Happy New Year, readers! As the headline goes, 2025 is also a milestone for me as a terminally online goth. I made absolutely sure I logged into a certain forum at a certain time, so I could grab this screenshot.
Almost to the minute, it had been twenty years since I registered for an account with MyHeartland, the premier forum for fans of The Sisters of Mercy online. It wasn’t the first net community I joined, but where others have faded or foundered, Heartland has persisted in defiance of most natural laws – much like its namesake band!
Perhaps part of its longevity is thanks to the ease with which it interfaced with the real world. Within months of joining, I was in Leeds to see The Sisters for the first time, an infamous ‘warmup’ show in a cramped, tiny venue. Surrounded by complete strangers, some of whom were only known to me by forum avatars and nicknames, I felt nothing but elation for the show I was about to see.
It set the course for years after – of travelling to Leeds to meet fans of the band from across the country and even further, to dance and drink and celebrate our shared interests. The forum was a handy logistical tool, a repository of memories, a vague space for rambling threads with highly referential jokes. Heartland has such a cherished place in my mind because it was so effective at not only connecting me to myriad other fans at a time when the internet was still developing, but it even created the right circumstances for us to form a community in the real world.
The other communities I recall from this time came some way in delivering that interconnectedness that underpins any subculture. I skulked into online goth quietly, trawling through Net.Goth‘s acres of tongue-in-cheek FAQs, lurked on the IRC channel and haunted the slashgoth messageboards. I watched in fascination as the history of goth ran right into the present, from meeting people via the classified section of the NME to organising gigs over newsgroups.
It was hard to imagine the magic ever going away. I established myself on every new platform that emerged – other forums, LiveJournal (my awkward, angst-ridden entirety was nuked many years ago), and finally a procession of social media platforms starting with MySpace and ending with TikTok. Yes, ending – for I’ve finally encountered an online community I struggle to navigate, let alone connect with.
Perhaps we all have a limited capacity for online presence, our ‘time in the sun’ to adapt and adopt a new medium for communication. Online communities have only become more closely-knit, spawning entire languages and references solely for their participants. But where places like MyHeartland celebrated a fandom for The Sisters and encouraged us to socialise… newer communities and platforms instead relish their isolationist, confrontational approach that balkanizes the old ‘net into suspicious tribes.
These are, of course, the equally suspicious grumblings of an old man. A man who celebrated the fortieth anniversary of First and Last and Always (and another more personal anniversary!) by arranging for The Sisters of Murphy to play a gig in my city – nineteen years after I saw them for the first time in, you guessed it, Leeds! The guys in the band are friends, we’ve recorded podcasts together, I’ve even guested on stage with them before – all thanks to a forum I joined two decades ago. A legacy of fantastic yet fading memory.
It’s hard to extol to the new pioneers of the digital frontier what it’s like trying to browse websites from a couple of decades ago – negotiating cybergraveyards with the Wayback Machine like some grotesque lantern of misty memory, throwing jagged shards of half-recalled websites on the cave walls. I’m delighted with the friends I made and the events we can still organise thanks to this old network, but I’m urging everyone to rely on something more concrete than the Internet to preserve memories you want to hang onto…
Here’s hoping I’ll see you all in another twenty years!
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Martin Belam
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The Blogging Goth 
That’s a terrifying discovery – that I saw Sisters for the first time about ten years before you did! Admittedly, that gig in Brixton was, I think, the only time that I’ve seen them live. My then partner and I planned to see them again in the late 90s, but that plan fell through.
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See this is why I hate doing articles that mark anniversaries – somebody’s always been there before you! 😀
What did you think to them in Brixton? I envy you seeing them at such a unique point in their career.
Would you see them again?
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I’m just an old fart, is all! 🙂
From what I recall across the hazy mists of time, I enjoyed them. Somewhere I have a t-shirt, too.
As for seeing them again, I’m periodically vaguely tempted (when I see an upcoming gig listed), but never quite tempted enough, it seems, to actually buy a ticket. I’d probably be a lot more tempted if I could actually hear some of their new material in advance, I’d admit. I do prefer to know a bit about what I’m paying for, at least in terms of the headline act – I’m tight like that!
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