the rise of the batcave
All scenes must start somewhere. Whilst for many the exact time and place can be hard to pinpoint, one of the origins of Goth can be traced back to Wednesday nights in Soho. With live bands and DJs, music spanned from new wave to glam rock and gothic rock although, most dancers were just there to meet likeminded people. We sat down with The Batcave party starters Jon Klein and Sophie Chery to hear more about the origins and legacy.
Interview by Lisa der Weduwe | Cover photo by Derek Ridgers | 16.06.23
Can you talk about the late 70s and early 80s music scene and the bands that you played in?
Jon Klein: I was actually based down the West Country in Bristol at the time and so I was a little bit too young to be involved in the London punk scene. I was in local Bristol bands getting my first proper exposure in a band called the Europeans. We did a self financed first single that John Peel really liked, which then got us a deal with a label up in London. That is quite a curious story, actually, because the Major label we signed to in London also had another older act that had a hit single in the charts. So they got a couple of us involved on Top of the Pops - bring the average age down a bit. Those were the days when there were 10 million people watching Top of the Pops, so it was fantastic profile. It felt like my life plan was working. But then the singer took the money from the deal and fired us. It was a little bit of a shock and a surprise, and that created a bit of a tornado really. I started doing other things, and trying to create bands but none of it was really working and I was just getting crazier. I ended up having an accident in which I fell out of a window at a party, 42 feet and broke my back, ankle and jaw. I ended up flat on a bed in Bristol Royal Infirmary for about three months, then in plaster jacket for six months and then surgical corset the next year, so I decided on a different life strategy because I couldn't tie my shoelaces up.
I went back to art school and started heading towards a graphic design degree, and that's when I met Olli. It was the summer after I finished my foundation course that I first met Kevin Mills, the third person who started Specimen with us. He was in another local band and interviewed me for a fanzine. We started to hang out and then a couple of weeks later, this wild looking guy with corkscrew hair turned up having just gotten back from a six or nine month trip in Africa. Olli was a couple years older than me and he was around in the first wave of punk where he'd played at the Roxy. He's actually on the first Live at the Roxy album, which is the first compilation album that’s come out of the punk scene. He was very much into that DIY culture. And his whole family, him and his sister, were real kind of entrepreneurs. They just did stuff - buying and selling things, setting things up and doing stuff was really part of his psyche. He'd previously opened up a clothes store in the Beaufort Market on the Kings Road. He'd had a store next to Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. His was poetically called Scabs and they used to send people into the Vivienne Westwood shop, do quick little drawings on the sly, and then knock together the 20 quid version of it. The stories I got from Olli were fantastic, because that is also the point where there were wars with Teddy Boys. Suddenly you’d get 10 Teddy Boys coming into their stall and wrecking stuff on a Saturday afternoon. So the next week the Teddy Boys would come in and there’d be 20 punks in the back of the stall. He's telling me a story of one time, they chased this Teddy Boy up the Kings Road and they eventually caught him. They cut his Quiff off with a pair of scissors and burnt his brothel creepers, in the middle of the Kings Road!
And so this was the guy that I met in Bristol, and he was just hilarious. He was the naughty boy that your parents really didn't want you to hang out with at school. So I just totally fell in love with him. Straight away, you know? By the point I'd met him, I'd already changed my trajectory, and I wasn't going to do a graphics degree, I was gonna do a performance art degree. But I said look Olli, I'll help you with your music, but you know, October, I'm going to uni in Brighton, and there's just no way I'm not going to do that and he says: Oh, it's fine. We'll just relocate the band to London and you'll have to come up every weekend for rehearsals. He didn't ask me, he told me, which is exactly what I did. I did a year of that course in Brighton, on which I was screen printing up posters, doing our photography and developing prints and stuff for the band. Then I took a sabbatical after that first year, because by the end of that year, we had a publishing deal. So I took a sabbatical, and we opened the Batcave that summer. That's where it all kind of took off from yeah. So that's the long version of the story sorry, haha.
Sophie Chery: In the meantime, I was in Paris where nothing was happening for me. So moved to London to buy a bass and find people to play with. It was quite fun that jump from Paris to London. We'd all done journeys to get to that place, at that moment in time. It wasn't just being in the local scene and things happening. It was all about a move and that kind of energy. It was the same as Jonny Slut, he came to London to do fashion. I think he saw himself working in fabric printing or doing something like that. So it's no surprise that he became a fashion icon as such.
