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 'Pale Roses'. 'Pale Roses' is a...

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 1984/85, I’d...

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 school in 1980 was ‘Nineteenth...

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 also more kind of abstract,...

Friedrich Nietzsche’s misogyny is a brute fact that no pageant of interpretation can disguiseJohnny 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 the second,...

Cat People was new wave with some goth rock influences.‘Put It On’ began as a few verses describing a vivid scene of collapsing firebombed buildings and firefighters rushing to the scene. It envisioned these poorly ventilated buildings, trapped victims breathing in...

The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 14, Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (Guardian, maybe subject to copyright)“Although The Goths happened to appear after the early-80s post-punk, we were always destined to be a sort of retro-fit to the genre”, Johnny Stowmarries says of his...

Studio album by The Alan Parsons Project.Johnny notes that when he wrote ‘Midnight’, at the very beginning of 1990, he was “back at a point of the original context, which was a part of the underground culture that was coming out in the 80’s, up through the 90’s”. “I...

On the morning of the 27th of January 1974, three days after the deluge of rain began.Johnny comes straight to the point, “‘Smashed’ is a ‘River Drama’”. “It’s unique among my songs because it’s come from a childhood memory”. “It was amongst the last songs I wrote...

Depicting 'Tree', an illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story The Premature Burial by Harry Clarke, published in 1919.“I wrote ‘Tree’ when The Goths were only one rehearsal away from going separate ways”. “‘Tree’ was the last song I wrote before we split. It ended up...