Revisiting The Art of The Batcave and its Roots in London’s Soho Subculture
In this first installment of a series called Venues, we cover the places that have become legendary in subcultures for their impact on music, fashion, and community. This series endeavors to look at why specific spaces and events have become so memorable and symbolic of their moment in time. If we’re lucky, we can use the knowledge of these past successful venues to inspire the creation of new spaces that nurture the underground and most vitally, the art and artists that frequent these spaces. We begin the Venues series with one of the most beloved and referenced of the ‘80s, the London weekly called The Batcave.
Flyer for the debut of The Batcave in 1982. Artwork by Jon Klein.
Approaching a topic like the early ‘80s Batcave club in London’s Soho can be tricky. Why write about an event that has already had so much press and so many online articles dedicated to dissecting the fashion, hair, and makeup of the club’s regulars like Marc Almond, Dave Ball, Nick Cave, Robert Smith, Nik Fiend and Mrs. Fiend of Alien Sex Fiend, Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, and Youth of Killing Joke, among many others? The fixation on the celebrity aspect of the event leaves room to illustrate the deeper impact of The Batcave, the beacon for the new underground emerging from the previous decade’s prevailing genres like disco, punk, glam, hard rock, and folk making way for the darker post-punk and goth genres.
“I pay my £3.00 and am confronted by great swoops of grubby netting that stretches from wall to wall. The atmosphere’s ideal for mere mortals and pop stars to admire each other’s white pan- cake make-up and to sway to music by Siouxsie, The Cure, Alien Sex Fiend and such early ‘70s Glam Rockers as Sweet and T. Rex. Marc Almond stands arm-in-arm with Nick Cave of The Birthday Party. One Dracula lookalike keeps getting his towering hair-do in the drooping netting. Ollie, lead singer of The Specimen and club host, laughs: “Anything goes! It’s all fun and very creative.”
The Batcave and places like it represented a space for people who identified as outsiders to gather and express themselves without fear of persecution or violence. The act of dressing for oneself and for the purpose of being seen meant those who created these avant garde looks were out of step with contemporary trends, let alone society’s ideas of gender and beauty. Venues like The Batcave also represented a democratization of fashion and subcultures in its relaxed door policy, which Batcave co-founder Olli Wisdom was keen to point out to media covering the club’s success. Similar legendary clubs around that time, most notable among them were New York City’s Studio 54 (its original run was from 1977-1980) and London’s Blitz Club (1979-1980), boasted a strict door policy where entry was a symbol of elevated social status. In fairness, all of these clubs promoted a sense of equality among those in attendance, but the attitude about access to that space and the arbiters of that access at Studio 54 and Blitz were far from the open policy of The Batcave. Consequently, the door policy at The Batcave attracted a diverse range of people and defied the stereotype of gatekeeping in dark alternative scenes like goth.
Soho and Subculture
The Soho neighborhood of The Batcave’s original location at 69 Dean Street has its own fascinating history. A place for bohemians, outsiders, and intellectuals, Soho attracted unique businesses and nightlife, furthering its reputation as a place that stepped outside the boundaries of polite society and stayed relevant by transforming through the decades. The neighborhood itself was built during the reconstruction efforts following 1666’s Great Fire in London, where “Artists quickly adopted the new suburb as London’s fashionable quarter, and the king, Charles II, purportedly visited his mistress ‘pretty, witty’ Nell Gwyn in a house on the site of No 69” (The Face, February 1983). In an interview for The Quietus in 2012, David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets described Soho, saying “It had a sort of Dickensian, Jack the Ripper flavor to it, you know, the back streets of Soho. It was dingy and very much had the faded glamour of old Soho. It was romantic in that way, it was easy to project one’s gothic fantasies on that locale.”
By the 1930s the establishment at 69 Dean Street was The Gargoyle Club, a subcultural hotspot for the bright lights of stage and screen, including the English playwright, director, actor, and composer known as The Master, Noël Coward. Given the nature of Coward’s reputation as a creative pioneer, his beloved and subversive works along with his enjoyment of nightlife at venues such as The Gargoyle Club, it is fitting to note how his career pushed social and moral boundaries that reflected the societal changes around him. This boundary-pushing has become a central part of Coward’s legacy, as was eloquently summarized by a BBC retrospective, saying “The Master may have hidden always behind a mask, but he was also hiding in plain sight – continually using his plays to remind audiences of the roles he played, the masks he wore. Consider this line from Leo, another character close to a self-portrait, in Design for Living: ‘It's all a question of masks, really… we all wear them as a form of protection; modern life forces us to.’”
