It’s become the song that we’re most known for. I want it played at my funeral on a loop. I wonder how many people have been buried to it.

At concerts, we tend to dedicate it to people who have recently passed on, musicians and such. The song’s really about accepting the inevitability of death. I didn’t research it – and it turned out that I was about 100,000 out. The line “40,000 men and women every day” was my wild guess about how many people in the world die daily. “Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity,” I sang, but I wasn’t suggesting that people kill themselves to find out what it’s like. I sang about Romeo and Juliet as an example of a couple who have successfully gone to the other dimension, but I got a lot of grief over it because everyone thought I was promoting suicide. I imagined a couple: one of them dies but is able to come back for her lover, and they go to this other place no one knows about. The line '40,000 men and women every day' was a wild guess about how many people in the world die. Don’t Fear the Reaper is basically a love song that imagines there is something after death and that, once in a while, you can bridge that gap to the other side. I was 22 and had just been diagnosed with an irregular heart condition, which got me thinking about dying young.

The riff actually came first and the opening lines – “All our times have come / Here but now they’re gone” – just spun into my head fully formed. I never dreamed it would become such a famous song, or that the riff would be played by every kid trying out a guitar in a shop.

At first, I thought Don’t Fear the Reaper would be played on album-oriented radio, like all our other songs. We were happy in our niche and certainly never thought of ourselves as a pop group. We wrote romantic songs with historically based themes. Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, singer/guitarist/songwriterīlue Öyster Cult were a cult band.

Blue oyster cult don't fear the reaper