Interviewer: Now Johnny, the Evocations album was The Goths third album, and it was also the last album you wrote with Percy Blakeney when The Goths were still together,
Say The Goths started say in ’87, the regular shows start in ’89, the first album comes out in ’91,
Is there a point where the first two albums, Lost Art and Creature Feature, were all the songs that you’d been writing for a few years,
Then in ’92 was that, wow, you know, everything’s gone, I gotta start writing new stuff now?
Johnny: Yeah. Exactly. I’d written a few new things for the second record, then they were all exhausted.
It was time to start from scratch, and there’s this test about whether you can keep doing it; have you used up the, whatever, twenty five years’ worth of memories and inspiration on the first or second album, and I found that I could do it. I was pretty happy with that.
Interviewer: Did you find that it pointed to an end of an era in The Goths? That was, you know, you’ve got to go somewhere different now?
Johnny: After that record, yeah, there was the Put It On track that was pointing to what was to come, not that I knew that, but I guess it was, yeah. It was after three records that I felt really categorised kind of angst-ridden and I thought I gotta get out of this or I’ll have seen my day.
Interviewer: Gotta get out of this can mean two things, one it means dissolving completely and two it seems to me it means if you didn’t do something different every time you wouldn’t perform live.
Johnny: There wasn’t a dissolving completely and yet that is what actually happened because I suppose we performed a lot, maybe more than other acts due to the longevity we would play for hours and hours into the night on weekend nights and keep the party going. At the same time it was much, much more fragile than I could have imagine because the songs were getting written of necessity, needing to play new material constantly. It could and would dry up completely.
There were several moments where I’d be flummoxed as to where a song or the music came from.
It didn’t seem like it was purposeful, like you ‘wrote’ it and I still feel that happens but in tiny amounts, and for me, dissolving completely The Goths has led to these tiny amounts accumulating so that I’m now catching up with my songs on those records at those gigs from decades ago.
That’s very much why I’m back here, because there’s no letting go. I’m still catching up with those tracks from those moments from those decades. I mean, I’m not commercially successful but I still hope I will be. All it takes is a couple of records to get into the top ten and then all of a sudden everyone will stop treating it as alien or exotic or a fringe thing.
Interviewer: The Goths broke up in ’93, was there ever a time you thought The Goths could perform again?
Johnny: I feel sure The Goths won’t be getting back together anytime soon at least, if ever. It’s a bit like saying, come on, just make up. Because it is an intensely personal relationship, it’s not purely musical. It becomes pretty much impossible to recreate that.
My idea as a solo artist is about being as ordinary as I can be and behaving ordinarily. No one has any idea if any of this is going to be around for a year or a century.
Interviewer: ‘Goth’ now has definite connotations, not altogether ones that fall into The Goths category. Did that or does that pose difficulties in explaining your brand? Because of the diversity of styles?
Johnny: So as from calling ourselves The Goths, I distanced ourselves by coming up with phrases such as ethereal, neo-Elysian, superlunary, and so on. And I kept distancing it through the early ’90s even though I had songs already that were written, thinking, after I put out the Lost Art album, as very much an album act, not a singles act, or at least not until I had what we thought would work for the first album, ‘Lost Art’, an album name I chose, and it worked very well, I sold-out the album at gigs in 1991.
Lost Art has Wilderness, Citadel and Crusade on it. The second album, Creature Feature, in 1992, went into tighter and funkier songs. It had the original versions of Neck Romancer, Waft Off and Skin Feature. The third album, Evocations, in 1993, was darker and more experimental in tone. Its songs, like Midnight, Put It On, Smashed and Tree, crossed over a spectrum of musical forms, from ballad to psychedelic to hard rock, rock ‘n’ roll. Also, Evocations consisted of recently written songs that were not part of The Goths live repertoire. I was left to finish the album, and years later, I was able to add my vocals to a few of the tracks.
Interviewer: What was it that made you realise the prospect of going solo?
Johnny: It was this completion or squaring the circle once I had released the three original albums and I could put out some promotions for those. I began to put together the team and the approach I was going to take to launch the solo project that would be this new album, the ‘Weather Being’ album.
I felt that what I was doing was just second nature, that I was working in the field of possibilities and that something could be done and I felt a need perhaps to contribute to that.
I always written a certain amount, sometimes the words and all the parts, and I’ve come around now to accepting it.
I think part of it is that I enjoy the brand of music, hearing the music on records and in clubs that I like a lot. It just seems full of intensity and soul. It doesn’t seem calculated. It’s easy with popular music to feel it’s all calculated.