Ever since seeing this provocation, I’ve been giving my first Gothic encounter some serious thought. What was it? Might it have been watching The Exorcist in the 80s, with two older brothers who were always happy to traumatise me, and a Catholic mother who probably didn’t mind me feeling the weight of Father Damien’s guilt? That felt a little late for my first Gothic encounter, even though I can’t pinpoint how far into the 80s we were when I first saw the film.

Or was it the one Sunday morning when my brothers—again!—plonked me in front of the TV to watch Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981) while my parents were out working? I can distinctly recall the sublime mythic confrontation between Damien and Christ—and, more pragmatically, that this was the last chance we had to see the movie before the Betamax video had to be returned to the local video rental store. This latter detail places this experience and memory at least a few years after the film was first released. The video must’ve been a weekly, rather than a new release. No, there had to be something earlier than these.

It struck me—viscerally—as I was driving to work one dreary morning, listening to local community radio in suburban Adelaide. I first heard the quiet haunting sound of a cold wind, not quite hushed, coming through the speakers that surrounded me in my cosy sanctuary. This was very shortly overlaid with tinkling bells, of fairytales and infant dreams. It was a strange, unnerving juxtaposition, but one that seemed familiar. My heart felt like it skipped a beat. My stomach began to churn. My arms, prickling with goosebumps, felt just a little weaker as I held on to the steering wheel. My body was recognising something, remembering something, that my mind had yet to register. It was a classic corporeal response to the uncanny, a sense of déjà vu, but I hadn’t yet had time to rationalise it. Next, a male voice, softly singing, lulling me… to sleep, to somewhere, I’m not sure which:

Stars in your eyes, little one
Where do you go to dream
To a place, we all know…

An electronic pulse started beating. Eurosynth melodies are soon overlaid. I finally knew what I was hearing: Bucks Fizz’s 1982 chart-topper, The Land of Make Believe.

Bucks Fizz might induce a different kind of horror for some, but I recall being a five-year-old who adored and dreaded this song in equal measure. (I also recall frequently dancing to Bucks Fizz’s Eurovision winner, Making Your Mind Up, for my grandmother in exchange for extra pocket money. I am grateful that this did not lead to a darker, more disturbing career choice.) The Land of Make Believe is the perfect musical blend of the joyful innocence and sinister undertones you might find in the best fairy tales, and I felt both in full measure as a child. I would sway and dance and sing along to Bobby G and Mike Nolan’s vocals, delivered in such sweet, kindly tones, while somehow trying to reconcile this happiness and pleasure with the lyrics of the first verse:

Shadows, tapping at your window

Ghostly voices whisper, ‘Will you come and play?’

And then the girls—Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston—in response:

Not for all the tea in China

Or the corn in Carolina

Never, never ever

They’re running after you babe

Who was running after me? And where are they coming from? The dose is repeated after the jubilant chorus, in the second verse:

Something nasty in your garden’s waiting

Patiently, ‘til it can have your heart

Try to go but it won’t let you

Don’t you know it’s out to get you

Running, keep on running

They’re running after you babe

Another reprisal of the chorus, a bridge, a key change, more of the chorus—the rest is pretty standard 80s pop fare. But as the music fades to nothing, an eleven-year-old girl recites a nursery rhyme to see us out, to leave the likes of poor little me in an indeterminate state of suspense:

I’ve got a friend who comes to tea

And no-one else can see but me

He came today

But had to go

To visit you

You never know

Just what on earth was this song about, and what was it trying to do? And what was that at the end of my bed?

The song was written by Pete Sinfield, previously of King Crimson, an English prog rock band of the late 60s and early 70s. In an interview for a retrospective BBC documentary, The Story of Top of the Pops: 1982, Cheryl Baker guesses that Sinfield ‘probably wrote [the song] with a spliff in his hand, playing the guitar’. But there was a serious political intent behind Sinfield’s song. Sinfield and the band were aiming to be no. 1 at Christmas in 1981 but hit the top a little late in 1982. In the same documentary, Sinfield says that he wanted to write a song that suggested ‘the spooky, scary side of Christmas’, but he also recalls that ‘it was just at the beginning of the Thatcher era. There was a lot of greed in the air, and it was quite an evil atmosphere.’ He also admits that he had Thatcher in mind when he wrote about ‘something nasty in your garden,’ waiting to have your heart. As Baker quips, for every spooky fairy tale, ‘there’s always a wicked witch’.

I had no idea who Thatcher was in 1982. Nor did I understand this strange, psychosomatic sensation of glee tinged with fear. I couldn’t describe it, and struggle to articulate it still. And I guess it is this sense of the ineffable that keeps drawing me back to the Gothic, a mode that keeps challenging the limits of my rationality and understanding—whether as eschatological horrors played out on my TV screen, or in eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, or the revived memory of a song catching me, now a mid-mannered middle-aged academic, unawares as I drive to work. Sinfield wanted to write ‘something that gets you between the shoulders’. That he certainly did.