Johnny Stowmarries was the guitarist and main writer in the Brisbane duo The Goths, and it was his quirky, rather unique sound which first brought Johnny to the attention of record labels around the world.
Johnny: “It was quite unlike anything that was around”.
“With the song Tree, I had this very sort of psychedelic sound, which would become my first track off the Weather Being album, and that made quite a statement about the sound”.
“It was something that was completely innovative that I’d been gradually working my way towards”.
“The sound had a sort of psychedelic edge to it, and it had something very naïve about it at the same time, in a kind of innocent, very naïve way”.
“There’s this whole thing on Tree about finding yourself in a rather dim, dark place and, bit by bit, noticing things”.
“The chords, and sort of riffs, are unexpected, so you get a very sort of strange structure of chords, which makes it very unusual to hear”.
Long before Tree was first track on Stowmarries solo album Weather Being, the track was listed track number seven on The Goths Evocations album.
Looking back over the distance of over thirty years, there is a naïve quality to the music, from these shaky beginnings.
Johnny: “I was always just very, very excited putting down my music in the studio. I was a bit of a non-musician in a lot of ways, and I didn’t actually believe popular music meant anything at all. When I started recording, it changed my attitude to what people like us could do”.
Tree really announces Johnny’s arrival as a special songwriter, and somebody who’s quite different from the normal songwriter.
Johnny: “Even though you mightn’t quite understand the lyrics, you know that there’s something strange there, strange goings on, and it provokes intrigue”.
Johnny: “I’m not really sort of coming from that kind of ‘we’re in the key of…’, ‘we can’t do this, and we can’t do that’. I’m looking at music from a completely different perspective, and just doing what sounds right, which to me is a fantastic angle to come from”.
“It was all a case of James North, who is an award-winning producer and who produced all of the songs, who fell out in favour of Sean Carey, who is an Emmy award-winning producer”.
“Sean Carey, a pop rock producer, has done some great classic records, but my stuff wasn’t really like that at all. I was kind of coming more from goth-rock music.
“Weather Being is a special album because I actually recorded the tracks in The Goths, so I’ll always remember that for that reason”.
Weather Being really is a work of its time, very strongly influenced by the prevailing goth-sound of its times.
The songs are composed by Johnny Stowmarries, and they have the Stowmarries stamp all over them.
Johnny: “I seem to have all these ideas, lyrically and musically, very strange, and very childish in a way, some of the stuff, sort of very kind of fairy-tale, but still unique”.
“I don’t think any of the Weather Being songs give any ideas of what I’m going to do next, with the exception of Tree, Smashed, and one or two others”.
“The lyrics on Weather Being are very quirky and very surreal, and are in a style of writing all of their own really”.
“I think of Weather Being as a one-off really, starting out with something very sort of colourful and almost whimsical, with its own sound, own style, and I’ve enjoyed kind of getting hold of that and doing that”.
Johnny Stowmarries was the central figure of The Goths, giving the duo their early direction.
There is something to be said about the unpredictability of his songs, combined with their simplicity, which makes them so special.
On an album like Weather Being we see much more where Stowmarries has ultimately gone, and it is interesting to hear those songs actually revived and used in an album as the very tail end of The Goths.
There is a nice circle being described there.