’re making all of us lose face!” I believed being dark was a life choice that encapsulated dignity. It was a path of purity, it was sacred. We were against the superficiality dominating several fronts, so seeing those guys really bothered me. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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Differences in subcultural style were another cause for suspicion: while ‘extreme’ and groomed outfits were much admired within the music club enactments, to loner darks (like what happened in the activist enactment), they were seen as cues of inauthenticity. Used to the conflictual and unwelcoming suburban contexts, loner darks found it very unlikely that these outfits could be worn outside discos and clubs: at best, they could be shown in the more blasé public spaces in Milan. Sporadic contacts and personal encounters did the rest: if music club darks looked down on loner darks as outsiders—often for their botched attire—, loner darks found music dark indulging too much on the most frivolous aspects of the subculture.

6.2   Enacting Dark in Public, Alone The relevance of the norms governing the presence in public space in terms of style and attitude reveals the second difference between the loner enactment of dark and McRobbie and Garber’s “cultures of bedroom”: the centrality of visibility in public space remains in fact a key aspect of subcultural belonging. In this case, however, the symbolic strategy of ‘shock-by-style’, which we described for the music club enactment,8 was by and large performed alone. In suburbia, in particular, it came at a definitely higher cost. This doesn’t mean that the streets of Milan could be considered welcoming to darks: the ritual weekend gatherings that involved all the different enactments (and, as a matter of fact, all the other subcultures) exposed them to the risk of aggression from skinheads and paninari9 while the police was discouraging subculturalists’ presence with intimidating stop-and-searches.10 Even the ritual journeys by train to reach the ‘big city’ were exciting and dangerous at the same time: The train rides from Varese to Milan and back are quite the story. Groups of white-trash boors—I don’t even know how to define them—would get on at the Milano Bovisa station and they’d beat us up. They’d start calling us, “undertakers, ravens!” They didn’t even give you the chance to stand up to see who had spoken because you’d get punched in the head. But the most dangerous part was getting off the train and reaching the Hysterika by subway because the skinheads would turn really, really mean on anyone who didn’t agree with their opinions. Darks were considered sissies, losers. Luckily, I always saved myself by running away, but others got beat up. For no reason. (Andrea)

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Yet, compared to what happened in the belt of little towns around the city and beyond, Milan could be considered a sort of shelter: it was the place where it was possible to find records, fanzines and clothes that were inaccessible in any shop in suburbia. Some darks could even find a job there, in one of the several subcultural commercial venues of the city. Most importantly, after the mid-1980s Milan was also the place where the presence of darks was so ‘common’ to start becoming if not actually accepted, at least progressively ignored by the population. Conversely, in the small towns in the Province of Milan, Como or Varese, darks had to face not only isolation, but a fierce and open aversion that was expressed aggressively on a daily basis. I was pretty much alone in Parabiago and I was often faced with hostility there and in other places. Once, in the small town on the mountains where we had a house, I was chased by a gang of paninari who threw coins at me. Another time, there were some paninari leaning against a railing and they didn’t notice I was with my parents, so they started following me. One of them yelled, “Hey Dark! Piece of shit! Wild Boys! Wild Boys!”.11 My father got pissed off and shouted, “Idiots!” This kind of things happened in Parabiago, too, but I wouldn’t let it intimidate me. On the contrary, I had a good laugh and got by. Like one time, one of the guys from school who called me undertaker all the time came looking for me in secret and said, “Do you go to Milan? If I give you the money, will you buy me a studded wristband?” He told me he was a metalhead but kept it hidden from his family. A part-time metalhead who left his house looking normal and then changed his clothes in the woods. (Donatella Bartolomei) I lived in Agrate, a town with a population of twelve thousand. I was the only dark in my high school. My look was not too extreme: it was toned down. I tried to be a bit more similar to my classmates, who I had absolutely nothing in ­common with. But nonetheless I stood out in town: boy did I! Because of my look, everyone thought I was a junkie, a juvie. I was at the cemetery visiting my dad one afternoon. I was at the grave and a blabbermouth met my aunt a few minutes later and said to her, “Be careful. Don’t go in now because there’s a junkie. He looks scary.” That evening, my aunt asked me, “By any chance, were you at the cemetery this afternoon?” (Dave) Often, when I walked down the street in my town, people sung the theme to The Addams Family. (Silvia)

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It was not just a matter of urban public space: “cloth-based discrimination” (Fauquet-Alekhine 2016) was experienced in any place in which the daily lives of these darks unfolded, like school and the workplace: I lived in Vimodrone. There was a girl at school who waited for me every morning at the entrance, and when she saw me, she made the sign of the cross. Every single morning. If I was late, she’d wait till the last moment on the doorstep: she’d cross herself and leave without saying a word. I tried talking to her, “Why do you do that? Can you explain it to me?” But she never said a word. She’d just go away. It became exasperating. (Paola) I attended a private language high school. A public one didn’t exist yet, and I had a terrible time there. I didn’t take religion class and once I was invited to stay in the classroom instead of leaving it and to explain why I didn’t want to take religion. Stupid me actually stayed, whereas now I’d say, “No way! Bye!” I was put on trial. It was Kafkian! I wasn’t an atheist, but I didn’t accept Catholicism. I remember being exhausted by the end. It was horrible. That sort of resentment, those accusations: it was something people expressed to me very often. It was like they were saying, “How dare you leave our pack!” It was if they were telling me I didn’t have the right to be ‘different.’ (Donatella Bartolomei) I went to the Fine Arts High School and it wasn’t easy. I went to school with a mohawk, all gothed-up, lots of makeup, so I had to work twice as hard as the others. It was like I was less credible. Luckily, some of the teachers were able to see beyond appearances and appreciated me for what I was inside. But disaster struck at final exams. There were external members and my teachers had advised me not to show up like I usually did: purple hair, shaved on the sides. So, I tried to disguise myself and went to the oral exams wearing a turban to hide my shaved head. But the external examiner noticed it and changed the exam subject. I had studied for History of Art and Italian Literature and she started asking me History questions. “Well, actually I studied for Italian…” I said. But she kept insisting, “Talk to me about Manzoni’s historical period.” My blood started boiling. I sprang up, ripped off my turban, and yelled, “Fuck you, bitch!” Then I left and cried in the principal’s office. I barely passed, and I assure you it was completely unfair. In short, I paid a high price. (Orietta Drago) I only had a few tiny clashes at school. I kept saying to myself, “Go to school, do what you have to do, study, and then have your own world outside of school.” My attitude was different from the seventies, when social and political commitment were seen as a whole, and a rift was sure to occur within the social environs. (Roxy)

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It was easier to live in Milan than in the suburbs at the time because if you went around dressed like that, you attracted attention and people immediately started to feel ill at ease. One of my teachers actually believed I was a heroin addict; I was thin, emaciated, dressed like a punk. … He immediately identified me with a character from the film Christiane F.12 When I told him I didn’t do drugs, he answered, “You don’t do drugs now, but you will soon. So, please, get some help.” (Roy) Your personal aesthetic also represented a victory over your family and against the social norms. I was a salesclerk and I quit my job rather than cut off my mohawk. They told me, “Cut your hair or don’t come back,” so I quit. I didn’t even have a real mohawk. I just styled my hair mushroom-like, the sides of my head were shaved, and my hair was flat on top. It was more newwave: it wasn’t very daring, but I certainly didn’t look like your typical salesclerk. This was ’86–’87. Anyway, one day my boss came up to me and said, “It’s time you cut your hair. If you don’t, don’t bother coming in on Monday.” So, I didn’t go. When you’re seventeen, work isn’t as important as when you get older, and back then, I didn’t want to annihilate who I was just for a job. (Gp)

Sometimes, the pressures of the social context in suburbia also exacerbated conflicts within the family, although, in this case, to darks in all the enactments, the situation varied a great deal and families were either supportive, simply tolerant or harshly hostile. My teachers couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact they had someone like me in their class. And my parents didn’t understand, either. But I did good at school, so in the end nobody could break my balls. Except for one time when I went out on Saturday afternoon wearing red-yellow eye shadow like Siouxsie, and a top with buckles and zippers. My father said to me, “You’re not in the entertainment business, you know. At least not yet.” (Sara) Luckily my family was pretty broad-minded so I was never slapped nor prohibited from doing anything. There was only a moment of puzzlement: my mother got pissed off when I started wearing heavy makeup. But I think it was pretty normal because I was only twelve years old. (Donatella Bartolomei) My father went to London in the middle of the punk explosion. He used his old Super 8 camera to shoot footage: it’s kind of funny because he was wearing a white lab coat. He worked in the pharmaceutical sector. I remember he shot some film at Piccadilly Circus of original punks, the ones from 1977, and when he got home, he told us he was stunned. My dad is from a small town in the

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Province of Varese, a genuine country bumpkin, so this thing truly shocked him. Then, when he saw my brother and me dressing like that, he got upset. My mother was much cooler about it. She would say to him, “Let them be. They’re not doing anything bad.” And he would say in dialect, “They’re all junkies! I saw them in London. You didn’t see what I saw!” And the arguing would start. I was locked out of the house a couple of nights. The problem was with an earring. An earring I wanted to have, but in the end never did: my father always forbade me. We were in Milan once. My parents had gone with friends of the family. We accidently bumped into them at the central train station. They saw us and my dad went completely white. We were wearing combat clothes. I wasn’t, but the crowd I was with who were devotees of Sid Vicious and mohawks was. (Andrea) I didn’t have much of a relationship with my father. He attached a lot of importance to what people were saying about me around town, and the fact that people were badmouthing his daughter bothered him. My mother supported me. She always trusted my choices and accepted that I wanted to be myself. On the other hand, it was impossible to talk with my father and I ran away from home a few times. I had been rebellious since I was little and even at nine years old, I wouldn’t take him telling me how I was supposed to look in public, what to be, and what to do with my life. (Orietta Drago)

Loner darks responded to this fierce aversion with an equally intransigent disdain, making a point of their refusal to integrate within a social context that they perceived as narrow-minded and conformist to the highest extent. Once again, this aloofness had to be flaunted through style, although provocation, in this case, meant engaging in a sort of daily personal battle. In my small town near Bergamo, everybody treated me worse than a dog. People felt they had a right to insult me just because I dressed like I did. They were low-­ blows, heavy. I wore a lot of makeup, purple lipstick. I did it every day. I didn’t dress like that just to go dancing: it was who I was and I couldn’t see myself dressed in any other way. My mother even received crazy anonymous letters that said terrible things about me. I lived the harassment like an interior fortification and I was always full of anger. Those years were hard for me. Certain things mark you forever. (Orietta Drago)

Not surprisingly, loner darks deprecated incoherence in style as a sign of inauthenticity to a greater degree than in the music club enactment. In contrast, however, also getting “gothed-up” for concerts, events and other

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forms of gathering was cause for suspicion. The right to adopt the subcultural style had to be earned in the field: it was the price one was ready to pay for a stylistic coherence in everyday life to attribute a political and existential value to it. Therefore, making one’s look more extreme when it came without a cost was seen as a sort of illegitimate identity claim. ‘Sunday darks’ were those guys who committed a mortal sin: playing dress-up just to go to a concert was the most forbidden thing you could do. If you wanted to go around looking like a dark clown, you had to do it every day, otherwise you didn’t have any balls. Having balls meant going to oral exams at school wearing smeared makeup, studs, pointy-toed shoes and get a 9 out of 10 because you studied so much that the professor had to accept your freak-show look. You forced him to look beyond the smeared lipstick and studs. That’s why we were proud of wearing our clothes: that was the line, and you always had to maintain it. Sunday darks, on the other hand, were those who, underneath it all, were embarrassed by our world, our ideals, our being. They could be dark only with other people that were the same as them. It was like they were cheating and deep down they were taking the piss out of us because they made light of our way of being. (Sara) I detested ‘part-time darks’. One day, at concerts, you saw people dressed in an extreme way, and the day after you saw them at the station and they were dressed like nice goody-goodies and sometimes even like paninari or in suits and ties. They posed as dark and I was very offended by this behaviour. It was seriously unacceptable because for me it was a way of being. I had made a choice. I wanted to send the message, “Let’s stop pretending to be happy all the time. Let’s try to have a small effect on how people live their everyday lives. Let’s try to prove that you can be yourself without conforming.” I was hurt when someone took this lightly. (Donatella Bartolomei)

In this highly conflictual context, the aforementioned persuasion of being part of an intellectual, moral and political élite was embraced as a sort of defensive strategy: without the support of a group of peers to back them up, and without the payoff of gaining subcultural capital, this conviction helped loner darks to face the pressures of homologation in their immediate social environment. I think the way you present yourself makes a difference. If you’re fearful, you open yourself up to criticism, but I was very self-confident. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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Intellectual hubris was a weapon of sorts, and at the same time an escape from the conformism of everyday life. It invited loner darks to in-depth cultural explorations of the subcultural canon that led them to think of dark as not merely a music-related subculture, but as the latest chapter of a much longer heritage of libertarian culture and non-conformist aesthetic that had unfolded throughout history. It was like I was leading a double inner life. One part was social, functional to school, alternated with absolute isolation. Maybe because at fifteen I was reading Sartre and Camus. … You listened to Killing an Arab, read up about it, and discovered Camus. Just like the song At Night led you to Kafka. So, I began reading these writers and taking one step after the other. From Camus the passage to Sartre was easy. I even read all of Being and Nothingness and I was completely absorbed by it. I challenge anyone to read it as a kid. Then I read Nausea and thought, “Sartre was with Simone de Beauvoir”, so I got all her books, and the really bizarre works by Boris Vian, like Foam of the Days. I devoured all of Camus and by the time I got to The Myth of Sisyphus, I was exhausted. Back then, as soon as I discovered something, I found out as much about it as I could. For example, the album 1984 by the Eurythmics led me straight to George Orwell. I created my own imaginary world. And it turned out to be intellectually stimulating. For me, being a dark didn’t mean belonging to a group at all, nor going out to get high. Being a dark was letting yourself go to the fascination of that kind of aesthetics, to a particular kind of imagination, and to melodies that naturally led to specific literature. And I went to the bottom of it because I was alone and had a lot of time to do it. (Sara) I read Sartre’s Nausea when I was sixteen and then Camus, Kafka and the French poètes maudits. They reflected the way I felt, and it was a mixture of emotions: the music, the words, an atmosphere that didn’t hide suffering but rather expressed it in an artistic and creative way. I read the surrealists and it was like they were talking to me about the same things the music I was listening to was talking about: acknowledging your suffering and not pretending like it doesn’t exist, which was a façade I couldn’t stand. The “All of us are happy” deception ravaging through that time. I believed it was important to say, “no”. If it’s not true: I’ll say it, I’ll take it out.” I read all the translations of the lyrics by The Cure and I identified with their way of expressing suffering, even though it may have been a bit naïve. It wasn’t about masturbatory self-gratification. They let the suffering come out, and transformed it into art in order to sublimate it, and overcome it in some way. When I was a junior in high school, I actually wrote an essay in philosophy on The Cure and the existentialists, quoting lyrics that I believed made very clear references to other works I knew. Like

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Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire. Dead Can Dance took the word ‘spleen’ from Baudelaire for the title of one of their albums. There were always references to other works. (Donatella Bartolomei)

In this respect, darks in the loner enactment—whether conceived as a phase or as a permanent choice—cannot be regarded as the subculturalists Todd Dedman (2011) defines as “peripherals” (those who limit their participation in the subculture to superficial forms of consumption), and who he distinguishes from “purists” (those who shape the subculture more actively). This enactment had, in fact, its own peripherals and purists, since loner darks often had very refined cultural competencies and were usually active in forms of DIY cultural productions, writing poems and novels, forming music bands and producing fanzines.

6.3   Enacting Dark in a Mediated Scene: Epistolary Exchanges Drawing on the work of Will Straw (1991), Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (2004) define music scenes as the contexts “in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others” (1). They identify three different kinds of scenes: “The first, local scene, corresponds most closely with the original notion of a scene as clustered around a specific geographic focus. The second, translocal scene, refers to widely scattered local scenes drawn into regular communication around a distinctive form of music and lifestyle. The third, virtual scene, is a newly emergent formation in which people scattered across great physical spaces create the sense of scene via fanzines and, increasingly, through the Internet” (2004: 6–7). When describing their experience of subcultural belonging, our interviewees gave a slightly different meaning to the concept of “scene” (‘la scena’). By this term, they refer to the broader subcultural clique of people their social group was connected to—not necessarily involving producers or musicians—and at the same time to the network of places where their subcultural practices unfolded. Since each enactment entailed different nexuses of practices, interviewees portrayed the Milanese dark scene as structured into two sub-scenes that partially overlapped and yet remained distinct: the music club and the squat scenes. Both of them had a strong geographic focus, but they also expressed a high level of translocal

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connection: music club darks circulated all over northern Italy and Switzerland to meet new people and “see how things worked” in other cities,13 while Creature Simili collaborated with collectives scattered all over Italy and Europe. Loner darks, in turn, never used the concept of scene to account for their experience of subcultural belonging, since their enactment did not entail a broader subcultural clique or a common circuit of “geographic” places in which to perform subcultural practices. Yet, the definition of “virtual scene” elaborated by Bennet and Peterson seems appropriate in describing the broader patterns of socialisation typical of this third enactment: “People scattered across great physical spaces” were connected through a systematic engagement in dense epistolary exchanges and in reading and producing fanzines. To loner darks, in fact, writing letters to a vast network of pen pals all over Italy was one of the subcultural practices that we have defined as of the second kind (“deemed of key relevance for subcultural participation”),14 while in other enactments it appeared not only less often, but also as a practice of the third kind (“practices that subjects do not deem as of key relevance for subcultural participation”). Addressing the case of the French industrial/post-industrial music scene of the 1980s, Christophe Broqua and Vincent Douris (2018) talk in this regard of a “pre-virtual” or “epistolary” scene. With this term, the authors intend to underline how several patterns of socialisation and exchange that would later be typical of Internet scenes (see, among others, Hodkinson 2003; Williams 2003, 2006; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Gibson 2005) actually predated the widespread diffusion of the medium. One thing I noticed, especially in the outer suburbs where I lived, was that since we were so isolated, many of us had an intense attraction to fanzines, and prolific correspondence. As to fanzines, as soon as you started going to events, like a record trade show, for example, invariably there was a booth that offered self-­ produced products. But building relationships through letters, in my opinion, was the best. I corresponded with a lot of people. My cousin in Bologna would tell me what was happening and what they were doing there. I went whenever I could, of course, and it was how me and my friends came into contact with a lot of things. I remember a German guy I met through a Swiss friend and we exchanged ideas on music collecting. I have a stack of letters at home, all written on a typewriter. I started by writing in longhand, then after a while my dad bought me a computer and so I was already printing things out. But the best relationships built through writing letters were those with bands. The ones that

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later merged with the World Serpent label, like Current 93 and Death in June, who weren’t well known yet, answered you personally. I sent letters asking for information and even trivial things, and they wrote me back personally. I think the apotheosis was when I sent Christmas greetings to Douglas Pearce from Death in June and he answered back with a handwritten postcard that read, “Thank you, I wish you a Merry Christmas, too. We’ve just returned from a tour in Prague.” Something like that is unthinkable today. The same was true of David Tibet from Psychic TV and Current 93. In one of their first CDs, they didn’t include the lyrics so I wrote to him to get them. Tibet answered, “With pleasure. To Andrea with passion and joy, I wish you all the best.” The relationship with artists went beyond being just an ordinary fan. Ironically, they were closer, we had a close tie, almost communal. At one point, I even got mad at the two Coils, John Balance and Peter Christopherson, God rest their souls. I wrote, “Hey, I sent you money, I want my record!” I was really pissed off! They answered to apologise and wrote, “Sorry, we’re kind of short on them right now, we also moved. The records you asked for are out of print. I’ll send you some other ones.” He sent me a 10” and a 12”, both signed. These are things I remember fondly. All my correspondence was mostly with guys like this. But I also wrote to people that I met on vacation and hung out with in clubs. (Andrea)

Through letters, loner darks compared their experiences and supported each other, engaged in ‘philosophical’ or political debates, and enriched their knowledge of the subcultural canon, discovering new bands, writers and artists. When I was thirteen, I listened to the Police. I saw a poster of them at school and out of curiosity I went out to get Reggatta de Blanc and ended up buying all their records. Then, suddenly, I started listening to the Cure. I had seen the video of their ’85–’86 hit song, Close to Me, where they’re locked up in a cupboard that falls over a cliff into the sea. I thought the idea was brilliant. That was all it took to enter the labyrinth that took me from The Head on the Door and all the Cure’s records, to their concert in Milan in 1987, to a completely different look, to literature about that world and every other dark band. Siouxsie and the Banshees, for example. Robert Smith played with them on their live album Nocturne and other records, so I discovered them because of that. I was really obsessed with Robert Smith. I was madly in love with him when other girls my age were drooling over Simon Le Bon. Later, through a number of pen pals, I got to know other stuff like Death In June. I remember a guy who lived in Pordenone sent me tapes of them, packed up in bubble wrap. (Sara)

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It was not uncommon to exchange little parcels of tape-recorded compilations, books and fanzines that to loner darks were of key relevance as a symbolic form of participation in the subculture. As a matter of fact, in this enactment, reading, producing fanzines and getting engaged in epistolary exchanges were not distinct but strictly interlaced practices. First of all, because pen pals were found through fanzines and music magazines: it was among their readers that loner darks could find their “kindred creatures”, often bonding with people that they never met in person: The way I built up my identity through my look created various dynamics inside me. It wasn’t just about style. I lived my life very privately. At that point, I wasn’t going to clubs or even to concerts, so at the beginning it was very lonely, a bit sad. I loved writing poems so I looked for people who felt the same way. I started putting ads in music magazines, looking for pen pals, to find people that might somehow be similar to me. I exchanged letters with so many people. … A lot of people wrote back, male and female, including people who were in jail, I remember. Sometimes it looked like my mailbox was about to explode! I wrote that I was dark but I stressed my love for poetry and a few bands. We exchanged poems, song lyrics, monologues, and sometimes we shared secrets. I met some of them in person, but many wrote to me from far away, even from Sicily and other parts of Italy. I realised that many of them were isolated, just like me, and we all dreamt about London. Most of them were my age but some were around twenty-five, thirty years old. One of my pen pals even became my first boyfriend: we exchanged letters for two years before meeting for the first time! Then, later on, I created my own fanzine: Settimo Senso. (Donatella Bartolomei)

Secondly, because it was not uncommon for micro-fanzines (often printed and distributed in less than 50 copies) to originate from ongoing letter exchanges that had been kept up over time. Under the initiative of a particularly engaged practitioner, mail exchanges could evolve into “from many to many” forms of communication, where each pen pal was invited to participate with articles, poems and other forms of DIY art. At a certain point, I created my fanzine, Settimo Senso, and I photocopied it at the stationery store near my house. It started to circulate thanks to my pen pals because a lot of them sent me articles: some on music and others wrote poems. … It was a mix of topics and had a few pictures of singers and bands. I was fifteen years old when I started Settimo Senso and mailed it to whoever wanted it and to who wrote for it, so it was only about twenty copies or so. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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In this sense, to loner darks, reading and producing micro-fanzines was a way of creating a community with people with similar experiences and views on the subculture, and to build mediated networks of those social relationships from which they were disconnected in their daily lives.

