Is it really 20 years since The Horrors emerged? I first saw them at an NME new bands event – the “Rock’n’Roll Riot” tour – at the Astoria back in 2006.

They had already caught my attention with their first single, Sheena Is A Parasite, and the amazing video with Samantha Morton as a kind of goth bride.

When they opened the show that night, ahead of the now-forgotten Dykeenies, the now-disbanded Maccabees and still-terrible Fratellis, there was an instant riot in the moshpit.

I remember their hardcore fans, mostly aged between 14 and 18, immediately began running into each other, heads clashing and blood spurting. It was very strange, and weirdly exciting, and took me back to the early days of punk.

Then I interviewed Faris Badwan and discovered he had an impressively encyclopaedic knowledge of underground psychedelic music and that, far from the terrifying rabble-rouser he presented himself as onstage, he was a very polite and well educated young man who had been educated at public school (Rugby, I think).

Anyway, like a lot of punk bands, after the initial shock and awe The Horrors mellowed out after that and began to sound more like The Cure mixed with The Psychedelic Furs – which was obviously a good thing. More recently they went ‘industrial’, sounding like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, which was not so much of a good thing; for me, anyway.

And now they’re back, sounding gloomy and gothic, moody and melancholy, with a new slimmed-down line-up, and a new single called The Silence That Remains. And I love it.