The North of England has been associated with the word “gothic” ever since the Bronte sisters walked from the parsonage in Haworth up to the blasted heath around Top Withins, and the Demeter with its vampiric cargo was scuttled on the coast of Whitby in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Anyone who has taken the time to ramble through the wilderness of the Pennines along the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, or hike up Pendle Hill, will understand why artists hailing from the region so often incorporate the environment into their work. Its unique contrasts of bleakness and beauty, awe and dread, are intoxicating. In the late 20th century, that gothic influence found its way across the Pennines and down into the tenement blocks of the North West, blooming into new life amongst post-industrial malaise.
For Preston’s Jack Bowes, who performs under the name Rainy Miller, there’s a very different way of looking at this tradition of Northern Gothic, by “holding up a mirror” and flipping the whole thing geographically on its head. This led him to the Bible Belt of the US, via Jim White’s travelogue Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus. “When you start looking at the parallels, they’re kind of similar to the North of England,” He tells me. “You’ve got the crazy landscapes, you take the Mississippi River and compare them to the Trough of Bowland or the Yorkshire Moors, or take places like Accrington that might be the same as those roadside towns in the Southern Belt. It’s rooted in a lot of the same ideas of folklore and communal history.”
A fascination with these parallels runs deep throughout Joseph, What Have You Done?, Miller’s fourth full-length album. It’s a record he has been chipping away at for years, adopting pieces cast away from 2022’s Desquamation (Fire. Burn. Nobody) and the Space Afrika collaboration A Grisaille Wedding. “Vengeance.”, for instance, uses a noise-drenched refrain from Graham Sayle (of hardcore unit High Vis) as its centrepiece, taking a stray piece left off Grisaille and turning it into the cathartic moment on a track about “wanting to really fuck someone up”.
On the album’s closing title track, Bowes hands over the mic to fellow Lancastrian and poet Christ Bryan. For a record so steeped in trauma and personal catharsis, these choice moments of collaboration feel especially weighted. “I know he’s a father himself,” Bowes explains. “So with a lot of the record being about paternity and father figures, to give him the final reprise made perfect sense.”
In order to form the connection between the North of England and the Southern US, Bowes had to branch out of sounds explored on his previous records. “I got so caught up in this whole Southern Gothic thing, that contextually it meant there had to be elements of guitar on the record, in order to have that link. I did a lot of the guitar bits myself – I can’t play the guitar at all, but I borrowed one off a mate and was just figuring it out as I was going along.” In his book, this isn’t necessarily a matter of trendy genre-hopping, but more about finding the right tool for the job: “You can use the stylistic elements of each genre as a signifier. If you need a song that has to contain some sort of frenetic anger then it might as well be a noise track, because that to me is the greatest signifier of that energy.”
Rainy Miller’s distinctive sound has already brought him to the attention of the wider experimental music network in the UK and Europe, alongside a loose cohort of artists (we’re not calling it a scene!) such as Bowes’ school friend Blackhaine and Huddersfield’s aya. Is this Lancashire’s moment on the world stage? For Bowes, this is seeing it backwards. “For me I think about how to bring the information of the world that I’ve seen and then concentrate that right back home in the most literal terms. We’ve had the proof in the pudding in Preston where there are now kids making club nights because of conversations that we’ve had with them directly about it.”
What he proposes is a sort of “magpie” approach to cultural exchange, nicking the technical knowledge and avant-garde cultural signifiers that come with exposure to the art world and figuring out ways to translate them back into a local context. This is something that was sorely missing for Bowes and his peers growing up, he reflects. “I’ve got mates from home who were way more creative than me, but because we had no gigs in Preston, we had no exposure to culture. They went and worked on building sites and a lot of them I don’t think that was their first choice of thing to do.” Bowes hopes to redress the balance for the next generation through his music and the work of his Fixed Abode label, “I don’t think we need to take this shit to the rest of the world anymore, we just need to make our own backyard pretty bulletproof.”
Do we even need to be taking it to Manchester? I ask. This gets Rainy thinking about how the cultures of the North West tend to be treated as a monolith (“Greater Manchester”) when the reality is strikingly different. “You go to Blackburn and then Manchester and it’s like chalk and cheese,” he points out. “You go to Accrington and then to Blackburn, they’re entirely different places.” He notes that we tend to “let Manchester celebrate other places’ victories,” which accounts for his reluctance to be lumped into any mention of a “new Manchester sound” in interviews.
Away from the endless bustle of Manchester, pacing the streets of Leyland in the small hours of the morning, Bowes discovered another striking parallel between his locale and the Bible Belt: the divine.
Unlike the “over the top” US, with its ubiquitous strain of Evangelical Christianity, it was in the quiet solitude of the suburban mundane that Bowes found that connection to something bigger. “I would go and find things like lamp posts that were flickering, and stop and have a conversation with myself there,” he tells me. “Mundanity is stillness in a sense, and you can’t do that in places that are so busy and rushed. You need all this space, all this technical boredom, to really tap into that kind of thing.”
Mundanity seems to be the de facto condition of those growing up in Northern towns deprived of cultural outlets. It’s the tedium of newbuild estates, footy, video games and early nights. Bowes proposes a way of seeing that “stillness” through a cultural lens – a tool, he says, “to draw you out of yourself into a conversation that feels bigger than what’s happening right there at that moment.”
In this sense, the Northern Gothic of Joseph bears with it a streak of hope cutting through the persistent gloom. One of the most anguished lines on the album, from opener “Mud in My Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions)” is repeated to the point of becoming an absurd mantra: “You were born to be a star / you were born to be nothing.” It’s a painful concept to be confronted with in an era of increasingly restricted social mobility.
Yet Bowes is interested in cutting away from this black and white “rags to riches” idea of working class engagement in the arts. “It’s given me an umbrella for a life’s work to really flesh out this idea. It’s just giving a home for people who want to push this out of Manchester. You almost open that up to everyone else to go and find their own definition. I find that quite interesting.”
all photographs by Tom McKean
Joseph, What Have You Done? was released on 2nd May 2025 via Fixed Abode
[article first published in STAT15, July 2025, 250 limited print editions]
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