When I came here, I put an ad in Melody Maker to find other musicians. I met this Australian girl and ended up sharing a house with her, and through her I met Hamish, who was DJing at the Batcave. Hamish had come from Spain where he had a band called Sex Beatles and he reformed it here with Liz, the girl I was sharing a house with, a mate of his on drums and I. It then merged into Sexbeat when Lindsey joined on drums and Liz and the other drummer left. Suddenly we were three and the name got shortened to Sexbeat. It’s good that we abbreviated the name, because we were known for our song Sexbeat. It wouldn't have had the same vibe would it? Sex Beatles doesn't sound the same. Too hippyish, haha! Lindsey and I, we were not keen on it. It was just Oh, hang on a minute. We're just not Beatles, we are Beat, you know.
How did the Batcave emerge out of all of this then? What was the impetus for that?
Jon Klein: Well, for us, it was just somewhere to play. We’d played at Dingwalls and had a really bad time. We were one of the support bands and we had a fight with a soundman, had a fight with a lighting guy, and took them to task whilst on the stage. They said our attitude wasn't a rock and roll attitude. We self-promoted a show soon after and got a publishing deal with Rusty Egan's Metropolis who were based in Trident Studios where Ziggy and Transformer were recorded. It was here that we met Final Solution, who put on London gigs. Conversations led to the idea of doing a local one nighter. There was a huge catchment of people in the music industry around, from record company staff to other bands - in the building Soft Cell were there, The The and Neubauten with Some Bizarre Records.
There were also generally just loads of people that had nowhere to go. There was a bit of an absence of places to hang out in London at that point. So we did a public service. We organised a place for us to go, for our mates to go and for people to play if they felt like it. It was a way for people to get exposure. When we opened the Batcave, we wanted to be able to play somewhere with absolute control over our environment, but it fast became obvious that that wasn't just what the Batcave was about. It was also a hub for all kinds of creatives and it had it's own momentum. It was people from fashion and actors or people from PR or labels or writers and poets. It was very proactive, people going were really doing things, so yes it was a buzz. A lot of collaborations would have kicked off from meetings and plans laid out over a drink at the Batcave, I'm sure.
Do you remember the first night?
Jon Klein: I remember it because Specimen we're playing. And I just remember being in the dressing room, which was pretty humble, and thinking we can get 40 people in, 50 or 60. Or maybe no one's gonna come. Shit, that'll be really embarrassing. And we suddenly got notified that, wow, there's a queue right up the street into the next street. So the first night was rammed. It was really exciting. We had people there from the cabaret circuit, I think we had raw meat jugglers entertaining the queue. That venue also had a little theatre with velvet seats, so we'd have different acts going on there, as well as eight millimetre films we were showing. In the first few weeks we had a really interesting performance artist who was doing a monologue and getting more and more depressed, and he suddenly ran and jumped out of a window, and that was on the fifth or sixth floor of the building. They had rigged something outside but it scared the living daylights out of the audience.
Do you remember the first time you went Sophie?
Sophie Chery: Vaguely haha. I was playing with Hamish. And it's when we were Sex Beatles because we had a drummer that wasn't Lindsey. We had a drummer who was epileptic and we didn't know about that. When we played upstairs, there were some strobe lights during the gig. So when we finished, the poor drummer just rushed off and he went into this kitchen area and he had a fit. I wasn't aware of it, Jon found him. I didn't find him because when the gig finished and I got off stage via the audience, my bass got tangled in somebody's jumper. And so it took me quite a while to get detangled from this guy. In the meantime, the drummer had an epileptic fit. And that was my first night at the Batcave. So yeah, it was a little bit kind of wow, what’s going on. It was chaotic, but it was great. And then the second time was when I met Jon properly. I was quite upset because I thought that he thought I was Australian because my bass was left-handed. And he was talking about playing upside down.
Jon Klein: She plays her bass upside down. And it was just a bad joke; “oh, we got an Australian bass.” And she got really pissed off, oops!
Sophie Chery: I was like, I'm not the Australian one, I'm the French one. And that's the first time I met Jon, Olli and Johnny. After that night we went to this place on Fulham Road, this cafe that was open all night. They used to serve red wine in teapots and teacups because they were not supposed to sell alcohol after hours. And it was great. So we’re all just hanging around there, having our red wine, served in teapots. As a French person, that was really weird, but I really enjoyed it. So yeah, that's how it started.
