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 played The Tube Club, Wilson’s, The Roxy and The Moon Bar…and once I was back playing gigs in the city again, around that 1989/90 period, I was playing The Bohemian”.
“Citadel came from loading in the van, heading into the night, heading into the city and playing gigs till the wee hours, at The Bohemian”.
“‘Went into the Citadel to see what I could find’, is a line about heading into the night, heading into the city and going onstage”.
“You’re thinking to yourself how this is going to go over, will you get the audiences up and out of their seats, or will it descend into a ratty crowd scene…these kind of thoughts running through your head”.
“So that first line was adequate, but to write the rest of Citadel I turned to a novelette called The Singing Citadel for inspiration to complete the song”.
“The Singing Citadel is a Michael Moorcock fantasy tale about a Princess who puts a Rider to a quest, to dispel a magical “singing citadel” that’s been luring her people away to oblivion”.
“The Princess accompanies the Rider towards the mysterious ruins, but gets entranced by the strangely hypnotic singing coming from the ruins, and gets inadvertently drawn into the citadel, and herself disappears”.
“It’s a tale that resonates. It’s kind of like a reference to the post-modern predicament, this errant rider on a quest with no idea as to what or why”.
“It’s all very open-ended, and I feel that Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower had a certain influence in me writing Citadel”.
“It has the same singular interior idea, going into a fort, it isn’t really clear why, not really getting very far in the end, more questions than answers”.
“Citadel has characters that are sort of avatars of the self, there’s almost no story. What sounds almost heroic or uplifting in the music is actually reflected as completely indolent and stagnant in the narrative”.
“It’s a sense of growing up in Brisbane at that time in the 1980s. Those times fueled the music. Oppression permeated the life back in those days”.