Soho and places like The Gargoyle Club were spaces for creatives like Coward to nurture ideas and witness others pushing their own creative boundaries through performance art and music. Naturally, the fine arts world has a connection to the club, as noted in an article by The Face (February 1983), saying “The rooftop Gargoyle club at 69 Dean Street opened in 1925, boasting the French painter Henri Matisse not only as a member but as the inspiration for the Moorish interior of its ballroom – a steel and brass staircase was still in evidence when the Comedy Store took over the club in 1979.”
Coffee bars represented a new social order for post-WWII London where socioeconomic and gender barriers began to change, lending to what we now think of as the subcultural melting pot that Soho represented. These were more than a fad for teens to get out of the house and caffeinate themselves with espresso instead of whatever was available in their home; coffee bars were attractive to creative types in the 1950s because they stayed open later and were all-ages. Importantly, women could feel less intimidated in a coffee bar versus a pub and live music was hosted at coffee bars in addition to jukeboxes that brought recorded music to spaces that once solely relied upon live music to provide entertainment and ambiance. Consider that 45rpm singles debuted in 1948, exponentially expanding the popularity of the jukebox and its eventual evolution to the club DJ.
Flyers and exterior/interior views of Le Macabre Club. Images: Movies and Mania / Desperate Living.
A notable coffee bar in Soho during this era was Le Macabre Club, an obvious predecessor to The Batcave in theme and décor. Opening in 1957 and closing sometime in the 1970s, Le Macabre Club took influence from the notorious horror-themed Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (The Grand Guignol Theatre) in Paris as well as other ‘death cafés’ in Europe. An excerpt from an article in The Telegraph (2017) describes Le Macabre Club’s atmosphere: “The tar-coloured walls would be adorned with plastic skeletons, painted cobwebs, and frescoes of naked women twirled in the moonlight by libidinous ghouls. You’d see hip teenagers (‘cats’, as they were known) wearing sunglasses, sipping espresso, and debating the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and the jazz of Dizzy Gillespie on the coffins, punctuated by the odd guitar jam…” In an interview with The Look in 2000, Glen Matlock of The Sex Pistols described his experience at the famed Soho coffee bar, saying “When I started working as the Saturday boy at Let It Rock [in 1973], Malcolm McLaren used to take me around these strange places which played a part in early rock & roll. One time we went to Le Macabre. I don’t know how he knew about it, but it was the real thing. The tables were coffin lids and the jukebox only had songs to do with death.”
Intoxication Hall at Cabaret du Néant. Image: Wikipedia.
The roots of this uniquely morbid social gathering place also traces back to the cafes of Paris in the early 1890s such as the Cabaret du Néant (“Cabaret of Nothingness"/"Cabaret of the Void”) which featured the same coffin-shaped tables as well as (human) bone chandeliers in the various rooms of the venue, like The Vault of Sad Ghosts and Intoxication Hall. The Batcave even had a notice posted above the door that was referential to that of Cabaret du Néant’s entry sign which read “Enter, mortals of this sinful world, enter into the mists and shadows of eternity. Select your coffins, to the right, to the left; fit yourselves comfortably to them, and repose in the solemnity and tranquillity of death; and may God have mercy on your souls!” The Cabaret du Néant along with The Gargoyle Club and Le Macabre Club were definitively goth before the term became colloquially known.
By the ‘80s The Batcave became the beacon for other similar-minded clubs to follow, celebrating the emerging scene that rose after many young people thought ’77 punk had become a parody of itself and the New Romantic scene had gone commercial. The Batcave positioned itself as a meeting place for friends as well a launching pad for bands, attracting a diverse range of people. The same fate awaited the scene that blossomed at The Batcave as it did for those that came before it, but the mystique of this campy, ghoulish weekly event in Soho is still evident in the deathrock and goth scene today.
Images from ‘A Night At The Batcave’ in Smash Hits, March-April 1984.
Becoming The Batcave
“Strange mutations from the tomb of punk rock, the gothic are coming out of the undergrowth.”