Jon Klein: It was really buzzy, you know! Hamish had come from the Lyceum scene where he'd initially been working on the badge stall and later on DJing there. So he had a really good insight into what was getting played and what was happening with bands on the scene. It was great that bands without deals were able to headline quite big theatre shows in London. So it was a really, really creative kind of moment on the music scene. Sophie and those guys, they were living down the Kings Road, we were living in Soho, it was just really creative.
Sophie Chery: It was very exciting times in London then, very good. You didn't need a big job to survive. It was really easy. Life was free.
"The Batcave was perfect, because there was a bit of kitsch in there, a bit of comedy in there, there are the dark implications, but it's playful. It was just the perfect way to contextualise a lot of aspects of what people do."
Do you have any favourite moments that come to mind?
Jon Klein: Oh God for us there's so many you know! When I moved into a flat at 72 Old Compton Street with Olli, that became our operational headquarters. One day we had a couple of journalists coming down to see us. Don't know if they were interviewing us or just coming up for a cup of tea that day, but on the way out Olli stuck his head out the window and shouted at them. When they looked up he poured a bucket of water over journalists. One time we also got busted. We had a police raid before the Batcave night. So there was me, Olli and Lucy, who was doing PR at the time, and we were just getting ready for the club and there was little knock on the door. I answered and this hand just picked me up and marched me into our living room. I was scared witless - it was a guy in a bomber jacket and I thought it was local mafia stuff, and maybe we were gonna get executed for the things that we didn't know we'd done. It turned out it was the drugs squad and the guy downstairs had given them a nice little phone call saying oh, there's loads of people with funny coloured hair upstairs and they're always like coming in and out of the flat making lots of noise, I think they're dealing drugs. So they started searching our flat. Lucy was in the toilet at the time and one of the uniformed cops said think there's someone in the bathroom, sarge. So two of these cops, they're banging on the door and Lucy thought it was Olli messing around. She's saying like bollocks get lost Olli. Stop messing around. So these two cops took a running jump at the door and they both bounced off it like a bucket of water. They were getting more and more upset saying, I can hear somebody flushed something. As soon as they got in, it was a hand down the S-bend. They were searching everything, taking apart our VHS videotapes and everything. And they never found anything and eventually kind of left apologising. But one of our rats bit them. They were rattling the cage and Basil the rat, who had never ever bitten anyone before, took exception. One of these coppers put his finger in the cage and haha.
Sophie Chery: I've got good memories of America. When we first went to New York, that was mental - the Batcave in New York. It was like, wow, a very different vibe than London, obviously. And the decoration was really good because they gave us downstairs.
Jon Klein: Yeah, the Danceteria, it's the club where Madonna's dancing in Desperately Seeking Susan. It was a multi floor club in Downtown Manhattan. They gave us the ground floor and the basement, spray painted the whole of the basement black, and gave me like $3,000 and a couple of local artists - one that would do more traditional painting, the other one that was a graffiti artist. And so we did a fantastic ghost train-like installation in there. And that's basically what got us our Sire record deal, because there was quite a bit of noise in New York. We had a labyrinth with these glow in the dark trees, and the DJ booth was visible through a hole in the wall in a 3D graveyard built with a UV sky. As the doors opened there were levered skeletons coming down the walls, bats flying up and the whole thing was full up to chest height with dry ice. It was a proper acid trip kind of thing, it was on another level to what we were able to do in London at the time. So it really kicked things off in America straight from the word go.
Sophie Chery: And it was great to be confronted with an American audience, you know, as opposed to the London one, the English one. They were very enthusiastic and quite child like.
Jon Klein: We had break dancers from the Bronx breakdancing in the graveyard. It was a real collision of early Hip Hop culture and, well, there was no such thing as Goth at that time, but you know, it was a really interesting collision.
Sophie Chery: Lindsey and I, we were not really supposed to play there but Hamish was already there to DJ so we thought oh well might as well go too and play our set. So we arrived separately from Specimen and Hamish, and went to the Chelsea Hotel. There was this famous, lovely manager at the time. We just went, explained we're playing at the Danceteria he approved and he gave us a room really cheap. And it was just fantastic. I got my trousers stolen the first day. Thankfully when I played the first night at the Danceteria somebody gave me a pair of blue rubber trousers. So that was a great replacement. It was weird because in London you could walk out dressed up and nobody bat an eyelid. But over there, it was, like everybody pointing at you and laughing at you.
Jon Klein: Oh, cars would stop to heckle you.
Sophie Chery: It was kind of a weird trip, like being back in Paris where people look at you with prejudice, fear and anger, except over there they heckle!
