#wraith cheekbones

Happy Friday the 13th!

Born on this day 112 years ago: actress Carroll Borland (25 February 1914 – 3 February 1994) who played Luna Mora, eerily silent vampire daughter of Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) in 1935 Universal horror movie classic Mark of The Vampire. As Luna in her trailing white funeral shroud, proto-Goth Borland created the archetype of the morbidly beautiful cadaverous and vampiric glamour ghoul, paving the way for everyone from Morticia Addams, Vampira, Lily Munster and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Born 99 years ago today: ultimate black-clad, throaty-voiced, morbidly beautiful French beatnik chanteuse, actress, eyeliner role model, proto-goth and Morticia Addams lookalike Juliette Gréco (7 February 1927 - 23 September 2020). “The French actress, Juliette Gréco, who used to sing in Existentialist cafes and still has the appearance of somebody not entirely reconciled to soap” is how the New York Times summarized her in 1958 (yikes!). More happily, a 1960 profile in Life magazine anointed Gréco the “soul of post-war Paris.” With her low, sensual voice saturated in vin rouge and Gauloises smoke and stark, gloomy image (“You moonbathe while others sunbathe,” Pablo Picasso famously exclaimed regarding her consumptive nightclub pallor), Gréco would exert an influence on later artists like Nico, Marianne Faithfull and Marc Almond. I was privileged to see Gréco perform in London twice: at The Barbican in 2000 and the Royal Festival Hall in 2011. Face powdered chalk-white, sheathed in a long black funeral shroud with batwing sleeves, she was mesmerizing! (Her furious, fist-shaking version of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” was particularly devastating). Why not remember Gréco’s artistry by cranking up her signature tunes like “Les Amours Perdues”, “La Javanaise”, “Sous le ciel de Paris” or “Les Feuilles Mortes”? Pictured: young Greco captured backstage at the Bobino music hall in Paris in November 1951.

Released on this day (12 July 1985): Camera Obscura, the majestic sixth and final solo studio album by the Velvet Underground’s ghostly erstwhile femme fatale, Nico (1938 – 1988). Camera Obscura reunited the heroin-ravaged Marlene Dietrich of punk with fellow Velvet Underground alumni John Cale for their fourth (and last) collaboration and the first since The End in 1974. According to Nico’s biographer Richard Witts, the atmosphere between them was tense: they had only three weeks to complete the album on a shoestring budget, and most seriously, Cale wouldn’t permit Marlboro addict Nico to smoke in the studio. Reviews were mostly positive: Melody Maker called Camera Obscura “a glowing return to form” that “pushed that all-or-nothing voice back to full expression.” Creem magazine characterized the sound as “layering a warm, undulating electronics-and-percussion groove beneath That Voice.” Nico agreed, saying, “You know, I would have gone to the Amazon to record it … the Amazon Jungle … because of the rhythm section. I wanted just a whole bunch of Amazon drumming. You’re supposed to have a heart attack …” Most significantly, Camera Obscura demonstrated that - like Billie Holiday or Marianne Faithfull - no matter how troubled her life, Nico could marshal her energies and produce powerful music. The two songs sung in German ("Das Lied vom einsamen Mädchen", "König") are haunting. Chanting “When I dream in / When I scream in / When I wipe my / Dirty hands clean …” on “Tananore”, Nico evokes Lady Macbeth. Her sombre rendition of jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” is like being handed a dozen dead roses. And the alienated confessional “My Heart is Empty” is one of the best things Nico ever recorded. Portrait of Nico in London by Peter Noble, 1985.

