Birmingham's Ausgang were never trying to be liked, which made it stranger when a good number of people quietly took to them anyway.
The band formed in the city in 1983, growing out of an earlier outfit called Kabuki, a lineage the group's Bandcamp page still nods to under the handle Ausgang-Kabuki. Max sang, Matthew played guitar, and the rhythm section clattered rather than settled, a habit that would define the band's whole run. They played their first show at Birmingham's Powerhouse that September, and within a year they had signed to Criminal Damage Records and released a debut EP, The Teachings of Web.
What Ausgang did with that deal is the interesting part. Solid Glass Spine, the A-side of a 1984 single backed with Strip Me Down, climbed to number 28 on the UK independent chart, a modest showing that undersells the record's oddness. The guitar doesn't crunch so much as wobble, twangy and slightly seasick, while tom-heavy drums and a driving bassline push the song forward with an urgency that has nothing to do with the vocal, which warbles high and almost cheerful over the top. It is goth music with the nihilism sanded off, closer to the jangling optimism the UK press would later file under positive punk than to the theatrical doom of Ausgang's Batcave contemporaries.
That contrast was the point.
Alien Sex Fiend and Specimen, the bands Ausgang got lumped in with at London's Batcave nights, dealt in horror-film camp and stage blood. Ausgang's version was stranger for being sincere, spiky and clipped rather than spooky, closer in spirit to a punk band that had wandered into the wrong festival than to a goth band proper. Andi Sex Gang, of Sex Gang Children, produced the group's Head On! EP that same year, which says something about which side of the scene they sat closest to even as their own songwriting pulled steadily away from it.
The band kept moving without ever quite settling. A switch to FM Records brought 1985's Hunt Ya Down EP, followed by a debut album, Manipulate, later that same year, then a short-lived label of their own, Shakedown, and the King Hell 12-inch. A rebrand as Ausgang-A-Go-Go and a final mini-LP, Los Descamisados, arrived in 1987, and the band split not long after, its records already scattered across three different labels in four years.
None of that churn explains why Solid Glass Spine keeps turning up in accounts of goth's sunnier corners four decades on. It surfaces again now, cited among the records that made the case for positive punk's cheer rather than its gloom, and it still makes that case better than most of the bands actually filed under the name. The song never asked to be a thesis statement. It just happened to be one.
