The Best Cars To Own If You’re A Goth

You know how it is. One minute you’re comfortably in your noisy alternative nineties bubble, headbanging along to Machine Head and playing Metallica’s “Black Album” on repeat. Then you buy a terrible rock compilation album that contains a song you don’t know titled Temple of Love (the goth national anthem) and you’re immediately transfixed by the operatic wailing of Ofra Haza over a driving bassline and Andrew Eldritch’s cynical baritone. Before you know it you’re drinking snakebite and black, smoking clove cigarettes, and dousing yourself in patchouli oil. You’ve wandered over to the dark side. Come on in. The water’s lovely.

Why does goth continue to endure? Plenty of sub-cultures have come and gone over the years, as their raison d’etre has evaporated. But goth survives and thrives in the main because it’s tolerant and welcoming. Those on the margins of society will always find a home among the black-clad hordes. It’s an incredible canvas that means there’s no one way to be a goth – the music is the bedrock from which the darkness ferments but it pulls influences from all over the place: art, literature, movies, and fashion.

Cars are an extension of ourselves, how we present our personalities to the outside world. Goth if nothing else is sub-culture of self expression – so how does the goth about town…. well get about town? You need a decent sound system for blasting out your terrible taste in music to the neighborhood. How else are passers-by going to enjoy the self-mocking lyrics of “Black No.1″ by Type O Negative? Headroom for ridiculous hair is a bonus – if you’ve spent hours blow drying and backcombing before freezing the whole ‘do with enough hairspray to make a new hole in the ozone layer the last thing you want is it crushed against the headliner. Depending on what goth look you’re going for it’s likely you’ll be wearing multiple layers of PVC, velvet or leather, so you want an industrial-grade HVAC system so you don’t sweat off all your carefully applied makeup. No one wants to look like Brandon Lee in the Crow. Unless that’s exactly what you’re going for in which case good grief. Plenty of legroom is a useful commodity as well. I can personally attest that trying to drive an NC Miata in stompy boots is not recommended unless you enjoy having your knees jammed into the bottom of the steering wheel and fluffing your clutch control at every green light.

If you’re considering joining us here’s your guide to some appropriate wheels. You won’t find any hearses here because unless they’re a Cadillac they generally look look awful and are whopping cliche. There’s no Munster’s Koach or Dragula either because that would be too easy. Plus you’re not finding either of those on Craigslist. So slide your copy of “In the Flat Field” by Bauhaus into the CD player, put your black Aviators on and let’s take a turn onto Detonation Boulevard.

Land Rover Defender

A vehicle fashioned entirely from pig iron and abandoned railway infrastructure. I once described the Defender as being equal parts Blake’s satanic mills and British sheer bloody-mindedness, a turn of phrase I was so pleased with I’m repeating it here. A vehicle so stubborn and set in its ways it existed for the last thirty or so years of its life essentially unchanged. A clanging metaphor for the industrial decline of Great Britain.

To look at a Defender is to understand it immediately. Its identity is right there on the surface. Flat panels, simple angles, and sharp corners make up a no-nonsense, get-shit-done demeanor. Any repair on a Defender can be fixed with a cheap socket set and a decent hammer, perfect for industrial goths and rivetheads.

This sort of goth is occasionally seen foraging around flea markets for military surplus clothing before scurrying back to their communal artistic squat. Once there using an obsolete brick of a workstation laptop running an obscure Linux kernel they’ll log into the alt.gothic Usenet group nobody reads anymore to gatekeep what is and isn’t considered goth. They probably plan to make a (very) few extra quid on Bandcamp by sampling the clanging and crashing of the Defender’s suspension and releasing it as an industrial track. Dressed for the apocalypse? These fuckers are waiting for it.

• Alternative Vehicles: Steyr-Puch Pinzgauer, Volvo C304.
• Dresses Like: A failed extra from Mad Max: Fury Road.
• Dances To: Cabaret Voltaire. Throbbing Gristle. Ministry. Einstürzende Neubauten. KMFDM. Combichrist. Concorde crashing into a saucepan factory.
• Watches:  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Elysium. That black and white video of the Teletubbies set to Joy Division.