Opening on 21 July 1982 and closing in 1985 after moving to various locations around London and going on tour to America, The Batcave’s ambiance featured an entrance made from a coffin (no, really) and once inside, revelers hung out under faux cobwebs and cheap black plastic lining the walls. In addition to a DJ, the club also featured live music and cabaret shows. In short, it was a spooky place to gather with friends and dance under the cobwebs or hang out and talk about the arthouse films projected on the wall with the occasional break to watch a live performance. The entry cost and drink prices at The Batcave were reasonable, making it feasible for young people with low income to participate in the fun, an important consideration since this was still a tough economic climate of inflation and high unemployment for England and especially hard-hitting for people at the beginning of their working years. The connection between cinema and television, especially the horror genre with its creature design and special effects makeup is apparent in the way many Batcave attendees preferred to style themselves. This free agency of self-expression showcased the connection between visual media and music, which often was inspired by literature from the likes of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allen Poe among many others. Universal Horror Monster films like The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Dracula (1931) along with classic German Expressionist films like Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) have important influence on goth culture both in their visual tone and subject matter which tends toward exploring the archetype of the outsider and the nature of good and evil.
Batcave co-founder Olli Wisdom (1958-2021) appeared on the 1977 Live at the Roxy compilation, the first of its kind covering the London scene at that time along with Wire, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Adverts, Eater, and more. Wisdom appeared on the track “Freedom” by The Unwanted and according to his Batcave co-founder Jon Klein (1960-), Wisdom lived by a DIY ethic long before opening The Batcave: “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” (Museum of Youth Culture).
Album artwork and track listing for ‘Live at the Roxy’ (1977) compilation featuring Olli Wisdom.
In 1982 Klein was at university in Brighton while also art directing his and Wisdom’s band Specimen, creating flyers and screen printing posters, but he took a sabbatical from his studies when Specimen had a publishing deal, opening The Batcave that summer. The Batcave’s resident DJ was Hamish MacDonald (DJ Hamish) who moved to London from Spain with the band he sang and played guitar in called Sex Beatles, which later became Sexbeat along with Sophie Chéry (bass) and Lindsey “Linzi” Light (drums). The power of the DJ at The Batcave was undeniable: Hamish had the power to connect the glam rock era to post-punk to Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend’s own so-called “deathrock” and quintessentially Batcave sound. This melding of genres is a mirror to the diverse mixture of people that would check out The Batcave and to the fact that it was only one of the notable club nights—Soul Furnace, Rebel Rockers, The Gold Coast, Gas’s Rockin’ Blues—held at the venue known variably as The Gargoyle Club, Gossip’s, and Billy’s. In fact, the club Billy’s was the immediate predecessor to The Batcave and was frequented by members of Bauhaus, Joy Division, and more—some of the most well-known names in what would become known as goth and post-punk.
“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.”
Album artwork for Specimen’s ‘Batastrophe’ and Sexbeat's S/T 7” (both 1983). Images: Discogs.
By all accounts, the atmosphere of The Batcave was buzzing with connections and creative energy, all led by the music heard on its stage and dance floor. Of the scene overall, Jonny Slut (Jonny Melton) is one of the most famous faces from The Batcave. The frequent subject of photographs by scene photographer and documentarian Derek Ridgers, Slut was one of the event’s hosts as well as a member of Specimen and later a Batcave DJ. As he explained to The Guardian in 2023, The Batcave’s vibe was “Of not feeling like you fitted in, not wanting to fit in. It was sexy but also asexual. I remember feeling not particularly gay, not particularly straight. I didn’t care. Other things were more important, friendships, music, the way we were living.” Others came to The Batcave to convene with fellow creatives and launch new projects, as was the case for J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus, who recalled “It was there one night that Lydia Lunch proposed an idea to myself, Marc Almond and Nick Cave that turned into The Immaculate Consumptive, which was project the four of us did at Danceteria in NYC in 1983” (The Quietus).
Danceteria flyer for The Immaculate Consumptive et al, 1983. Image: The Internet Archive.
The Art of The Batcave
The music of The Batcave became its own genre with ‘house bands’ Specimen, Sexbeat, and Alien Sex Fiend, all of which reflected the shifting and expanding genres of the late ‘70s and early '80s integrating glam and post-punk into more danceable dark songs (e.g., Sexbeat’s “Sexbeat”). Many artists who frequented The Batcave were inspired by the burgeoning goth scene and incorporated it into their work, such as Soft Cell’s song “Martin” from their 1983 LP The Art of Falling Apart. Soft Cell co-founder Dave Ball said about the emerging goth scene, “It was romantic, intellectual, Byronesque… I always found goths were the sensitive, bright kids, very gentle” (The Guardian).
Soft Cell’s album artwork for ‘The Art of Falling Apart’ (1983). Image: Discogs.