6.4   Enacting Dark in a Mediated Scene: Amen and the Other Fanzines The “comparatively marginal role played by the numerous goth fanzines of the 1980s” described by Paul Hodkinson (2002: 161) in the UK applies only partially to the Milanese context. In actual fact, their role was marginal (while not absent) only within the disco club enactment, while reading and producing zines were practices of the second kind both for the loner and the activist enactment of dark. What circulated was a vast and heterogeneous number of publications that differed in editorial quality (ranging from very amateurish to refined and professional projects), regularity of the publication, number of collaborators involved (from one person to larger collectives) and editorial line. In this vast undergrowth of DIY productions, some projects stood out for their attention to detail, the level of the contents and the quality of the artwork. They began to get popular and to be sought after, attracting loyal readers who kept up with every issue. Circulation grew as did the area of distribution; in some cases (Amen, for example), it spread all over Italy. What is relevant here is that to loner darks, these publications gained a capital role in mediating the subculture. In her exploration of the emergence of the goth-zine culture in the UK and the US from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Claire Nally demonstrates how they offered “different definitions of goth subculture” and testified “the heterogeneous nature of goth identity and music in the UK and the USA” (2018: 124). In Milan, these “different definitions” accurately reflected the different enactments of dark, in particular regarding their stance on political activism. Some of the most influential zines, for example, strictly addressed music and other cultural resources within the subcultural canon. One example is VM, founded in 1984 by Alessando Limonta. It was based on the Florentine magazine Free, and Rockgarage from Mestre, with the exception that it focused entirely on Italian bands. Five issues were published and each one had a tape supplement (the fifth had two LPs). The first was by Underground Life from Monza and the others included tapes by

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Weimar Gesang from Milan, Janitor of Lunacy from Brescia, the band from Piedmont Intolerance and many others. Conversely, the fanzines produced within the activist enactment, by single individuals (like Hydra Mentale by Joykix) or collectives (like Amen, by Quelli di Amen), were conceived as an integral part of the political struggle and seen as a prosecution of the experience of the political underground press in the 1970s: Whereas in the UK social discontent among youths was driven by punk, in Italy it was initially expressed through the movement of 1977, and in particular by its creative wing, the so called “indiani metropolitani” (Metropolitan Indians).15 Some extraordinary publications like Viola and WoW were published at the time, so the importance of the press was passed down to us. There were a lot of self-published projects: anyone could write, photocopy and distribute anything. A circuit of activist bookshops and record stores distributed and circulated them with great freedom. The important thing was to write, communicate and spread ideas. There was an overwhelming flow of fanzines, catalogues, records and cassettes, because anyone who had anything to say or an idea to convey only needed a typewriter, scissors, glue and a photocopier. (Angela Valcavi) I had a photocopied fanzine, too, Mentalità Compresse, with a collective that revolved around the libertarian collective in Novate Milanese. It wasn’t exclusively dark, it had some hardcore sections, too. Roberto Schieppati, who initially hung out at the Hysterika but later moved to the more politicised scene, collaborated on it. The fanzine was eclectic and run by a collective of very motivated people. There were many fanzines published by collectives, like the punk, PUNKamINazione—I think I still have a few copies somewhere—and others by single individuals, like Joykix and his Hydra Mentale. Production had no limitations because it cost little to nothing. You drew, wrote, photocopied and, ironically, printed on demand like you do today with digital publishing. To distribute them, you could leave fanzines at the Virus, the Helter Skelter and other alternative locations that had stands for self-produced products. Or you could sell them through personal contacts by mail or telephone. An incredible network was created. (Roxie)

In his study on “the politics of zines and underground culture” (Duncombe 1997: 8), Stephen Duncombe warns about the limits of a virtual politics, restricted to a “politics of culture” (200) and unified only by “a negation of what it is” (192), without promoting “solidarity, planning, and a vision” (192). From this point of view, the scene of politicised dark and punk

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fanzines was more ambiguous. On the one hand, in fact, producing a fanzine (by a collective or a single individual) was a practice that is tightly intertwined with other political actions, like leafleting, participating to protests, squatting and also organising concerts and other cultural initiatives that actually implied solidarity, planning and a vision. On the other, however, these politicised enactment of the subcultures, as already observed,16 did not aim to “construct a new future” (192)—for Duncombe, a key characteristic of proper politics—but, coherently to punk’s ‘no future’ slogan, attributed to political struggle an ethical value in itself, giving up any hope in changing society. If anything, in a sort of symbolic secession, they intended to carve out from the mainstream a network of “freed” spaces for their cultural activities and alternative lifestyles. In any case, the intense political commitment prevented even the more professional and popular of these fanzines from ‘selling out’ to what Duncombe defines as “subcultural entrepreneur[ship]” (171): not only because the revenues of each issue were generally reinvested in producing the next one, but also because their network of distribution (including music shops, squats, “alternative” bookshops) remained strictly confined to the “underground”. In Milan, in particular, one of the main points of collection and distribution for these politicised punk and post-punk fanzines was the bookshop Calusca, run by Primo Moroni (1936–1998) (Wright 2011), one of the most influential intellectuals of the Milanese radical left. Even after the bookshop was forced out of its legendary headquarters in Corso di Porta Ticinese and moved to Piazza Sant’Eustorgio first, and later to the Cox 18 squat in Via Conchetta, it kept on playing a pivotal role as a contact point for all the antagonist realities of the city, including punx and Creature Simili. In 2002—four years after Primo Moroni’s death—a large number of these self-published fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s were collected in the Archivio Primo Moroni (Primo Moroni Archive), currently the most important Italian archive for underground political press and leaflets. If you printed, mimeographed or photocopied something, you brought it to Primo at the Calusca bookshop where cops went regularly to confiscate everything. There must still be an incredible archive at police headquarters! A lot of stuff was being distributed and Primo had created a space inside the bookshop run by Gomma, Marco Philopat and Joykix. (Angela Valcavi)

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Within this vast and heterogeneous galaxy of DIY fanzines, the one that from the very beginning emerged as undisputedly the most relevant Italian “darkzine” (and the first as a matter of fact) was Amen, produced by Quelli di Amen, one of the collectives that—as we have seen17—merged into Creature Simili. The most popular dark fanzine was Amen. It was great. A lot of attention went into how it looked. It was a publishing project that truly made sense. Each issue was well-structured and included stories, translated interviews, and they always made an effort to include a cassette of Italian bands; some of them were pretty frightening and extreme. You read it eagerly. It came out when it was ready, it was never precisely on such-and-such a day. Like all the fanzines, it was a product of collaboration between people who did other things in their everyday lives; they worked or studied. You could find Amen at the Helter Skelter, for example. I studied with Angela Valcavi, who created it, at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and when a new issue came out, she sold it to me directly. There was activist distribution, too. Amen was very wide-ranging so it went beyond the simple definition of fanzine. (Roxie) In addition to its unique name, Amen-This is Religgion,18 the first issue of Amen burst onto the fanzine scene with a really extreme cover—by sheer coincidence it was the same image as the one on the cover of Death SS’s Evil Metal19— and a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. This presentation immediately voiced our opposition to religious authority and emphasised the nihilist character of the fanzine. Whereas most fanzines were photocopied, Amen was printed on sixteen pages, mostly in black ink, with unsettling skull-­ shaped illustrations by Gustave Doré and Aubrey Beardsley barely visible in white ink. We wanted it to further explore existentialism, exacerbating it and flanking it with a fierce anticlerical stance. The word “darkzine” appeared on the cover of the first issue. I didn’t like it very much, I have to say. It bothered me to peg myself with a definite identity, so it was never used again. A thousand copies were distributed by Primo Moroni at the Calusca bookshop and in record stores like Tape Art, Supporti Fonografici, Zabriskie Point, Mariposa, and later Ice Age, which was the most popular. Through Supporti Fonografici, we met Adn Distribution20 that specialised in industrial music, and we knit a tight bond with them. Amen was also distributed by mail thanks to word-of-­ mouth and through ads in music magazines. We also sold it at the end of concerts. In three months, the copies ran out. It was a result far beyond our expectations and it was backed up by letters that started to arrive from cities all over Italy. We got a true sense of Amen’s circulation when more and more requests for interviews started to arrive from national newspapers; we always refused to give them. (Angela Valcavi)

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Eight issues of Amen were published between 1983 and 1988 and each one included a very popular cassette tape: We put out issues when we could collect enough money and material. In addition to the magazine, over a period of six years, we published a book of short stories in three thousand copies, four LPs and a 45. These numbers were similar to those of a small publishing house. We re-printed a thousand copies of the first issue and then printed another five hundred. We printed a thousand of the second and another five hundred later, and for the following issues, we printed 1,500 and 2,000 copies off the bat. We always included a cassette of Italian bands, with the exception of Un chant d’amour: one of the two cassettes that came with the sixth issue that was coordinated by a French collaborator. Then we started printing on vinyl. We released Flux of Fluster, the great band Far, and a monographic picture disc on the anniversary of Law 180: the Basaglia reform21 and the closing down of mental institutions. It was a beautiful piece of work, all packaged up in a metal cage! In May 1988 we included a 45 by Casino Royale, produced by Francesco Virga, to promote and support a project by the Youth National Liberation Front in El Salvador. Five hundred copies of the record sold out really fast. We also distributed T-shirts, including one against apartheid in South Africa. All the proceeds went to publishing the following issue. (Angela Valcavi)

Amen’s editorial line strictly reflected the politicised take on the subculture of the activist enactment of dark. On the one hand, it paid close attention to the most obscure declination of post-punk, goth and industrial, while spawning an impassioned approach towards art, movies and literature. On the other hand, it deployed radical criticism against all those institutions that seemed to exercise their repressive power against freedom of the individual, starting with the church, the traditional family and the homeland. Those of us who created ‘Amen’ all came from different political experiences. I came from occupations and the 1977 movement, Roberto and Luca from Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy),22 Stefania from the FGCI (Italian Communist Youth Federation). For better or for worse, we were children of the seventies. That period in history taught me the importance of developing a counterculture. At the beginning of the eighties, in response to a powerful creative flow, me, Atomo and Vincillo gave life to Fame,23 a fanzine founded in Baggio, the district in Milan where we lived. It was an unforgettable experience of friendship, of getting drunk on sparkling wine and having great fun. Atomo, who drew really well, wanted to take inspiration from the

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satirical magazine Il Male,24 so we threw ourselves into the adventure. For the cover, we decided to photograph ourselves about to climb a wall with the word “fame” written in huge letters on it. We chose the name Fame—hunger— because we had a hunger for everything and also because the American film, Fame,25 had just come out and Atomo kept repeating, “For fuck’s sake! I want to be famous, too!” We painted it on a wall next to a supermarket in Baggio and people kept wondering why the word ‘fame’ in huge letters was outside the supermarket. That was really something! It reflected the ironic spirit of Il Male, a bit sacrilegious, but we had both feet firmly grounded in the eighties. The artwork was in part inspired by Dadaism and in part by a popular comic strip with a photo novel melodrama edge to it. We printed two issues, then, because of disagreements between us, Fame just fizzled out. But I’d got a taste for it and while I was selling the last copies of Fame, I met Roberto, Luca and Gianna. They were particularly interested in fanzines as a medium, as a means for expression, and a few months later, ‘Amen’ was founded. In the meantime, the first hardcore darks wearing huge crosses started to circulate around the city. Something had begun, and at first we didn’t notice[] because we were so taken up by our artistic paths. We missed the whole trendy side to the phenomenon so we decided that for starters, the fanzine had to have a music section, and we supplemented it with cassettes by unknown bands. The idea of actually becoming a label was in the air. We did everything properly: we printed it at a printer’s, the Quarta Internazionale, that later provided us with a managing director and a permit for the supplements. We had a graphic designer and we went nuts making the text bigger or smaller with this fantastic electronic typewriter that Roberto kindly bought for us. In the first issue, we alternated goth stories and existential poetry, like Peter Handke, with articles on the bands Virgin Prunes and Obscurity Age and their different approach to the music industry, as well as pieces on aesthetics and art. The For Fashion section was featured on the centrefold and we gave it a sociological spin. We wrote, “Therefore, subcultures are a way of promoting social unrest and they represent, even though to a limited extent, autonomous forms of expression, and a set of social, ideological and economic contradictions that affect society. Adopting a subcultural style, and the related symbols through which identity is expressed, is something much more challenging and meaningful than picking up a fashion trend.” Dick Hedbige docet! Through Amen we began to build subjectivity, an identity that took its initial shape with the trilogy Dio, Patria e Famiglia (‘God, Homeland and Family’), and evolved with each issue. The art/music component, fashion, and the political intent were complementary. Even the name wasn’t a random choice: in the dark and post-punk cultural scene, choosing such a provocative name seemed obvious and in line with the clichés of black clothing, heavy makeup and the abundance of upside-down crosses. In our specific case, the

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choice was imposed first and foremost by our deep opposition to religious authority. In the country that houses the Vatican, where the church has the power to intervene in politics, wearing an upside-down cross had an anticlerical significance rather than a satanical one. In 1983, Catholicism was still the state religion26; the Vatican has always conditioned our country. In 1982, the Banco Ambrosiano case27 exploded; archbishop Paul Marcinkus, president of the Vatican Bank, was indicted for financial fraud but thanks to the Lateran Treaty, he escaped to the Archdiocese of Chicago after financier Roberto Calvi was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. This was the context in which we launched Amen. The title had a strong impact but also a sarcastic subheading: its tagline was, “This is Religgion”, with the double G used in the outer suburbs’ slang to mimic American drawl. The week after the launch, Primo Moroni alerted us, “Hey, the cops came by, took Amen and said you could be charged with publicly offending the state religion!”28 It was still a crime then, and the concordat between the state and the church wasn’t revised until a year later, in 1984, when the Italian state became secular! Apparently, our hooded character who sat on a throne with upside-down crosses behind him didn’t go down too well with them, nor did the passage from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist that we photocopied from an Adelphi edition and put on the back cover. Did that make Adelphi blasphemous, too? This stance defined our singularity to the point that in the fifth issue we were in contact with the Anticlerical Association that promoted the debaptism, so we included a form to fill out to renounce baptism. We also contacted a collective from Fano that organized anticlerical meetings. What was so uniquely distinctive about us was probably a result of our 1970s roots; fundamental for anticlericalism and also for feminism which was a big part of my personal growth. The same applied to our attention to sexuality: if those who came before us hadn’t undergone their fight to free us from archaic legacies, we wouldn’t take many ways of life for granted today. We can’t say that transgenderism, homosexuality, self-determination are issues that have been completely solved, but at least they are established realities. The fourth issue of Amen was dedicated to these topics and it included a supplement on HIV information. (Angela Valcavi)

This radically politicised take on dark was not representative of the whole Milanese dark scene, with the disco club enactment embracing what activist darks deemed as only “the more superficial aspects of the subculture.” Yet, the editorial line chosen by Amen played a crucial role in mediating the subcultures of loner darks in all northern Italy, where the fanzine was highly visible. For many of them, politics was part of the subcultures’ DNA, even if this understanding was not associated to engagement in activist practices—if not on a personal level.

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At the beginning we believed that Amen was more of an anomaly within the dark scene than an active component, but now I realise that for many, it represented a point of reference. We were surprised to sell so many copies, to receive so many letters. So much so that at a certain point, I asked a neighbour to pick up my mail when I was away: the mailbox was stuffed full! And we had amassed an incredible quantity of demo tapes. Of the many, we turned down the band Timoria.29 They sent us a demo, we listened to it and said, “This shit doesn’t have anything to do with us!” So, we wrote back telling them they were good but no thanks, it wasn’t our kind of music. “You need a label that will take you under their wing, and that’s not our job.” We sent this answer out a lot. A lot of very intense correspondence began during that period. I was very involved in writing to John Balance of Coil. We were literally mad about Coil. We wanted to do an interview about the relationship between Coil and Psychic TV and the Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the artistic cooperative founded in 1981 by these two bands. From what we read, the Temple had strangely changed direction in a very short time. Apparently, Genesis P-Orridge, lead singer for Psychic TV at the time, had become a veritable guru. That’s how the first exchange of letters began. It later became very intense but only one letter remains. Another important collaboration was with the legendary Vittore Baroni30 who often sent magnificent articles and mail art projects that led to the founding of Informe. After all this time, I regret not having kept the more significant letters. Unfortunately, our letter archive disappeared. I have no idea what happened to it. After the Dio, Patria e Famiglia trilogy, Amen began to become more and more refined also from a graphic and artistic point of view. It became a proper magazine. But after the release of the exhausting issue on Law 180, something broke. Our paths had taken different courses and as far as I was concerned, my experience there had come to an end. I had other objectives so I concentrated all my energy in an artistic and social project with an international approach that took shape between 1989 and 1991 with the two issues of Informe, a publication on art and rebellion. But that’s another story. (Angela Valcavi)

The activist enactment of dark came to an end by 1987. In the same year, the production of politicised darkzines in the Milanese area ceased too. Yet, the dark fanzine scene continued to develop throughout the 1990s thanks to a series of more or less ephemeral projects that later became digital and online publications. During the 1990s, some of them would even gain translocal—however niche—visibility all over Europe, like Batty’s Tears by Emanuela Zini, which was written directly in English. I had contacts with the international industrial scene, and at a certain point I created a fanzine, Batty’s Tears. We didn’t have Word back then: we didn’t have shit! I started writing it on my father’s computer, it was great. My boy-

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friend had a distribution label so I could listen to CDs for free and I began writing reviews. It was 1991 and I was already earning a living by making photocopies and mailing them around the world, hoping for letters asking for more copies. Each issue cost me five-thousand lire. I have to admit that in some ways it changed my, let’s say, status, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Back then, women who were into experimental industrial music weren’t very common. I wrote the fanzine in English and did everything myself; I had ­collaborators who wrote pieces in Italian and I translated them. A little while later, I started meeting people who said, “Hey, you’re Zini! I used to get your fanzine and I still have copies of it!” As for circulation, however many copies I was asked for, that’s how many I would print. People asked for it and so did stores. Sometimes I took it to the record store, Supporti Fonografici, and other places, or else I sold it through record mail order catalogues. I wrote it in English because I thought, “How many people in Italy are really interested in the industrial scene?” In English, I had a better chance of expanding circulation. Most of the bands were foreign and it was great because I even sent copies to Iceland. When the magazine started getting popular, people would send me their CDs to review. That was really great because at the time the industrial scene had fantastic CD covers. I could interview whoever I wanted to: Voice of Eye, who I really liked, or Sleep Chamber. Musica Maxima Magnetica was their record label and I reviewed all their stuff. But when you do this kind of thing, there’s nothing mind-blowing about it. On the contrary: it’s a huge pain in the ass sometimes, like when you have to stand in line for hours at the post office. But in the end, I became popular thanks to Batty’s Tears. (Emanuela Zini)

In any case, the approach of these new publications was more similar to VM than to Amen’s angry political engagement, and had music as their primary interest.

Notes 1. See Chap. 4. 2. See Chap. 7. 3. See Chap. 4. 4. The Scapigliatura was an artistic and literary movement founded in Northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had its epicentre in Milan and was later established throughout the country. The name—coined by the writer Cletto Arrighi—is a loose translation of the French word bohème (Gypsy life), in reference to the disorderly and nonconformist life of artists. The Scapigliati opposed Italian romanticism, pre-

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ferring the international one, along with the nascent French naturalism and the poètes maudits like Baudelaire. According to Italian literary criticism, the Scapigliatura anticipated later well-known movements such as Verismo and Decadentism. See Del Principe 1996. 5. This passage is part of a longer excerpt already cited in Sect. 4.3. 6. The Beasts of Satan were a group of serial murderers active in the province of Varese in the second half of the 1990s. They adopted what has been defined as ‘acid satanism’, based on drug assumption and confused esoteric beliefs. Their crimes and subsequent trials received a great deal of media coverage in Italy and abroad. 7. On this form of identification, see Sect. 7.4. 8. See Chap. 5. 9. See Chap. 5. 10. See Chap. 3. 11. The reference is to the 1984 single by Duran Duran that became part of the paninari music canon. 12. Christiane F.—Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, by Uli Ede, Germany, 1981. 13. See Chap. 5. 14. See Chap. 2. 15. Mariani (1987). 16. See Chap. 4. 17. See Chap. 4. 18. The subheading This Is Religgion, with two gs, refers to the pronunciation of the word ‘religion’ in a song by PiL, “Religion II” (in their first album, The First Issue, 1978) as perceived by an Italian audience, and at the same time to Milanese suburbia slang. 19. Death SS is an Italian heavy metal band, founded in 1977 and still in activity. 20. ADN was an Italian experimental and industrial music label established in 1983  in Milan. As the first Italian fanzine for experimental music in English, it published eight issues until the spring of 1986. See https:// www.discogs.com/it/label/16371-ADN. Last accessed 13 June 2019. 21. The Basaglia Law, n. 180 of 13 May 1978, abolished large mental asylums in Italy in favour of smaller psychiatric facilities that could better guarantee patients’ rights. Despite several proposals for reform, this legislation, inspired by the Venetian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, still regulates psychiatric healthcare in Italy. 22. Democrazia Proletaria (DP) was an extreme left-wing Italian political party founded in 1975 as an electoral coalition and in 1978 as a party. It was dissolved in 1991.

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23. See Valcavi (2017). The name of the fanzine plays with the different meanings of the word in English and in Italian (“Hunger”). 24. Il Male (Evil) was an Italian magazine, published from 1977 to 1982, characterised by a caustic and irreverent satire. Some of its covers are legendary, like one in 1978 with several false front pages of national newspapers with the dramatic (fake) news: “The Leaders of the Red Brigades (the most feared terrorist group of the time) are Raimondo Vianello and Ugo Tognazzi” (two very popular comic actors). 25. Fame, directed by Alan parker, USA, 1980. 26. The Concordat between the State and the Catholic Church, also known as the Lateran Pacts, was signed on 11 February 1929 between the Holy See and the Italian Fascist State as a reconciliation after Italy had annexed the Vatican State in 1871, denying the temporal power of the Pope. For the first time, in 1929, Italy and the Holy See established bilateral relations. In addition to mutual recognition, and a financial agreement with which Italy accepted to pay the Pope an indemnity, the Lateran Pacts established the Catholic religion as the only State religion. It then provided various measures, such as the civil effects of religious marriage and the exemption of military service for priests. On 18 February 1984, Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and Cardinal Agostino Casaroli signed a new Concordat: the Catholic religion was no longer defined as the only religion of the State, religion class in schools became optional, and a new method of sustenance for the Church, known as the eight per thousand, was introduced. (The text of the Concordat signed in 1929: https://www.uaar.it/laicita/ concordato/concordato_stato_chiesa_1929.html/. Last accessed 15 June 2019. 27. The Banco Ambrosiano, based in Milan, was one of the main Italian Catholic private banks. Founded in 1896, it went bankrupt in 1982 after one of the most serious Italian bankruptcies in the twentieth century, estimated at 1.2–1.3 billion dollars. It was under the chairmanship of Roberto Calvi, nicknamed ‘God’s Banker’. After various crises due to financial irregularities beginning in 1977, in 1981 it was discovered that the P2 Masonic lodge was protecting the bank. Calvi left without protection to face the scandal, and sought the intervention of the Vatican and the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR or The Vatican Bank). However, on 21 May 1981, he was arrested for financial fraud, tried and sentenced. On 18 June 1982, he was found hanging under the Blackfriars Bridge in London. On 6 August 1982, the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed. American archbishop and President of IOR, Paul Marcinkus, was also indicted for fraudulent bankruptcy. It was in fact ascertained that his bank had had a primary role in the Banco Ambrosiano crack.

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28. Article 8 of the Concordat signed in 1929 established that “[o]ffenses and public injuries committed in the Italian territory against the person of the Supreme Pontiff with speeches, facts and writings are punished as offenses and injuries to the person of the King (after 1946, President of the Republic)”. 29. Timoria was a famous Italian alternative rock band, founded in Brescia in 1986 and active until the early 2000s. 30. Vittore Baroni, born in Tuscany in 1956, is an Italian artist, music critic, musician and scholar of counter-cultures. He is known primarily for his contributions to mail art and sound art.

