Northampton

Northampton stands as the unlikely birthplace of goth rock, where Bauhaus formed in 1978 and rehearsed in abandoned Cromwell Street buildings amid the town's collapsing shoe industry. The band's debut single "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979), recorded at Beck Studios and released on Small Wonder Records, established the genre's template with its nine-minute descent into vampiric atmospherics. The town's decaying Victorian industrial architecture and provincial isolation created the perfect incubator for Bauhaus's stark, gothic vision that would define the movement.

Scenes

Artists from Northampton

• Bauhaus

  Four musicians from Northampton needed six weeks to write and record 'Bela Lugosi's Dead,' and the single they cut in one take at Beck Studios in Wellingborough effectively invented gothic rock before anyone had a name for it.

Records made by artists from Northampton

• 
  In the Flat Field
  Bauhaus · 1980
• 
  Mask
  Bauhaus · 1981