SEAN: This isn't entirely accurate. I think you're taking lines from interviews a little bit out of context, and those interviews were never very detailed to begin with. I grew up in the goth scene and was influenced by bands people consider the founders/godparents of the genre. (But that music is very different than what has today become the standard definition of "goth"). I am very open with my roots. But I also grew up listening to classic rock, film scores, classical, big band, punk rock, post punk, etc, equally. (NOTE: all of those founding bands, from The Cure to Bauhaus, to Siouxsie, Sisters, etc, also say that are just musicians/artists/bands, not "goth musicians").

I am not a goth musician either, meaning I do not write music to fit a genre. I write music, period. My music isn't so easily categorized, though genres can apply to it in terms of today's hashtag mentality, perhaps, like rock, alternative, goth, post gothic (which I prefer, if 'goth' must be mentioned), etc. If that helps someone organize LAM in their minds, fine, but the music is by no means limited to that and anyone expecting stereotypical goth will be disappointed. Which is one reason why I dislike labels (also because there were too many bands that were embarrassingly bad who used the label, particularly in the mid 90s. And, sadly, similar to the rest of mainstream society, portions of the scene have been worn down and corrupted, become a fashion scene that worships style, status, image, and "celebrity" due to how one looks rather than a scene about music, rebellion, and ideas. So labels can have a down side, too, when trying to be taken seriously as an artist if the genre labels come with baggage like this).

My music may have an audience with particular groups of people, but it's a bit different from music you would normally identify as "gothic music", and has a wider audience than you realize. If you're expecting cliche "gothic music" when you play an LAM album you're not going to get that (at least with how "gothic" has become defined). You're going to get something closer to what was at the roots of the genre, mixed with other things, rather than something written to *fit* an existing genre, written to sound like other songs. That's a big and important distinction.

Also, you don't seem that aware of LAM's history or ability to attract different types. LAM was the first band from the goth scene to start playing the Sunset strip in Los Angeles. And that was the days of rock and goth segregation- there was a very real iron curtain between the two scenes. Today it's all a mixed pot, so your critique doesn't really apply, but back in the early days, LAM was selling out the Roxy and Whisky to goths AND rockers AND metal heads who were discovering there was something more than bad hair rock bands they'd normally see on the Sunset strip.

I reject the labeling of music with any genre label. The first time I had to describe what I wanted to do musically, when I was a kid, I said "scary pop" ("pop" meaning, to me at the time, songs with melodies you remember). That still sort of sums it up most accurately. Labels limit how an artist is perceived and that ultimately limits them artistically because expectations from audiences then dictate their longevity, their acceptability, their marketability. I have never allowed audience expectations or genre styles to control me. Apart from how I look, which is just unavoidably how I physically look and prefer to dress, there isn't much that is standard to the "gothic" scene with LAM. And sadly, with today's ever-decreasing attention spans and low tolerance for the unfamiliar, too many people require things to sound the same, even in the goth scene. I can't do that with my music, like I literally do not want to create stuff that's a copy of something else or has the stereotypical hallmarks of a genre -- which many bands pandering to a genre will gleefully employ to take advantage of that built-in audience they will be exposed to.

I love some gothic music, LAM grew up in the 2nd generation gothic scene in the early 90s. But the art I create isn't limited by a label. Not saying my music is great or anything- just saying it is what it is. I don't think many labels effectively apply to it.

I really don't understand why people get so hung up on labels and then get angry when artists want to reject labels (while those audiences will simultaneously condemn other artists for pandering to labels, just not the label *they* have a fondness for). Artists/musicians are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Actually LAM merchandise is available ANYwhere in the world, through most online stores, through all legal download services like iTunes, Amazon, and direct from the LAM website. LAM's current albums are released by Darkride Records, which supplies limited numbers to most stores in Europe. Also, shirts and much more are available from this website and from the new Darkride Records merch shops here and here, which offer international shipping.

No. These are not titles of LAM songs, and "Wrathchild America" is not an LAM song. And many songs labeled as LAM are often not LAM songs. But, the LAM song "Spider and the Fly" is often mislabeled on illegal filesharing services as "Gothic", and the LAM song "HATE!" is often mislabeled as "Love Song". These songs are available for legal download at iTunes.com at a much higher quality, and/or available on the albums 'Selected Scenes from the End of the World: 9119' and 'Psycho Magnet'. Both these albums are available in any music store and online ('Psycho Magnet' is sold out but available digital wherever digital is sold).