References Bennett, A., & Peterson, R. A. (2004). Introducing Music Scenes. In A. Bennett & R. Peterson (Eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp. 1–15). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Brill, D. (2008). Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. Bloomsbury Academic. Broqua, C., & Douris, V. (2018). An Epistolary Scene: ‘Post-Industrial’ Music in France in the 1980s. Punk & Post Punk, 7(2), 219–233. Dedman, T. (2011). Agency in UK Hip-Hop and Grime Youth Subcultures  – Peripherals and Purists. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(5), 507–522. Del Principe, D. (1996). Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. London: Verso. Fauquet-Alekhine, P. (2016). Clothing-Based Discrimination at Work: The Case of the Goth Subculture. British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 13(4), 1–16. Gibson, C. (2005). Subversive Sites: Rave Culture, Spatial Politics and the Internet in Sydney, Australia. Area, 31(1), 19–33. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2003). ‘Net.Goth’: Internet Communication and (Sub)Cultural Boundaries. In D.  Muggleton & R.  Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 285–298). Oxford, New York: Berg. Mariani, G. (1987). Was Anybody More of an Indian than Karl Marx? The Indiani Metropolitani and the 1977 Movement. In C. Feest (Ed.), Indians and Europe. An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (pp. 585–598). Aachen: Rader. McRobbie, A., & Garber, J. (1976). Girld and Subcultures. In S.  Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds.), Resistance Through Rituals Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (pp. 209–222). London: Hutchinson.

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Nally, C. (2018). Goth Zines: Writing from the Dark Underground, 1976–92. In The Subcultures Network (Ed.), Ripped, Torn and Cut (pp.  110–128). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Straw, W. (1991). Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies, 53, 368–388. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Valcavi, A. (2017). Fame: il romanzo di una fanzine. Milano: Agenzia X. Williams, J. P. (2003). The Straightedge Subculture on the Internet: A Case Study of Style-Display Online. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 107(1), 61–74. Williams, J. P. (2006). Authentic Identities: Straightedge Subculture, Music, and the Internet. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(2), 173–200. Wright, S. (2011). Cattivi Maestri: Some Reflections on the Legacy of Guido Bianchini, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, and Primo Moroni. In P.  Lamarche, D. Sherman, & M. Rosenkrantz (Eds.), Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire (pp. 21–56). Chicago: Carus Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 7

Dark Canon

7.1   Assembling the Canon In the previous chapters, we have shown how in Milan in the 1980s, the subcultural canon of dark was mobilised within different bundles of practices—or enactments—bringing about different forms of subcultural identity, each with its own criteria of validation. In this way, we aimed at accounting for “plural authenticities and plural structures of meanings within the same subculture” (Hannerz 2015: 13). With the concept of ‘subcultural canon’, in which we include shared subcultural resources such as music, style, material artefacts and other forms of cultural consumption, we aim conversely at acknowledging the consistent distinctiveness of the subculture, and subculturalists’ “relatively consistent adherence to an identifiable range of shared tastes” (Hodkinson 2002: 7). Within the field of fan studies from which we derived the concept, “canon” refers to “those titles that are considered to contain the legitimate materials” (Newman 2008: 59) of a franchise, hence defining a “binding set of resources” (60) for a fandom. In fan participatory cultures (Jenkins 1992, 2006), in fact, user-generated cultural artefacts like fanfiction or vids (Tosoni and Ciancia 2017) “are judged both on their own creative merits and in terms of their compatibility with the events, characters, situations and narratives already encoded with the ‘canon’” (Newman 2008: 59). The concept of “semiotic solidarity”, which Henry Jenkins (2006: 156) adopted from Matt Hills (2002), underlines how these © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_7

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materials are binding not only in terms of narrative, but also of style, aesthetic taste and values. Moreover, scholars in the field agree in underlining how a canon is not to be conceived simply as established by the production, or as given once for all. On the contrary, they underline how fans are continuously engaged in practices of “fan critic” (Jenkins 1992), endlessly discussing what to consider as in canon and what not. In this way, they can refuse some of the elements introduced in a franchise by the production as “out of canon”, or transform the canonical status of some elements over time: “fan canon” or “fanon” are the concepts used to stress the importance of these forms of bottom-up negotiation (Gray 2010; Hellekson and Busse 2006; Leow 2011; Liebler and Chaney 2007)—and therefore the dynamic nature of the canon. Adopting (and adapting) the concept to account for the consistent distinctiveness of a subculture, we intend therefore to underline, first of all, how the subcultural canon takes shape in a process of social construction in which subculturalists negotiate, validate or refuse the canonical status of some cultural resources. Second, how this process of canonisation and de-­ canonisation is to be conceived is steadily ongoing, with new subcultural resources entering the canon and others eventually becoming de-­ canonised. Finally, how the canonical status of these resources is not necessarily without controversy among all subculturalists (since, according to Hodkinson, their “adherence to an identifiable range of shared tastes” is only “relatively consistent”): and yet, whatever their position, subculturalists are in the know about the possible controversial status of a specific cultural resource. In what follows, we will address how the dark canon was appropriated and reworked in Milan—and indeed, as we will see, throughout Italy—in the 1980s, focusing on its main subcultural resources: music, literature and the arts, and style. In doing so, we will try to account for its processual, dynamic and sometimes controversial nature, which can be intermittently spotted in the interviews. In our life histories, in fact, two different depictions of the canon seem to coexist: a retrospective, closed and stabilised view of the canon, which took its shape over the more than 30 years that separate the collection of the narratives from the events; and—especially in music—an in-the-making, open and processual view of the canon (or rather, of the process of canonisation) as perceived at the time, which often emerges thanks to interviewees’ work on their memories triggered by the specific methods of interview adopted.1

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7.2   Music Isabella van Elferen and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2016) have recently pointed out how in literature the relationship between goth as a music genre and the subculture is by and large underdiscussed in favour of issues regarding fashion and style, despite the fact that “music, rather than being considered ancillary or equivalent to other goth subcultural practices or forms of expression, is instead foundational to and constitutive of goth social reality” (2). To fill this gap, the authors adopted a musicologist approach and have shown how the “consistent distinctiveness” of all the variations of the goth music genre is to be acknowledged in the recurrence of five “chronotopes”, where “the particular qualities of goth music together with recurring lyrical themes create […] five characteristic goth time-spaces: (…) the intimate and expansive past, the intimate and expansive future, and the dislocated present” (125). These chronotopes would “serve as the backdrop for the narratives of goth musicking subjects” (125), that would in turn serve “as the grounding for the elaboration of goth subcultural social chronotopes organised around shared fantasy narratives of loss that engage the ironic imagination in the task of reenchanting the world” (126). A musicologist approach of this sort is beyond our competence: to focus on the affective regimes instituted by goth music, and the ‘shared fantasy narratives’ it conveyed, we will adopt instead a phenomenological approach, interrogating our interviewees’ narratives. Such an operation, however, must be integrated by calling attention to the practices of assemblage, appropriation and negotiation of the music canon of dark in Milan back in the 1980s. During the 1980s, in fact, the Milanese (and Italian) dark canon did not fully correspond to a single specific music genre like goth, and to the way it has been described and formalised together with its numerous variants and sub-genres in a number of comprehensive publications on the history of post-punk (Reynolds 2005; Mercer 2009; for the Italian scene, see Coccoluto 2014). It was not only a question of the importance of national bands that most often sung in Italian (like early Litfiba, Diaframma, CCCP, Moda, Underground Life and many others) and were generally unknown abroad, nor of the absence of canonical bands that became popular in the country one or two decades later. More significantly, the subcultural music canon in the 1980s differed from retrospective formalisations of the goth genre in terms of flexibility, because it included (temporarily or permanently) bands and music styles that a

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rigorous musicologist approach would set apart.2 Indeed, labels and definitions that are widely accepted nowadays, and that define the boundaries and the internal variations of the music genre, were not widely used at the time—like ‘goth’, ‘post-punk’ or ‘death rock’—or else they were used with slightly different acceptations: such was the case, for example, with ‘dark’, ‘new wave’ and sometimes even ‘punk’, whose distinctions were quite blurred at the beginning of the 1980s and became more precise only in time. In this section, we will proceed in three steps: we will first address the assemblage of the dark music canon, starting from its logic and its mediators; we will then present the (politically) controversial canonical status of the neo-folk sub-canon, and, finally, we will move from consumption to the DIY production of music in the Milanese scene. Regarding the assemblage of the canon, it began to take shape in the early 1980s when the ‘little of everything’ that went under the name of new-wave started to be featured in mainstream media (radio, magazines and also television), with the same eclecticism we have already described for the music played in discos3: Once you saw and heard new wave, that was it. There was nothing like it. It’s like driving a Ferrari after having had a FIAT 500 all your life. It goes without saying that whoever listened to new wave also listened to dark wave; whoever listened to Joy Division had records by Depeche Mode. Because that was the matrix; even if dark was significantly bleaker, less electronic, with more electric-­ acoustic instruments. Synths were used peripherally in dark wave, while new wave based everything on them. Imagine taking the keyboards away from early Simple Minds! Let’s just say that new wave was more future-oriented because it relied a lot on a romantic, melodic, electronic sound. It was a time when synthesisers started to cost less: a module cost 20 million lire4 in the ‘70s, then the Prophet 5 and other models came along, and they cost under three-four million.5 A lot of musicians used the new sound to instil fresh air and romanticism into music. It’s often called new wave-new romantic because the neo-romantic theme characterised an offshoot of punk, and dark wave sprouted from punk, too. New wave was a bit more frivolous, no doubt about that, but it had a very refined sound. (Pino Carafa) I think it would be better to separate new wave from what is called post-punk. New wave had a little of everything; from the early punk bands in ’76 to Patti Smith, from ‘80s Britpop to the Italian singer, Diana Est, the one who sang Tenax, just to be clear. In this never-ending game of finding a definition, I’d

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say that new wave was a sort of 1980s pop which was pretty commercial, but also alluring because it was part of all the innovative things happening in music. Post-punk, on the other hand, introduced tones and lyrics with more existential, dramatic and decadent connotations. The sounds came from early punk, like Joy Division, but there were precise and specific instrumental features: an obscure bass with an incessant obsessive rhythm, and very intimate lyrics about suffering, devastation and desperation: an equation for a hopeless existence. (Angela Valcavi)

What arrived from the UK was a heterogeneous mix of sounds that included, among the more successful bands, The Buggles, Culture Club, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Bronski Beat, Cyndi Lauper and The Police, all of them ranking in the Italian top 20 singles between 1980 and 1984. Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet were also thrown into the mix under the label of New Romantic. What all these bands had in common was the allure of novelty, and the impression of a clean break from the Italian melodic tradition, from classic rock, and from Italian singer-­ songwriters of the 1970s: In the early ‘80s, you listened to Visage, Simple Minds and Depeche Mode on the radio. They were a little commercial but had new wave and post-punk sounds to them. Things started appearing on TV, too. At five in the afternoon on a small local television channel they even showed A Forest by The Cure, Ashes to Ashes by Bowie, Leave in Silence by Depeche Mode, and I couldn’t wait to see them. They also had Tubeway Army with Gary Numan singing Are Friends Electric? I remember there was a jukebox in the café near my house where I would always put on Gary Numan. (…) That genre of music stood for the rejection of the prevailing fashion: jeans, trainers, football matches… And love songs. I had a hard time with the Sanremo music festival.6 With the exception of a couple of singer-songwriters, they always sang about the same things. In fact, when I saw Garbo at Sanremo in 1984, I thought, “Finally! Someone who didn’t write a song to his girlfriend who left him, and why didn’t she come back, and ever since you’ve been gone, and all that shit…” I couldn’t stand the fact that all Italian music was like that. (Pino Carafa)

Our interviewees described their first encounter with these bands as a moment of sudden revelation: a shock triggered by what seemed like a radical break from mainstream Italian music at the time. The unfamiliar sounds of these bands worked in combination with the visual style of their photosets, album covers and videos, and produced an indelible

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impression. Not surprisingly, many of them (like Simple Minds, Visage and the Eurythmics of Sweet Dreams) entered stably into the subcultural canon and are still regularly played in goth events all over Italy: When I was thirteen, I listened to The Police. I saw a poster of them at school and out of curiosity I went out to get Reggatta de Blanc. I ended up buying all their records. (Sara) I was eleven years old when I started to get into music. My parents gave me my first stereo. At twelve, I listened to rock. Classic rock. A classmate, who would later become my brother-in-law, had a cousin with lots of records by Pink Floyd, Genesis, The Who, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles… He made me cassette tapes of them. But I had a sudden enlightenment one day watching a TV show, I think it was something like Super Classifica Show, and saw The Police playing Message in a Bottle. I said, “Shit! This band is great! Look at what they’re wearing!”. At that time, they were passed off as punk, so I thought, “Ok, this is punk, so I like punk!”. I started breaking everyone’s balls, including my cousin who was already a big fan of David Bowie. I idolised him, he indoctrinated me with Bowie and I kept bugging him about this great “punk band”, The Police. His older brother had been to London in ’77 so he knew what real punk was. One day he finally said to me, “What the fuck, they’re not punk! I’ll show you what real punk is.” He made me a tape with The Clash and the Sex Pistols and I had another eureka moment. (Roy)

Younger interviewees—the ones we have defined as the “second generation of darks”—describe their first encounters with bands like Depeche Mode, The Smiths and The Cure in the same way when they started to be featured on mainstream media in the mid-1980s: In middle school, one of my classmates was a fan of Depeche Mode and he was the first to give me tapes of their records. But the turning point came in ’84 or ’85 with the TV show Mister Fantasy on RAI, the national TV channel. It aired after midnight. I would get up secretly to watch it and that’s where I saw the Flash, The Clash, The Cure, and thought, “Shit! I like this. I even like how they dress! I want to be like that” (Sergio di Meda) Music was really important to everyone then. As for me, it was one of the things that saved my life. At that moment in my life, the fact that there was a certain genre of music I could relate to, simply saved me. At first, I listened to The Cure, Litfiba, Diaframma, CCCP… I remember The Smiths played at Sanremo in 1987 and CCCP were on Super Classifica Show when they released the cover song Tomorrow with Amanda Lear. (Orietta Drago)

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In particular, The Cure were given a high level of visibility on television with the release of The Head on the Door, in 1985. The album reached the top 20 on the Italian charts, and the video of Close to Me was aired on Videomusic and the show Deejay Television on Berlusconi’s Fininvest Channel, Italia Uno, making them well known to the general public. For interviewees of both generations, these first encounters represented the entry point of a journey into a wider—and definitely darker—musical territory, and an invitation to its exploration. The shaping of the 1980s’ dark canon is actually the result of these practices of exploration/appropriation, which had their own logic and their own mediators. Regarding their logic, in his analysis of punk, Erik Hannerz noted how “the same band could be placed as either commercial or DIY depending on how the [binary opposition between the subcultural and mainstream is] (…) worked. Consequently, there are no objects that are intrinsically punk or mainstream” (Hannerz 2015: 194). For Milanese dark, this doesn’t seem to apply to all bands: The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus or Joy Division soon took on an iconic value that remained undisputed notwithstanding their progressively wider popularity within, and even outside, the subculture (as was the case with The Cure). If anything, as already seen,7 an in-depth knowledge of these bands was taken for granted among darks of all enactments and could not work as the basis on which to claim subcultural capital: Actually, everyone had their own tastes: it wasn’t as conformist as it seemed. For example, not everyone knew Adam & The Ants. They weren’t as well known as The Cure. Psychic TV were very niche and so was Nick Cave, who I loved. (Emanuela Zini)

Yet, not all the criteria for the acceptance of a band were related to its musical style alone. The appropriation of some bands or albums by other subcultural groups, or the popularity gained among the larger public, could, for example, push them out of the canon. Such was the case, in particular, with Duran Duran: initially accepted in the canon under the label New Romantic, the band was suddenly de-canonised in 1984 when, at the height of their popularity, they released the single Wild Boys and reached number one on the Italian charts. The song was in fact adopted as a sort of hymn by the Milanese paninari, and became the symbol of the glamour and hedonism the darks were in opposition to:

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At the beginning I listened to Duran Duran, too, and I have to say I liked them a lot. I had posters and stuff. Then all of the sudden, they didn’t belong to us anymore. Wild Boys had become the paninari’s theme song: all of them used to listen to that song. Usually, the guys knew only that one, while the girls got into the band a bit deeper. So, I took the posters off the wall and I gave up Duran Duran for a very long time. I remember playing them again many years later when the paninari had disappeared, so that contrast didn’t make any sense anymore. They are not my favourite band, but I have to say I was right: they weren’t bad at all. (Sara) I was mostly influenced by an older cousin who lived in Bologna where the scene was really alive at the time. In my first two years of high school, 1983 and 1984, some kids were fans of Duran Duran and others were fans of Spandau Ballet. I’m talking about Duran Duran before Wild Boys. I was on the Duran side. I don’t know how, but my path started there. (Andrea)

Other bands or singers—from that time or from the past, and inside or outside the strictly conceived music genre—enjoyed a sort of “internal authentication” by bands already canonised as a consequence of a cover song (i.e. covers of David Bowie, T. Rex and Brian Eno by Bauhaus), of a collaboration, or even of a positive mention in an interview. Actually, these threads were of great importance for darks to proceed in the exploration/ assemblage of the canon: When you talked about dark music, you’d go from Christian Death to Depeche Mode. The same thing happened with people. I met lots of people, from junkies to straight-A students with a perfect bob cut, from people looking for literary references in music to near-illiterates who listened to music and didn’t know anything else. I started with new wave in 1984, listening to Depeche Mode first and then Eurythmics and Soft Cell. Gradually, I wanted to get to the origins. I discovered Juliette Gréco, for example, and musicians who performed with her in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, dressed in black, in clubs called caves. I really liked Marc Almond, too, who recorded an album of Jacques Brel songs in English. It was called Jacques, released in December 1989 with the song J’arrive (Death is Coming), and stuff like that. He also recorded the cover of Secret Child by Juliette Gréco. I loved the connection between that music and existentialism. For me, and I think it goes for all of us, music was fundamental. It wasn’t just listening to any old song. I haven’t found the same intense feelings that the music then gave me since. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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The “scripts” used by darks to contrast and separate their music from the mainstream resonated very closely with those punks used to define the borders of their subculture, as described by Hannerz (2015). In particular, the ‘complex’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘deep’ subcultural was opposed to the ‘simple’, ‘empty’ and ‘shallow’ mainstream. Music in the dark canon was in fact described as complex and refined to the point of requiring some musical education to be fully appreciated. On the contrary, mainstream music was considered immediately and ephemerally catchy: Early Christian Death are still my favourite band. When I heard them the first time, I was horrified. I don’t think I was ready yet. If you were someone who listened to Duran Duran, Depeche Mode and Spandau Ballet, you couldn’t possibly be ready for an album like Ashes. In time, you realised how fantastic they were and got a taste for it. It’s like cinema, you can’t see a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky if you haven’t seen other stuff first. (Gp)

On the other hand, dark bands were described as addressing more challenging philosophical and existential themes and to be closer to ‘real life’ than hedonist mainstream music (in particular Italo-disco). In this sense, music in the canon was regarded as an essential resource for nurturing that “intrinsic difference” (Hannerz 2015: 47) that for darks derived from their “higher sensibility”: the same sensibility that led them to refuse the frivolous mainstream music and culture of their times: To me, labels are all the same. Punk, post-punk, dark; they were nothing more than thinking minds that needed to pursue another area, a darker one. I want to live in the light forever, be able to see the woods, take walks. I love photography, I love filming. But to understand what to appreciate in the illuminated part of life, I first have to know my dark side. I think the classification “dark” is more likely linked to adolescents in the mid ‘80s (…) but it doesn’t bother me because I’m part of the dark side of art, not the Laura Pausini or Eros Ramazzotti side. And dark means finding what’s under the rug, inside your soul. (…) When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, the only station on the radio was RAI. There was no FM or independent radio stations. Nothing. (…) That’s where I heard two songs, Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, when it came out in ’72, and Bowie’s The Laughing Gnome. I said to myself, “That’s what I want to do. I want to play, to make music.” (…) And that’s when everything started. I was very sensitive, I had a very personal mood that led me to that world and other more multi-media things like Roxy Music and Brian Eno. I even found Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian very dark. Deep down, dark

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is a school of thought and whether one guy is a dandy and the other guy wears Martian makeup, is irrelevant. Dark isn’t only Robert Smith. Dark is Bowie, Brian Eno, Brian Ferry, Sakamoto. I am dark. (…) Dark music had to come to terms with these icons: Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and glam. Robert Smith once told me, “If they didn’t exist, I wouldn’t exist.” (Garbo) To us, music represented a way to look deep within ourselves and to look ahead at the same time; something few kids had the courage to do in the ‘80s, so we were stronger. We had the courage to do some deep soul searching because the lyrics of the songs were pretty heavy. They implied meditation. And when you’re twenty years old, in meant doing a lot of work on yourself. New wave and dark wave were very effective from this point of view. (Pino Carafa) Maybe it was the search for an interior surreal space that sought to exorcise the fear of death. (…) That type of feeling was reflected perfectly on the covers of Dead Can Dance’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun and Spleen and Ideal. Music that was full of reverberations like songs by the Cocteau Twins, who opened all the reverbs on the master, creating aureole-like sounds and fantastic voice effects. When I listened to it, it was as if the music was a black and white photograph of a field where it’s snowing. (Andy)

Moreover, the ‘simplicity’ of mainstream as opposed to the ‘complexity’ of the subcultural regarded also access: mainstream music was described as incessantly broadcasted on public and private radio and television; info, interviews and posters as amply offered in teen magazines; albums as readily available in any music shop, however minor and obscure. On the contrary—notwithstanding the vast popularity of the bands that acted as ‘entry points’ in dark music territories—our interviewees stressed how being in the know about dark music demanded commitment, effort and constant research. In fact, moving on from the more popular bands required combing through niche stores, having cassette tapes recorded, bonding relationships with those who knew more and finding specialised fanzines. In this sense, the role of different kinds of mediator was of pivotal importance, starting from fanzines and the few alternative music magazines available like Rockerilla, which was first published in 1978, and Mucchio Selvaggio, which came out the year before. National distribution of these magazines and of some of the main darkzines—like Amen—contributed to define a certain level of consistency in the dark canon all over Italy:

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In 1982, I noticed there was something in the air. I began to take interest in a certain type of music and was a big fan of stuff like Adam & The Ants and The Police. I was only 14 years old and at the time you couldn’t just click and get information: you had to wait, look for things, and sometimes find things on the side. I had a classmate who had great records, like Psychic TV, even though he wasn’t dark. He was way ahead of the times. In my case, listening to music meant adding bricks to something that was growing. I’ve always been somewhat of an intellectual, in the sense that I have a hunger to learn about things. I had an encyclopaedic frenzy that I have luckily since overcome, but at the time it was in full swing. So, I read Rockerilla, or rather I studied it, and the same was true of Mucchio Selvaggio and the fanzines that were left over from punk. (Emanuela Zini) I was a staunch Depeche fan until I was blown away by a review of Virgin Prune’s Sons Find Devils, written by Red Ronnie in the magazine Tutti Frutti. They immediately played to my soul; Virgin Prunes and their two identities, Gavin Friday and Guggi. It was automatic. Some music gets to you deep inside, in the sense that you resonate with them and what they do. The video of David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes also had a huge impact on me. I was moved by the rarefied darkness, created by Lindsay Kemp and reworked using retro editing technology and a keen eye for detail. You can get that on your iPhone now, but back then it was carefully researched from both a musical and imagery point of view. I was nine years old, Ashes to Ashes came out in 1980, and until I turned fourteen, I had nothing to do with that scene. I used to break dance, I went to Milan to the wall on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I wore fluorescent clothes, but I was already curious to explore what was happening. So, I gave up break dancing, I started to play, and I got into music and synthesisers. In the meantime, I had odd jobs; I taught figure skating and I spent the money I made on records. It was a cult. Nothing like today. Today you can get anything, if you’re curious, but at the time, money was tight and you could only afford four LPs so you had to choose carefully. You’d go to Supporti Fonografici and it was always an exciting afternoon. You’d say, “Today I’m going to get a record by Alien Sex Fiend, but which one?”. (Andy)

For people in the music club enactment, DJs also had a key role in updating the scene with contemporary developments in the genre: My first practical commitment to my passion for music was spinning records in a little club near Ravizza. I spent all the money I earned and what my father could afford to give me on records. He was a tram driver and worked overtime to permit me to be dark. So, I bought the records I would play for people. Being a DJ means offering people good music, new music, and getting everyone to

