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 Century Romanticism in Literature, The Writings of Sir Walter Scott’”.
“I had to write an essay about Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the historical novel into literature in 1814”.
“The Tales of the Crusaders was among Scott’s novels that visualised the past using vividly drawn figures and brilliant realization, with landscapes that would’ve been like widescreen technicolour back in those days”.
“Ivanhoe is a medieval romance known to generations of moviegoers, with the revival of chivalric, epic, medieval swashbucklers like The Talisman”.
“And I found a way to join these forms together experimentally into a song”.
“Crusade is a very brief take-off of a song about going ‘off to the Crusade’”.
“It was a one-off jam session, a guitar riff with a chorus and a chorus with a riff on a guitar”, remembers Johnny. “It was easy to compose, and it was easy to bowdlerize into a two-to-three-minute rock song no problem”.
“In the 80’s, romance and adventure was back in vogue and very popular. Movies like ‘Legend’ and ‘Highlander’ were big at the box office”.
“Going back to that time, there is a bit of early U2 in Crusade”.
“I’d gone out and bought the U2 album Boy when it first came out in 1980”.
“The idea of their track Stories for Boys, was about escaping into fiction, ‘That I can’t have what I don’t know’”.
“It was an idea I copied in Crusade”.
“Crusade was sketched-out of a story the way U2’s song Shadows and Tall Trees used the chapter 7 title of Lord of the Flies by William Golding”.
“‘Who is it now? Who calls me inside? Are the leaves on the trees a cover or disguise? I walk the street rain tragicomedy I walk home again to the street melody’”.
“I followed U2’s lead and abstracted the tale of Saladin and The Talisman. I took an approach with Crusade which was to write around the story. Mainly it was successful because people could dance to it as a song. It’s nostalgic these days to me because it’s one of my earlier songs”.