If there was one lesson we took away from Andrew Collins's The G Word last Saturday (Radio 2), it was that goth, as a movement, is defined more by dress than music. With the exception of the ever-inventive and entertaining Cure, much of the soundtrack to Collins's excellent documentary/homage consisted of blizzards of sound over which tuneless baritones (such as Siouxsie Sioux) intoned rather than sang lyrics concerned mainly with darkness and death. “There are very few happy goth bands,” said one contributor, wildly exaggerating the number.

Even so, while the goth sound might be largely tedious - besides the Cure, Collins had to call on Johnny Cash and Joy Division to establish some form of musical credibility - the lyrics are another thing. Steep a doomy teenager in the Romantic poets and a lot of it is going to come out in his or her writing. Thus a lot of goth lyrics read, even if only by squinting slightly, as poetry.

And, yes, there is humour there, even if much of it is inadvertent. There was a fine Spinal Tap moment concerning the minor goth act the Specimen. Two of them were rooting through a skip and came across that valuable kitchen accessory the Autochop, in quite good condition. Just then a window opened across the street and a man shouted: “Oi, show some respect, that's a dead man's Autochop.” Which gave the Specimen the title of their genre classic, Dead Man's Autochop.

Even so, why, more than 20 years after these strange creatures in black crawled from the primeval ooze, their otherwise deathly faces slashed with red lipstick, their spindly frames weighed down by chains, their feet weighed down by thick-soled boots that can do their posture no good at all, are there still so many of them around?

Collins didn't really consider that, possibly accepting that, like cockroaches, they deserve to survive because they have survived. But there's a dedication to the trappings of their existence that demands recognition and, yes, respect. Being a goth is hard work. Besides, I never met one who wasn't a decent soul, never happier (or less gloomy) than when helping old ladies across streets. That's British goths - in America they machinegun their classmates, having missed the point of the whole thing.

Which, coincidentally, is what much of the British pop press did in 1975, when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played their first European gig at the Hammersmith Odeon. It was a show brilliantly captured by Badly Drawn Boy in the series Wish You Were There (Radio 2, Mondays), in which modern pop stars who were either too young or unborn at the time talk to those who were there about what went on.

Having decided beforehand that the Boss was all hype and no substance, the critics sneered at the band's musicianship - this was, after all, the height of prog rock, when virtuosity was all. Ironically, within a year the same writers would be worshipping at the feet of that real triumph of hype over substance, punk.

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