World Goth Day; The work so far (by absolutely everyone it seems)...

As normal, I was dead set against the concept of working for a living, so instead of battling with Excel I decided to crack open a healthy session of heavily restricted corporate internet access and Google "World Goth Day" and "www.worldgothday.com" to see how far word has spread about the partially insane concept me & Mr. Oldgoth had launched earlier this year off the back of 2009's 1-week campaign in the UK.

Stuff me; there's pages and pages of results that don't repeat the same hit.

It makes interesting reading for someone who likes to watch humanity do its thing without any particular restrictions. Most results are from discussion forum threads which either treat the concept with total disdain ("why would I want to celebrate Goth Day? I'm a goth EVERY day!"), a little bit of disinterest, extreme suspicion as if there's some sinister marketing ploy behind it to hike up the price of event tickets or something equally bizarre, or treat it with enthusiasm ranging from mild curiosity to the peak of conceptgasm. Other results are journalistic reports about World Goth Day and event announcements by promoters, working hard as usual to get the word out about their impending celebrations.

Either way you look at it, the idea really has travelled some serious distance and frankly, I'm utterly stunned.

Just to put the point across, World Goth Day is something belonging to every goth across the planet. It's not something that is owned by me, Mr. Oldgoth or any of the people who have kindly given their time to run the social networking pages associated with WGD. It's an idea that without other people taking it on, doesn't exist. Obviously I'm chuffed to bits that I decided to run with the ball that was first presented by BBC 6Music in the first place, when they aired a subculture weekend from 21st-23rd May 2009 ('Goth Day' was on the 22nd May). I'm equally chuffed that I was backed both actively & spiritually by so many people around the world. The team behind the Goth Cruise documentary DVD have decided to release it on May 22nd to coincide with World Goth Day. The Sophie Lancaster 'Hope' compilation album will also be released on the same day. Several promoters around the world have organised events in the name of WGD, and many other things, too many to mention here, are all happening just over a week before this blog was posted to celebrate the gothic subculture on the almost literal say-so of a goth DJ from Telford.

For that reason I'd like to publicly thank every single person involved in some way with making World Goth Day so huge in its first official year of existence. With any luck, it'll be bigger next year and only grow over the consecutive years. But that will only happen as long as the idea is pushed every year; we can't rest on our laurels yet because disinterest can settle in much quicker than any work to promote it. With any luck I'll still be one of the people at the forefront of it nagging the world to join in for years to come. Who knows...