Cranes are a British goth rock band. Formed in the mid 1980s in Portsmouth, England, they are best known for the soft, high-pitched vocals of lead singer Alison Shaw, memorably likened by the NME to "a beautiful siren being slowly strangled on a spiral staircase of hammer-horror guitars". Cranes saw an increase in popualarity in 1992 when they toured with The Cure. Cranes took their name from the innumerable mechanical cranes around Portsmouth docks.
