Your evening longread: The rockers who found love in 'lonely hearts' ads

EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle. 

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Lonely hearts

If you were a lonely goth living in a small town in Ireland or the UK from the 70s to the 90s, there was a way of meeting new friends or partners… penpal and lonely hearts ads.

(The Guardian, 10 mins reading time)

Hopeful, passionate and bored fans sent in their photos, names, addresses and obsessions for publication and crossed their fingers, hoping for a big response. Decades before the advent of online forums, fans would then exchange handwritten letters, gushing over the likes of Pat Benatar and Whitesnake. Teenage goths from Scunthorpe and Southend could fall in love, the ice broken by their shared love of Siouxsie and the Banshees. The ads would generally convey a passion for music, but between the lines were cries for connection, pleas for love.

Read all the Evening Longreads here>