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evolve with you. There’s synergy. A DJ shouldn’t just want to be cool and show off. He has a task, and it’s a burden sometimes. In 1984, the same year I began working as a DJ, my father gave me a Korg Poly 800 for my eighteenth birthday. We went to Merula in Bra, because things cost less there, and it was the cheapest synth you could buy. I had just begun playing records in clubs and I felt I wanted something else because being a DJ is like being a babysitter; playing your own music is like having your own kids. After you’ve been a babysitter for a while, you realise you like kids and want one of your own, right? Right. So, I got my first synth. I started to play around with it, wrote simple stuff at first. I kept it up until 1990, the year I recorded my first demo tape; very new age but greatly influenced by Dead Can Dance. (…) In 2005, I did the remix of Garbo’s Onda Elettrica. I’ve spent my entire life with synthesizers; electronic music was and still is my true love. Electronic from the heart, as romantic and evocative as possible. My commitment to music has been constant, and even though I didn’t really feel like doing it at times, someone would always call me and say, “I’ve got this project, come on, work with us on it.” And I’d want to do it again. Now I have to find very solid reasons before I accept a project, and I’m not interested in commercial stuff. (Pino Carafa)

With some luck, the works of these bands could be found in the few specialised record shops in Milan that also distributed fanzines and music magazines. Any advice and suggestions from the passionate shopkeepers were highly appreciated by their customers with whom they often developed personal relationships. The main point of reference was Supporti Fonografici, that Carlo Villa and Peter Pestalozza opened in 1985 in Viale Coni Zugna, and that soon moved to Corso di Porta Ticinese (on the ‘alternative’ axis of Milan): On Saturdays, there was a ritual pilgrimage to record stores. Supporti Fonografici and Tape Art were the centre of gravity of the music scene because, in addition to official releases, you could find a lot of self-produced music and very minor labels that released some really great stuff. One of these was Sordide Sentimentale.8 They published limited edition tapes, 45s and LPs that had great booklets. I remember Joy Division. So, the stores became places where we socialised and met friends and new people. That’s how I met people with whom I developed musical and publishing projects. (Angela Valcavi) The owner of Supporti Fonografici was incredible. I think his name was Peter. I remember going up to DJs continuously in discos and asking what they were playing. But this wasn’t always possible, especially when we had already asked them about a thousand questions. So, we went to Supporti without a song or

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band name, but with a tune in our head: a bass line, a chorus. And we simply sang it to the owner. He listened to us like it was the most natural thing in the world, turned to the shelves, and gave us an LP. The right LP. (Antonella Pala)

Supporti Fonografici was also a label (from 1984) and produced local dark bands like Weimar Gesang, but also world-renowned bands like the Christian Death of The Wind Kissed Pictures, who could be seen hanging out in the Milanese scene: Virgin Prunes had a huge impact on me because they were theatrical, extreme. They were precursors of Fura dels Baus, but with music at the centre, and during their performances the fire inside them exploded. They were really angry, they played dark music that ripped into you. If I Die, I Die is killer music. I still listen to it after twenty-five years. And Tuxedomoon, the absolute best in new wave in my opinion; Holy Wars is a masterpiece. It has elements of jazz mixed in with a dark atmosphere and great lyrics. And Christian Death. Catastrophe Ballet was pure poetry. Gitane Demone came from jazz so she was at the next level compared to the others. And the lyrics were definitely more intimate. Once, at the end of June, 1985, I had just returned from two months in London, and one night at the café at the Colonne, some friends introduced me to Christian Death’s drummer, David Glass. At the time, they were shooting the video for Lacrima Christi and they chose some of the girls who hung out at the place where I was DJing as extras. They were staying at some guy’s house and I drove David Glass around Milan all night long. I put him and a friend of mine, who was all over him, in the car. I got the chance to tell him that I had just bought the Poly 800 and I recognised the sounds from their album Ashes, a masterpiece like Catastrophe Ballet. (Pino Carafa)

There were also those who were privately trading LPs back and forth between Milan and London, and selling them with bootlegs and illegally recorded tapes at the Fiera di Sinigaglia, the open-air market that was one of the mandatory stops in the weekend rite of the Milanese walk and shop in all the enactments: In my case, everything took place around music. I developed my taste during the musical revolution that was going on throughout 1980 and 1981, when I was sixteen years old. I used to listen to a lot of ‘70s music, from the Grateful Dead to MC5 and the Velvet Underground. We met at the Fiera di Sinigaglia where there were stalls with boxes full of records: you could buy stuff, swap it, and have it imported from London. At the time, there were only two stores in Milan where you could find stuff like that: New Kary and Zabriskie Point. But records

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were expensive so there was a lot of taping going on. If someone had an LP, they would make ten copies of it and swap cassette tapes. If you had money, you came back from London with boxes of music. And in the meantime, we read Rockerilla and Mucchio Selvaggio. I listened to PiL, because I used to be punk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, Gang of Four, Pop Group, Rip Rig + Panic—a great band with a fierce-looking monkey on the cover of the album—and lots more. Most of them have been forgotten. I also had my industrial side with Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Einstürzende Neubauten and an Australian band, SPK; you couldn’t find any information on them. I also liked Cabaret Voltaire and Test Department. One band I could not stand from the start was U2: what the fuck is this shit? Stop! Forever shelved. (Joykix)

Trading and exchange also took place by sending and receiving parcels all over Italy, and sometimes even abroad: It was the early ‘80s. The Sex Pistols had already broken up but I wore out Never Mind the Bollocks listening to it five months in a row. I knew all their songs by heart. Then I really got into punk and new wave music reading Rockerilla and other fanzines I bought at the Fiera di Sinigaglia. There was a guy at Sinigaglia that made tapes of live concerts. He’d take a tape recorder to punk concerts, tape them and sell them. He had been to London during the height of punk and had taped the best stuff, like Joy Division. He was one of the few to see them play live in ’79–’80. At the time, I paid five-thousand lira9 for a ninety-minute Maxell tape so I had loads of taped LPs and EPs, and I learned a lot. I remember Radio Popolare had punk and new wave radio shows; the one on Tuesday evenings introduced me to The Danse Society, Wire, The Cure and Adam & The Ants that were labelled as punk but actually invented the new romantic look with tribal music and all the rest. I even listened to Litfiba, before they became Litfiba naff. I was close friends with Stiv “Rottame” who wrote for the hardcore fanzine T.V.O.R. (Teste Vuote Ossa Rotte / Empty Heads Broken Bones), and ran a really cool store off Via Torino, the New Zabriskie Point. Stiv came to the Virus and especially to the Fiera di Sinigaglia loaded with LPs by punk bands and sold them for a thousand lira10 each, so I started buying ten at a time. I kept one for me and swapped the others all over the world because I had friends in Sweden and Norway. Most of the time, the records I was sent arrived broken because you had to pack everything really well and write “fragile” everywhere in the hope that the records arrived intact. So, I told them, “remember, write ‘fragile’ on it!”. I also subscribed to a fanzine from the US called Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and I bought British magazines like Melody Maker and New Musical Express where I found people and places to swap records with in the classified ads. Every time I got home and found a pack-

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age waiting for me, it felt almost sexual, as if it were a beautiful and willing woman. You never knew what was inside the package. And each time, it was a new discovery, because music was my one and only true love. (Roy)

Yet, the principal way in which the canon was assembled was through word of mouth, personal contacts and exchange with other subculturalists—or at least dark music fans: In high school, everything was word-of-mouth; you could tell by the way someone dressed that they listened to the same music, so you went up to them and said, “I’ve got this band, do you know them?”, “No, will you tape it for me? I’ll tape this one for you.” Everyone passed taped stuff around pretty recklessly, like only parts of records; crazy stuff if you think how nowadays you can download everything for free. At the time, if you wanted a record by a certain band, you had to find someone who would tape it for you, and you were really lucky if you had an older brother. (…) Music was important because of that; you met people through it. You knew someone because you had given them a record, so then it was, like, “Why don’t we go out sometime?”. Or he was a friend of someone that you knew and he didn’t know you knew him, and you realised there was something that you all had in common. (Sergio di Meda)

These contacts were direct and, especially for darks in the loner enactment, mediated by letters, and entailed an intense exchange of information and recorded tapes. In this sense, practices of exploration/assemblage of the canon and practices of socialisation were inextricably intertwined with one another. Record shops themselves became important hubs of socialisation: I lived in the Province of Varese near the Swiss border in a small town with a population of three thousand. You can imagine how hard it was to get anything. (…) On Saturday afternoons, I bought records at the Casa del Disco in Varese and the Bottega della Musica, where you could find almost everything. We met a lot of people we would hook up with later in these two stores and we’d say to each other, “Look at what that guy is buying,” “I bought this,” “He bought this other one.” We slowly started getting to know the guys from the first clique in Varese. (Andrea)

With a canon still in the making, these practices of music circulation must be interpreted as forms of collective and bottom-up negotiation on the canonical status of subcultural resources: negotiations that integrated and

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finally validated—through acceptance or refusal—the role of mediation played by magazines, fanzines, Djs and record traders of different sorts. In several cases, these forms of negotiation developed into actual controversies, openly and discursively addressed by subculturalists, like in the case of the canonical status of Duran Duran after 1984. Indeed, one of the most heated of these controversies was about the canonical status of a distinct set of subcultural resources—concerning not only music, but also style—that from the mid-1980s began to be organised in a recognisable sub-canon: that of neofolk.11 As a music genre, neofolk is characterised by dark tones, the wide use of acoustic instruments and lyrics addressing issues of social and cultural decadence, often influenced by esoteric and neopagan themes. In particular, Death in June, the main and most representative neofolk band, was the subject of never-ending discussions. While in fact the contribution of the band to the musical genre was immediately appreciated, the values they professed, and in particular their political beliefs, were highly scrutinised and argued. The British trio led by Douglas Pearce debuted in 1983 with the mini-album The Guilty Have No Pride, followed in 1985 by the album Nada. These and their following works proposed an imaginary revolving around the theme of the ‘Death of the West’—like the title of one of their songs: their lyrics portended the fall of western civilisation in nihilism, consumerism and chaos, and were informed by a disconcerting military mysticism echoing Nazi esotericism. The band’s first single, Heaven Street, explicitly referred to Nazi concentration camps: Heaven Street was the path Jewish prisoners took to the gas chambers. From a visual point of view, Death in June sported a large repertoire of masks, military uniforms—including those worn by the Waffen-SS— and symbols like a modified Totenkopf that once again seemed to allude to Nazi Germany. The scarce information available on the band at the time didn’t help shed light on their political orientation: Douglas Pearce was stubbornly reticent to explain the use of such marked iconography. While darks in the activist enactment circumvented the issue by bracketing the problem of the band’s political beliefs (like they did with many other cultural resources, like Mishima or D’Annunzio), darks in the music club enactment were divided.12 Some of them thought that the fascist ideology exasperatedly portrayed by Death in June had to be understood as a part— and, at the same time, as the final and inevitable outcome—of the crisis of western civilisation they lamented. On the contrary, others believed that fascism was the extreme means proposed by the band to restore a western society in decay. Within this last position, many resisted the canonisation

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of the band finding it politically unacceptable. Others, conversely, found these positions close to their own, or were driven towards the extreme right by their fascination for the band: In the ‘80s, it was practically impossible to be goth and fascist; it was a contradiction in terms. It all stemmed from misinterpretation. When Death in June came onto the scene, we did ask ourselves if they were right-wing or left-wing because the lyrics and the way they dressed had a military influence. They had been members of Crisis, a left-wing punk band. But they represented a political turning point after the second half of the ‘80s. I wore camouflage, military uniforms and the Maltese cross, myself. I never had swastikas, but swastikas were often used just as a provocation. Even Siouxsie fell into the trap of wearing a swastika, but then she wrote songs like Metal Postcard and Israel to disclaim she was a Nazi. She even started wearing the yellow, six-pointed star. Aldo Chimenti, a friend of mine from Torino who wrote a book about Death in June, Nascosto tra le rune,13 explained Douglas Pearce’s beliefs to me. He said that his beliefs were erroneously interpreted as right-wing, whereas they were about the poetics and symbolism of European decadence. In any case, whoever listened to Death in June placed themselves into a specific niche, and I think the level of the entire movement started to deteriorate in part because of being drawn toward the right. (Sergio di Meda) I never really went to the root of things, but I noticed that in the dark movement there was a view on politics that was quite different from the one I had. For some, like the guys from the fanzine Amen’ and those who hung out at the Virus, politics, punk and dark were one and the same: anarchy and left-wing ideals. Then things changed and there was a lot of political apathy in the dark movement, sometimes even right-wing sympathies. I never judged or criticised these people: everyone did whatever the fuck they wanted to. The fact is that at a certain point, a great band came out: a band I really liked, even though I wasn’t crazy about their politics: Death in June. By the way, they came from another band, Crisis; hardcore communists, extremely active politically, meaning politically active in beating up fascists. After that, the neofolk movement took shape, and they were all about a world made up of runes and Viking ideals, and shit like that, that was jumbled together with right-wing elements. Basically, it was racism. I think that that was the link: Nordic imaginary filtered through Death In June. That was the breaking point: there had never been anything like it before. (Roy) The darks from Via Torino were politically ambiguous. Like Death in June were ambiguous. I wore a swastika at the time but I wasn’t a Nazi. I did it to provoke the sanctimonious left-wingers. (Nino La Loggia)

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The band and the sub-genre were finally canonised, notwithstanding the contrasts it generated within the disco club enactment. Indeed, as we have seen, within this enactment political activism was seen as a practice of the third kind14: that is, considered irrelevant to subcultural belonging (and yet influenced by it) and regarded as a personal choice.15 Under the influence of the neofolk sub-canon, the range of possible personal political choices simply began to admit right-wing positions more systematically, including specific forms of fascism. Yet, as we will also see regarding sexual orientation, the political identity of subculturalists was seen as secondary and subordinated to the main, common subcultural identity—that of dark. Different political orientations did not have any particular impact on the practices of the second kind, and therefore neofolk didn’t generate a new, distinct enactment: We weren’t into politics even though, at the time, dark meant being pro-­ anarchist. Afterwards, the dark goth movement leaned slightly to the right with the appearance of Death in June and, I admit, I became a staunch follower. Actually, I think darks just embraced the neofolk themes of the decay of civilisation and the Western world in ruins. The only thing linking it to Third Reich Nazism was the look. There wasn’t a lot of politics in our groups, in the sense that it didn’t characterise us as a movement: it was more the music and the need to have friends who had ideas in common with you. (…) The problems weren’t so much internal because many of us identified with neofolk Decadentism. The problem was with the ones external to the movement. I remember that Death in June were supposed to play in Turin (…) but they couldn’t because groups from the political squats protested. And another concert, where they were supposed to play with Der Blutharsch at the Vittoriale, was cancelled. (Andrea)

Moreover, the cultural resources within the neofolk sub-canon were never accessed alone, but always as part of a wider pattern of consumption of canonical cultural resources. In this sense, neofolk remained a sub-canon of dark and did not evolve into a distinct canon for all intents and purposes. Moving our focus from consumption to the local production of canonic music, it must be noted how the situation in Milan was actually quite contradictory. One the one hand, in fact, the ‘black tide’16 represented by loner darks, together with darks of all the other enactments, enthusiastically participated at concerts, making Milan an important stop for many international bands on tour, from the most popular to the lesser known. As we have seen, a Bauhaus gig in 1982 at the Odissea 2001 disco

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contributed to deepening tensions between Creature Simili and Virusian punx.17 Joy Division didn’t make it to Italy, but New Order tried to remedy the absence in 1982 at the Rolling Stone disco. In the same year, Siouxsie and the Banshees played at the Parco delle Basiliche on 19 July. In 1984, she played in Italy again, this time at the Teatro Tenda with Robert Smith from The Cure on guitar, and then again in 1990 at the Festa dell’Unità, the traditional festival of the Italian Communist Party. The Sisters of Mercy played on 9 April 1985 at the Odissea 2001, the same year in which The Cure performed during their ‘The Head Tour’ at the Teatro Tenda on 15 July. Depeche Mode played in Milan on 6 March 1984 at the Teatro Orfeo, and on 28 November of the same year at the Teatro Tenda. We have already described18 how these concerts were lived as sorts of rites: a moment in which the symbolic subcultural “community” became temporarily embodied, and its subcultural iconic heroes became temporarily present, ‘real’ and sometimes even accessible: The first concert I went to, thanks to my cousin, was in 1980: The Police at the Palalido in Milan on 2 April. They were my favourite band then, but when I saw the opening act I said, “This is really something!”. It was The Cramps. Suddenly I didn’t give a shit about The Police anymore. I also saw Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus in 1982, as well as Killing Joke. Gomma suggested I listen to Officine Schwartz who were the Italian version of Einstürzende Neubauten. Shit, I was floored at the first concert I saw, with the bins and other weird shit. Their music was really original and I was completely overwhelmed. (Roy) In 1989 I experienced seeing The Cure live at the Arena di Milano. They were invited to a disco after the concert. I went, but only Marc Almond came, he played support. During their previous tour in ’87, after the concert The Cure went to the Pois, the café at the Colonne, and Robert Smith started serving beers. When he arrived holding a tray, people literally fainted. I went to a Christian Death concert and I remember people saying they took the tram after the concert and my friend Luisa and I thought, “Wow, they these guys must be really poor!” I saw Litfiba a number of times, including a performance at the Parco Sempione where a really young Morgan in the band Bluvertigo,19 and Timoria with Francesco Renga played, too. There was also a guy called Joe Perrino who disappeared from the scene, phenomenally trashy: Joe Perrino & the Mellowtones. I remember him because he was so out of context: bare-chested, long hair. There was always tremendous movement around Litfiba. And I had practically become a Depeche Mode groupie. I met a guy from Turin who ran their fan club and I told him, “I don’t want to meet them to tell them how cute

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they are, I just want to say hello.” And that’s how it started. I had long conversations with Martin Gore about keyboards, that’s it. So they put me in with the fans that weren’t annoying and at every concert in Milan, I was there. I waited for them. And each time Martin Gore and I would pick up the conversation about keyboards from where we left off the last time. (Eleonora Mosca) I saw Virgin Prunes in 1983 at the Odissea 2001, the same place Sex Gang Children played and The Danse Society presented their second album, Heaven Is Waiting, the year after. Virgin Prunes were incredibly theatrical; their early performances were really over the top, extremely physical. Both of them wore women’s clothing but looked tough, masculine. I remember when the concert began, they threw talcum powder everywhere. The music was very evocative, there were few lights. And the performance was all colour, blood, red, paint, with the two of them climbing things. (Nino La Loggia) That was the season of great concerts. In ’89 The Cure’s Disintegration was released and I saw them live at the Arena di Milano. I had already seen them in ’87 on “The Kissing Tour”, but I remember the Arena concert more with Marc Almond as support and Depeche Mode backstage because they were in Milan recording six tracks of Violator. It was amazing! I remember it as a crazy experience even because I fell doing the pogo during Charlotte Sometimes. I also saw Death in June in Modena with Current 93, in 1991. And Depeche Mode a lot: the first time was on their ’87–’88 “Music for the Masses tour”. But The Cure concert at the Arena was really mind-opening, or rather, a further mind-opener. The concert was a ritual. We got there early in the morning. For some people, concerts are still a ritual today, even though they are also a tsunami: full chaos. But a lot of concerts still hold magic: in alchemical terms, concerts hold enormous potential. Music is a huge part of my life so I want to share it with others, I want to hear it played, I want to see if the person playing is real. This element has been crushed throughout the years: nowadays, singers tweet, “I had an amazing pasta today.” You wouldn’t dream of receiving a message like that from your idols back then. No wonder bands were idolised. And I still idolise Depeche. When I had the opportunity to meet them in person, I always backed out. Then, at one of their concerts in Milan in 2013, I finally shook Martin Gore’s hand. But for a long time, I was happy just to live the dream during their concerts and know they were people, individuals who played and jumped. It was hard for me when I saw Kraftwerk, too. It was already 1990 and their musical engagement was so strong that I couldn’t even imagine them on stage. Today, I see things from the stage. The magic is still there, at least at good concerts. Me and my new project, FluOn, went back to the roots [after the experience with Bluvertigo], playing in small venues, clubs, in a very nice, close dimension. Friendlier. (Andy)

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On the other hand, however, those who had bands talk about a city that was not very receptive, with few venues ready to concede their stages to emerging new wave and dark bands, and an audience that didn’t respond enthusiastically—sometimes due to the amateur level of many of these bands, that played mainly covers. Those who dreamt of making a living as musicians followed the myth of Florence, which at the time was the real capital of Italian darkwave. By the mid-1980s, many bands from the Tuscan Scene, in fact, had stably entered the national canon, such as Diaframma, Neon, Litfiba, Moda and others. Siberia by Diaframma and the EP Yassassin by Litfiba were released in 1984, while Rituals by Neon came out the following year, tracing the Italian path to darkwave: My first band was called Fandango. I played keyboards and sang backup, but I was more interested in synths. I’d go and look at them at the SIM, the musical instrument fair at the Fiera di Milano. I went straight to the Roland stand and I stayed all day. Our singer’s name was Pippo, very good-looking, who wanted to be a little new wave, a little glam, and a little dark. He worked for a fashion magazine and it drove us literally mad. We were hoping for a total black look, not very ornate, linear, but instead he’d take Jean Paul Gaultier clothing from the photo shoots. He had a marvellous baritone voice, almost operatic. Low, thundering voices were popular then, but the problem was that he was totally in love with himself. In all honesty, we weren’t very good at that time, but we played. I remember a gig at Gremlins in largo Corsia dei Servi in Milan: Pippo was wearing a white trench coat and he looked at himself in the mirror the entire time. He was supposed to re-enter a song but he never did. We were all in black and he was in his white, billowing trench coat. The venue had given us everything: wind, smoke machine, everything. And there he was with his back to the audience because he was fascinated by himself in the mirror. The trench coat flew and the song didn’t take off. We played a few cover songs, A Forest and Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure, and some of our own songs that were influenced by The Cure. We changed names once or twice and played in various clubs and fairs around Como during the spring and summer. We would pitch our music wherever there was a place to play. (…) Then in the ‘90s we won the Festival di Rescaldina. It was pretty important at the time, and we were near the top at another festival in Arese. Garbo saw us at Rescaldina (…) and asked us to collaborate with him on his new album. I co-wrote one of the songs and sang backup on it. (…) The fact is everyone was envious of Florence. We used to say that in Tuscany even the smallest band had a chance to enter the same scene as Litfiba and Diaframma. We thought so. After we won Rescaldina, we fooled ourselves into thinking we would be called to play at Arezzo Wave. That was the idea: if you won, your song would be played on Radio Popolare and your band

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would be on the list for Arezzo Wave. Instead, things went nowhere, except for the encounter with Garbo. We even sang a duo together: we sang Dead Can Dance style. I remember getting a meeting with a producer I will not name at Torre Velasca. He gave us the once over and said, “You’re pretty good and you’re nice, but I’m sick of all this English crap and I don’t understand why two such sunny, upbeat people go around dressed like that.” (Eleonora Mosca)

Indeed, no band from Milan and its neighbourhoods could make it beyond a niche and local notoriety. Enrico Ruggeri ended his new wave experience with Decibel after participating at the Sanremo Music Festival with the song Contessa in 1980, and became famous as a solo artist taking a different musical path. In the following years, a few new wave bands were active in Milan, but in very tight circles. They included La Maison, Other Side, State of Art and Jeunesse D’Ivoire: young enthusiasts of synth and ethereal atmospheres influenced by German electronic music from the 1960s and 1970s and industrial music like Throbbing Gristle, SPK and Cabaret Voltaire. These bands have recently been rediscovered thanks to the philological work of the Tuscan label Spittle Records, that rereleased their most popular songs on the compilation, Milano New Wave 1980–83. The song A Gift of Tears by Jeunesse D’Ivoire, also appeared on the 2001 compilation Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol.1 published by a label from London, Angular Recording Co. Weimar Gesang were also active in Milan: today they are considered a niche cult band, even if their work has never been rereleased. Lastly, in 1983, the keyboard player for Jeunesse D’Ivoire, Rieko Cha-Cha Hagiwara, joined 2+2=5 led by Nino La Loggia and Giacomo Spazio. The former came from the HCN punk experience, and with the new band adopted a more obscure new wave sound that local recording studios—used to 1970s sounds—were not fully able to valorise: a further sign of weakness in the local scene. Their debut album was released at the end of 1983 and had a title that resonated like a crystal-­ clear break away from punk ‘no future’: Into the Future. The album was reprinted in 2010, once again by Spittle Records: In the early ‘70s, when I was around thirteen years old, I listened more to freak music, but the record that made me change genre was David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust in 1972. In the years that followed, I got into Joy Division and I listened to early Warsaw that was very punk. We went to see Bauhaus and The Clash play in Bologna, but the concert that had the most impact on me the most was Siouxsie in Turin. She was on tour with her album Juju. I already knew her music, I had the three records before that one. The second wave of punk, on the