A general request about illegal filesharing: Please tell people who illegally share LAM's music that they are hurting the bands by stealing the music. PLEASE do not put LAM music or videos onto file sharing services, on YouTube, etc. If people want to sample LAM music please direct them to the LAM website, the LAM YouTube page, LAM on Spotify or any other streaming service, etc. See the Links page of the LAM website for a complete list of official LAM websites and online profiles with samples of LAM's music. If you must put an LAM song online, please only place a partial song online, not the entire song. This way, people get a taste but will have to support the band and buy the album to hear the full version.

From an interview with Sean Brennan: "SEAN: I got the name from the lost 1927 silent film. Being familiar with film since childhood after reading about it in film books, I chose the name because no one knew what it was at the time (early 1990s) and the name was atmospheric. To me the name evoked imagery ranging from danger to romance; from a foggy night in London during the blitz in WWII, to simply a name that is open and can interpreted by the listener any way they like. When I named LAM no one but a handful of film fanatics knew what "London after Midnight" (the movie) was, and that was the intent. But just a couple of years later the internet was born and now everyone knows. It's a lost Lon Chaney film that's actually not a horror/vampire film, as often stated. It's about a murderer who is "mind fucked" into confessing to his crime. The police utilize the Lon Cheney "vampire" character, an actor in the story, to fool the murderer into thinking he is surrounded by vampire type creatures, driving him to the point of insanity and eventually confessing to his crime. So, in reality, it's not really so much a horror film. It's about affecting the state of mind in order to achieve some truth. Much like I try to do with music, touch people's minds and emotions- sparking thought or feeling or making them face (sometimes uncomfortable) truths."

A discography with this information can be found on the History page of the LAM website (see link to left). LAM used to play a song called "October" that was originally written by Sean for a band he played in briefly as a kid just prior to starting LAM. LAM only included this song in its repertoire for about the first year of existence and released it on the original 4 song demo tape. The song was soon taken off the tape and replaced with "Revenge", which was later released on the album 'Selected Scenes from the End of the World'. "October" has finally been re-released on the 2022 album "Oddities Too".

SEAN: The full title of "Revenge" is actually "Revenge: Written in vulgar disgust of ignorance, prejudice and jealousy". This is printed in every album booklet. That extended title is a bit is a take-off on some lines from Byron's satirical poem "Of English Bards and Scottish Reviewers". I have an old book of Byron's works and the title includes something similar, "written in vulgar disgust...", etc. The poem condemned some poets and reviewers Byron disliked at the time. "Revenge" sort of touched on similar themes but also spoke to humanity's willful ignorance, hate, and cruelty.

About the Hitler sample in "Revenge", I wanted no mistake that the song was condemning the mentality of superiority and destructive cruelty rather than endorsing it. And with a sound sample of Hitler you don't really think of anything but disgust and repulsion.

SEAN: The "Jesus Hates Me" shirt was the second shirt ever made by LAM in the early 1990s, re-released in the early 2000s. It was designed ONLY as a non-verbal response to people preaching Christianity to me and friends when they saw us, thinking that because of the way we looked we must be some sort of "devil worshiper", or just generally in need of religious salvation. Believe it or not, there are many of these conservative types in Los Angeles. The shirts were created when LAM started in the early 90s as a way to simply say "fuck you" to such people. It was just humorous response to constantly hearing "Jesus Love You". As intended, the shirt was a non-verbal response to hypocritical, ignorant, holier-than-thou people, hiding behind religion while judging another person (it was not a condemnation of a person's religion). Sadly, irony is often lost on the those with limited mental capacity, like conservatives and garden slugs, so while the shirt would shut some up it would also anger them.

Yes, Sean was guest on Montel Williams in 1992, when London After Midnight first started. The topic of the show was supposed to be "Gothic rock and its impact on young adults" and generally the discussion of the subculture. This is why Sean agreed to be on the show, and why they asked LAM to be on (LAM was the most popular up-and-coming US band related to the gothic scene). But once the day came to film the show, the producers 'dumbed it down' to grab some ratings; they changed the theme to "Vampire Rock" (Montel's interchangeable phrase for "Gothic" and a phrase they felt would grab viewers' attention). The program's producers booked some other bands that were there to simply shock the television audience with little else that was substantive to offer, and also booked a conservative Libertarian/Republican guest as a counter-point, who made insane accusations against the bands and people in the scene.

The other bands were there for shock value: Dark Theater was a Chicago-based band with a singer who claimed he was a "real blood drinker" and sang about vampire fiction. The other band was Haunted Garage, an old Los Angeles band that played punk-like music and spat fake blood at their audiences. The Republican guy attacked the bands saying the music corrupts youth, promoted Satanism and drugs, etc. However, having announced that LAM was to be on the show by passing out flyers at local clubs, many of LAM's Los Angeles-area fans packed the audience (a few hundred LAM fans showed up, some had to be turned away due to overcrowding), who luckily helped to drown out the right-wing Republican fanatic.

