Female Goth Icons: The Women Who Built the Genre

Reading time: 9 minutes

Ask who invented goth and you will hear three band names, and they all default to the men: Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, The Cure. Yet the first record most historians point to as goth's prototype was fronted by a woman, the genre's most mythologised bass part was played by a woman, and the first band to take a goth album to number one on the UK independent chart was founded by five women in Hamburg. This page is about that gap: the women who built the genre, and how the writing of its history keeps misplacing them. The names that matter most here are Siouxsie Sioux, Patricia Morrison, Danielle Dax, Anja Huwe, and Gitane Demone, carried forward by the women building the current scene.

Disclosure, once and up front: this site belongs to the team behind Daemon Grey, a Canadian industrial goth metal artist on a Berlin label. He is not an entry on this page. It exists because his audience lives in this music, and the history deserves a correct telling.

The Canon Problem

Goth's canon was written after the fact, and the writing itself did the marginalising. The musicologist Charles Mueller, whose Florida State University dissertation remains the deepest scholarly study of the original British scene, shows that the "gothic" label was first applied by the music press largely as mockery, and only later hardened into a history with a fixed cast. In his account, that cast has the wrong lead: Mueller argues that Siouxsie and the Banshees, not Bauhaus, defined the prototype for goth's sound and image, and that the genre they shaped deliberately purged the masculine signifiers of mainstream rock, the solos, the power-chord aggression, the misogynist lyric conventions. The veteran scene journalist Mick Mercer told Mueller that goth had the highest female-to-male ratio of any subculture he knew.

The sociology agrees that women were never a decoration here. Amy Wilkins's study of goth women in Gender & Society argues that the scene's open celebration of sexuality gave women a way to refuse mainstream passive femininity, while noting the strategy's limits, and Dunja Brill's Goth Culture (Berg, 2008) devotes an entire monograph to gender and style in the subculture. Meanwhile the famous origin quotes about who first called this music "gothic", attributed to figures around Joy Division and to a 1978 Banshees live review, survive mostly as copies of copies whose originals are rarely produced. A history that poorly documented is a history that gets rewritten by whoever ranks first, and the current top-ranking list for this search runs thirteen singers across roughly 4,500 words without once naming Patricia Morrison, Danielle Dax, Anja Huwe, or Gitane Demone. Hence this page.

Siouxsie Sioux

Start where the scholarship starts. By August 1978, when "Hong Kong Garden" arrived, Siouxsie and the Banshees had already worked out the palette that a thousand bands would spend the next decade repainting: ritual drumming, scything guitar, and a commanding female voice treated as an instrument of authority rather than ornament. Mueller's dissertation devotes its longest chapter to the band, reading them as the group that set goth's prototype and turned seduction, artifice and ambiguity into weapons aimed at rock's masculine order. Mark Paytress's authorised 2003 biography (Sanctuary) carries a foreword by Shirley Manson, which tells you how far downstream her influence runs. Our own guide to the goth rock family tree traces the genre through three founding lines, and one of them is simply called the Banshees line: it runs through Xmal Deutschland and the darkwave diaspora to the revival's frontwomen. Start with Juju (1981).

Patricia Morrison

Patricia Morrison's career is a map of how the American and British dark scenes actually connected. A teenager in Los Angeles punk's first wave, she co-founded the Bags, formed Legal Weapon with Kat Arthur in 1981, then joined the Gun Club in 1982, anchoring the swampy blues-punk that fed directly into deathrock. With Fur Bible, her band with Kid Congo Powers, she opened for Siouxsie and the Banshees, which is where Andrew Eldritch found her. She played on the Sisterhood's Gift (1986) and then on the Sisters of Mercy's Floodland (1987), the album whose image, hers as much as Eldritch's, still defines goth for much of the world. Eldritch wrote "Lucretia My Reflection" about her, casting her as Lucrezia Borgia. She left the Sisters at the end of 1989 and later joined The Damned. Filed as "the woman in the Sisters", she was in fact the connective tissue of two continents' scenes. Start with Floodland.

Danielle Dax

If the canon rewards self-contained auteurs, Danielle Dax should be central to it. Emerging from the avant-garde duo Lemon Kittens alongside Karl Blake, she went solo and made Pop-Eyes (1983) essentially alone: she wrote and produced every track and played guitar, drums, bass, flute, keyboards, saxophones and a TR-808 herself, decades before the one-person project became ordinary. Her records sit at the experimental edge of the dark scene, art-damaged psychedelia with a mutant pop instinct, and her one film appearance is a perfect goth footnote: the Wolfgirl in Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984). Dax rarely appears in goth lists precisely because she fits no template, which is the point of this page. Start with Pop-Eyes.