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other hand, the one with The Exploited, bored me. I found it vulgar, and even street punk was too simplistic, it was all just, “fuck, fuck, fuck the system!”. You grew up, you evolved, you changed. You kept to your roots but you started listening to different and yet related things. Rieko, my girlfriend, recommended bands like Birthday Party and Pop Group that really struck me. So, when I returned from my first trip to Japan, I started playing with Giacomo Spazio. We played our first gig in May 1982 at the Cinema Porpora in Milan that, sadly, has since become a bank. At the time it was an art-house cinema and our idea was to combine film and music. We had another gig in Turin with La Maison, then Giacomo insisted Rieko play keyboards because if there are only two of you on stage, either you bang out sounds like crazy or the concert is sad. We recorded our first album with Rieko: self-financed of course. The record was instinctive, very naïf, and had sounds that were popular. At the time, recording studios had a traditional concept of music: they produced sounds from the freak scene and progressive rock. They took away all my snare drums, the vocals were way louder than the bass, and it sounded like a classic rock band. We were anything but classic, but it was difficult to get that across. Afterwards, Vince joined the band on bass and we were associated with La Maison that played very ­experimental new wave. Then there was Kubrix and Bahnhof, who were really good, and we also worked well with Weimar Gesang. The covers of their albums had amazing graphics. (Nino La Loggia)

The only Milanese artist gaining national (and international) notoriety was Renato Garbo, who was considered by many as the Italian David Bowie. In 1981, his first album, A Berlino… Va bene, was released, even if real notoriety didn’t come until a few years later when he appeared on TV at the Sanremo Music Festival and Festivalbar20: Everyone’s a musician on the Internet today, and it’s all shit, but nobody cares. Back then it was harder. You needed a hundred million lire21 to put out a record, and you needed a record company. I began by putting together four crackpots that became my group. During the summer, I went into the recording studio to record my demos (…). There was a sound engineer who played keyboards with a very interesting hard metal band called Biglietto per l’Inferno, and I was trying out pieces that were ideas for my first album, A Berlino… Va bene. Anyway, this guy says to me one day, “Can I get a record label exec to listen to your stuff?” I was seventeen years old, I was playing because I liked it, I never thought it could actually become a job. I had a diploma as a building inspector and I was probably going to enrol in Architecture. That’s how I saw myself. I wasn’t the kid who said, “I want to become famous.” My problem was that I had things to say, and above all, to say them to myself. Anyway, this guy

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brings my demos to the general manager of a record company. I think the train of thought was, something’s happening abroad and there’s no one doing it in Italy. There were a few things in Florence but Diaframma, for example, were still unknown. I was discovered by chance. So, the record exec called me to his mega office in Via Meda, that’s where Fonit Cetra had its offices then. I went on a winter’s morning, intimidated by it all. Huge offices, secretaries… Record-­making meant big bucks then. I remember a huge desk and someone saying, “Please, have a seat.” I waited ten minutes then this man walked in and looked at me. I was dressed dark, but not excessively, I was a kid. But I think he saw something in me even though I looked like Lucio Dalla, short and hairy, and there was no way I could represent the mood, the area they were trying to define. Then, with his back to me, he took my cassette, threw it on the table and said, “Is this your own stuff?”, and made coffee. I thought, “Shit! What did I do wrong?”. Finally, he turned around and said, “I’m going to be the producer for EMI, and I’m going to sign you.” That was 1979. My album was going to be released on 21 September 1981. My mother couldn’t believe it. In May 1981, I finished recording and Giampiero Scussel, the producer at EMI, called me and said, “Get ready, you’re going on tour with Franco Battiato and doing seventy concerts.” I was terrified. Battiato was about to release La voce del padrone that came out on 21 September, the same day as A Berlino… Va bene. I travelled around with him and it was an amazing experience: I learned how to move on stage, there were two thousand people at every concert, we only got one day off every ten days. And that’s how everything started. A little while later, Diaframma, Andrea Chimenti’s Moda and Neon came onto the Italian scene. Neon was my group for a while in the early ‘90s. Internet didn’t exist then, I didn’t really know much about what was happening around the world unless I saw it on TV or heard it on the radio. I didn’t have a basis for comparison. I didn’t know The Cure or others existed. I met some of them while on tour. Robert Smith and I were together on a radio show, Azzurro in Bari. He sang, Why Can’t I Be You? Our rooms were next to each other in the hotel. We got up one morning to give interviews in the lobby. I got ready, put on a little face powder, eyeliner, and I left the room. He left his room, looked at me in the elevator, stopped, and went back. His hair was flat and he wasn’t wearing make-up so he went back to his room to put make-up on when he saw that I was all done up. Then I finally met David Bowie. I interviewed him for the magazine Ciao 2001. He was let go by RCA because they said he wasn’t selling enough records. Can you believe it?! He was really pissed off so he self-produced Let’s Dance. EMI bought it and he came to Italy to promote it. We were at lunch in Milan at the Hotel Plaza, and Bowie said, “You live in this world. Be careful because a lot of people you have to live with don’t understand.” It was more or less the same thing Brian May from Queen said to me, “What the fuck are you doing here?” (Garbo)

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Aside from the influential figure of Garbo, however, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Milanese scene started nurturing bands of key importance for the national and international canon22:

7.3   Literature, Cinema and the Arts Within the dark canon, music did not stand alone. It intertwined in an inextricable knot with style and other subcultural resources appropriated from literature, cinema, theatre and the visual arts. From our interviewees’ points of view, these cultural resources reverberated together, reflecting the same aesthetics, atmospheres and, ultimately, the same ‘way of thinking’: Besides music, it was the whole way of thinking that fascinated me. It was a way of seeing things that probably made other people sad but filled me with a great zest for life. I noticed that there was a sort of common thread among “people who dressed in black”, and that this thread brought up interesting issues. Why were some bands called Bauhaus and Weimar Gesang? So, I started to research what was behind these cultures. I went to Germany and Vienna to see the artistic movements that had had something to do with the genre: Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Joan Miró… I noted that, in general, people who liked dressing in a certain way also thought in a certain way; they had a particular taste in common. We opposed banality: at the time I perceived the world as very banal, with all its rules and having to sit behind a desk all dressed up in a tie… As I got older, I realised there are situations where this is necessary, but at the time I harboured a feeling of rebellion. It was all about: I think differently, I’ll close myself off in my shell. I discovered that my shell actually held other people like me in it, and what the fuck did I care about what was outside? (Eleonora Mosca)

Just as some iconic bands worked as entry points into the exploration of a wider musical territory, music represented an invitation to more complex patterns of cultural consumption. These heterogeneous cultural resources were appropriated into the canon following a close-knit web of references, mainly through what we have defined ‘internal validation’: close examination of the lyrics of canonised bands, the artwork of their albums, and other forms of homage and citations led darks to look for a specific book, to discover a writer, to develop a passion for a director or an artistic movement:

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Through songs, lyrics, sounds, I ventured further into this world, discovering nuances and associations between various forms of art. For example, the film The Hunger,23 starts with a Bauhaus video, my first true love. I also made connections between film genres like horror and thrillers and the gloomy sound of dark music. My journey into discovering music, art and literature was solitary but very driven. I was hungry for more knowledge; always in a never-ending search for LPs to buy and books to devour. As for art, in view of my preferences in taste and style, I think Giger is the most complete: I love the biomechanical genre and, obviously, Gothic architecture. Clearly, there were some people for whom listening to music and dancing in clubs was enough, but most of us, without question, had a shared passion for reading in common. And I think it was clearly tied to the subculture and not only to us as individuals. We were sensitive to specific topics that made us kindred, and everything happened spontaneously. (Antonella Pala)

The Cure, for example, were (and are) encyclopaedic in their literary references. The song At Night, from their second LP, Seventeen Seconds, was nothing other than a transposition of the short story At Night, written by Franz Kafka in 1920, and it even included some of the words. Charlotte Sometimes (1981) was inspired by the children’s book of the same name written in 1969 by British author Penelope Farmer, and its B-side, Splintered in Her Head, was a line from the novel. The song Bananafishbones (1984) was taken from a short story by the writer of The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, A Perfect day for Bananafish. How Beautiful You Are (1987) was an adaptation of Baudelaire’s poem Les yeux des pauvres, while their later song A Letter to Elise (1992) drew from Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (The Holy Terrors) and Letters to Felice, citing Kafka again. Furthermore, All Cats Are Grey echoed the Gothic trilogy Gormenghast by the twentieth-century British author, Mervyn Laurence Peake; Other Voices was taken from Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and the song M in Seventeen Seconds again cited Camus from his novel A Happy Death, published posthumously in 1971. The band was not unique to this form of inspiration and cultural homage: for example Join Hands, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ second album released in 1979, was imbued with English pre-romanticism and sublime poetics, in addition to the Medieval melancholy of the Ossian cycle of epic poems and homages to Edgar Allan Poe. Mozipedia, written by Simon Goddard in 2009, endeavours to track all the literary and artistic references in songs by Morrissey and The Smiths. Bauhaus invited their fans to the eponymous artistic movement or to the works by Antonin Artaud

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exactly as they invited them to music by Brian Eno and T. Rex. The Virgin Prunes’ theatrical approach led darks to La Fura dels Baus and Japanese Butoh dance. Just before the release of his album Tender Prey (1989), Nick Cave published a novel himself, And the Ass Saw the Angel: the book was a must-read for all fans, and it introduced them to the Southern Gothic genre used by William Faulkner and Mary Flannery O’Connor. Italian bands in the canon were just as rich in their references: CCCP, for example, led to Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Majakovskij and Soviet Constructivism. Cinema was given the same attention as literature and the arts, with some cult movies becoming must-sees for all darks: such was the case, for example, with The Hunger by British director Tony Scott, where a diaphanous Catherine Deneuve plays a bisexual vampire in love with both bony David Bowie and androgynous Susan Sarandon. Peter Murphy, lead vocalist for Bauhaus, appears in the opening scenes: on stage in a cellar club, enveloped in a cloud of smoke, he opens his cape to form bat wings from behind a grate and sings, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, a tribute to the Hungarian actor who played Bram Stoker’s Dracula in film in the 1930s. Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott is another relevant example for its dystopic depiction of the urban sprawl, the visual style of its replicants—above all, the one interpreted by punkish Daryl Hannah—and its existential themes addressing issues of life, death and identity. The canon also firmly featured works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German master of cinema who died of a sleeping pill and cocaine overdose on 10 June 1982 at the young age of 37. In the same way, the movie, Nosferatu the Vampyre, directed by Werner Herzog and released in 1979, was very popular and immediately led viewers to the 1922 original, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and to Expressionism: one of the historical avant-gardes darks felt to be the heirs of. Horror from the 1970s was also well received, including the movies by Italian director Dario Argento: Suspiria (1977), in particular, was appreciated for its blatantly Gothic setting between Freiburg and the Black Forest: I read The Divine Comedy. An incredible journey, a path to purification. And most of us had read books on Joy Division and The Cure to learn the lyrics. The words of Piggy in the Mirror by The Cure are fantastic: he looks in the mirror and sees a pig, the ugliest side to him. It probably refers to Sigmund Freud’s Eros and Thanatos; the most primordial and savage aspects of our being, the errors we make. Regarding films, Blade Runner was the quintessen-

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tial film of new wave: we all saw it when it came out in 1982. Then there was the film The Hunger that featured a concert by Bauhaus and starred David Bowie and the stunning Catherine Deneuve, who could knock you out with a single glance. We liked science fiction because it portrayed the future like new wave did, and envisaged a more evolved man: Ray Bradbury, Arthur Charles Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip Dick. In the eighties we were told that in the year 2000 we would be driving around in our own spaceships. Nothing of what they had prophesised happened, and we didn’t even evolve, but it was still pretty stimulating. That’s why I place Bradbury on the same level as Tolstoy, without a doubt, and Dostoevsky, too. They hold the same view as new wave philosophy. Evolution is the keyword to being truly alternative. (Pino Carafa)

The logic of assemblage of this trans-media canon through the play on cross-references closely mirrored the one we have already described for music: interviewees resorted to the same scripts and depicted their patterns of cultural consumption as ‘complex’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘deep’. Once again, they underlined how a continuous effort of in-depth research was needed for the exploration/assemblage of the canon: Above all, it was a matter of atmosphere. For me, music was a passkey: it wasn’t crucial in itself. What attracted me was the context. I was more into cinema and art. I was interested in Twentieth Century avant-garde art. Dadaism was all the rage in the places where we hung out, and so was the phenomenon of graffiti that was just taking off in Italy at the time. Political authors like Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin wrote about anarchy, and painters from Fuseli to Goya depicted dreams and nightmares. Some artists brought out their personal inclinations that clearly had a dark side. And then there were films: German films, Fassbinder in spades, and plays by Jean Genet. The only problem was that at the time, none of these were easily available, so interest in culture acted as a go-between. I saw most things at cinematheques, like the Cineteca Italiana24 in via San Marco, the Obraz cinema in Largo La Foppa, and the De Amicis. They had extremely concentrated programmes. You’d bring a sandwich and watch all of Fassbinder’s or Herzog’s works over two days; afternoon and evening. You’d watch one film after another and most of them weren’t even repeated. That’s why, compared to today, personal cultural choices and tastes were truly distinctive: they became catalysts, identifiers. Today, a plethora of things are available with a click and you can experiment in lots of different directions without much effort. At the time, your tastes were your I.D. card, and it was impossible to be part of a cultural sphere without reflecting it in the way you dressed and the way you lived. (Roxie)

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Once again, these forms of expression were seen as stemming from—and nurturing—a higher sensibility that represented the “intrinsic difference” (Hannerz 2015: 47) of darks from the empty and superficial mainstream. The themes of death and mourning that greatly influenced subcultural style and the subcultural resources in the canon, were perceived as the antithesis to a widespread operation in social removal performed by the hedonist mainstream culture of the 1980s in order to drive ‘the masses’ to accept the empty promises of consumerism and to lead an impoverished conformist life. In this sense, reflecting on death with the help of the resources in the canon was described as an act of courage, a rediscovery of existential truths and a form of rebellion, all at the same time: [We appreciated] horror, science fiction, philosophy and art in general: from paintings to theatre to cinema. [We read] the poétes maudit, the Milanese Scapigliatura and Poe: they all talk about death. (…) During the years of “Milan to be sipped”, with its cocktails and paninari, death was unthinkable because society had a single common concern which was consumerism. Its aim was to keep us all far away from thinking. You had to work, produce, reproduce, consume. You weren’t supposed to have philosophies on life or death because if you started thinking about these things, you became dangerous. A revolution driven by a political movement, like in the seventies, or a cultural movement, like in the sixties, didn’t exist anymore. In the nineteen eighties, action stopped and thinking began. Thought was evolution, and it represented a danger. That was the impression we had: people were opening their eyes. (Sergio di Meda)

In these cultural journeys, the role of the mediators we saw at play for the assemblage of the music canon seems to be less relevant, with the exception of some fanzines, like Amen, and of the organisers of subcultural events, primarily the group at the Helter Skelter.25 Personal initiatives of exploration and discussion with other darks were the primary means in which the canon was assembled, socialised and institutionalised. These discussions were direct and/or mediated by letters, especially for darks in the loner enactment: When I was a teenager, my parents were often away so after going to the Hysterika, I would invite my friends over. We’d talk with music in the background and sometimes we’d read together. I think that kind of thing was different from what most other teenagers were doing. We’d dance and get drunk and get carried away just like everybody else, but then—sometimes there were a lot of us—we’d end up sharing an intimate moment talking about music we

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listened to, or what we were reading, and everyone expressed their personal feelings. I felt different. Even though I wasn’t as elitist as a lot of others, I realised that nobody even remotely understood my lifestyle. (Paola)

These forms of bottom-up negotiations led to the definition of a ‘core’ of widely shared subcultural resources: to be profoundly familiar with them was taken for granted and, as it happened with dark iconic bands, could not be the basis for gaining subcultural capital. Such was the case, for example, with L’étranger (The Outsider) written in 1942 by Albert Camus, that had a place on every The Cure fan’s bookshelf: Killing an Arab, the band’s first single (1978) condenses the crucial moment of the novel in its lyrics. In the same way, the decadent atmospheres that saturated music in the dark canon were closely associated to Charles Baudelaire and the other French poétes maudit that were explicitly quoted by many bands, such as Dead Can Dance: We didn’t talk about these things. We took it for granted that they were part of everyone’s personal journey. I never asked anybody, “Have you read The Outsider?” It was pretty obvious everyone had. (…) Later on, it was like a ­ sking, “Have you seen the film Edward Scissorhands?”26 Pfft, like, it’s so obvious. (Emanuela Zini)

Only other less common and—at the time—less explored cultural discoveries worked as forms of distinction within the subculture. If anything, cultural consumption patterns where these core resources figured together with music marked the difference between the subcultural and the mainstream, especially from the mid-1980s on, when the more prominent iconic bands started gaining popularity and became well known to the general public. For darks, these forms of mainstream appropriations were superficial and were limited to the surface of the subculture, since they disentangled the consumption of music from the web of cultural references it was a part of: I lived seeing a certain film, reading a certain book as something magic. It meant living dark as the crepuscular side of your true self. Music had drawn me to literature, too. I read Les Fleurs du mal while I was at art school, even though it wasn’t on the study syllabus. I started reading short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and it was the first time I took advantage of the books we had at home. In my opinion, dark was the convergence of various forms of cultural consumption. Remember that it was at the time when the dark icon, Robert Smith, was

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accepted by the mainstream magazine Ciao 2001. I belonged to the generation that got the chance to see the pop side, the popular side of dark that no longer made you think of a Batcave atmosphere somewhere in London. Everything had become more massified. In 1987, the song Why Can’t I Be You? by The Cure was presented on the television programme Azzurro at the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, under the Polygram label, and it became a mass phenomenon. (Andy)

Naturally, music was entangled also with style, as one of the main subcultural resources.

7.4   Style In his research on 1990s goth in the UK, Paul Hodkinson (2002) has shown how the scene, “rather than being entirely reliant upon ‘authentic’ processes of mutual gravitation or spontaneous reaction, (…) was and always had been thoroughly reliant upon media and commerce in a variety of forms”. In contrast to the classical approach of the School of Birmingham (and in particular to Hebdidge), the author therefore concluded that “the involvement of profit motives and communications media can be highly conducive to the cultural substance deemed (…) to characterise subcultures” (196). This is also evident in 1980s dark in Milan. Regarding media, we have already underlined how the dark canon was highly mediated from the very beginning because Milanese darks assembled it not only through socialisation among peers, but also by appropriating the cultural resources they found in independent and—from the mid-1980s on—mainstream media. In the interviewees’ narratives about their first access to the subculture, a key role was always played by visual media, like television, music magazines, fanzines and also albums by iconic bands, with their pictures and graphics. Indeed, music and the style shown in these media worked together to trigger the moment of ‘sudden revelation’ mentioned by all interviewees as their first step into the subculture: My standard of style was Robert Smith. So, from one moment to the next, I started wearing black, I cut my hair and started to smear lipstick on my mouth just like him. (Sara) I was extremely fascinated by a video by Depeche Mode, and not just because of the music. I was struck by their slightly androgynous look, between dark and ambiguous, and I started to copy it right away. (Donatella Bartolomei)

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I can’t remember exactly how the change came about, but in ’85 I was definitely an angry dark trying to create my own style by taking pieces from various looks singers had. I began listening to The Cure so I teased my hair; then I liked Siouxsie so I bought a curling iron to make my hair frizzy. I remember following a girl in London because she was wearing really cool boots and I wanted to ask where she got them. I was sixteen and she told me, “in Lugano”. I wrote and signed a permission slip, went to Lugano to buy them but didn’t find them. (Emanuela Zini)

The intertwining of style with visual and others resources in the subcultural canon—mostly literature—was addressed by Catherine Spooner (2004) who stressed “the dependence of Goth subculture upon literary narratives, principally those of vampire fiction (…)”, and clarified how “animating these kind of narratives through dress is an important aspect of Goth fantasy life” (195): You couldn’t have anything that wasn’t black. Your attitude ranged from anguished and desperate to that of a melancholy soul, and your manner had to be very dandy, decadent and extremely polished. It was a style that drew from a genre of literature; Oscar Wilde, Poe. And at the time I was deeply moved by Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, and obviously by the great Baudelaire. We used a lot of symbols tied to necrophilia, death, crosses, and we even went to cemeteries, but not to desecrate the graves. They were expeditions that had nothing to do with satanic worship; they were just night-time walks with music in the background. Then piercing and tattoos hit the scene. They were illegal then, and nobody was supposed to know that there was a guy that made tattoos because he would have risked god knows what. Piercing came from Psychic TV and that scene. For the person getting a tattoo, there was a rituality to it and it had a very important meaning. We used our entire body to express what we thought and how we felt. It was the only territory that had been left to us. (Joykix)

For Spooner, in fact, goth style actually represents one of the historical manifestations of the broader genre of Gothic, even if it should not be considered, “a monolithic entity not subject to historical contingency” (191). Indeed, interviewees underlined how style, far from being monolithic, presented a wide range of heterogeneity: whilst reflecting common tastes, it varied depending on sub-canons and individual creativity: There were differences amongst us, not like today where we’re pretty consistent. New Romantics wore a lot of frills, new wavers wore jackets, skinny ties and women’s hairstyles—even men—, while darks at the time often wore crosses,

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sometimes even upside-down. I can’t tell you the reason for that: I think it was supposed to represent religious refusal. The new waver category covered everyone who was exotic, a little alternative, a little flashy. They mainly hung out at the Plastic where you’d often see people that looked dark, flashy, but never confrontational. But that was only fashion, there was no political association. (Sergio di Meda) New wavers chose their own personal look and it was more audacious, more imaginative. Dark wave was the extreme version of new wave that preferred grey to black. I’d say that from 1980 to the end of ’84 we were more new wavers. Then, around 1985, there was the passage to dark: nobody was going around with a lock of hair on their forehead and grey coats anymore. Simple Minds started recording more commercial albums and so did Depeche Mode with People Are People. Some music was going in directions we didn’t like. Therefore, from the Hysterika on, we listened to Alien Sex Fiend, The Cramps, The Sisters of Mercy: heavy stuff, very extreme. And our look became more extreme as a consequence: our hair was more teased, we wore heavy makeup, black fingernail polish, boots with a million buckles, trousers with zippers. Very punk-looking stuff. We looked like a punk in mourning. That’s how it was until ’89. (Pino Carafa)

As documented in a number of photographic books portraying the subculture at an international level—including Italy (Baddeley 2010; Scharf 2011; in particular for the 1980s, see Harriman and Bontje 2014)—the variations of style depending on sub-canons ranged from glam to punk, even though loud colours were substituted by black—including lipstick, eyeshadow and nail polish—purple, white and grey. Some preferred the sober essence of new wave with black suits and ties, long dark coats, and asymmetric haircuts. Those into neofolk, in the later 1980s, adopted a more military style with uniforms, combat boots and battledresses. The key relevance of individual creativity, in turn, was systematically stressed by interviewees to counter dark style to fashion, coherence in style to massification and to the mere emulation of iconic bands, and ultimately the subculture to what Erik Hannerz defines as the representation of the “undifferentiated mainstream” (2015: 40), often epitomised by the subculture of the paninari: The paninari wore a uniform. They had to wear Timberland, Naj-Oleari socks, a Moncler with or without sleeves and have a tanning salon tan… If you didn’t have all these things, you weren’t a paninaro and they kicked you out on