It was clear when LAM arrived and the program began that the program's producers didn't have a clue what LAM was about and were simply diving into the realm of shock TV for rating's sake. They just wanted controversy and not a real discussion of how music can impact kids. So they focused on image and their misconceptions of the gothic scene, and bands generally. "Ratings", after all. They even had LAM's name wrong in the chyron (chyron are the graphics, the lettering you see on a TV screen). Some fans noticed this on the TV monitors in the studio and corrected the TV crew before filming started. So the producers clearly had no clue who or what LAM was all about from the start.

The show aired the day the Los Angeles riots broke out (after police had beaten Rodney King and were acquitted of charges). It was the last "normal" TV show before several days of 24 hour riot coverage of Los Angeles being burned down due to the justified anger over the verdict.

Anyway- It's REALLY not worth seeing. LAM is hardly in it and the rest of it is quite boring. Here is Sean's recent response to images from the show being posted to Facebook: I had no idea the show was going to have that "Vampire Leader" under my name. That was their idea, not mine (they even had the name of the band wrong in that text just prior to taping- it originally read "London After Dark", instead of London After Midnight. After seeing this on the TV monitors facing the audience, the fans told the show's producers to correct it).

The way Montel Williams used the term "vampire" on the show was essentially interchangeable with "gothic", he had no clue what goth was, but it seems the staff got the idea of "vampires" from the one of the other guests (Vlad from a band called Dark Theater) that gothic had something to do with people pretending to be vampires ("Vlad" claimed to be a "blood drinker" and his songs were often about vampires). The episode was total garbage, not worth watching. (I really wish these images would go away from the internet- they give people the wrong idea without this explanation. So please don't share these photos, at least not without reposting my explanation).

When I was approached for this episode the producers said nothing about the confrontational format that they planned, with the crazy Libertarian/Republican guy, Jim Bieber, from 'Young Americans for Freedom' who accusing us of corrupting our audiences. I told the producers I was just a musician, not sure how I'd fit in on the show because I was quiet and low key and the other bands were very different from London After Midnight. But they assured me that it was just a discussion of the subculture.

The other band on the show, a band called Haunted Garage, was a very underground rock/horror/comedy punk band that played around Los Angeles in an entirely different scene (things were VERY segregated in the early 90s - scenes didn't really mingle). Note that this was really before exploiting goths became a "thing" on daytime TV- there were some instances, especially with punks, on daytime TV, but this was new to me. So I had no idea what to expect.

Anyway, I agreed to be on the show and the night before the taping I made flyers and passed them out at a club event so the TV studio ended up being filled with LAM fans, crowding out the regular Montel audience that would normally make up the audience. Most of the best commentary came from the audience and the guy from Haunted Garage who pointed out he was just doing "Monty Python" on stage set to music while spitting fake blood, which kind of undercut the Republican guy accusing us of destroying society and malevolent evil.

It was a mainstream media attempt to get ratings by scaring conservative America. And it worked to some degree. Lots of death threats toward me, and the general misconceptions of goths were perpetuated due to the bullshit from the Republican guest, which of course was then repeated on other TV shows. No talk about the music, no talk of the history of punk or goth or what we stood for or what the songs meant or what they were a response to. No performances. It was just "weird looking people, be afraid conservative America, they'll make your kids get piercings (literally, that was the warning at the time, piercings)". I guess we were the original "groomers", but for piercings and weird makeup. And here we are all these years later and the Republican party is still doing the same fucking thing but to the LGBTQ community and progressives generally - offering nothing but hate, lies and division.

Many people, for some reason, assume this is a picture of Sean despite the image looking absolutely nothing like Sean. Again- it's not Sean. No, it's not. Yes, we're sure. We would know, right? That photo was taken from an old issue of Interview magazine years ago - it's just a little girl all dressed up as an adult, symbolizing lost innocence, the theme of the album 'Psycho Magnet'. Duh. :)

There have been other people who played live in LAM over the years but were either asked to leave or who migrated on to other things. Like NIN or any other evolving music/art project, there had never been a regular live line up. Sean Brennan writes all the music and records it - you can check the liner notes to each album for specific details.

Sean writes all the music in LAM and performs it for albums. The live band that plays concerts includes Sean Brennan, Michael Areklett, Pete Pace, and Jeremy Kohnmann.

LAM first played in the early 1990s at the legendary death rock/gothic club Helter Skelter in Los Angeles (located at the old Stardust Ballroom on Sunset Blvd, now torn down and replaced with a Home Depot). LAM was the first band to ever play the club. Other bands to play there included Nine Inch Nails, Nitzer Ebb, the original Christian Death on one of their ill-fated reunion tours, and many other acts. The founders of Helter Skelter later opened another long running Los Angeles club called Perversion. The name of this club was taken from a club night LAM did whenever the live band performed at Los Angeles venues like The Whisky or The Roxy in the mid 1990s. So yeah, Sean named Perversion. A little known fact.

