Goth blog challenge: My first concert/festival

It's time for another goth blog challenge =]

17. My first concert/festival

This topic is a little embarrassing for me considering that the first gig I went to was a very long time ago and was for a band that's as far from Goth as possible!

When I was 14, I went to see Simple Plan at the Birmingham Academy. A lot of my friends from school were going and it was the first time my mum agreed to let me go to a gig, probably because they were such a tame band =P I didn't die at the gig and so my mum let me go to most gigs I wanted after that (as long as I brought my own tickets!), she did refuse to let me see a few bands though that she thought were too dangerous; including Lordi, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Rammstein!

Between the ages of 14-17 I went to a lot of gigs at the Birmingham Academy, I even went to see bands I didn't really like because I loved the atmosphere so much.

I was the girl at the front on the barrier every week, covered in bruises and drenched in someone else's beer! It was wonderful. I even had a secret handshake with the security guards; they used to bring me extra water!

I was going to post photographic proof, from my old myspace, but myspace has gone all new and deleted all the old content =[ =[

Despite this I didn't see any Goth bands, very few played locally and if they did no one else wanted to go (and I wasn't allowed to go on my own).

When I was 19 I went to my first festival, T in the Park. Which was amazing; I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the last ever performance in Scotland by Nine Inch Nails. Sonisphere got the last ever ever gig, but we got the better set-list apparently =P

The first Goth specific festival I went to was Midlands Goth Festival, you can read about that in this post.

I still harbor dreams of visiting Whitby Goth Weekend one year or maybe even Wave Goth Treffen and of course seeing as many of the Goth bands I love as I can; although of course it's not possible to see them all because many some of my heroes are dead =[

I'm off to mourn the loss of teenage memories, I should have saved another copy of those photos somewhere...

Goth blog challenge: Corsets or no?

I'm answering another Goth blog challenge because I've started late and this is already the 3rd week of January.

Once again I used a random number generator to decide what to answer next:

28. Corsets or no?

Hell Yeah! 

I love corsets. 

I think they are beautiful and I love how they give me extra back support when I'm dancing the night away!

Here's a silly picture of me in my black and white pleather under-bust corset. The hat belongs to a guy I know called Rory, his name is Chester the Trilby lol!

These pictures were taken on my friend Beth's birthday a couple of years ago, I picked them because they show how much I like dancing in a corset!

Yup I was quite tipsy. You can tell by the colour of my face - I only go pink when I drink =P

I dance in the exact same way sober though, because if I close my eyes I don't have to see people stare at my idiocy!

Thanks to Meera for the pictures =]

Do you like corsets? If not, why not?

Goth Blog Challenge: How I first found out about Goth fashion

I just found out about Darkstalker Girl's Goth Blog Challenge, which can be found here. It's based on F Yeah Lolita's Lolita 52 challenge. I liked the idea of participating and like F Yeah Lolita I'll be answering them in a random order. I didn't have a jar to put the slips of paper in so I used a random number generator =]

The first one it picked out was:

How I first found out about Goth fashion

I'm glad this question is specific because the ways I found out about Goth music and Goth fashion were very different. I grew up listening to Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees (Thanks to my dad! His music taste is awesome and eclectic) but I didn't know anything about Goth fashion until I was older.

When I was 10 or 11, and already running around in a black velvet tunic top, purple velvet flares and a purple velvet dog collar, all of which I still own... The flares I don't have a picture of right now (I promise to obtain one, soon!), but here's the dog collar (I was 18 in this picture).

I saw some girls on the bus one day whose style really opened my eyes. They were wearing really cute frilled  blouses, one had a black skirt, the other a red tartan one, both with fishnets and Doc Martens. They looked like china dolls to me, so beautiful and delicate. Then I noticed one of them was carrying a bag like this:

Source: Alchemy Gothic

I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen (I grew up really loving Halloween, witches, vampires, The Addams Family and Harry Potter, all of which may have contributed to the morbid streak...). My mum who was with me on the bus told me the girls were goths. I wanted to dress like that too, even the frills (which considering the Tomboy I'd been when I was younger, surprised even me!)

However it was several years before I really did dress like that, because as beautiful as I thought the girls looked I didn't have the confidence to dress that way (especially in our close-minded little village). In the end I even ditched the velvet in favor of blue jeans and t-shirts for a while (ages 12 to 14), in hopes I wouldn't get bullied when I moved to a new school, I really wanted to 'fit in'. My route to gothdom was a long slow one after that; you can see some of the process in this post.