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your ass. It wasn’t like that at all with us. Not all darks wore Dr. Martens, for example. You followed the wave but with your own creativity. I had some plastic, yellow crosses with glitter copied from some of the British pop bands. Creativity was a must, it was commended, and maybe that’s what characterised us because we wanted to flaunt something that was uniquely ours. (Roberto Schieppati) We wanted to be different from the paninari who were just spoiled, rich kids with designer clothes. We hated them because it was all about fashion for them. If you happened to talk to the paninari, some of them wanted to be fascist at all costs but in reality, they didn’t know anything. It was a matter of being part of a group: if you got one of them alone, they didn’t even know what they were representing. In fact, the paninari disappeared pretty quick because they had no substance. They were just photocopies of themselves: they all dressed the same, wore the same name brands, the same shoes, the same jackets (…). Even though we all wore different shades of black, everyone had their own personal style. I got to the point where I wore rice flour on my face to look really white and once, during one of my first holidays alone in Rimini, at sixteen, I even wore blue blush like Gary Numan and made my eyes up to look beaten up. I bought any old dress and reworked it to look more particular, more in sync with my tastes. I loved Lycra, it was simple to cut and tear. I couldn’t actually sew, so I altered the clothes using knots, safety pins and zippers. Anything I could find. (Antonella Pala) I always considered [style] an art form. I enjoyed living that kind of aesthetic and I identified with it. I liked myself that way. I thought everyone else was wrong. Everyone looked the same, what a snooze-fest. We were probably immature, but we were nothing like the paninari from an aesthetical research point of view. Paninari were invented by the media, they didn’t make any sense. (Gabriele Trezzi) I took rosaries from my grandmother’s drawer and I put safety pins in my ears. You didn’t spend money on clothes, you had to find the right things as cheaply as possible and work them to your style, invent your own style. You had to stick to a general aesthetic code, but you had to be yourself. (Sara) We didn’t follow handed down, pre-packaged designs. No, we had no idea where what we were doing was coming from. We were concentrated on expression, on finding visual artifices to communicate something that was hard to find elsewhere. Of course, someone had drawn the guidelines: Siouxsie became an icon for a lot of girls and so did Peter Murphy and Robert Smith. But each of us experimented, we mixed things together. That was how you proclaimed

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your otherness from the prevailing norms to the world. Punk was like that, too: a lot of effort was put into experimenting with look, even though it wasn’t as obsessive as it was for darks. (Joykix) For years now, they have been selling ripped jeans, but back then you ripped them or you shaped them the way you wanted with safety pins. We are more standardised nowadays. Clothes are all the same; you go to Camden Town in London to find them. At the time, fashion was customised, it was personal theatricality, depending on the season: in spring-summer you wore pointed-toe shoes or Creepers that rockabillies wore in the ‘50s, tight, high-waisted trousers… (Andy)

Regarding commerce, it was of key relevance from two points of view. First because, notwithstanding their criticism towards the paninari’s ‘brand-name uniform’, darks favoured some specific models and even brands for their outfits, especially of shoes, that could only be found in specialised shops. Prescribed models were, for example, Creepers— adopted from teddy boys through the mediation of punk—and winklepickers—pointed-toe shoes inspired by fifteenth-century Crakow shoes, while preferred brand names were, for example, Dr. Martens, which soon became synonymous with combat boots. As a matter of fact, within the activist enactment, these preferences were seen as forms of compromise with consumerism and were openly resisted: with regards to combat boots, activist darks preferred the analogous lower-priced versions of Dr. Martens they found in work-ware shops. This was another difference in the rules of the practice of dressing that we addressed when we presented the different enactments of dark in Milan27: The style of many of the darks in the Milanese scene included branded accessories, sometimes quite expensive. For example, at one point everybody had Dr. Martens boots. We preferred to buy our boots in shops selling work ware. We didn’t have money, and those boots were definitely cheaper. I’d say that there was also a political point in that, because if you gave up to consumerism like everybody else, what was the point of it all in the end? (Angela Valcavi)

Second, because notwithstanding their emphasis on DIY and customisation, darks assiduously visited the small specialised shops that started to appear in Milan during the 1980s and were often owned by other subculturalists. Many of these shops also sold their goods by mail order, while the shop Inferno & Suicidio was part of a small chain with selling points

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in Turin and Prato. In these places, darks found not only styles and brands of shoes they could not find elsewhere, but also T-shirts of goth bands and novelists and poets in the canon, and even original articles manufactured by the shops themselves: There were a lot of different currents in Milan. The store Inferno & Suicidio in Via Torino was for hardcore goths. I preferred Zac Style on a street off Via Larga. They had only one display window, and it was really out of the way. There was a guy who made clothes really badly, but they were fabulous. He had great taste in choosing unusual fabrics. I remember I bought an incredible burgundy-coloured jacket there, in really dark velvet that looked like upholstery. It wasn’t finished perfectly, but it was fantastic anyway. The Zoccolaio was inside the Duomo underground stop: that’s where hardcore goths bought their pointed-toe boots, buckles, really tight trousers, jackets, frock-coats in purple— the colour of funeral homes. And huge black crosses. I was more of an “intellectualloid” and had a softer style. I dressed like David Sylvian, even though I put flour in my hair as well as hairspray, gel or beer to keep it sticking out. However, my world had very few colours in it: never purple, only grey, white and black, interchangeably. My friends and I took photos outside abandoned factories or in front of the lake, looking off into the distance wearing sunglasses. It was a Simple Minds image, who I liked a lot then. My look stayed the same for years, and I never wore makeup. (Eleonora Mosca) Aesthetics was fundamental. I was struggling but I did what I could. I went to stores in Milan like Zac Style, Inferno & Suicidio and Corneil’s, and I drew the album cover of The Sisters Of Mercy’s Floodland on the back of my studded leather jacket, which I still have. That was a great trend: depicting the covers of your favourite artists on the back of your studded jacket. There were some amazing works: the Alien Sex Fiend logo or a drawing of Christian Death. I teased my hair and shaved it underneath: tease hair, hairspray, tease hair again. It was my natural colour, it was a lighter shade of blond than now. (Andy)

In all its variations, dark style in the 1980s was not only a matter of taste but was also associated with specific symbolic meanings and stood for a distinct set of values. We have already pointed out how, within all enactments, style had a primary confrontational role: it was conceived as a way to provoke ‘conformists’, and to visibly challenge the new consumer values that were all the rage in the 1980s in Milan. Through their style, darks wanted to challenge any preconceived notions associated with specific forms of dressing and flaunted a blatant refusal of all the prescriptions that were taken for granted on how to conduct a ‘good’ and normal life:

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Being alternative was a way to rebel against preconceptions. Back then, whoever wore ripped jeans was automatically considered an asshole, whereas those who could afford a Moncler were cool. I hated these preconceptions and the value system they represented. I was out to challenge the world in the way I dressed, “I’ll show you that I can be a better person than the guy in a suit and tie.” Apart from all the existentialist talk about how harsh life was, that I think was pretty typical of adolescence, what mattered to me was fighting against preconceptions. That’s why I am extremely proud of having lived through that period. I’m proud of myself for not choosing to be a paninara: it seems easy now but it wasn’t then. In dark, I wanted to distance myself from the paninari who believed that a person’s worth was determined by money and the things they could buy. We were the first generation precluded the possibility of doing any truly heroic acts, so ours, like punk before us, was a sort of minor heroism: getting on a tram with a shaved head and the risk of getting beat up by the paninari. (Emanuela Zini) Fashion also reflected a way to conceive the self: it meant breaking away from everything that was taught to you as a given since birth. Dressing the way we did was a way, although eccentric and concocted, to put your foot down and declare, “I’m this”, or “I’m that.” And the only way to do that was to shock other people, even if only outwardly. There were some people who did this dishonestly, pretending to be good and then doing bad stuff in secret. I think that working on appearance is healthier: you are taking a step back from the given, but you do it ostentatiously. I’ve always been an exhibitionist, and in time I cultivated my exhibitionism and it became my job: I exhibit myself to put food on the table, either with music or in art. So, style and look were a form of identification, but at the same time they were also a form of de-identification from your “nature”, from what your family had taught you. The fact is that at a certain point, you asked yourself, “Who said it had to be this way?”. Remember, we were in the full-blown moment of a lifestyle tied to money, excess and families that could finally afford a holiday home. Digging a niche for yourself was invaluable. (Andy)

Among the stereotypes that darks wanted to crush were those related to gender. In fact, the interviewees devoted a great deal of attention to it in their narratives on style: Dark aesthetic also played on gender, like musical bands like Virgin Prunes did. Tearing fishnet stockings and making a T-shirt and gloves out of them was very common from an iconographic point of view. You worked hard at it: you took stockings and transformed them, you wore black lipstick, you made your face really white, you used black eyeshadow and blush to make your face look gaunt. (Andy)

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In short, interviewees explained how style had a key role in refusing gender stereotypes and contributed to their deconstruction. On the one hand, it allowed darks to experiment freely with identity and sexuality beyond the traditional binary oppositions of gender; on the other hand, it helped them construct a more open and equal relationship between and across genders, and across different sexual orientations. As a matter of fact, these claims are quite controversial in literature on goth (Spooner 2004; Brill 2007, 2008; Goulding and Saren 2009). As pointed out by Dunja Brill, in fact, there would be a “glaring gap which often separates ideal from reality in Gothic gender politics” (2009: 184). According to the author, “seduced by the prodigious rhetoric of their subculture, Goths regularly seem to fall in the trap” of professing “‘genderlessness’ to mask and thus perpetuate practices and images which are in fact heavily—and sometimes quite perniciously—gendered” (ibidem). Regarding style, in fact, “male Goths enjoy an exceptional freedom to experiment with feminine style elements and to thwart traditional images of masculinity, yet still remain largely locked within the discourse of dominant male (hetero)sexuality” while “female Goths are free to experiment with (bi)sexuality (…) but stay trapped within the norms of essentially quite standardised and conventional ideas of feminine beauty” (184). In this sense, goth style would grant androgyny only to males, prescribing instead a ‘hypersexualised’ female ideal. Indeed, this sort of criticism can also be found in our interviews in reference to the dark club scene in the 1990s (which is the context of Brill’s ethnographic research). Interviewees who remained in the club scene after the end of the 1980s, in fact, unanimously underlined how, in the following decade, the goth style in Milan started to change visibly, together with its associated values and with some of the rules disciplining the practice of dressing: I didn’t follow a strict code. I don’t think it even existed amongst people my age. But years later, when I discovered that dark was becoming a type approval, I wore blue because everyone else was in black and had crosses and teased hair. It was always a matter of moral choice; moral choices make you think. You wake up in the morning, open your closet and decide to wear something in particular because you believe it has a symbolic meaning. It’s completely different from when you decide to wear something just to go to a disco where everyone is dressed the same. When I started noticing people taking the piss out of me because I wore a blue and gold corset, I knew that the time had come to wear a blue and gold corset. (Emanuela Zini)

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In fact, we have seen how, beginning in the 1980s, the music club enactment differed from the others because it was open to a certain level of flexibility in the adoption of the subcultural style that could become more radical, and also sexualised, in discos and subcultural events.28 It was not uncommon, for example, for some darks to get gothed-up after arriving at a club: something that was not permitted within the other enactments: My style was a little punk, a little dark, a little new wave. I wore pointed-toe shoes with or without heels (…). It was part of who I was, a piece of my identity, of what I wanted to be and how I imagined myself. Sure, there was also the desire to stand out, to be recognised as different from the others, from the more or less silent majority. But when I went to the Hysterika the first time, it was mind blowing. I thought I was a fashionista, but in that place I was completely upstaged. Sunday darks came to the club, too. The girls had loud, exaggerated looks. Some of them looked really good, but many of them were the kind that changed in the elevator. I, on the other hand, once I had decided to dress that way, I was always dressed that way. I sat my high school exams dressed like that. My literature teacher told me, “If you sit your exams dressed like that, you’ll be given terrible grades.” She even called my mother, who responded in kind, “My daughter can wear what she wants”. I didn’t sit my exams dressed like that just to be stubborn, it was simply who I was, period. It was inadmissible for me to have a bob cut or wear a blue dress. I would have been betraying myself. This is the way I am and this is the way I’m going to appear. (Roxie) The style was still pretty simple: it hadn’t been influenced by fetish yet; rubber, lattice, and vinyl were yet to come. Many girls didn’t go out already gothed-up, but I did. I did it to provoke. I started overdoing it with eyeliner, lipstick and heavy eyeshadow when I was fifteen. I dyed and teased my hair, using hairspray that only lasted two days. Whereas I saw other girls changing and putting on makeup when they got to the club, or in the car before coming in. When they left their homes, they put something on that hid what they were wearing, and then they’d take it off. (Antonella Pala)

Yet, female interviewees in all enactments, including former music club darks, underlined—sometimes even in a critical vein—how any openly seductive aspect of style was systematically downplayed, if not avoided all together. This claim is supported by the visual material gathered during the interviews: We girls chose a certain way to dress in order to shock everyone who was outside our scene, and to push people into looking beyond appearances. Looking at photos from the past, I realise that it seems like we made ourselves look uglier on

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purpose. This doesn’t happen anymore. For example, when I go to the Shelter,29 I no longer see that kind of exploration into aesthetics. Nowadays, people want to make a good impression on others rather than provoke, so style is confined to specific stereotypical images of beauty. (Paola) I did everything I could to hide my body: loose sweaters and long dresses that hid everything. We obliterated the physical part of ourselves. We weren’t worried about trying to impress the opposite sex. (Antonella Pala) For me, our look was the complete denial of eroticism, sex and gender. Often, the effect was that we made ourselves considerably uglier. For example, I had huge boobs compared to the average size of my friends’, and I wore bras two sizes too small to crush them and try to hide them. My big bust clashed with the overall look I was going for. (Sara)

In this way, darks wanted to distance themselves from the dominant feminine ideals of the times and, above all, from the ‘supermaggiorata’ (bombshell): the sexy, big-breasted and scantily dressed showgirls—like the “Fast Food Girls” on the Drive-in TV show (Ciofalo 2011)—that soon became the trademark of Silvio Berlusconi’s private television networks. The stylistics in this endeavour included heavy makeup that didn’t valorise facial features but rather overwritten them with spiders and spiderwebs; hair that was unnaturally teased, or shaved; loose shirts and long skirts that covered the body, and also miniskirts over torn fishnet stockings worn with combat boots, Creepers or winklepickers. Sometimes, it was an androgynous look inspired by female stars in the canon, like Annie Lennox from the Eurythmics of Sweet Dreams: I didn’t actually wear makeup, I drew spiders, bats and spiderwebs on my face. I wore mini-skirts, pointed-toe shoes, ripped stockings, big black shirts that hid my body. And obviously smeared lipstick. I didn’t give a shit if I looked ugly, unfeminine: if that’s what “feminine” meant, I preferred not to be stuck in a gender category. The year before, I was pretty, I was even popular with the boys at school. Then I changed into a sort of monster. Unapproachable to boys. Or rather, unapproachable to the ones I didn’t want to approach me. I’d sit oral exams dressed like that, too, in a suburban school in 1988. My teachers were appalled, but they couldn’t say anything because I was very good at school. (Sara) I began wearing makeup in high school and there was a period where I had a mohawk, wore heavy foundation and white face powder, heavy eye makeup, and a cloak. I always looked like I was about to put on a concert! It was quite an

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endeavour to get ready in the morning! Now I wonder why I did it, but at the time I was totally into it. It represented a personal battle; I was trying to demonstrate that I didn’t want to go along with the mindset of a life I considered superficial, trivial, foolish. Furthermore, I didn’t like the feeling that I didn’t have a choice and that I had to be a certain way to be a woman. It bothered me. I felt like an alien. So, I expressed myself through the way I looked. During the ‘80s, everything was very plastic and it was extended by superficiality and conformity. The image the paninari presented wasn’t just a coincidence. They weren’t just about buying designer clothes. They represented an area of superficiality that I just couldn’t go along with. (Donatella Bartolomei)

What is important to note is that this look did not imply a loss of subcultural capital within the scene: As for the concept of femininity, I consider myself a “stilnovista”30 even if, naturally, I am flexible. Basically, I don’t think a woman needs to flaunt her physical traits to make a good impression. The fact is that once the urges have subsided, you find yourself wondering, “Who the hell is she?” I don’t think any woman is happy being judged this way, but I think it probably happens to women who aren’t used to looking inward. New wavers did. The women in our crowd did. They could wear miniskirts, too, but they weren’t vulgar. (…) There was no way I could have fallen in love with a regular. For me, a normal wasn’t a woman, she was a mannequin. We wouldn’t have had anything in common. (Pino Carafa) I thought dark femininity was wonderful. I thought female paninari were less feminine. They wore wide-legged pants, sweaters, a tuft of hair on their forehead and a ribbon in their hair. I had other preferences; dark female role models like Lisa Gerrard, Siouxsie, Gitane Demone, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, and Patricia Morrison when she performed with The Sisters of Mercy in Floodland. (Andy)

In this sense, for women, the androgynous goth style was a way to deconstruct dominant gender stereotypes (and prescriptions), just as the adoption of typically feminine stylistic elements was, for men, a way to distance themselves from the macho stereotype of the Italian male at the time: When I was fifteen, in 1980, I hung out with “regulars”. I was the black sheep: everyone took the piss out of me because I didn’t share the same values as them. Then I started seeing people on Corso Vittorio Emanuele with their hair sticking up. It was the Milanese new wave collective, the guys who went to the Taxi,

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the only alternative club in the city at the time. I was immediately struck by their look. They had really bizarre hair for the times; shaved in the back, long in front, and a lock of hair on their forehead. They dressed really outlandishly and had pointed-toe shoes. “Who the hell are these guys?”, I wondered. In those days, look had a basic function: identifying your kind. I started hanging out with them in September ’83, when I was seventeen. (…) We started hanging out and I realised everyone accepted me because they didn’t care if I could get into fights or do wheelies with my scooter. I had finally met people like me who gave more importance to what you had inside, your sensitivity, than showing off your physical strength and your basest, most superficial self. We looked at each other and we identified right away. From then on, I went straight there after school (…) Until that point, I had never had a girlfriend because I wasn’t the tough-guy type. So other guys were always getting the girl instead of me. I wasn’t an alpha male, and I never had a place among men. I was a sort of mascot. But in the new wave movement and later in the dark, I got girls’ attention without having to be tough. It was the exact opposite, the more sensitive and introspective you were, the more you were appreciated. New wavers didn’t need to show off their muscles. They could lean against a column holding a cigarette and wait for a girl to woo them. (Pino Carafa)

In dark clubs, in fact, the attempt to rewrite the norms ruling the relationship between genders gave women the otherwise uncommon opportunity to make ‘the first move’. More generally, darks looked for a way to reconcile free sexual experimentation (in opposition to what was perceived as the ‘repression of the Catholic Church’), and the desire to avoid objectification and commodification of a relationship between genders reduced to mere sexuality. A style that rejected hyper-sexualisation was part of this endeavour: Sex wasn’t the most important thing in our lives. We saw ourselves as more liberal, more responsible, more open-minded. But I’m not sure how much of that was true. After the seventies, what could you be more open to? Some of us were more easy-going, others wanted to live sex consciously, as if you had to retrieve the sacredness of sex. Sex wasn’t a consumer by-product, women weren’t objects, but sometimes it was all just in theory. For example, I remember a guy I knew beat his girlfriend. (Roxie) Maybe our relationship with the opposite sex was more intellectual. In the sense that we shared ideas, opinions, and we also discussed a lot on the differences related to gender. (Roberto Schieppati)

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The attempt to redefine gender relationships and stereotypes also provided an opportunity to experiment with non-heteronormative forms of identity and sexuality. While an open-minded approach, uncommon in Italy at the time, characterised all the enactments, this was particularly true of the disco club scene as also acknowledged by darks in the activist enactment—usually quite critical with disco club darks: There was a degree of openness that was really uncommon for the typical Italian macho culture, and I liked that because it escaped common labels. I only wore makeup a few times, and it was always very light and simple, but some people wore really heavy makeup, both men and women, which was completely atypical for Italy at the time. In the dark scene, the idea was: “We’re different, so let’s look different.” There was much admiration for the gay phenomenon because of the bands we listened to. The girls especially thought that being gay was cool, that it gave a more alternative touch. I don’t remember any overtly homosexual people at the Leoncavallo, the Helter Skelter or the Virus, but in the dark scene, one openly declared their sexual preferences. Guys walked around with their arms around each other, even kissing in public, because they felt the support of the group’s love. (Roberto Schieppati) The dark movement had very specific opinions regarding sexuality. It was the first time since the advent of punk that makeup was used so fiercely. It was a shattering characteristic of dark that had been anticipated by glam rock, even though it was worn only by rock stars on stage. Sexuality had always been a taboo subject in every other scene. Notwithstanding feminism and the early gay movements, there was a lot of prejudice and homophobia even in contexts above suspicion. With the advent of postpunk and dark, guys wearing eyeshadow and eyeliner weren’t cover story material anymore. Sexual preferences were put into play, as was belonging to a gender. For some, ambiguity expressed through makeup and clothes was a way to dare conformism: emaciated boys wearing thick layers of black makeup, lipstick, and skirts was often interpreted as homosexual behaviour. Even exponents of the music scene didn’t keep their homosexuality a secret. These aspects of the lifestyle were really explosive against taboos: they shattered the macho attitude towards homosexuality. An attitude that, unfortunately, I have to say could also be found at the Virus. I can’t remember any overtly homosexual dark groups of people, even though people didn’t shy away from their sexual preferences. Within the dark scene, homosexuality wasn’t considered repugnant much less ridiculous, and clubs offered a safe haven. This was the same period when the first overtly gay clubs came to light, like the pioneer Nuova Idea in 1975, and the Sottomarino Giallo in 1985. It’s not the same thing, but I think the dissemination of “youth styles” contributed

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to changing lifestyles in our country. There were gay clubs before, don’t get me wrong, but the scenes were separate, and the concept of “gay friendly” is definitely more recent. In the fourth issue of Amen, we dealt extensively with topics pertaining to sexuality and homosexuality and included an information pamphlet on AIDS that unleashed a lot of controversy, even in circles we considered “liberal” but revealed themselves to be extremely chauvinist and sexist. Along with other efforts in dealing with these topics, I remember the fanzine Individuo/a, published by people from the Virus. It dealt with gender coexistence, its political aspects, and the idea that we all belong to the human race. (Angela Valcavi)

The years between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1980s were the years in which the gay movement in Italy reinvented its language, adopted a countercultural approach, gave the first signs of internationalisation and gained visibility (Cristallo 1996; Rossi Barilli 1999). Casa Morigi in Milan is a fifteenth-century building located behind Corso Magenta, which was occupied in 1976. It is now regarded as the place where the Italian gay movement was born. Concomitantly, overtly gay clubs started to open. The Milanese dark disco club scene was closely tied to this new gay scene: several clubs had both dark and gay nights, and others had customers from both scenes: I always hung around the goth and the gay scene. The only ones that bothered us were the skinheads because they were convinced all dark males were gay, period. Makeup and nail polish were reason enough to beat us up. We’d all get dragged into it because we were seen as losers, ravens. (…) But have you got any idea how many skinheads are gay? (…) We didn’t care, “She likes men and women, so what? Who the fuck cares?”. (Antonella Pala)

Yet, in terms of identity politics, a key difference could be discerned between the gay and the dark scenes: in the former, homosexual orientation was proudly claimed and held as primary one’s overall identity; in the latter, on the contrary, homosexual orientation was freely acted upon, but it was also regarded as secondary to subcultural belonging. What defined identity was above all belonging to the subculture. As was the case with politics, sexual preferences were considered a personal choice and deemed not relevant: indeed, they were not even at the origin of specific sub-­ groups. Basically, the dark disco club scene was the first to be genuinely indifferent to (homo)sexual orientations:

