Lord Byron Portrait by Thomas Phillips, c.1813 “The time I came up with Wilderness, in 1989,” Johnny remembers, “books, films and music, were all jumbled up in my head.” “I first got a thread of the song reading a Moorcock tale called...
Michael Moorcock wrote The Singing Citadel and recorded albums with his band The Deep Fix “I wrote Citadel around 1989/90 when, having gone through a few dormant years, I was back playing gigs again in the city at The Bohemian Cafe”. “Earlier through...
It’s ‘Stories for Boys’, a children’s crusade. Images may be subject to copyright. “Crusade is a very brief, very abstract pastiche of Tales of the Crusaders by Sir Walter Scott”, according to Johnny. “One of the History subjects at...
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Brian Eno–David Byrne, February 1981” Images may be subject to copyright. “When it came to ‘Waft Off'”, Johnny recalls, “I wanted to do something of an old haunted castle ‘trope’. But I wanted to do something...
Friedrich Nietzsche’s misogyny is a brute fact that no pageant of interpretation can disguise Johnny describes ‘Skin Feature’ as “a headlong dive into existentialism”. “It draws from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘The Earth has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of...
Francisco Goya 1814 the series “disasters of war”, page 71: Against the common good. “’Neck Romancer’ was something I’d wanted to do for a long while. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to, but after I’d written the first album and I was working on...
