In Brixton in 1982, the flat where Andi Sex Gang lived became one of the places early goth actually came from, months before anyone had agreed on a name for it.
Sex Gang Children formed that year around Andi's voice, Terry McLeay's guitar, Dave Roberts's bass and Rob Stroud's drums, and quickly became regulars at the Batcave, the Soho club night that did as much as any record to invent the look and sound now shorthanded as goth. When the NME's Richard North went looking for a name for the whole scattered scene, in a 19 February 1983 piece headlined "Punk Warriors," he singled out Andi specifically, alongside Southern Death Cult, The Mob and Blood and Roses — proof the band was read at the time as central to something bigger than itself, not peripheral to it.
Song and Legend, recorded that November at Jacobs Studios in Farnham, is where the evidence sits.
Tony James — a veteran of Generation X, soon to co-found Sigue Sigue Sputnik — produced it with engineer Ken Thomas, and between them they buried the band in echo: guitars smear into the drums, vocals arrive with a decay trail long enough to fill a stairwell. It is not a subtle record, and it was never trying to be one. A dozen tracks of tribal drumming, tangled guitar lines and a vocal that favours incantation over melody add up to something that sounds less like a rock band than a ritual being performed slightly too loudly for the room it's in — closer, in places, to ceremony than to song.
The gamble paid off commercially as well as artistically. Released on Illuminated Records in 1983, Song and Legend went to number one on the UK independent chart, carried by the single "Sebastiane" — a title that leaned on religious martyrdom as imagery rather than subject, and did the band no harm at all with an audience already primed for controversy by the name Sex Gang Children itself.
Ian Astbury, who would soon be fronting his own band a few branches up the same genealogical tree, later credited Andi's flat and his taste for the darker end of glam and post-punk as one of the actual sources of a look everyone else spent the rest of the Eighties copying.
The band split in 1984, reformed in 1991, and has kept going in one lineup or another since, most recently with 2021's Oligarch. None of that undoes what Song and Legend did first: it got to the ritual before anyone had agreed on a word for it, and it did so with equipment and a budget that suggests nobody involved expected it to still be talked about decades on.