Jon Klein: Well I remember before the first Danceteria show, me and Olli trying to flag a taxi on Fifth Avenue, because we were staying up on West 44 so it's like 25 blocks away. It was just like the original Batman TV show, you know Burt Ward with tights on and underpants walking down Fifth Avenue and trying to get a taxi and no one's gonna stop, it was hilarious. The other thing that we did on the end of that trip, was we managed to organise the show at CBGB, as it was still open at that time. That's the first time we saw firearms in public. After our soundcheck, we'd gone a couple of blocks north from the club, to the diner, and on the way back down to the club this guy just barrelled out of a doorway with a big shooter and says, hey, guys who's gonna get it? My God, I've never experienced anything like that in my life. We just kind of froze, it was just Oh, walk, keep walking, make no eye contact. So we went to CBGBs and got really drunk.
The iconography and design of The Batcave has become seminal. Can you talk about how the classic designs emerged and how you approached the interior for your venues?
Jon Klein: Well the first Batcave prop I made was a painting I did on a fish fingers box. I managed to push it into 3D and then put some clear plastic over it and fixed it all down with some studs from Liberated Lady on Kings Road. So it was very much just what you could do on a budget of nothing. Then there was this strange creative guy who was a friend of Don Ward, who had the lease on the building for the club. He made some interesting soft sculptures of these weird fabric padded creatures like bats that were hanging in places. I suppose the cargo netting and stretched and stabled fabrics were simple, practical ways of making something look a bit spookier and less like a discotheque. I'd just done that year at art school so I guess I was a self appointed art director at the Batcave. I had a portfolio already so things like the first Batcave flyer was an old piece of work that I customised and tarted up. I suppose the first real prop I made actually, for our first venue was the original coffin sign, because we wanted a profile out on the street so a sign with a light inside it was good. The original one had a mannequin's hand that was chopped up, with weird solder and gel joints and bits of surgical tools sticking out. During the foundation course I was influenced by other people's work I'd found lying around the studios or in cupboards. Particularly one girl that did really amazing mixed media drawings with layers. I often worked on transparent or opaque papers, just to be able to work on both sides, often red, white and black building up layers.
The Batcave album cover artwork, I should tell that story, that's quite a funny one! Obviously I grabbed that job to do the Batcave album cover. We were going to get a gatefold twelve inch sleeve, which is an amazing thing to be able to work on. The inside of the sleeve was actually a drawing I'd started a year or so before and never completed - I think it started off as a drawing of Iggy and the Stooges, 1969. And so I started cannibalising it, ripping bits of paper off and sticking things onto it, and also using gloss enamel paints. And then the front cover. I was into making stuff with processes at the time. I'd cut some letters off an old flyer, and started sticking them up in different places to photograph, like on the electric bar heater. The image I used was of the cut out letters stuck onto a red polythene bag. There was a colour photocopier that had just arrived in Soho in Poland Street, and I got them to do a colour Xerox of the negative of this and so hence the opposite colour green appeared. So great, you know, that’s the text done. For the outside I grabbed a vinyl album that was hanging around the flat. In the old days they used to have these plastic dust covers that the albums are kept in. And so I just shoved bin liner inside the plastic cover and started burning it over the gas stove in the kitchen. So the front cover is all basically melted bin liner and plastic. But the interesting thing was that many years later, I looked at the back of that burnt album to find out that it was a Buzzcocks album, and it said, Jay Melton - so it was Johnny Slut's Buzzcocks album that even had the vinyl record in it when I was melting it in the kitchen. He's almost forgiven me for that, haha!
So it was all really about making stuff. It was just part of daily life and one thing I like about the work is it wasn't generally over thought. Our life was doing this stuff, it wasn't sitting down and thinking of something clever. We just kind of followed your nose and went instinctively towards what you thought you wanted to make. I suppose probably the most well known example would be the definitive Batcave logo. There's one specific Batcave logo that's inside a bat that I did for a membership card one afternoon. Olli said we need some new membership cards and forms, can you do something? So we’ve got to get to the printers in an hour before they shut so it'll be ready for tomorrow. I was looking around and there was no paint or anything and all I could find was one little bottle of tippex. It was half gunky and half dried. So this is a real fast little logo. And that has become the most widely spread Batcave image that's out there - more than any piece of music I've ever worked on or anything else creative I've ever done. We even went to Lithuania a decade or so ago to appear at a festival, and a Dutch guy turned up who had a really big tattoo of it on the back of his neck, and they really carefully shaded all the areas so it looked exactly like a 3D image of the gunky half dry tippex.
