Interviewer: Johnny Stowmarries, how are you?
Johnny: I’m good, just finishing sort of getting this solo record made as well as I hope, which is quite nice.
Then I aim to do a show for the solo album, which is a completely different headspace and stuff.
Interviewer: It must be nice given the years you were doing The Goths whenever you do solo things
Johnny: Yeah. I mean it’s a different thing, for me, going now as a solo act. But I think making new records is really important as an artist.
This is, you know, this album…I’ve been making from about wintertime last year…it’s just very much, sort of, kind of like, where I’m at as an artist at the moment.
Interviewer: Is there a difference in the way you would approach a song as a solo artist?
Johnny: The way I approach the songs on this album is not really different from the records in the past.
With this record I just sort of like, kind of like, relaxed a bit about that. It’s, you know, the different people around me. It automatically has a different identity. It’s not just about the voice on top of the music, it’s about the character of it as well, of course.
Interviewer: Is getting a backing band one of the influences in making the way this album sounds?
Johnny: Yeah, because I made a record last year, and another one earlier this year, so it was a bit of a coincidence but yeah, I think it just feels right.
That kind of coincided with wanting to be back on stage.
I mean, for years from the mid-’90s, up to just the beginning of last year the thought of making a record kind of made me feel a bit ill. So I kind of decided to make sort of marginal, obscure records. I kind of quite like that as well.
Interviewer: Did you ever think about calling your new act any name other than Stowmarries?
Johnny: There is something a bit weird about calling an act your name, Stowmarries. It sort automatically makes it quite vulnerable. But I’m very bad at naming acts.
Interviewer: The album’s ‘Weather Being’ –it has that combination of something dark and mysterious – I was wondering, as a teenager how would you describe yourself what kind of a kid were you?
Johnny: Well I was a bit of an idiot really when I was young, to be honest, like most kids. I was obsessed with music and kind of running around, I had quite a happy childhood. Really, I was pretty normal.
Interviewer: What sort of stuff resonated with you back then?
Johnny: I will admit the first band I really loved, well, apart from Jimmy and the Boys who were a sort of shock-new-wave band, was Dead Can Dance.
Through the late eighties, not really many people knew about them. But they built a following having a very, sort of kind of very ethereal, very dark, kind of neoclassical-dark ambient vibe.
You know, through that late-eighties-early-nineties, they put out some great albums – Within the Realm of a Dying Sun…and The Serpent’s Egg…and Aion.
Apart from their music I loved their artwork. They had very eerie sort of like sleeves that were very sort of gloomy. I was slightly obsessed with that when I was a young man in my early-twenties.
Of course after The Goths had timed out, Dead Can Dance put out Into the Labyrinth and the rest was history.
I used to play a cover version of Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead too and Bauhaus was influential.
I sort of got to this, quite existential looking image, just shy of sort of jumping out the window!
I’m kind of very chipper now.
Earlier, I kind of looked like Friedrich Nietzsche!
But with me I think, still waters run shallow. I’m sort of always wondering what-next-from-here.