The Batcave is not where macabre music and fashion were founded, but it was an important meeting place to nurture the underground scene at that time, which happened to be brimming with creativity and frustration with the ‘old guard’ of punk and the perception of saccharine flamboyance by the New Romantics. For context, think about what the icons of The Batcave would have been into long before the event itself was founded: as children of the post-WWII Baby Boom (the club’s founders being born in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s) the youngest people legally able to attend The Batcave at 18 years old in 1982 would have been born in 1964, qualifying them as Baby Boomers. In their formative years, these people would have been exposed to musical movements like punk and glam, intellectual and art movements like the Beatniks and Pop Art, visual media like Universal Horror Monsters, Hammer Horror films, and the popularity of the film noir genre, as well as the campy horror and sensuality of Maila Nurmi as Vampira on television’s The Vampira Show (1954-1955) and the accessible vintage fashions found at thrift stores and shops that could date back to the Victorian era. It’s far from surprising that individuals exposed to this media and fashion would become intrigued by the darker aspects of humanity. In England alone there is no further to look than at The Damned’s frontman Dave Vanian, who himself looked like a vampire and was (for a short time) a gravedigger. Dave and first wife, Laurie, had a shop in London called Symphony of Shadows that was frequented by Batcave regulars and anyone wanting bespoke dark fashion, but the ethos of the day was DIY, furthering the mystique of the club’s aesthetics.
The Batcave logo has taken on its own status as a symbol of goth and deathrock. Designed by Jon Klein, the logo was made as a rush order using a half-dry bottle of Tipp-Ex (what we call Wite-Out in the United States). This is another reflection of the DIY nature of the scene in those days, a result of resourcefulness and an open, spontaneous approach to creativity.
The Batcave’s membership card with the iconic logo.
The 1983 compilation album Young Limbs and Numb Hymns has become a relic of the bands associated with The Batcave, although at only eight tracks it is notably missing artists like Marc and the Mambas and The Meteors, among numerous others. The 2023 follow-up Young Limbs Rise Again (The Story Of The Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985) resolved this with Jonny Slut curating a more complete retrospective of The Batcave’s sound through six LPs with artwork by Jon Klein and Sophie Chéry and featuring photographs by Derek Ridgers. In addition to creating the aforementioned coffin sign at The Batcave’s entry, which originally had a surgically defiled mannequin hand attached, Klein also added fabrics and cargo netting to make the interior look less like a discotheque and more like a lair. Klein was also responsible for the artwork on Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, wherein the typography and imagery continues to be instantly recognizable to record collectors and fans of the deathrock and early goth scene.
Front and back cover artwork for Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, 1983.
“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.
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.”
Same Old Scene?
The Batcave moved to multiple locations in London over the years, including a tour of in America with a stop at New York’s Danceteria featuring Jon Klein’s art direction along with break dancers from the Bronx, again showcasing how various underground scenes converged at The Batcave. As bands and individual clubgoers gained media attention and a modicum of success with tours, along with the commodification of clothing, hair, and accessories associated with goth subculture (fishnet and lace—very much in common with Madonna’s style during her mega-successful Like A Virgin era in 1984), The Batcave club closed in 1985.
In 2002 Batcave co-host and Specimen member Jonny Slut started a weekly event in London called Nag Nag Nag in response to the changes in UK dance music and club culture, taking its name from the Cabaret Voltaire track. Electroclash was heavily featured at Nag Nag Nag but the night seemed to mirror much of what The Batcave had done only decades before, pushing the boundaries of alternative music by playing a variety of genres and melding them into one club night that appealed to a wide cross-section of people with a shared desire for a darker, grittier event to hang out, hook up, and get lost in. Naturally, as Nag Nag Nag gained traction with a following, it attracted fellow musicians and celebrities creating a spectacle of its own while going back to the roots of the Soho neighborhood as a place to be wild and meet fellow outsiders. Cosey Fanni Tutti described the vibe at this event in her autobiography Art Sex Music (2017, p. 519-520), saying “We had coordinated the book launch [for her limited edition title Confessions] with our DJ set at Nag Nag Nag. The club was run by Jonny Slut and had been described as the new Blitz, except it had a non-elitist door policy; those first in line got in. It didn’t matter if you were a frequent celebrity visitor like Boy George, Kate Moss or Björk or the guy at the supermarket checkout. There was a diverse crowd, some dressed in the style of Leigh Bowery, some in drag, some dressed down, but all hugging, dancing and laughing. A great atmosphere, the dancefloor was a riot. Such a great stress-reliever.”