No! Don't buy these books! These authors used LAM's name in their books without permission and the information contained about LAM is completely inaccurate. For example, "The Vampire Companion" stated someone else sang for LAM, that LAM was somehow related to the "vampire scene" (whatever that is), and also that the band no longer existed. "The Vampire Encyclopedia" made claims that were similarly untrue and inaccurate. Sean Brennan wrote to both authors in 1994 when the books were first released, and asked them to remove any mention of LAM- because the band wasn't related to the vampire subject and the information they printed was wrong.

"The Vampire Companion" author didn't respond. The author of "The Vampire Encyclopedia" responded with a pompous letter stating he refused to alter his book, even though he acknowledged the information it contained was wrong. In 2005, after another edition of this book was released containing the same false information, Sean Brennan wrote directly to the publisher. They assured him that they would remove all references of LAM from future prints. We're not sure that they actually did or not. Again, don't buy these books!

Sean Brennan is a vegan. Since LAM's inception Sean has promoted the ideas of animal rights, veganism, and various progressive political and social issues in LAM's music and/or LAM's literature. Flyers from as far back as the VERY FIRST concert include advertising and articles on various animal rights and progressive political causes/organizations.

That performance was during a the 2007 European "Violent Acts of Beauty" tour LAM did with the opening band Kirlian Camera. KC's violinist, Sarah, was a big fan of that particular song, "Heaven Now", from the just released LAM album 'Violent Acts of Beauty'. That was the last concert of the tour and KC had some problems with the local promoters that night, so Sean dedicated the song to Sarah.

Wait, you're joking right? Have you been living in a cave? Did you hear "Your Best Nightmare", a song purposely written in the style of an Edward Gorey story, and think that defined LAM or something? Have you attributed others' views (or lack of) to Sean? Sorry, but this needs to be set straight- Sean has always been political- addressing social, environmental and political matters in his music and other LAM-related literature and forums (and stage performances) as far back as the first LAM concert. If you didn't know that then you haven't been paying attention. In addition to certain songs that address political or social concerns, LAM's flyers and literature (as early as the first days of LAM) showed pages of information about animal rights, human rights, environmental, and similar issues. VERY "political". LAM didn't "turn political", Sean has always been political, even from his very early childhood! But are you saying the 2007 album 'Violent Acts of Beauty' is all political? There's only ONE song that is blatantly "political" (America's a Fucking Disease), but while the other songs touch on important issues (like older LAM music), the songs can be interpreted any way the listener wants. So if you can't see past that one song then you have a very limited imagination.

No, with various edits it can contain some false or wrong information. There was a crazy guy (who was briefly banned from Wikipedia for "hostile editing" of band pages, including the LAM page) who added a lot of false, useless and/or misleading information to the page. Every time the page was edited to be more accurate this guy would revert it back to its inaccurate state, even when simple spelling errors were corrected, thus making the page utterly useless for years. It's still not very accurate. The LAM page on Wikipedia, therefore, is a very poor source for information.

Sean, of course. Read the liner notes. :) There are no other artists singing on any LAM song with the exception of the song "Blessing", a song that features Lore singing some background vocals. European singer Lin Silence performed a speaking part on the song "I'm No Angel" from the 2022 London After Midnight album 'Oddities Too'.

Sean sang on one of Lore's songs (called "Haunting") and also sang on a L'ame Immortelle song released in 2001 called "Life Will Never be the Same Again". Sean also helped with some minor arrangement of the vocal melodies. LAM also did a remix of a Pig song in 2016.

The USA. Sean was born in Connecticut.

Sean Brennan and all live band members are male. There has never been a female live member. There are currently no LGBTQ+ members of the live band and Sean is not gay, though LAM fully supports LGBTQ+ rights.

The Gashlycrumb is the LAM newsletter and merchandise catalog, which has largely been replaced by the LAM website. Do not confuse The Gashlycrumb with "the gastly crumb", mentioned here.

No. This is a question that only surfaced after people saw the cover artwork for LAM's 2007 album 'Violent Acts of Beauty', which is reminiscent of old Soviet-era propaganda art. The similarity is intentional as some themes on the CD reflect the struggle against fascism, right-wing conservative hate and a society that welcomes dysfunction and self-destruction rather than progressive ideas and compassion. See more on the interviews of this website page about this very subject. Also read Sean's interviews and writings on the LAM Community and Facebook page.