Skeletal Family: 'It got to the stage where virtually every night we had a new song'

“It’s funny, really,” he says, “because after about 1987 or ’88 when we finally ground to a halt, I don’t think any of us expected to be sat here doing this now...and then things evolved.”

Nowell traces the resurgence of interest in the Keighley band back to the late 1990s when reissue specialists Cherry Red Records acquired their back catalogue, including such Goth disco staples as She Cries Alone and Promised Land, and began licensing them for compilation albums. “By 1999-2000 we’d started to get a new following, which was strange, but with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails coming in, we clung upon their coat tails,” he says.

In 2002 he and guitarist Stan Greenwood decided to relaunch the band with keyboard player Ian ‘Karl Heinz’ Taylor and singer Anne Marie Hurst. However the line-up chopped and changed “with about 20 different singers” before things began to fall into place in 2021 with the arrival of Anneka Latta as lead vocalist.

“I think we’ve got a lot to thank Cherry Red for in some ways, and Cleopatra in America, they took a lot of stuff as well, so it became like a worldwide audience,” Nowell says. “We’ve done more gigs in different countries since the reformation than we did back in the day.”

Greenwood meanwhile says he has never lost his enthusiasm for writing music since he first started playing in 1979. “When Skeletal Family first split up I just formed other bands and carried on playing,” he says. “There’s probably only been about eight weeks when I broke my ankle once where I couldn’t go out and play. With Skeletal Family we were lucky because we gained a decent international following, but after the band split up you could only play cover versions. It’s OK playing local pubs because your friends will come and see you. But with Skeletal Family you could write original material and there was an audience which would appreciate it.”

Taylor believes the current five-piece line-up, which also includes Adrian Osadzenko on drums, works so well “because of the songwriting”, adding: “It got to the stage where we’d go into the studio and virtually every night we had a new song.”

Latta says Skeletal Family had always been on her radar before she was invited to join them two years ago following the amicable departure of Hannah Small. “Coming from Keighley myself, everybody’s heard of them,” she says. “But I was in a band called Exoteric who supported them at the O2 Academy so I got to work alongside them.”

Songs they had demo-ed with Small were reworked – “We gave Anneka the finished backing tracks with no vocals on and let her reinterpret them,” says Taylor – and new ones added.

“I purposefully didn’t listen to what the previous singer had done,” says Latta. “I just listened to the music, had no idea how it sounded before and I’m glad we approached it in that way because I think once you hear something else you get that in your head. It was nice to be able to put my own stamp on it and put a little bit of myself in there too.”

She was keen to contribute as a songwriter too. “I’ve always been writing songs with all of the bands I’ve been in – to me it’s part and parcel of it,” she says. “You want to use your own lyrics ideally because you can relate to them and the music as well, I love to put my own melodies to them. It feels like we’re a good solid unit now.”

Lyrically, Light From The Dark is “a bit of a Covid baby”, says Latta. “It was born in lockdown, so there’s bound to be themes there but I think actually only upon reflection did I realise that I must have been coming from that point of view a little bit. Some of the songs are darker than others – I think that highlights the rollercoaster that we’d all taken at that point.”

Although the band have only played the new songs live once, Latta noticed they were “really well received”, and reaction to the singles Crybaby and My Own Redemption has also augured well. “You’re a bag of nerves but you’re also excited to get your new material out there as well,” she says. “Certainly for me, nobody knew who I was. We had Covid, we couldn’t gig live, so we put something out there. For me personally I was nervous to see what people’s reaction would be but thankfully it’s all worked out really well.”

Due to work commitments, the band only have a gigs lined up in Manchester and Glasgow to coincide with the album’s release. However Greenwood is keen to play in Keighley soon. “We probably will do a hometown one soon but that’s one we can arrange at relatively short notice. There are two or three decent venues in Keighley we can probably play...I think once the album is out more bookings will come in and it will then be a case of us having to pick and choose which ones we want to do. That would be a great scenario.”

Light From The Dark is out on Chapter 22 on Friday April 21. Skeletal Family play at Goth City festival, Leeds on July 14. skeletalfamily.com/