It’s the soundtrack of the deepest, darkest nights of the soul — from Bowie to Bauhaus, from Nine Inch Nails to Nick Cave, from post-punk and dance pop to blues and country.

In 2006, Peter Murphy of Bauhaus sat down next to My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way for an MTV interview to promote a new CD collection titled Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box. “I’m trying to work out what sums it up,” Murphy said when asked how he would define goth. “It can’t be just about a bit of makeup and a dark lyric. There’s got to be more to it than that.” Way sheepishly chimes in: “Well, it’s very hard to categorize who and what is goth.” Thanks for the insight, jeez.

The scene was a torch passing of sorts. Murphy’s Bauhaus had helped invent goth during the early Eighties; Way had brought it to stripmalls and arenas in the 21st century. And, still, neither could answer a question that has haunted people for decades: What is goth?

Let’s travel back to 1983. A time when London’s Batcave club was in its infancy. There, the aesthetics of goth were cultivated—a love for horror movies and Gothic novels, a sickly pallor and a koosh ball of hair, pointy winklepickers and a mish-mash of fetish materials, and most of all, a romance with melancholy. ‘83 was also the year that vampire-thriller The Hunger, co-starring David Bowie, hit the big screens. Vampires, Bowie,  Bauhaus – it was the perfect trifecta, beautifully bound in…