Having steadily carved out a particularly vivid, wired space for themselves in the unsettled jumble that was both UK and Irish post-punk fields - they were friends with U2 but very defiantly in their own space - on ...If I Die, I Die, Virgin Prunes reached a dramatic apotheosis. “Baby Turns Blue” is the song that sums it up the best, but the combination of Gavin Friday’s vocal desperation and beyond-glam extremity and the band’s transforming of rock-as-such into a  kind of alien ritual at once made it a goth landmark while at the same time transcending the form.

– Ned Raggett