Born on this day: the fabulous Finnish American actress and pin-up model Maila Nurmi (11 December 1922 – 10 January 2008) – better known as cadaverous wraith cheek-boned 1950s horror movie hostess, leading lady of Ed Wood Jr’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and pop culture sensation Vampira!  Out of Vampira drag, Nurmi favoured a low-maintenance beatnik look of cropped-short blonde hair, Capri pants, sandals and shapeless sweaters. You get a good impression of what the real Nurmi looked like in her cameo appearance as a beatnik poetess in the 1959 exploitation film The Beat Generation (pictured. Yes, that is a pet rat nestled on her shoulder). “This is only for the cool cats – sterile creeps can crawl out now!” she declares before launching into her poetry reading. “Dear parents, we laugh in your faceless faces …” her diatribe  begins, before concluding, “Since you forced us into this world with your own evil force, which you painted drab white, a force called “marriage”, we too will embrace force but of our own cool kind – now is our time, through the Beat way of life … our force of kicks – unending kicks! The kicks that destroy – without killing!” Maila Nurmi in The Beat Generation anticipates the confrontational spoken word punk poetry of Lydia Lunch decades later!

Light a black candle (or at least don a black T-shirt), grab the hair crimpers and can of Aqua Net - today marks a sacred occasion! Haughtily composed high priestess of punk, spooky voodoo doll frontwoman of the Banshees (and The Creatures), perennial eyeliner role model, perfecter of the death glare and Chislehurst’s finest daughter, Siouxsie Sioux (née Susan Janet Ballion, 27 May 1957) turns 69! For generations of punks, goths, queers, malcontents and misfits, Siouxsie represents MOTHER! What a life-changing performer: it was glimpsing a black-and-white photo of Siouxsie in a magazine when I was about thirteen that planted the idea of moving to London. (All these decades later, I’m still unsure whether to be grateful to her or not!). Pictured: Siouxsie photographed by Polly Borland for The Guardian, 1995.

Happy 70th birthday to fierce operatic Greek American avant-garde diva, pianist, composer, performance artist and AIDS activist Diamanda Galás (born on 29 August 1955). Don’t let the resemblance to Morticia Addams fool you - Galás has SOUL! Once memorably described by The New Yorker as a “lounge singer in a world on fire”, she wields her remarkable bird-of-prey voice like a weapon and possesses the same kind of wraith-cheekboned, raven-haired beauty Walt Disney endowed his animated evil queens with. Galás reportedly got her first break singing in front of insane asylum inmates, has paid tribute to serial killer Aileen Wuornos and in performance used to take the stage stripped to the waist and smeared in fake blood. Appropriately, director Francis Ford Coppola enlisted her to provide eerie shrieks-of-the-mutilated for the sound effects of 1992 version of Dracula. I haven’t seen Galás perform in many years, but I vividly remember the last time: she was reinterpreting jazz standards like “All of Me” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” at The Barbican in London in her own inimitable (blood-curdling) way, which lulled the uninitiated into a false sense of security. People were filing out in dismay all night! Keep doing what you’re doing, lady! If you’ve never dipped a toe into Galás’ wild, wild world, I’d suggest starting with the relatively accessible albums The Singer (1992) and The Sporting Life (1994), her collaboration with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Pictured: Galás by Paul Harris, San Diego, 1985.

Born on this day in London: morbidly beautiful actress Gloria Holden (5 September 1903 – 22 March 1991). The patrician Holden’s one big stab at major stardom was as the titular role in 1936 horror movie Dracula’s Daughter. Unfortunately, the film flopped and didn’t lead to other noteworthy opportunities (although she continued to act in lower profile roles until 1958). Nevertheless, Holden is haunting and memorable as the enigmatic Hungarian Countess Marya Zaleska. Accompanied by her sinister manservant and sporting a dramatic wardrobe of hooded capes and gowns, the countess arrives in fog-wreathed London following the death of her father Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi, of course!). Offered a glass of sherry, she quotes Lugosi (“Thank you. I never drink . . . wine”). Before long, she’s leaving a trail of drained corpses in her wake! While Dracula’s Daughter is never particularly scary, it is atmospheric and the most elegantly Art Deco of 1930s Universal Pictures horror flicks – and Holden is unforgettable as what must be the screen’s first lesbian vampire, long before Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers (1970), Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness (1971) or Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (1983). Pictured: 1936 glamour shot of Holden.