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The dark movement has always been indifferent to homosexuality and, in my opinion, in a country that houses the Vatican, this was true transgression. We have a macho chromosome, so male human beings have to be tough and muscular. I played with gender, too. (Andy)

Notably, this form of open-mindedness was not necessarily spontaneous for darks at first, especially for those who came from the limited cultural horizons of the suburbs. Driven by subcultural values, it was, in fact, the result of the work darks did on themselves in order to overcome what they acknowledged as personal prejudices: There was no trace of homophobia. On the contrary. I’d say that in the beginning, since ours was a movement that wanted to overcome any and all prejudices, accepting homosexuality was a rational choice, thought through, very conscious. When you were younger, you were taught to see homosexuality as something ugly, maybe even as something ridiculous. So, you forced yourself to get rid of the unease you felt was wrong. In time, it became an accepted fact, obvious. But it was a phase you went through. That’s what I mean when I say that while punk was a movement of spontaneous rage, dark was more reflexive. (Emanuela Zini) A friend of mine, who was very androgynous, was often labelled as a lesbian. When we went out together, people would ask us if we were a couple. For us, discrimination was inconceivable. (…) It was a contradiction in terms. The moment I voluntarily decide to impersonate “the other” in the eyes of normal people, what is the point (…) of discrimination? At most, we were racist against the regulars, the “non-different”. All the other forms of difference stirred a natural liking, from illegal immigrants to gays. Of course, it depended on the person, but the first impression was always positive. (Sara)

Similarly, the androgyny of style allowed those who were still uncertain about their own sexual orientation to experiment with identity without any form of stigma, and to accept their own eventual homosexuality more easily: There were people who discovered they were gay later on, years after. Including me. At the time, the difference between gay and not gay wasn’t important in the scene because aesthetics burst open a lot of doors. A guy who wore makeup and had a certain type of hairstyle wasn’t necessarily gay. It was a safe place in this sense. It was a shelter. (Dave)

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The strong connection between ethics and aesthetics that we have described was taken for granted in the 1980s, and worked as a powerful invitation for socialisation between ‘kindred creatures’: I was looking for brothers, at least cousins. People who felt the way I did and had the same tastes as me. (Gp) My look was completely over the top. Nobody could say, “that doesn’t look good on you” because I was an “other” compared to every canon of style. And the incredible thing was that we recognised each other. If you saw someone who had a similar style to yours, you stopped them on the street, no problem, even if you were shy like me. (Sara) In Novate Milanese I found two kindred creatures. I was on a train and I saw a girl. We looked at each other, but I don’t remember who took the initiative. That’s how I met Ezio, too, a good friend of mine back then. They were chance meetings that came about because we identified with each other, just like animal species; ethological. Human beings were much more standardised compared to now, so when you saw people with a particular look, it was easier to find something in common with them. That’s not possible today. Today people can be full of tattoos and then support the Lega Nord!31 But at the time there was a conformity between the music you listened to and your look. (Roxie)

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the subcultural style was intensely innovated with the appearance of latex, rubber, leashes, body suits, corsets and collars in the canon: dark style got hybridised with fetish. Until then, fetish influences had remained confined to a few accessories, appropriated through the mediation of iconic bands and other canonised cultural resources to further radicalise the ‘shock effect’ of dark attire: The last times I went to the Hysterika, looks were already veering towards S&M and bondage in a subtle way. PVC, fetish boots, fishnet stockings… It was cutting edge at the time, but it was limited to a specific look. (Paola)

A key role in this hybridisation was played by an increased visibility of the Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism (BDSM) scene that, during the 1980s, had been circumscribed to private parties and to an underground network of correspondence revolving around specialised magazines (Zambelli 2017). In Milan, the first parties and gatherings of enthusiasts began to be organised in the mid1990s when the first specialised shops

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opened, too. The new BDSM scene and the dark club scene partially overlapped, fostering the circulation of members and the transformation of dark attire along with its connected values: In Italy, fetishism was just imaginary, whereas if you went to London, an entire world opened up. I think fetishism in the eighties, what I saw of it in London, was quite different from what I saw in Italy later. In London, fetishism was also a form of expression. (…) There was nothing like it in Italy so the [dark] movement stole some things and called them their own. (Sergio di Meda) There was an obvious aesthetic connection between punk and dark on one hand and fetish on the other. Officine Schwartz, for example, held performances with a ballerina who looked like Charlotte Rampling in the film The Night Porter. There were allusions to the practice, but I never noticed much of this kind of activity in the early eighties. There were undercurrents, but they were always tied to musical expression, performance, and theatre. It was part of a broader realm that went well beyond the erotic and sexual sphere. (Roxie) Contamination between fetish and goth arrived in the early nighties: the practice of sexual perversions, deviations, as well as latex, black, fishnet stockings, S&M styles… Music was a big part of it because you probably weren’t going to listen to Lorella Cuccarini32 during a fetish party! They played Psychic TV or The Cult. As a matter of fact, I met Dave Vanian of The Damned at a fetish party in London in 1989. The situation was varied because there was another culture there; much more advanced compared to us. People who had just finished working in the City arrived in their bowler hats, suits and carrying a briefcase. They went into the changing room and came out wearing only a bondage harness. I came from the suburbs of 1989 Milan: if I saw them today, I’d say “OK, I’ve seen worse”, but it was pretty incredible at the time. I think there were links to goth music because some bands transmitted a certain sensibility, certain atmospheres, that had something to do with free and transgressive sexuality. For example, I find it hard to imagine Rozz Williams with a quiet, standard sexuality. The same goes for Marc Almond. (Dave) My moral standards were stricter in my personal life, yet there was a moment where I wrote sadomasochist short stories for “technical” magazines. They were, well, pretty X-rated. I still have them. They’re really hardcore. I came across them because I loved British magazines like Latex and some of the other more popular magazines with photos of girls dressed in fabulous rubber outfits. I entered this world through aesthetics. Then I contacted the guy from the magazine and offered to write for him. He paid me fifty thousand lire33 per story: not

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bad. It didn’t shock me, but it wasn’t my thing. I started going to latex nights because Sex Sade opened in Via Torino and I became friends with the owner. It was a store that slowly, slowly started organising fetish events. I invested a lot of my salary in latex outfits! My boyfriend and I went to the Pervert nights where you wouldn’t find darks, you found S&M, slaves and transsexuals. At a certain point, I started to go to dark clubs dressed in latex. It was a new thing for that scene. The fact that Sex Sade was in Via Torino helped the dark scene discover it. There was another really big store of the same genre on the other side of the street and seeing these things brought the two scenes together. (Emanuela Zini)

In dark style, provocation progressively gave way to seduction, paving the way to the hyper-sexualisation of feminine style described by Brill (2007, 2008), Goulding and Saren (2009) and others: I hated the fact that at a certain point dark shamelessly flirted with fetishism and that it had become so erotic. The women were very sexy. I’d really say women as objects, with the only difference being that they wore latex, whipped you and stuck their heels in your back. They didn’t seem very different in principle from the unrealistic, stereotypical women we detested. I think dark was a way to say, “I’m not doing this, I’m going to make a life for myself as I see it. If I have to study or work, that’s fine, I’ll do it, but I’m more than that. I’ll do my duty to society, but I get to decide who I am. If you accept that, fine, otherwise let’s ­forget about it.” But if you are limited to looking for your identity in the erotic scene, that means that you are nevertheless conforming, too. I didn’t identify with that phase, but I’m not judging. It was a natural process. No “counter” movement can survive forever; either you get killed or you get crushed and swallowed up. Dark gave me freedom of expression, the courage to dare and experiment things that I wouldn’t have been able to do in any other way at that age and in my social situation. But clearly, dark entered another phase. (Sara)

Indeed, as we have anticipated,34 it was not only a matter of new stylistic sub-canons taking shape: indeed, all the practices of the music club enactment underwent relevant transformations. For example, presence in public spaces became less relevant and the subculture was increasingly enacted exclusively in clubs and at subcultural events. As a consequence, the rules prescribing coherence in style throughout every aspect of everyday life progressively became less strict. New practices of socialisation took shape with the Internet acquiring primary importance (Hodkinson 2003) and extending the subcultural networks at an international level. A new way to enact dark took shape: and yet, addressing this new enactment would exceed the temporal limits we have established for the present empirical investigation.

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Notes 1. See Chap. 2. 2. From a methodological point of view, Van Elferen and Weinstock (2016) circumvent these discrepancies by constructing their corpus of analysis from DJ playlists at relevant international goth events. 3. See Chap. 5. 4. Around €10,000. 5. Around €1500–2000. 6. The Festival of Sanremo is the most popular contest of Italian popular music, held on an yearly basis in the city of San Remo since 1951. 7. See Chap. 5: “By and large, all of us listened to The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Sisters of Mercy. The first band that made you take a leap in quality was Virgin Prunes: older people listened to them. They were more extreme, they started to force the limits of the genre. I remember I started to talk to this girl about them, and after a while she told me, “You know, I thought you were just a pretty boy. I was wrong.” To convince her I was not a moron, I had to talk about a certain kind of music, make her understand that, even if I had feathered hair, I was not just about… The Cure, you know” (Sergio di Meda). 8. Founded in 1978 by Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves Von Bontee, the French label Sordide Sentimental was specialised in publishing limited editions of bands like Psychic TV, Tuxedomoon, Red Crayola and others. 9. Around €2.5. 10. Around €0.50. 11. The sub-canon of Electro Body Music (EBM), which included bands like Wumpscut, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Skinny Puppy and Die Form and had a specific visual style, became relevant in Milan later than in other cities, like Turin. In particular, the opening of the first Milanese club devoted to EBM, the Cave in Segrate, with Pietro Tannoia as DJ, dates to 1991. 12. We have not gathered enough information to address the reception of the band in the loner enactment. 13. Chimenti (2010). 14. See Chap. 2. 15. See Chap. 5. 16. See Chaps. 4 and 6. 17. See Chap. 4. 18. See Chap. 6. 19. The popular alternative band Bluvertigo was founded in 1992 by Morgan (Marco Castoldi) and by our interviewee Andy (Andrea Fumagalli). 20. Festivalbar was a popular Italian singing contest that took place in the squares of the main Italian cities from 1964 to 2007.

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21. Around €50,000. 22. Such was the case, among others, with Camerata Mediolanense and Bluvertigo, to quote only the bands that counted one of our interviewees as temporary or permanent members (Emanuela Zini and Pino Carafa, and Andy, respectively). 23. The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott (UK/US, 1983). 24. The Italian Film Archive. 25. See Chap. 3. 26. Edward Scissorhands, directed by Tim Burton (US, 1990). 27. See Chaps. 4, 5 and 6. 28. See Chap. 5. 29. The last dark club in the Milanese area closed for good in 2013. 30. Stilnovismo was an Italian poetic school of the thirteenth century that included Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri: it praised an angelic ideal of woman, and love as a mean of spiritual elevation. 31. Lega Lombarda–Lega Nord, a right-wing populist party, was founded in 1984. At the time it was characterised by its hostility towards immigration from the south of Italy. 32. An Italian showgirl and mainstream singer, popular in the mid-1980s. 33. Around €25. 34. See Sect. 5.4.

References Baddeley, G. (2010). Goth: Vamps and Dandies. London: Plexus. Brill, D. (2007). Gender, Status and Subcultural Capital in the Goth Scene. In P.  Hodkinson & W.  Deicke (Eds.), Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes (pp. 111–128). New York: Taylor & Francis. Brill, D. (2008). Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. Bloomsbury Academic. Chimenti, A. (2010). Death in June. Nascosto tra le rune. Milano: Tsunami Edizioni. Ciofalo, G. (2011). Infiniti anni Ottanta. Tv, cultura e sociaetà alle origini del nostro presente. Milano: Mondadori. Coccoluto, S. (2014). Desiderio del nulla. Storia della new wave italiana. Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa. Cristallo, M. (1996). Uscir fuori. Dieci anni di lotte omosessuali in Italia: 1971/1981. Milano: Teti. Goulding, C., & Saren, M. (2009). Performing Identity: An Analysis of Gender Expressions at the Whitby Goth Festival. Consumption Markets & Culture, 12(1), 27–46. Gray, M. (2010). From Canon to Fanon and Back Again: The Epic Journey of Supernatural and Its Fans. Transformative Works and Cultures, 4. Hannerz, E. (2015). Performing Punk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Harriman, A., & Bontje, M. (2014). Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: A Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s. Bristol, Chicago: Intellect Books. Hellekson, K., & Busse, K. (2006). Introduction. In K.  Hellekson & K.  Busse (Eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hills, M. (2002). Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2003). ‘Net.Goth’: Internet Communication and (Sub)Cultural Boundaries. In D.  Muggleton & R.  Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 285–298). Oxford, New York: Berg. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Leow, H. M. A. (2011). Subverting the Canon in Feminist Fan Fiction: Concession. Transformative Works and Cultures, 7. Liebler, R., & Chaney, K. (2007). Canon vs. Fanon: Folksonomies of Fan Culture. MIT Media in Transition, 5. Retrieved June 16, 2019, from http://works. bepress.com/raizelliebler/10/. Mercer, M. (2009). Music to Die for. London: Cherry Red Books. Newman, J. (2008). Playing with Videogames. London, New York: Routledge. Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. London: Faber and Faber. Rossi Barilli, G. (1999). Il movimento gay in Italia. Milano: Feltrinelli. Scharf, N. (2011). Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe. Shropshire: Independent Music Press. Spooner, C. (2004). Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press. Tosoni, S., & Ciancia, M. (2017). Vidding and Its Media Territories: A Practice-­ Centred Approach to User-Generated Content Production. In S.  Tosoni, N. Carpentier, A. McNicholas, M. F. Murru, R. Kilborn, L. Kramp, R. Kunelius, T.  Olsson, & P.  Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt (Eds.), Present Scenarios of Media Production and Engagement. Bremen: Edition Lumière. Van Elferen, I., & Weinstock, J. A. (2016). Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture. New York: Routledge. Zambelli, L. (2017). Subcultures, Narratives and Identification: An Empirical Study of BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Submission, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism) Practices in Italy. Sexuality & Culture, 21(2), 471–492.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions: An Enactment Approach to Subcultures and Post-Subcultures

In this book, we described the different forms taken by goth in Milan in the 1980s: the ‘activist’, the ‘music club’ and the ‘loner’ enactments of dark. In this endeavour, we adopted a practice-centred approach, and deployed the concepts of ‘canon’1 to account for the consistent distinctiveness of the subculture (Hodkinson 2002), and of ‘enactment’ as a conceptual leverage to shed light on the “plural authenticities and plural structures of meanings within the same subculture” (Hannerz 2015: 13). In this way, our intent was to move beyond “substantive thinking” (O’Connor 2016) in the study of subcultures: when unreflexively inherited from the School of Birmingham, in fact, this approach risks to lead researchers to methodologically conceive subcultures as consistent, homogeneous and monolithic. This depiction of subcultures is ill-suited to describe the internal heterogeneity of dark in the Milanese context in the 1980s. In our approach, the “convex-concave model”, put forward by Erik Hannerz (2015) to deal with this same methodological problem, helped us to address issues related to the assemblage of the subcultural canon. Yet, our approach differs from the one proposed by the author in its main focus (and implications). Hannerz’s model, in fact, aims at identifying the invariant deep (sub)cultural structures of meanings underlying the plurality of scripts used by subculturalist to separate the ‘subcultural sacred’ from the mainstream conceived as external (‘convex pattern’) or internal (‘concave pattern’) to the subculture itself. As the author clarifies, “the structure of these patterns, as well as the participants’ enactment of them, © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8_8

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are identical when comparing how punk is performed in Indonesia and Sweden” (2015: 197). Conversely, our practice-centred approach focused on the role played by local factors in shaping the experience of subcultural participation in the context of Milan2 in line with present literature on the appropriation of subcultures outside their contexts of origin. Among other factors, we underlined the role played by the historic period of ‘riflusso’ (resignation), by the new hedonist values of the 1980s, by the suffocating repressive presence of the police in the city, by paninari, by Italian machismo culture, by the circuit of squats, by the cultural influence of the Catholic Church and by the presence of cultural mediators. In this way, we have not only brought to the forefront the differences between Milanese dark and goth as depicted in current academic literature3 (actually, focusing mainly on the 1990s), but we have also described some of the differences between enacting dark in Milan and in the neighbouring towns around Milan. We think that these divergences from Hannerz’s model arise mainly from its level of abstraction: our approach, based on second generation practice theories (Schatzki et al. 2001), remains, in fact, sensitive to the contextual factors shaping the actual unfolding of the practices that each enactment was composed of. In our analysis, we identified three different kinds of practices in which subculturalists were engaged4: practices deemed of key relevance to subcultural participation in all the enactments; practices deemed of key relevance to one specific enactment; and practices not deemed of key relevance to a specific enactment, and yet shaped by subcultural participation. With regard to the third typology, one of the examples we discussed concerned the tacit rules on sexuality and its relationship with sociality.5 Another example was the relationship of darks with the widespread diffusion of heroin at the time. The first generation of darks was in fact exposed to it by their subcultural participation, while the second generation was shielded from it: We darks from the Virus (…) [used a lot of drugs]. We used more than others, more than the anarcho-punks. Amphetamines, mostly the mythical Plegines, diet pills with an amphetamine base, and lots of Valium and Rohypnol mixed with alcohol. There was a lot of over-the-counter medicine, too, like cough syrup that contained codeine. If we couldn’t get anything, we sniffed hairspray, glue, popper… Some of us got lost in drugs, even heroin, but I can’t remember smoking any weed. We hated the freaks, they were our antithesis. In everything! For some punks, that was the moment of ‘straight edge’: a healthy, no drug, no

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alcohol lifestyle advocated by the American hardcore-punk band Minor Threat. I have always believed that darks used more drugs. But actually, the second generation of darks was mainly into drinking: they were smarter. For us, dark was self-destructive: that’s what I believed. A lot of us started doing heroin. I did it only for a short time because heroin wasn’t allowed at the Virus. The slogan “Destroy your illusions, not your life” was written everywhere. So, I managed to get off it. Fighting desperately… Whereas others got caught up in it forever and I have no idea what happened to them. At the end of 1987, I fell victim, too. I was in love, but it obviously ended badly. I went to rehab, psychotherapy… It was incredibly painful and the pain was in every part of my body. But I got straight. Then AIDS came along, and lots of people started dying. It probably doesn’t happen much now, neither heroin or AIDS. You don’t hear much about it. Those that were meant to die, died. Heroin was part of the repression: whoever didn’t hang themselves, ended up being an addict. Only a few were able to kick it, in different ways, but mostly with incredible willpower. (Joykix) I only smoked weed. But there was a disproportionate use of alcohol, especially cocktails, in clubs. Luckily, I stayed away from hard drugs as opposed to a lot of my friends who unfortunately didn’t make it. I think taking refuge in the dark scene kept me away from drugs, while others threw themselves head first into punk, emulating Sid Vicious’ unhealthy exploits. Some of them met the same end as him. I think that the use of drugs was different in the punk and in the dark scenes. By going to the Hysterika, I was sheltered from some drugs compared to those who went to punk concerts. (Gp) Heroin arrived earlier, when I was about twelve years old. When I became part of the dark scene, it hardly existed anymore. I’ve only smoked weed in my life, even for ideological reasons, because at the time I thought cocaine was bourgeoise and it was expensive. My generation was more self-righteous, that’s true: we didn’t drink a lot. I was an existentialist so I had to keep up a certain aplomb: don’t tan, don’t smile in photos, never look too happy, always be a little melancholy, a bit snobbish, and look at others reprehensibly because they are uncouth. You know, decadent behaviour and drinking gallons of beer and losing control just don’t work together. I hung around with people who didn’t even smoke cigarettes and never got drunk. But later, when I started to hang out with another generation, they did amphetamines, acid, cocaine, everything. I drove with them to buy drugs in various places and just watched. I never took anything. Well, yeah, cocaine stopped being bourgeoise at a certain point. Then all the weird stuff, crystal, cocaine derivatives, became popular. (Emanuela Zini)

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Such was also the case with taking holidays in London. It was regarded both as the birthplace of dark and a sort of utopia where the subcultural way of life and style were socially accepted by the population: London wasn’t only about roots: it was also a concrete, accomplished utopia. It was the place where we imagined the line drawn by the dark movement prevailed, and where freedom of expression wasn’t held back by the prejudice, narrow-­mindedness and bigotry that was smothering our country. London was considered paradise, and a lot of people I know lived there for a while. We were told it was filled with people like us, that being dark was normal, and obviously, most of the bands we loved were from there. (Antonella Pala) I felt completely fulfilled when I was in London because I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to. It was the dark homeland. When I went to dark clubs in London, I was the happiest person in the world. I spent all my summers from the age of fourteen to eighteen in London. And when I was nineteen, I lived there for a few months. The daily atmosphere was very different from the one I breathed at home. In Italy, everyone looked at me as though I was crazy, whereas in London, the variety of humanity and races was much broader, and the punks were absurd. Italian tourists on the streets took photos of me and my friend, too! I was star struck by the presence of the legendary bands who were all in London: Siouxsie was there, The Cure and Depeche Mode were there. And when you saw darks walking around everywhere, you felt like you were part of a family. (Donatella Bartolomei) Nobody looked twice at you in London. The shock effect didn’t work on people. Even though the girl I hung around with had dreadlocks, blue extensions and white streaks through her hair and I had crimped hair, we felt normal. I was there for a month and a half and I looked much worse when I returned to Milan. Like when you come back from holiday and you’re a little out of it; you feel normal then you realise you haven’t returned with your head yet. What was even worse was that you arrived from a place like London where you went into a bakery looking like that and nobody thought twice about you, whereas when you got on a tram in Milan, everyone turned and stared. And then there were the paninari! (Emanuela Zini) I went to London when I was eighteen with a group of people from the Hysterika, including Sergio di Meda. We rented a house together. I think we spent a month there. But in 1989 the utopian ideal of London was already waning. Goth had become a circus and everyone had multi-coloured hair, yellow, green and blue dreadlocks. It had become a spectacle compared to the beginning. (Gabriele Trezzi)

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In our final results, we have shown how the three enactments of dark differed in key aspects such as attitude towards political engagement, practices of socialisation, style and dressing practices, sub-scenes, criteria for the validation of subcultural identities and for gaining subcultural capital, relationship with public space.6 What the three enactments had in common, in addition to the same subcultural canon, was the fundamental importance they had on the lives of interviewees. In fact, the interviewees unanimously described how, back in the 1980s, being engaged in one of the enactments of dark was not a single facet of their adolescence, but an experience that shaped all the main aspects of their everyday lives, including relationships with peers, families, jobs and school. In hindsight, they also concurred in acknowledging that subcultural participation was an essential formative experience that deeply influenced their present identities and the paths their lives took: I don’t think [the experience of dark] ever really ended [for me], because I’m still the same. The reason I chose this path was not because I wanted to go around wearing crosses and rosaries. It was an ethical choice. And I simply carried on with that choice, maintaining my ethics, that haven’t changed. (Emanuela Zini) Being a part of the movement always put me in a position where I had to come up against a much more difficult world compared to normal life, because it was a world at war, and that, inevitably, shapes who you are. I feel very enriched culturally because living a certain way, hanging out in certain places and with certain people, opened my outlook on life. Many of my current tastes are based on what I experienced in the past: literature, cinema, political views. I didn’t want to conform. If you’re part of the majority, you’ll always be on the winning side. I was always in the minority, so I was on the losing side, a loser. But I liked being a loser because I knew there was nothing to win. Today, I think that a real winner is someone who is able to maintain his ideals throughout his life. And this isn’t easy. And in any case, I’ve always liked being on the side of the freak, being strange. (…) At a certain point, you find yourself in the position of wearing a life, even if you’re an alien. Just don’t ask me to conform and try to be a winner: I work for you and you pay me. That’s the deal. (Roy) Ours was rebellion against pervasive banality and I still carry that with me. When I teach voice to my students, I always say, “Try to think from a different perspective.” Today, even if I wear other colours besides black, I still listen to music from that time and I’m the same inside: my style has changed, but not my head. (Eleonora Mosca)