Anja Huwe

Xmal Deutschland disprove, on their own, the idea that women were guests in this genre. Anja Huwe founded the band in Hamburg in 1980 with an all-female lineup: Rita Simonsen on bass, Manuela Rickers on guitar, Fiona Sangster on keyboards, Caro May on drums. Signed to ZickZack for the "Schwarze Welt" single in 1981 and then to 4AD, they sang in German and conquered Britain anyway: Fetisch (1983) reached number three on the UK independent albums chart and Tocsin (1984) reached number one. Huwe's voice, an incantation more than a melody, is one of the genre's foundational sounds, and the German dark scene that later produced whole festivals grew in soil Xmal Deutschland broke. In 2024, Sacred Bones reissued the band's early singles and released Codes, Huwe's first solo album, with Rickers guesting on guitar. Start with Fetisch.

Gitane Demone

On the American side of the story, Gitane Demone is deathrock's great underwritten figure. She fronted the Los Angeles band Pompeii 99, whose 1982 debut Look at Yourself preceded the merger that folded its members into Rozz Williams's Christian Death. On Catastrophe Ballet (1984) and Ashes (1985) her keyboards and soaring, jazz-trained vocals became integral to the band's sound, and her look became inseparable from its aesthetic. She and Williams reunited for the stark cabaret of Dream Home Heartache (1995). Christian Death's story is usually told as a Rozz Williams story, and our solo goth artists guide rightly covers him there; the band's records argue that it was equally hers. Start with Catastrophe Ballet.

The Current Generation

The revival's leaders are following the same blueprint, and more openly crediting it. Lebanon Hanover, the darkwave duo co-founded in 2010 by the Swiss artist Larissa Iceglass with William Maybelline, built one of the current scene's defining catalogues from The World Is Getting Colder (2012) onward, minimal, cold and entirely on their own terms. In Dallas, Leah Lane founded and fronts Rosegarden Funeral Party, writing and playing guitar across three albums up to From the Ashes (2024). And Anja Huwe's Codes put a founding icon back on current playlists, closing the circle. One boundary note for this page: solo artists in the goth lineage, including Chelsea Wolfe and Zola Jesus, have their own dedicated guide at goth music artists; this page stays with the band members and scene-builders the canon most reliably drops.

The Icons at a Glance

Icon	Built	Start with	Why the canon owes her
Siouxsie Sioux	Siouxsie and the Banshees	Juju (1981)	Defined goth's prototype sound and image (Mueller)
Patricia Morrison	Bags, Gun Club, the Sisterhood, Sisters of Mercy	Floodland (1987)	Connected LA punk and deathrock to Leeds goth
Danielle Dax	Lemon Kittens, solo catalogue	Pop-Eyes (1983)	Wrote, produced and played an album alone in 1983
Anja Huwe	Xmal Deutschland	Fetisch (1983)	All-female band, German lyrics, UK independent number one
Gitane Demone	Pompeii 99, Christian Death	Catastrophe Ballet (1984)	Half of deathrock's defining sound and look
Larissa Iceglass	Lebanon Hanover	The World Is Getting Colder (2012)	Co-built the revival's darkwave blueprint
Leah Lane	Rosegarden Funeral Party	From the Ashes (2024)	The new generation's band-builder

For the genre's full map, wave by wave and style by style, the main goth guide is the parent page of this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is considered the queen of goth?

Siouxsie Sioux is the name most often given that title. Her band's 1978 singles predate almost everything now called goth, and the musicologist Charles Mueller credits Siouxsie and the Banshees with defining the genre's prototype sound and image. She has never used the title herself; fans and press applied it.

Were there all-female goth bands in the 1980s?

Yes. Xmal Deutschland formed in Hamburg in 1980 with an all-female lineup: Anja Huwe, Rita Simonsen, Manuela Rickers, Fiona Sangster and Caro May. Signed to 4AD, they took Fetisch (1983) to number three and Tocsin (1984) to number one on the UK independent albums chart, singing in German.

Who was the female member of the Sisters of Mercy?

Patricia Morrison. She played on the Sisterhood's Gift (1986) and the Sisters of Mercy's Floodland (1987), and Andrew Eldritch wrote “Lucretia My Reflection” about her. Before Leeds, she had already co-founded the Bags in Los Angeles punk's first wave and anchored the Gun Club's rhythm section.

Which current goth bands are led by women?

Several of the revival's defining acts are built or co-built by women: Lebanon Hanover, co-founded by Larissa Iceglass in 2010, and Rosegarden Funeral Party, founded and fronted by Leah Lane in Dallas. Anja Huwe's 2024 solo album Codes put a founding icon back on current playlists.

Sources

• Charles Allen Mueller, “The Music of the Goth Subculture: Postmodernism and Aesthetics” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2008). FSU repository
• Amy C. Wilkins, “‘So Full of Myself as a Chick’: Goth Women, Sexual Independence, and Gender Egalitarianism”, Gender & Society 18, no. 3 (2004): 328–349. DOI
• Dunja Brill, Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style (Berg, 2008). Review record
• Mark Paytress, Siouxsie & the Banshees: The Authorised Biography (Sanctuary, 2003).
• “Anja Huwe Announces Solo Album ‘Codes’ and Xmal Deutschland’s Early Singles for Release on Sacred Bones”, Post-Punk.com (2023).
• Xmal Deutschland biography, AllMusic.