> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Diving Into Obscurity: Sex Gang Children - URL: https://goodoil.news/diving-into-obscurity-sex-gang-children/ - Published: 2026-09-19T21:00:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-19T21:00:24.000Z - Description: How the Gothic Goblin from Visigoth Towers gave his nickname to an entire subculture. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: Rock History, Culture Before every black-clad teenager with a cheap synthesizer, a gallon of white foundation and a persecution complex started calling themselves ‘goth’, there was a short, intense man living in a Brixton squat block nicknamed Visigoth Towers. **Andi Sex Gang** (born **Andreas McElligott**) and his band Sex Gang Children were not the biggest or the most polished of the early-’80s dark post-punk lot. They were among the first and they helped give the whole circus its name. The name, of course, made them the most perilous band to search the internet for, especially in the Wild West days of file-sharing via LimeWire. The name was pilfered from **Malcolm McLaren**, who, with his sole talent of stealing other peoples’ ideas, generating bad publicity and calling it managerial genius, had nicked it in turn **from William S Burroughs**. He floated it as a name for the band that became Bow Wow Wow. Boy George briefly considered it after leaving that group, then decided it would not get him a record deal and handed it on to a band then called Panic Button, led by Andi. So Panic Button became Sex Gang Children, which, oddly, makes them part of a small, but exclusive club, along with the Soft Machine and Steely Dan. Steely Dan named themselves after a dildo and made music to match. No such e-z-listening elevator music from the Sex Gang Children. For a band that officially lasted about two years the first time around, Sex Gang Children have left behind a discography that looks like it was compiled by a particularly vengeful accountant. One proper studio album in the original run, a fistful of singles that still get played in the darker corners of Europe, then decades of live tapes, remixes, reissues, name-change albums and later records that prove Andi Sex Gang simply refused to stop. They formed at the tail end of 1981, when the Punk Explosion had blown itself out, and punk was bifurcating: on the one hand were the Hardcore Punks, turning punk’s three-chord fury up to 111 mph. On the other were the Post-Punks: which was a fancy designation for punk bands who’d stuck together long enough to really polish their musical chops. At the same time, a darker, more theatrical strand of post-punk peeled away from the rest. What had been nascent in Joy Division and the Damned turned into a fully-fledged new genre. Joy Division had already been called “gothic” in the press for their atmosphere (as had the Doors, back in the day). They even had a tomb on the cover of Closer. Then the Batcave nightclub opened in Soho, and turned this clutch of post-punk misfits into a scene. But what to call it? Perhaps somewhat ironically, the scene was initially dubbed “positive punk”, a term Andi Sex Gang used himself. The press later needed a catchier label for the black hair, the tribal drums, the cabaret theatrics and the general air of decadent doom. **Ian Astbury** handed it to them. The frontman of what was then called Southern Death Cult, morphed into Death Cult then most famously became the Cult, coined the term as a nickname for Andi Sex Gang. “One of the groups coming up at the same time as Southern Death Cult was Sex Gang Children, and Andi: he used to dress like a Banshees fan and I used to call him the Gothic Goblin because he was a little guy, and he’s dark. He used to like **Édith Piaf** and this macabre music, and he lived in a building in Brixton called Visigoth Towers. So he was the little Gothic Goblin and his followers were Goths. That’s where goth came from.” The sound was as distinctive as the nickname. Siouxsie and the Banshees set the template with their 1981 classic, *Juju*. Sex Gang Children perfected it: Heavy, prominent bass, complicated tribal drumming from **Rob Stroud**, thin angular guitar, sudden violent mood and tempo shifts, and Andi’s high, shrieking, multi-tracked vocals that sounded like Édith Piaf being chased down an alley by a pack of vampires. They added decidedly un-punk instruments like violin on songs like “Sebastiane”. Live, they were theatrical to the point of cabaret, decades before **Amanda Palmer** turned it into a one-note cliche. These being the days when the punk DIY aesthetic was rapidly morphing into the Indie Revolution, naturally their recorded debut was a self-released cassette. 1982’s *Naked* was recorded live at the Clarendon in Hammersmith and sold on the cheap. Like Metallica’s demo tape, released at almost the same time across an ocean and a continent away, it became a much-sought-after classic. Then came the *Beasts* 12-inch EP on Illuminated Records, which spent a year and a half on the indie chart despite having its sleeve withdrawn because they used a **Diane Arbus** photo without asking. The “Into the Abyss” single, produced by **Tony James** of the Damned and later Sigue Sigue Sputnik, followed. The one, essential, studio album arrived in 1983: *Song and Legend*. It hit number one on the indie chart, spawned “Sebastiane” (the one with the violin that still slashes) and “Mauritia Mayer”. “Dieche,” a remixed B-side, was their last indie hit in 1984 (I spent years hunting *that* one down, after hearing it once only on the radio: ah, the pre-internet days). “Into the Abyss,” “Sebastiane” and “Mauritia Mayer” became goth club staples that still get played when the lights go down. [Line-up chaos followed](https://youtu.be/MpzAi99xjqU?si=PLhPPBuT-q%5FNUtX8&ref=goodoil.news), as it usually does. Drummers came and went (**Nigel Preston**, then **Ray Mondo**, who was later deported). **Dave Roberts** left to form Carcrash International. By 1984 the original group had collapsed. In the wake of the line-up chaos came a mess of live albums (*Ecstasy and Vendetta Over New York* and a self-titled live LP from the Lyceum, both in 1984) and the 1985 remix collection *Re-Enter the Abys*s. Andi took the next batch of songs and released them as *Blind!* (1992) under his own name (or Andi Sex Gang & the Quick Gas Gang, depending on the pressing). That record later got reissued as a Sex Gang Children title, which is how these catalogues get so confusing. He kept recording solo albums: *Arco Valley* (1988), *God on a Rope* (1993), collaborations, soundtracks (including work appropriately connected to [**Dario Argento**’s](https://goodoil.news/diving-into-obscurity-the-films-of-dario-argento/) *Phenomena*), and a string of later experimental records. Some of them bleed into the band catalogue depending on who is pressing the CD that week. He has spent decades fighting labels over rights, which explains why the same songs keep appearing in slightly different packages. The band name was revived in the early 1990s with *Medea* (1993), the album most fans point to as the first proper reunion album. They continued to release albums on and off: *The Wrath of God* (2000), *Bastard Art* (2002), *Viva Vigilante!* (2013) and *Oligarch* (2021). None of them sound like *Song and Legend* warmed over. Andi kept the theatrical vocals and the sudden mood swings, but the later records lean more experimental, more cabaret, sometimes more industrial. They are not for people who only want the 1983 singles. The band still headline European goth and alternative festivals and still sound like no one else. Sex Gang Children were never the stadium version of the goth genre. The Sisters of Mercy, the Mission and the rest took the atmosphere and made it bigger and more accessible. Sex Gang Children stayed baroque, awkward, theatrical and slightly unhinged. That is why Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden and Danzig have cited them, and why the later dark-cabaret and deathrock scenes still recognise the debt. They helped turn post-punk’s leftover darkness into a distinct style: bass-led, rhythmically tribal, vocally extreme and visually and lyrically macabre. Andi himself never much liked the marketing term that grew up around his squat. The scene that followed often degenerated into a pastiche of Hot Topic dress-ups and eternal adolescent self-pity. The original impulse was closer to punk’s confrontation plus a dose of inter-war cabaret and literary rot. Forty-plus years later the little Gothic Goblin is still at it, still refusing to sand off the edges. The children of the sex gang grew up and went mainstream. The man who accidentally gave them a name them never did. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**