1938 Phantom Corsair

There’s a whole subgenre of goths who refuse to enter the twenty-first century. They watched movies like Sweeney Todd and Dorian Gray and thought yes that’s the world I want to exist in. I want to pretend to be nobility in a world of grubby street urchins, malnutrition, and general lack of sanitation. Some of these velveted faux toffs even pretend to be vampires. “I’m Count Lucius Mahogany de Ponsonby and this is the Countess. We’ve been undead for four hundred years.” No you’re John and Jane Bloggs from Shittleworth under Lyme. She’s a nursery schoolteacher and you spend your days chained to a cubicle for the local council. No amount of drinking cheap red wine from a Gothic Legends goblet pretending its blood is going to change that.

You know the sort of frock-coated posers I’m talking about. They’re the ones prancing down Flowergate with a cane and opera glasses at ten am during Whitby Goth Weekend, when the rest of us are trying to find a fried breakfast and a morning beer to get the day started. When caught in the throes of passion it takes two hours to get their brocade waistcoats and twenty layers of underwear off and outside of two Whitby weekends a year they’re the most boring people you could wish to meet.I’m going to take a little bit of artistic liberty here, because no cars existed during the mid to late nineteenth-century period these high-collared fops draw their aesthetic from. Alright a few did but they were tillered steered death carts powered by boilers that were more likely to shake your stupid top hat off your head. Influential style for the decadent romantic arrived with art deco in 1925 so what better conveyance for those with a supposed aversion to daylight than the one-off Phantom Corsair of 1938. Built on the bones of equally deco (and incredibly advanced) Cord 812, designed by Russ Heinz and built by Bohman & Schwartz coachbuilders, it was intended for limited production but only one was ever built.

Importantly for our romantic goths leaving their mansion (new build three bedroom semi-detached) this gloss black land crab has a drinks cabinet and no glazing for the rear passenger compartment lest the occupants be exposed to sunlight or more likely onlookers snickering at how pretentious they look.

• Alternatives: 1936 Lincoln Zephyr V12. Chrysler PT Cruiser.
• Dresses Like: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert about to hit the club. Jerry Seinfeld in his puffy shirt.
• Listens to: This Mortal Coil, The Cocteau Twins. Dead Can Dance. Any meandering trad goth bands with swirling vocals, and indecipherable lyrics who get to the melody about five minutes into the track.
• Watches: Coppola’s Dracula. Only Lovers Left Alive. That one with Colin Firth coming out of a fucking pond soaking wet.

Nissan Cube

With massive hair and huge stompy boots covered in fur, Cybergoths require a lot of room in a practical quirky package, so what better than a Nissan Cube? The specialist hairdresser who used to make my fake dreadlocks for me had one of these. He also had a house in North London painted black and a garden decorated with disembodied doll parts. Pretty sure that kept the neighbors away. When you charge what he did you can afford to be odd.

This is what happens after the apocalypse. Emerging from the ruins Goths discover color, stick a load of bright plastic wires and tubing into their hair, and decide to go dancing. Looking like they’d fallen to Earth from an orbital rave spaceship, gas masks, and goggles looked over the top but were necessary to survive the overpowering smoke machines in Slimelight on a Saturday night at the turn of the century.

Everything went to shit about a year and nine months after the turn of the millennium so the Y2K future cybergoths lean into never happened, but that doesn’t stop them from embracing the futuristic and quirky by sticking circuit boards to their faces and pretending to be dance robots. The look is less popular than it used to be, but the bright color and over-the-top accessorizing made it popular in Japan, so expect the Instagram scene kids to rediscover it and ‘invent’ it again soon.

• Alternatives: Scion xB. Feisar FX300.
• Looks like: A pharmaceutically addled rainbow-colored Muppet from hell.
• Dances to: Apoptygma Bezerk. Icon of Coil. Covenant. The skin-peeling screech of a ZX Spectrum loading screen. Car alarms.
• Watches: Any drama-filled anime, apparently without irony as if there wasn’t enough real-life goth scene drama going on in 2000 to crash Livejournal several times over.

