Cleopatra's Goth 100 has Bats in its Belfry

Los Angeles, California: Cleopatra Records have turned the goth underworld upside down as their much-anticipated Top 100 Albums countdown came to an end this week, wrapping up with one of the least-known Rozz Williams albums of all, and a spoken word one as well. 

Every King a Bastard Son was released in 1992, one of the late Christian Death frontman’s first solo recordings for Cleopatra. He envisioned, Williams said at the time, “something like Jim Morrison’s American Prayer, just the voice with snatches of familiar music, wind, rain, rhythms, playing behind it. But I was also thinking about Current 93, the later stuff, Crooked Crosses, things like that, and imagining a cross between the two.
 
“I think it succeeded.”
 
Clearly, it did.
 
Compiled from suggestions by fans, friends and folk from across the extended Cleopatra family, the Goth Top 100 launched a month ago on Mixcloud, YouTube and Cleopatra’s own website (links below). The four installments each count down 25 albums (each represented by one song apiece) at a time.  
 
Although Cleopatra itself launched in 1992, the label’s catalog reaches back to the early 1980s birth of goth in both the US (the Los Angeles deathrock scene) and the UK (the Batcave) and beyond. The Top 100 literally spans both the entire gothic spectrum and its timeline.
 
Classic acts from the 80s and 90s proliferate - deathrockers The Super Heroines, Christian Death and 45 Grave; Batcave habitués Sex Gang Children, Sex Beat, Alien Sex Fiend and Sexagisma; Sisters of Mercy proteges James Ray and the March Violets; second wavers Switchblade Symphony, Two Witches, IKON and the Electric Hellfire Club.
 
But the modern era too is widely represented, with entries for She Wants Revenge frontman Justin Warfield, Scotland’s Witch of the Vale, Crying Vessel and more.  Tribute albums, meanwhile, ensure mentions for figureheads the Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus, while goth's roots are explored via acts as far apart as Velvet Underground icon Nico, and the so-called "wickedest man in the world," Aleister Crowley.
 
Available on Mixcloud, YouTube and Cleopatra’s own website, the entire eight hour program is fronted by Delaware DJ Lady Crow, already familiar as the sultry-voiced host of the label’s bimonthly Pirate Radio Cleopatra broadcasts.
 
She says, “Like most countdowns, I don’t think there are any two people on earth who would agree with every entry in the chart… I certainly don’t… but that’s part of the fun. I grew up on this music, and Cleopatra Records was my guide to what I needed to listen to - it was such a thrill to host this special, both a wild trip down memory lane and a crash course in a lot of things I’d missed, as well.”
 
VIEW THE FULL TOP 100 HERE: https://cleorecs.com/pages/top-100-goth-albums