Blackie Lawless is many people. But there are two principle characters in his psychological cache that the world at large is likely to encounter.

It was just after the New York Dolls had split up. Arthur Kane and I had come to California. I was at this party and met this girl who read the cards. She asked me if I would like her to read for me. said, yeah, okay.

The detail she went into about things that had happened to me was extraordinary. She told me that I had lust come out of something very traumatic and that I would enter a period like a void in my life. She didn't say how long, but went on to say that I would one day go on to do something that would make what I had just come out of look insignificant.

I am closer to satisfying myself with this than anything I've ever done. It's not a 100% work - but if it was then I don't think I'd have a reason to go on. But it's a force to be reckoned with.

This story came about for the same reasons that The Headless Children came about. The object of being an artist is to stir the minds of men. if you don't do that then you are not an artist, just some guy who makes records.

I find it sobering for example that when I wrote The Heretic - which is a vision of society sliding into gang warfare - little did I know that I would be working in this studio after that record was done. And now look, I'm sitting in the middle of the killing fields of American conurbation.

The Shakespearian allusion made earlier is not entirely unjustified. There are classical parallels in the story of The Crimson Idol which Blackie acknowledges. The themes of the fatally flawed hero and of ghosts haunting the central character are hark-backs to both Macbeth and Hamlet. (Just because a guy once flung raw meat at an audience doesn't mean he's not widely read) Blackie smiles and nods. Yeah, that's deliberate.

Jonathan Steel's story is complex. On the one hand it is a classic rags to riches fable. This time of a neglected character seeking his fortune through a crimson guitar (hence The Crimson Idol). On the other it is the carefully woven example of the Catastrophe Theory which says that a disaster is not an isolated event going wrong, but a series of smaller incidents going awry which lead to the eventual outcome. So is Jonathan fatally flawed in the tradition of the great tragedies from King Lear to Julius Caesar?

Oh yes. Jonathan's motivations are stirred by the emotional privations of his childhood. He is constantly seeking to gain approval from his parents after the death of his beloved older brother who was tragically killed.

At one point in the story there is a big turnaround in his fortunes. Just when he has made it to the top two things happen. The first is after one of the band's parties where, basically anything goes. He says; I was intoxicated not just by the drugs and the alcohol but equally by my own fame as well. (And I've seen that in people in this business.) The second is shortly after this when, blitzed out of his mind, he finally summons up the courage to call his mother, with whom he has not spoken since he ran away from home. Jonathan describes the call like this: Less than fifty words were spoken and the last four were We have no son.

He thinks that after all that he has achieved, his parents would accept him. But the rejection he suffers is bigger than that which drove him out in the first place. And that is the beginning of the end. It is what drives him eventually to take his own life. Realising that all he has built has been based upon a premise that could never be realised; that everything including his own fame has been an illusion.

He goes from saying in the beginning I just want to be the Crimson Idol of a million to I don 't want to be... at the end."
It s at this point that you realise that Blackie's vision of the much denigrated genre Rock opera, has been taken far more seriously than many would have given him credit for. Lawless has gone from being tongue-in-cheek in the past to fist-in- face now.

There will be those who take all this for its surface value; who will think that anybody creating something of this nature, at a time when alternative forms of Rock music from Seattle to Thrash are pushing back boundaries, must be on to a loser. But that would be foolhardy, because along with all of the thematic threads woven into 'The Crimson Idol' is some very, very powerful Rock music. There is Doctor Rockter, every bit as heavy as the now familiar Chainsaw Charlie. Then of course there are The Invisible Boy, Arena Of Pleasure and the climactic The Great Misconception Of Me. Not to mention the poignant power- ballad Hold On To My Heart (another song not to be taken at face value).

Although Blackie has held this together almost single-handedly, taking responsibility for production, vocals, bass and rhythm guitar, other musicians have come in for some quite stunning contributions. There is the hitherto unknown Stet Howland on drums, whose drumming throughout is exceptional, so good in fact that some of the original tracks laid down by Frankie Banali were re-recorded with Stet. But most startling is the lead guitar work from Bob Kulick. The way he plays on this record, says Blackie, will enhance his reputation as a top class guitarist. He has excelled himself.