And how did the name come about?
Jon Klein: Ah, that was Olli's idea. Olli said he was driving up past Abbey Road Studios and it just dropped from the sky. It just came into his mind, and he knew immediately that it made everything else kind of obvious. The level of imagery, because, as I said earlier, there was no Goth then. So we weren't trying to think of something dark, or something scary. The Batcave was perfect, because there was a bit of kitsch in there, a bit of comedy in there, there are the dark implications, but it's playful. It was just the perfect way to contextualise a lot of aspects of what people do.
"You know, I'm still finding out about people that I never knew were there. So it's no wonder in that respect, that there is kind of a legend attached, just because of that meeting of minds."
Touching on that, Goth didn't exist back then. Now people would say the Batcave was seminal in the emergence of Goth. How do you feel about the term and what it signifies?
Jon Klein: Maybe I was slightly more sensitive when I was younger. It's curious because after the Batcave I went on to play guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees, and I know that they were like; we’re not Goth! By that time certain artists emerged and the Goth name was associated with stuff that they didn't want to be associated with. So that brings on a whole different kind of problematic in hindsight. I find no real problem with it, really.
Sophie Chery: It was not Goth, it was just the Batcave. We had a funny way to dress because we had to make it all ourselves. There was nothing available that was Goth looking in a way, so it was a mishmash of making up clothes. Sometimes I was all black, sometimes I was all bright. I had a Marie Antoinette dress and that was green and yellow. It didn't always look like the Goth uniform you see now. But there was the budding of it you know, it was quite free.
Jon Klein: Mike Nicholls, who was our projectionist, subsequently ran various kinds of clothing projects with Boy George. He often talks about the evolving tribes of the guys and girls wearing black and then when the Mohicans started appearing and when that started moving towards crazy colours. There was a lot of evolution, but also that earlier punk DIY ethic. It was a lot more DIY than the New Romantics. But what I have noticed in terms of the knock on effects of this, we played a few shows at the 25th reunion around 2008, 2009. We're going to other countries doing a few bits and pieces and so we met Batcavers. Batcavers are kind of like a subgenre, and what we noticed is these Batcaver kids that turn up with clothes and accessories that they have made themselves. Either they screen printed it or found someone who will, or cut things out and made really interesting stuff. And they would also seem to be the somewhat more mischievous side of the Goth fraternity.
The Young Limbs compilation celebrates 40 years since the Batcave - how is it looking back over those four decades and the lasting impact the club has had?
Jon Klein: What I look at when I look at this sleeve, is a piece by Kris Needs that we paid him to write, and he starts going on, blah, blah, blah; “It is the avenging spirit of nightlife Badlands. His shadow looms large over London's demi-monde. It is a challenge to the false idol, it will endure.” I was saying Kris that's strong, it's a bit up itself, isn't it? But actually the Batcave legend did endure so he was right you know, we had no idea. We just thought, it's a great place for us and our mates and we can maybe help our bands get a launch pad, right? Within a few years the bands had exploded or evolved anyway and everyone went to do their own things after that, but at that moment the club really was the hub and was inhabited by such a wide range of people. You’d have Lemmy on the slot machine, you'd have Martin Degville, from ZZ Sputnik would walk in on his platforms and massive white dreadlocks along with Tony James and Neal X. There are people like Vince Clarke from Yazoo, and then all the usual suspects, like the Banshees and the Birthday Party. You know, I'm still finding out about people that I never knew were there. So it's no wonder in that respect, that there is kind of a legend attached, just because of that meeting of minds.
If you could donate one object to the Museum of Youth Culture that represents that time, what would it be?
Jon Klein: It would have been nice to have actually donated the original Batcave sign. The one that I've got, we had made for our reunion in 2008. The original Batcave sign was last seen on the shoulder of a guy called Popeye who was running down Regent Street in 1983 on the last night of the Fouberts venue. So ha, it was never seen again. That would be kind of nice to put in your locker.
Sophie Chery: I think I'd give my Marie Antoinette dress. So a non-Gothic outfit but definitively a Batcave outfit.
Jon Klein: And also one of the backdrops that we made when we were in the Old Compton Street flat, made out of spray painted Astro Turf. I arranged all these scary masks on it. Then I stole a pair of Olli's PVC stage trousers, split them and glued them in the centre of the backdrop. So that would be quite a fitting souvenir.