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Some things will always remain untainted in me. Today, dark is more popular abroad, in terms of community. For example, a lot of my friends go to the Wave Gotik Treffen festival in Lipsia, whereas in Italy it’s a small niche. But I like to see that they are still dressing and putting on makeup in whatever way they want to. I’m also pleased to see darks today that are my age or older. (…) I’m an artist today and I use fluorescent colours in my paintings, but I still wear lipstick and eyeliner. Sometimes I feel like the character Cheyenne in Paolo Sorrentino’s film This Must Be the Place! (…) With Bluvertigo, I was the dark in terms of behaviour and impact on stage. We were four completely different people and I represented that aesthetic. (…) Everything in my life has changed compared to when I went to the Hysterika, but some chords still sound the same (…). At the Dead Can Dance concert in Milan in 2012, I was deeply moved even though my musical outlook has broadened greatly. Today, one of my favourite musicians is Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, but I also listen to Jobim and the bossanova. (Andy) I was given a hard time because I was different. I suffered a lot, but I’m grateful. I believed in something and I bet everything on that. That ideology may have been stupid, or wrong, but I believed in it, I researched it, I got to know it and I am the person I am today thanks to that experience. (Orietta Drago) I have changed many times throughout the years, yet the Donatella I am today is much more similar to the Donatella in my dark period at the end of the ‘80s than the Donatella when she was twenty and thirty years old. Even though I have a different perspective today, more positive, deep down I’ve preserved some of the nature I had then. I’m there. That period of time built my foundation. (Donatella Bartolomei) It’s part of my imprinting. Sure, I didn’t belong to any group at the time, and it made me feel like a loner, an outsider, but I experienced a lot of things, even though privately and transversally, I have no reason to regret any of it. All of it makes up my style. It’s a part of me even on a working level. The last fashion shoot I did was gothic, because it comes from inside, it’s part of my DNA.  I can’t withhold it, it’s exactly the kind of thing I like. (Riccardo Slavik) There are only a scattered few of us left from the old movement and let’s not even mention the new recruits. But I tried going out a couple of times with the people at work, and it didn’t go very well: they’re your classic, average Italian. They go out to eat tons of meat and spend entire evenings just sitting around a table talking about football. I don’t give a fuck about that shit, not to mention family, children… I don’t even venture into talking about music with them. But people like Gp—I think he still does it—has a group of friends he

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meets once a week to watch films. Everyone has their own genre to recommend to the others, then they talk about the films—some are really heavy stuff—and I think that’s great. The desire to explore further, in my opinion, was handed down to us from that period of time. The passion for cinema, music, going to music fests and organising weekends to visit museums and monuments. I think it’s all connected to the sensitivity that was instilled in us in the eighties: the desire to dig deeper and not to stop on the surface of people or things. (Antonella Pala) The fact that people my age still go out Saturday night in ripped T-shirts with the same old tattoos and the same haircut, makes me laugh a little. But I still believe that if that’s the way you feel, why not do it? I don’t care about aesthetics anymore. Obviously, it was a part of my life and I’m happy I experienced it because I met a lot of people through it. I had a lot of experiences that left permanent values in me, in particular refusing standardisation. What I don’t accept is type approval. I prefer to think with my own head and it’s difficult to have a conversation today with people your own age that were never part of a certain historical period. Or rather, who didn’t experience their personal historical period in a certain way. You really feel it: you feel they missed that part that was our experience. (Andrea) Sure, belonging to the subculture was extremely important for me because I developed a part of my identity (…), it wasn’t a façade. I believe that if you have suffered in life, you are compensated. And when you decide to stand alone, you have to suffer, (…) like when you’re fifteen and they call you a weirdo or an alien at school… There were groups that waited for me under my mother’s house to shout, “Aaaalien!” I can laugh about it now, but back then, it wasn’t so great. But that’s how you wanted to be, so you focused on being that way no matter what. Even now, at work, I find that the people who experienced that phase in their lives are more interesting, and perhaps they are artists today. It turns out that we were fabulous. (Gabriele Trezzi) I proudly wore my hair teased until the nineties, and I’m still faithful to black today. It’s like a prison, it’s terrible! When I’m out shopping for clothes, I’ll buy other colours and never wear them because I only feel comfortable in black. I’ve even kept dying my hair black. Speaking in greater depth about what the experience left me, I’d like to emphasise the sense of belonging. Years later, revisiting and talking about it with the people I hung out with at the time, I realised that it had a huge impact on all of us. It went beyond aesthetics. I would define it as elective affinities; a kind of magnet that attracted young men and women who were sensitive to aesthetic influences as well as political ones, and created a connection. It was a question of identification, of recognition. It wasn’t a group in the literal sense, but an attitude, a feeling, a commonality I have not encoun-

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tered since. There were many differences, but the bond prevailed. In my opinion, that was the sense of the experience and it should be reiterated. In addition to the fact that we were truly beautiful! Beautiful because we corresponded one to the other, because we made ourselves like we wanted to be. We were the precursors of plastic surgery. We professed the idea that you can change yourself and get closer to the ideal of what you want to be. We held to the concept of changing your own body through your look, tattoos, piercing, makeup. Our concern wasn’t type approval, but rather identifying with the same matrix to interpret in a thousand different ways, each one completely personal. That’s what made us beautiful, special, because we built something that represented us intimately, disregarding what the market had to offer. It was individualisation technology. (Roxie)

However, all our interviewees—whether still hanging out in the scene or not—considered the experience as circumscribed to the 1980s. The end of the activist enactment of dark can actually be dated to 1987, when the Helter Skelter ceased its activities. The end of the music club enactment can be symbolically dated to 1991, when the Hysterika finally closed and many moved on to the new techno and rave scenes: The year 1987 was devastating. Then squats started reappearing in the ‘90s, like the Cox18 where I still go. It was a huge movement that I believe ended with the G8 in Genoa in 2001. But [the new squats] were different, more open to “mass appeal”. They were interesting not because they were strange like us, but because they were organised, there were clashes, they became a movement… The rave scene in Milan was pretty interesting, too, but when you hit forty, you go once and then you say, “Ok, I’m either going to get really stoned or really bored”. Part of the dark subculture ended up in the rave and techno scenes, and it was probably the most interesting thing to happen in the ‘90s in terms of music and aesthetics, as well as from a cultural point of view. There was a lot of havoc. It reminded me of when the Virus was at its worst, the difference being there were a lot of new drugs around. Rave, in my opinion, was the last resurgence. It was a mix of punk, hippie music, drum and bass. But I never heard anything that made me go “Wow!” On the contrary, it was fucking boring most of the time. (Joykix) One thing about the ‘90s: a lot of people found other solutions to the “should I stay or should I go” dilemma. Some people threw themselves into the electronic wave saying it was the future of music, therefore mostly in techno clubs. From the early ‘90s to about 2000, the people who organised and ran everything were from the old scene, older than me, people who had experienced the movement. I

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hung out at those clubs, too, because my curiosity never waned, and I noticed that the people who let you into the new clubs were dressed in black. I wondered, “Shit. Why?”. At times, the entertainers had mohawks. In short, the same people who had been alternative ten years earlier were still alternative ten years later, they had just changed scene. (Sergio di Meda)

For those who remained in the dark scene, the constellation of clubs changed with new points of reference filling the void left by the Hysterika. Pietro Tannoia, formerly DJ Tannox at the Hysterika, inaugurated The Cave in Segrate (1991–1993), finally organising also in Milan, some years after Turin, event centred on industrial music: Pietro Tannoia opened The Cave in Segrate when there was nothing else around, and it spawned a generation. They played lots of Skinny Puppy and other stuff that came out then, mainly industrial, like Wumpscut. What he accomplished was really important because, even though his club was small, he built a bridge between the 1980s and the revival represented by neofolk and EBM music. (Pino Carafa) Industrial music arrived and it represented another evolution; sort of like when punk became post-punk and then dark wave. Samplers arrived and that opened up to a lot of new things: you could play inharmonious things and create new sounds. It was extremely polarised. There was some great stuff and stuff that wasn’t so great… Some of my friends were musicians and they said, “Whatever, I’m going to turn on the stereo, create some very cool feedback, take what I did and record a tape.” Then they sold the tape in Germany at an incredibly inflated price because it had a great cover design. What the fuck?! So, there was a lot of garbage around along with brilliant stuff. I knew a lot of people in the industrial scene in Milan. It was more diverse and open than the dark scene. I had already explored dark, so bring on industrial music and Coil. They were my favourite band for years and I also really liked Sleep Chamber. You also started to leave behind the style, and at the end you weren’t really dark anymore. (Emanuela Zini)

The Linus Club (1994–2000) opened in the centre of Milan in Via Paolo da Cannobio, while Roy spun records at the popular Rainbow (1993–2008), formerly Odissea 2001. New music and stylistic sub-canons made their appearance: not only Industrial, but also Electro Body Music (EBM) that brought back bands from the mid-1980s that had previously been quite obscure in the scene like Front 242 and Front Line Assembly. Some years

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later, following an Anglo-Saxon trend (Spracklen and Spracklen 2018), the canon started to admit bands that cross-pollinated goth and metal. New generations of dark started to hang out in clubs: and yet, while the first and the second generations felt a strong continuity between them, they both sensed a deep rift with the newcomers. They sometimes even called them with the derogatory name ‘stracci neri’ (black rags): [When] the latest recruits arrived (…) a friend of mine really took the piss out of them, he called them “black rags”. It was all about fashion for them. They didn’t know a thing about music, and I’m talking about the mid-nineties. Goth is still around today, but it’s been bastardised by metal: too many heavy guitars, too many voices. Marilyn Manson isn’t goth, he’s something else completely. You either like him or you don’t, like My Chemical Romance, but he has nothing to do with goth from the ‘80s like Bauhaus and The Danse Society. (Nino La Loggia) On one hand, there was indeed a period of decline, on the other, I started going out with a guy who was four and a half years younger than me, so I began to hang out with people who were younger: it was another wave. It’s interesting to note how little difference there was between the older generations: those who had lived punk like Nino, and us. Probably, it was hard for all of us to live that way every day, whereas you could feel the difference between my generation and the younger one. The paninari weren’t around anymore, so you didn’t run the risk of getting beat up. And all the old bands were gone, too. I’d say the decline began around ’94–’95. I continued going to dark clubs. I had a duel-­affiliation with the industrial music scene; I played with Camerata Mediolanense and I hung out with the new generation that I found was a bit too hair-salon inclined. I argued with them a lot. In the end, I was disappointed by them and I began to think, “What are you alternative to? You’re just a bunch of fucking hypocrites.” So, I took a step back. These guys didn’t have an anarchist or an alternative drive. Even if they had green hair and tattoos, they would talk behind someone’s back if she had on a pink dress and I just thought they were a bunch of morons. In a perfect world, I thought all alternative-minded people lived up to a certain level of integrity, but it had become a trend. And note that there were a lot more of these youths than us. (Emanuela Zini)

These criticisms are not just a matter of ‘veteran elitism’: they also reveal how dark started to be enacted in new and different ways. In the absence of empirical research, we limited ourselves to merely sketching what, from our interviewees’ points of view, appeared as the main transformations that led to the new dark enactments of the 1990s.7 In a similar way, lack

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of empirical research discouraged any observation about the trajectories of the loner enactment of dark after 1991, including those concerning the transformation of the epistolary scene into a properly virtual scene with the widespread diffusion of the Internet (Hodkinson 2003). Further research is also needed to evaluate the representativeness of our case study in the Italian context as a whole. As a sort of preliminary exploration, we asked 20 non-Milanese readers of the Italian version of the book—who volunteered after the publication of an announcement on the book’s Facebook page—to write a memoir about their experience in subcultural participation by using a questionnaire as a guideline, and compare it to the enactments described in the book. Indeed, some relevant differences emerged. For example, a reader described how the dark scene in his small town near Catania (Sicily) remained rigidly conservative from a sexual orientation point of view, notwithstanding the androgynous style: I may be wrong, but I don’t remember any sexual fluidity like the one described in the book, and I don’t remember open-mindedness towards homosexuality. It was quite a conservative scene from a sexuality point of view: a markedly heterosexual scene. Sure, there were guys who were more fluid sexually, and girls could experiment more, but homosexuals, or guys who crossed the line into very feminine attire, were always looked at as if they were strange animals. Heterosexual guys made sure you knew what they were: hetero, notwithstanding the makeup or the clothes. The alpha male mentality always prevailed. This mentality was also reflected in the relationship with music, strangely. I’m simplifying a lot, but let’s just say that if you were a fan of The Cure or Siouxsie, people thought—at least some—that you were a bit more effeminate, whereas if you were into Bauhaus or Joy Division, you were seen as more masculine. Obviously, this was quite ridiculous and a bit childish. It’s a bit hard for me to admit, but I think a lot depended on the fact that we were in the South, with its macho culture. But I also have to say, I don’t think the situation was that much different in the rest of Italy. I think the exception was Milan. It’s kind of ironic, but I only found out later that Sicily has its own libertine and differentiated approach to sexuality, even if it’s probably more hidden. Back then, I had a hard time understanding what my sexual orientation was, so I spent my dark phase being practically asexual only to discover and understand myself later, once I moved to London. (Seb)

Other than these differences, no other enactment of dark emerged from the memoirs of our volunteers, even if not all the enactments were present in all the cases. And yet, these results cannot be regarded conclusive in any way as conclusive.

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Finally, the enactment approach we proposed in this book was developed using grounded theory procedures. Nonetheless, we think that its validity is not limited to the study of subcultures, but rather that it could work equally well in addressing neo-tribes (Bennett 2005), lifestyles (Miles 2000) or scenes (Straw 1991). All the main methodological concepts we deployed—practices, enactment, canon—were, in fact, adapted from different fields in order to circumvent the contrast between subculturalist and post-subculturalist approaches. By moving the main focus of analysis on social practices, the enactment approach we proposed can, in fact, help to translate methodological incompatibilities into empirical questions, and can therefore contribute to moving beyond the enduring stalemate in (post-) subcultural studies (Hodkinson 2016; Woodman and Wyn 2015). Such is the case, for example, with the disputes over the role of structural determinants in the formation of subcultures8 (Muggleton 2000), and above all—as already pointed out—of the controversies counterpoising the homogeneous and coherent subcultural identities described by subculturalist with the heterogeneous, fluid and idiosyncratic forms of affiliation described by post-subculturalists. A practice-centred approach is in fact characterised by a specific focus on an intermediate social level between the individual and the structural, and between structure and action. In this way, it can help to address the specific forms of heterogeneity that characterise subcultures and, at the same time, also the specific forms of persistence and of internal coherence of post-subcultures, as already stated, among others, by Alan O’Connor (2016).

Notes 1. See Chap. 7. 2. See Chap. 3. 3. Such is the case, for example, with the existence of an activist enactment of dark and with the discrepancies with Brill’s observations (2008) on gender identity construction. 4. See Chap. 2. 5. See Sect. 7.4. 6. See Chaps. 4, 5 and 6. 7. See Chaps. 5 and 7. 8. As discussed in Chap. 2, this is the reason why we have not taken on board Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.

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References Bennett, A. (2005). In Defence of Neo-Tribes: A Response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(2), 255–259. Brill, D. (2008). Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. Bloomsbury Academic. Hannerz, E. (2015). Performing Punk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2003). ‘Net.Goth’: Internet Communication and (Sub)Cultural Boundaries. In D.  Muggleton & R.  Weinzierl (Eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 285–298). Oxford, New York: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2016). Youth Cultures and the Rest of Life: Subcultures, Post-­ Subcultures and Beyond. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(5), 629–645. Miles, S. (2000). Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford, New York: Berg. O’Connor, A. (2016). Towards a Field Theory of Punk. Punk & Post Punk, 5(1), 67–81. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr-Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London, New York: Routledge. Spracklen, K., & Spracklen, B. (2018). The Evolution of Goth Culture: The Origins and Deeds of the New Goths. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Straw, W. (1991). Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies, 53, 368–388. Woodman, D., & Wyn, J. (2015). Holding It All Together: Researching Time, Culture and Belonging After ‘Subcultures’. In S.  Baker, B.  Robards, & B.  Buttigieg (Eds.), Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives (pp. 43–52). Farnham: Ashgate.

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Index1

A Alcohol, 93, 108, 208, 209 Amen, 3, 15, 18, 60, 69–73, 75–77, 80, 125, 126, 142–150, 164, 171, 183, 198 Anarchism, 83n33 Anarcho-punk, 1–3, 5–7, 8n5, 35n9, 53–80, 99–101, 123, 144, 173, 208 Art, 18–20, 23, 60, 62, 63, 75, 77, 102, 125, 137, 141, 146, 147, 149, 153n30, 156, 163, 179–185, 188, 191 Authentication, 4, 14, 27, 30–33, 57–59, 65, 66, 98, 99, 101, 106, 162 Authenticity, see Authentication Autonomia Operaia, 1, 43, 70, 79, 124

B Bedroom cultures, 123–131 Bennet, Andy, 23, 138, 139, 218 Brill, Dunja, 2, 17, 25, 35n10, 98, 105, 124, 192, 202, 218n3 C Calusca, 43, 109, 144, 145 Canon, 4, 5, 7, 16, 17, 23–34, 35n9, 64–70, 97, 98, 102, 106, 125, 137, 140, 142, 155–202, 207, 211, 216, 218 Catholic Church, 47, 152n26, 196, 208 CCCP Fedeli alla Linea, 64 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Birmingham, 2, 14, 25 Cinema, 23, 41, 75, 84n37, 97, 163, 177, 179–185, 211, 213

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Tosoni, E. Zuccalà, Italian Goth Subculture, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39811-8

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INDEX

Cloth shops, 23 Cocaine, 107, 119, 181, 209 Consistent distinctiveness, 23, 24, 31, 97, 155–157, 207 Cox 18, 63, 82n18, 144 Creature Simili, 1–3, 43, 70–80, 87, 99–102, 104, 105, 108, 120n9, 124, 125, 139, 144, 145, 173 D Decoder, 6, 78 DJs, 18, 20, 21, 80, 88, 91, 93–96, 109, 110, 118, 127, 128, 165, 166, 170, 203n2, 203n11, 215 E Enactment, 4, 6, 7, 15–18, 23–34, 35n15, 42, 53–80, 87, 89–91, 97–108, 118–119, 123–150, 155, 161, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 183, 189, 190, 193, 197, 202, 203n12, 207–218 Epistolary scene, 217 F Fanzines, 2, 17–19, 34n5, 43, 46, 48, 60, 62, 63, 70–72, 77, 79, 107–109, 117, 132, 138, 139, 141–150, 151n20, 152n23, 164–166, 168, 170, 171, 183, 185, 198 Fascism, 47, 170, 172 Ferrarotti, Franco, 14, 16 Fetish & BDSM, 200 Field, 4, 22, 28–30, 34, 136, 155, 156, 164, 218

G Garber, Jenny, 126, 127, 131 Gay scene, 113, 198 Gender, 3, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 31, 60, 127, 191, 192, 194–199, 218n3 Goth music, 87, 92, 157, 201 Grounded theory, 14, 15, 23–34, 218 H Habitus, 28, 29, 35n10, 35n12, 218n8 Hannerz, Erik, 3, 23, 31, 32, 57, 155, 161, 163, 183, 187, 207, 208 Hebdige, Nick, 5, 6 Helter Skelter, 2, 6, 19, 20, 43, 59, 62, 67, 70–80, 84n34, 90, 99, 118, 120n17, 128, 143, 145, 183, 197, 214 Heroin, 3, 42, 49n4, 56, 107, 119, 134, 208, 209 Hodkinson, Paul, 2–4, 23–26, 34, 89, 97, 125, 139, 142, 155, 156, 185, 202, 207, 217, 218 Homosexuality, 60, 148, 197–199, 217 Hysterika, 3, 15, 19–22, 45, 78–80, 87–99, 102, 105–108, 112, 114, 118, 128, 129, 131, 143, 183, 187, 193, 200, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215 I Identity politics, 102, 104, 198 Internal validation, 16, 179 Intrinsic difference, 163, 183 L Law, John, 4, 32 Leoncavallo, 1, 19, 20, 43, 44, 67–73, 75–80, 99, 100, 102, 124, 126, 128, 197

 INDEX 

Life stories, 13–16, 23, 24, 30, 33, 34n1 Literature, 4, 14, 17, 22, 23, 25, 60, 72, 125, 126, 133, 137, 140, 146, 156, 157, 179–186, 192, 193, 208, 211 Lohman, Kirsty, 13, 17, 25, 35n13 London, 18, 20, 21, 54, 71, 82n16, 93, 94, 110, 119n5, 134, 135, 141, 148, 152n27, 160, 167, 168, 176, 185, 186, 189, 201, 210, 217 M Mainstream media, 158, 160, 185 Mainstream music, 163, 164 McRobbie, Angela, 126, 127, 131 Moroni, Primo, 43, 50n9, 82n18, 144, 145, 148 Muggleton, David, 13–15, 17, 31, 218 Music, 3, 4, 6, 7, 15, 18–23, 25, 33, 34, 48, 53–55, 57–65, 69–71, 75, 76, 79, 80, 80n2, 81n15, 82n22, 83n33, 84n37, 87–119, 123–125, 127–131, 135, 137–139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151n20, 153n30, 155, 156, 179–187, 191, 193, 197, 200–202, 203n6, 207, 211–217 N Neofolk, 170–172, 187, 215 New wave, 17, 19, 21, 58, 60, 61, 71, 76, 87, 88, 93, 95, 119n3, 120n18, 125, 134, 158, 159, 162, 164, 167, 168, 175–177, 182, 187, 193, 196

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P Paninari, 5, 8n7, 45, 90, 101, 112, 113, 115–118, 124, 128, 131, 132, 136, 161, 162, 183, 187–189, 191, 195, 208, 210, 216 Plastic, 20, 62, 63, 78, 82n17, 87, 88, 187 Post-punk music, 61 Practice(s), 4, 7, 13, 14, 17, 23–34, 35n9, 35n10, 35n11, 35n13, 63, 64, 99, 105, 108, 119, 124, 125, 129, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 148, 155–157, 161, 169, 172, 189, 192, 201, 202, 208, 211, 218 Public space, 41, 105, 108–117, 124, 127, 130, 131, 133, 202, 211 Punx, see Anarcho-punk Q Quelli di Amen, see Amen R Record shops, 23, 60, 166, 169 Riflusso (The Ebb), 3, 5, 41, 103, 208 S Scene, 2, 3, 6, 18, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 35n14, 45, 55, 57, 58, 63, 67, 68, 70–72, 76, 78–80, 83n33, 87–98, 107–110, 114, 118, 119, 119n2, 123, 124, 126, 138–150, 157, 158, 162, 165–167, 171, 173, 175–179, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193, 195, 197–202, 209, 214–217 Schatzki, Theodore, 4, 7, 24, 26, 27, 29–31, 208

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INDEX

Spooner, Catherine, 186, 192 Straw, Will, 138, 218 Style, 4, 14, 17, 23–27, 29, 54, 57, 58, 61, 64, 81n16, 84n37, 88, 93, 95, 97–99, 102, 104–106, 108, 110, 111, 119, 123, 130, 131, 135, 136, 141, 147, 155–157, 159, 161, 170, 176, 179–181, 183, 185–202, 203n11, 210–212, 215, 217 Subcultural capital, 33, 35n14, 98, 105, 106, 124, 129, 136, 161, 184, 195, 211 Supporti Fonografici, 109, 145, 150, 165–167

T Theatre, 2, 23, 60, 62, 63, 75, 81n16, 95, 102, 104, 127, 179, 183, 201 Thornton, Sara, 5, 33, 35n10, 35n14, 98, 105, 124 V Van Elferen, Isabella, 157, 203n2 Virus, 1, 2, 8n5, 19, 20, 43–45, 53–79, 81n10, 97, 109, 115, 123, 125, 128, 143, 168, 171, 197, 198, 208, 209, 214 W Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 157, 203n2