Off the record| Music | This is London

Off the record| Music | This is London

STANDING UP FOR GOTHS

After giving life sentences this week to two of the five teenagers who beat 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster to death for being a goth, the judge said to Brendan Harris (15) and Ryan Herbert (16): “This was a hate crime against these completely harmless people targeted because their appearance was different to yours.”

Following Sophie's shocking death, after she'd tried to protect her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, from the attackers, her mother, Sylvia, set up a memorial fund — Stamp Out Prejudice Hatred + Intolerance Everywhere (SOPHIE), at www.myspace.com /inmemoryofsophie — which has become the internet focal point for a heartfelt campaign. On 28 March, 7,153 people signed a petition calling for the Government to “widen the definition of hate crime' to include crimes committed against a person or persons, on the basis of their appearance or sub-cultural interests.”

Number 10 has responded with a polite no', because “these are not intrinsic characteristics of a person and could be potentially be very wide ranging, including for example allegiance to football teams — which makes this a very difficult category to legislate for”.

Yet as the blog Alterophobia (http://alterophobia.blogspot.com) exhaustively details, abuse against people who align themselves with goth culture is rife worldwide. And if any alternative lifestyle is as intrinsic to a person's being as a religious faith, it is this one. Appropriately for a murky world fascinated by vampires, goth is the subculture that never dies. Indeed, it is more popular than ever.

Yes, you can grow out of it, unlike your sexuality, disability, race or other categories that are officially included in the classification of hate crime — but many don't. Emerging from the post-punk scene of the early Eighties in the black-clad shape of bands such as Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sisters of Mercy, the early proponents of goth still thrive. Both Siouxsie Sioux and The Mission (an offshoot of Sisters of Mercy) performed major London shows as recently as March this year, and in the same month Bauhaus released their first album since 1983. The spirit of pioneering Soho club night The Batcave has been kept alive (or undead) by Inferno at Camden's Electric Ballroom and Slime-light at Electrowerkz in Islington, which claims to have a membership of 10,000.

Musically, the sound has splintered many times, but the macabre, glamorous aesthetic remains. There's the sexually charged metal of Marilyn Manson, the garage punk of London's latest ghouls The Horrors, and theatrical rockers My Chemical Romance, figureheads of the milder emo scene who still thrive on similar dark imagery and songs of outsiderdom. The latter two groups have both been victimised for their style: My Chemical Romance were bottled off at the 2006 Reading Festival and Horrors singer Faris Rotter lost a tooth after being assaulted by seven people in Whitechapel the same summer.

Goth attracts the alienated and lonely, hence the perception that it's a world of losers. With their white faces, lank hair and extensive piercings they are still more likely to be laughed at than physically attacked. The other British goths in the news this year were the couple who were kicked off a bus in West Yorkshire because one was holding the other by a dog lead, which gave the papers a good giggle.

Yet time and again we hear that for all the violent music and horror imagery, they couldn't be a more mild-mannered and peaceful bunch. If the sympathetic public reaction to the Sophie Lancaster case is anything to go by, we know who the real losers are.