More recently, events like Wraith continue the tradition of London’s darker subcultures. In an interview with Underground in 2023, Wraith founder Parma Ham described what makes Wraith unique in modern club culture, noting “…its penchant for the dark in both art and music, and the experimentation in transhuman fashion. Some people have said Wraith is elitist, which isn’t true, it just has a particular taste which maybe other people and nights do not understand and are intimidated by” (Underground). This statement could easily be from 1982 when The Batcave opened—our need for spaces that nurture outsiders and weirdos transcends time.
Speaking of elitism, the main complaint leveled by Batcave attendees towards former clubs like Blitz was their restrictive door policy. While The Batcave, Wraith, and Nag Nag Nag focused on the strength in diversity among attendees and mixing of musical genres, some events maintained the door policy that had become notorious for Studio 54 and Blitz. In the wake of The Batcave, the club night Slimelight emerged as the new London home for the dark alternative scene. The membership policy of the club was neatly summarized by Valerie Siebert for a 2012 article in The Quietus, stating “The club which came to prominence in 1987 defined itself with an exclusionary policy against non-goths. Newcomers had to be signed in by an existing member to prove their ‘gothness’ as if such a standard was pre-established and discernible to those ‘in the know.’” Clearly, the goth scene and all of its adjacent underground scenes are still grappling with gatekeeping, to greater or lesser success among various events. Most recently, in late 2024 London’s Mønster Queen hosted a Return of The Batcave 1982-1985 at Camden Assembly, which was produced with the blessing of Batcave founders Jon Klein, DJ Hamish, and Jonny Slut. Its cool to see such an iconic club night return so new generations can participate in the energy and creative fertility of a night like this while also serving as a reunion for scene elders who are nostalgic for a different time in the history of modern counterculture.
“People are always trying to claim that they invented ‘whatever’ – I don’t think any one person or place invented or started it, it was one of those synergy things. Like punk: all sorts of people started bands that sounded punk at the same sort of time. It was a feeling in the air. Gothic is the same I think. There was no plan, it was an organic thing, which just grew.”
Long after the doors closed at Batcave, the influence of subcultures like goth and deathrock have been exponentially amplified through the Internet and the advent of smart phones and social media. We see goth in the fashion world through the runway shows and designs by Gareth Pugh, Rick Owens, Yohji Yamamoto, and Ann Demeulemeester, among many others. In television, Stranger Things catalyzed Kate Bush to hit the top of the music charts in 2022 when it included her 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” and the inclusion of the 1981 song “Goo Goo Muck” on the series Wednesday (2022-) found a new generation of darklings discovering The Cramps. The recent fascination over the latest adaptation of Nosferatu (2024) by filmmaker Robert Eggers—a “plain clothes goth” as we would have called him in the ‘90s—again shows the power of goth in both film, television, and literature (lest we forget this story directly traces back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula).
A theme emerged during the research phase of this article and it was the sense of urgency among young people—regardless of the decade—to take matters into their own hands and create whatever they felt was necessary to help express their ideas about the world, their place in it, and embrace media from the past that reflected these ideas. From big hair, hand-sewn clothing, and painted leather jackets to the founding of bands and club nights playing music that felt fresh and in tune with the current preferences of the underground, the very aspects of The Batcave and all its preceding venues that still feel unique and poignant are paradoxically simple acts of rebellion. Instead of waiting for something cool to happen, the young people of The Batcave adopted a ‘fuck it’ do-it-yourself attitude that resulted in events and music that mirrored their lived experiences and influences. Lets hope it will never become obsolete or passé to build an underground community through the ethics of a do-it-yourself approach to art, a strong focus on equity and inclusion, and prioritizing fun and connection over strategic marketing and profit. We are still learning from subcultural hotspots of the past with The Batcave being one of the most vibrant examples of a thriving nightlife event that chose to deviate from the cultural hegemony.
At its core, places like The Batcave became ‘third space’ havens to meet like-minded people through fashion and music without pressure to meet societal norms. The music was secondary to the community being built around it and yet the music was the vascular system binding everyone together.
Currently, there’s a pervasive feeling among the underground scenes that youth culture has changed significantly since the invention of the smartphone, and not for the better. Seeing the energy that created The Batcave has continued on in subsequent thriving subculture club scenes, there is reason to hope that this type of venue and self-expression is not lost. For the new generation of club kids, Gen Z and their successor Gen Alpha, the integration of technology and social media into their need for visceral, IRL connections and boundary-pushing creative output will take the idea of events like The Batcave to a new level, and that is reason enough to be grateful for the blueprint laid out by the creative weirdos that came before us.
Keep an eye on social media for upcoming Batcave-related events and grab your own copy of Young Limbs Rise Again (The Story Of The Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985).
