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pages come up.
    The first hit was called Careless Love: Doomed Rock Relationships. Underneath it listed Kurt and Courtney, Sid and Nancy, Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence, Vincent Smith and Sylvana…
    A chick happened, mate
.
    ‘You and me both,’ I said aloud as I clicked onto the link. Thesite was done up like a pulp magazine, with lurid headlines in
LA Confidential-style
typefaces.I scrolled down pages and pages about Sid and Nancy and Kurt and Courtney, the authors deliberately comparing and contrasting the women, their blonde hair and bombed eyes, clear implication:
deadlier than the male
. Skipped past Paula and Hutch, a story far too depressing for Sunday afternoon turning into Sunday night. I’d always secretly fancied Paula, couldn’t fault Hutchence for that, not likehapless Sid and Kurt.
    Finally, under the headline: Kiss of Death: A Gothic Love Story, a big picture of the couple sprawled across the back seat of an old Cadillac. Vince with a pompadour oiled and gleaming, black Tuxedo and a blood-red shirt, cigarette dangling from one hand, the other arm around the shoulders of the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
    She almost looked like a doll. Littleporcelain face and red bow lips, huge green eyes peering up from thick lashes, framed by a Ronnie Spector-style bouffant of bright red hair. Red velvet dress with a white lace collar, the sort they put on those antique Victorian figurines, looking tiny and surreal in Vincent Smith’s embrace.
    Vincent and Sylvana Smith, just married, Paris, January 1981 read the caption. Only six months later,Sylvana would be dead…
    The hook was too good to resist. I read on:
    Largely forgotten now, in the post-punk era, Vincent Smith was the self-styled King of Nothing and his band Blood Truth made the most searing and unholy racket of anyone around. Their live shows were legendary for starting riots: Smith did his best to incite the volatile mix of punks, goths and skins that made up the ranks ofhis following, with seemingly half his audience turning up more for the prospect of a fight than the music. Just as well, legend has it that the longest show they ever played lasted thirty minutes.
    Blood Truth were formed in Hull in 1977, by Sex Pistols-mad guitarist Steve Mullin (who always emulated the playing style of hishero, Steve Jones), bassist Lynton Powell and drummer Kevin Holme. Theymet Smith, from Doncaster, at a Sex Pistols gig in that town in August of that year. He was two years older than the then sixteen-year-old upstarts and able to relocate to Hull, where he immediately took charge of the fledgling band, picking out a name and writing the lyrics for their songs in earnest.
    Smith was obsessed with Americana, in particular Elvis and the writer Flannery O’Connor, fromwhose classic novel
Wise Blood
he was inspired to take band’s name. The Memphis King had been dead for only a week when he met up with Mullin and co., and Smith saw this as his sign to resurrect the fallen Presley in his own performance as the anti-establishment Elvis. Coupled with Mullin’s natural flair as a guitarist, this gave them a different edge on the post-Pistols sound than any of theirrivals from the industrial North. Blood Truth’s other secret weapon was Powell, a brilliant musician who had studied jazz trumpet for years before meeting Mullin and reputedly learned the bass overnight in order to play in the band. Even by the time they had scraped together their first single ‘Blind Preach/Dockyard’ in January 1978, they had the beginnings of a distinctive sound that was all thestronger for their disparate influences. They also looked brilliant – along with Siouxsie Sioux, Vince Smith can genuinely be traced back as the first gothic role model.
    Initially managed by local entrepreneur Don Dawson, who put out their first records on his own Dawsongs label, Blood Truth set about conquering the North in ’78 with a succession of gigs that saw them rise from supporting thelikes of