Jaguar XJ12 Series III

There’s a certain kind of goth above the other goths. They have taste and sophistication. You’ll find them sitting sagely at the back of the goth club with a long drink looking fabulous, silently judging everyone else’s debauchery. Cruising through life like they’re gliding through a simulation, barely a thread out of place on their immaculately tailored and considered outfit which is vintage couture or some shit. You never see how good their make-up is because they never, ever remove their sunglasses, even indoors. What kind of car befits such dark elegance and a freezing cold demeanor? A Jaguar XJ12 of course. Before 1999 I would have suggested a 1961 fourth-generation Lincoln Continental but the release of the fucking Matrix ruined that car and the wearing of leather trench coats and wrap-around shades for goths everywhere.

Jaguars have always been the car for those people who in the immortal words of one British ex-Member of Parliament describing another, have “something of the night” about them – in other words a sordid past and a closet stuffed with skeletons. Which makes them the perfect car for the goth elder statesperson to swan about in. Light another Sobranie Black Russian and exhale, full of ennui as the uncaring nighttime cityscape rolls past your tinted windows to the strains of Duran Duran’s “The Chauffeur.” Place the back of your hand to your forehead. It’s all just so unbearable darling.

• Alternative wheels: 1986 Cadillac Eldorado. Toyota Century. 1983 Chrysler Executive.
• Looks like: One of the Blitz kids forty years too late.
• Listens to: Kraftwerk. Visage. The Neon Judgement. Ladytron. Laus Nomi. The Triadic Ballet.
• Watches: The Hunger. The Neon Demon. Heathers. That one scene from AHS Hotel with Lady Gaga. You know the one I’m talking about.

1994 Impala SS

It’s not all about spending all afternoon trying to pour yourself into restrictive black clothing before heading out to the night club in a haze of absinthe and clove cigarette smoke. That’s far too much effort for a delicate flower being crushed under the weight of a cruel world. Sometimes you just want to grab your gang and head to the local dive bar, drink all their tequila and take over the jukebox by playing goth crap all night. Scaring the normies, copious alcohol, and music. It’s what being a goth is all about.

The Impala SS is a car so goth I’m surprised it doesn’t run on eyeliner. A gloomy cavernous interior means there’s enough room for everyone without a spontaneous making-out session happening which is always an occupational hazard when a load of drunken goths are in close proximity to each other. The standard sound system probably isn’t up to much but because most goth music sounds like it was recorded in the toilets at the Batcave it doesn’t matter. It’s the perfect chariot for regular goths who are not trying too hard to be scenesters.

Long, low, languid with a skulking marauding presence on the road the slinky Impala SS, was basically marketed to goths from the off with its ‘Lord Vader Your Car is Ready’ tagline. I know because as soon as I saw that magazine spread in Car & Driver I wanted one. My budget didn’t stretch to a new Impala so I had to settle for a second-hand Z28 Camaro which with three friends aboard fried its brakes on the Yorkshire hills descending into Whitby and destroyed its back axle on the way home. I sold it to a drag racer who wanted the four-speed auto box.

• Alternative Wheels: Anything, as long as it’s out of the ordinary and black. Buick GNX.
• Looks like: Low effort modern-day Gary Numan. Siouxsie Sioux nipping out for a packet of cigarettes.
• Listens to: Ok fine the usual shite: The Sisters of Mercy. The Cult. Type O Negative.
• Watches: The Crow (ugh. Killer soundtrack though). Hellraiser. Any of the decent Tim Burton movies. Near Dark. Live footage of the Sisters of Mercy on YouTube because fucking Eldritch won’t get his taciturn ass into a studio to release a new album.

So there’s your tongue-in-cheek and not-to-be-taken-seriously guide to cars for goths. We don’t take ourselves seriously and neither should you. As we like to say, goth is a joke you’re either in on or you’re the butt of. So come over to the dark side. We have the best looks, the best music, and the best cars. All it costs is your soul. Just try not to snag your fishnets on the seat mountings when you’re getting out.

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