Crash and Brum 2 - Fighting Cocks, Birmingham, January 21st 1983 (updated 2023)

(This is the second in a series of three posts about gigs TSOM played in the Birmingham area in 1982/1983 - updates added in red for the 40th anniversary of the gig, six years after the original blog post)

Speaking of The Sisters of Mercy’s special relationship with Birmingham (as well as the three gigs under review, Wayne Hussey’s TSOM debut famously took place there in 1984, and it remained a favoured stop-off) Eldritch told a reporter from Wolverhampton’s Express and Star in 1993 : “I’ve always liked playing ‘Brumidgeham’. We have a certain rapport with the fans.” Unsurprisingly therefore, the Sisters' second visit to the Second City came barely two months after the first, as they were re-engaged by promoters Nitelife to play at one of their more regular venues, the Fighting Cocks pub in Moseley, where they also promoted a legendary gig by The Smiths that year.

As co-promoter Clive Whittaker said in an interview with a local online magazine, once a band came to be established, they would draw a crowd from a wider area, and Nitelife prided themselves on looking after bands sufficiently well when they were less well-known to be able to continue to promote them in the city as they rose up the musical food chain.

Thanks to the generosity of Belgian TSOM archive poster supremo Bruno Bossier and the hunting skills of arch collector LG, we have this little seen striking poster advertising the gig, confirming the date of the show (Friday 21st January 1983) and revealing that up and coming local band "Ourselves Alone" (a translation, from the Irish Gaelic, of Sinn Fein) were the support on this occasion, a band who seem to have sunk without internet trace. Like Clive’s other posters, this was a basic home-made Letraset job, with a medical scalpel used to cut out the different sections.

Since this blog post was first posted, a mint copy of the poster by the appropriately named promoter Mint (who promoted the gigs at the Fighting Cocks) was sold by rock memorabilia experts Omega Auctions, and reveals that the TSOM poster was the top half of a sheet produced to promote that weekend's pair of gigs, with Bingley rock band Pyramid on stage the following night (Birmingham, the home of Black Sabbath having remained a heavy metal stronghold at that time). The poster sold for £220.

As these recent (Streetview) photos will attest, The Fighting Cocks is one of the more aesthetically pleasing venues where the band played in the early days, at least from the outside, and was built in 1899 by TWF Newton and Cheattle. With its imposing façade of red brick, sandstone and terracotta, it is a noted local landmark. The downstairs bar boasts many of its original features and looks worthy of a visit in its own right, but the Moseley online magazine B13’s Martin Mullaney has also unearthed pictures of the function room upstairs, where the gigs took place and which seemingly hasn't been used for over twenty years! This was confirmed in a recent blog post by "gigswithivan", who was at the Fighting Cocks show in 1983 and recently returned with his old student pals. "One night in January 1983 (I looked it up – it was 21 January), I wandered into the Fighting Cocks pub in Moseley, Birmingham to see The Sisters of Mercy, the princes of 80s darkness. They played from within clouds of dry ice [unlikely in early 1983 -NVL] in the pub’s upstairs gig room. I was with my student house mates....I can’t remember much about that Moseley gig. It was dark, smokey and over 36 years ago. We were probably wearing second hand big coats and jackets – dead men’s gear from ‘the Digbeth tailors’.

My student housemates returned to the Fighting Cocks in 2015 and had lunch and a few beers there. Some framed posters of 80s gigs were up on the walls, including the legendary Smiths one we missed – we heard about it an hour after it finished, having been in another pub down the road in Balsall Heath…perhaps by pre-mobile carrier pigeon or someone passing on horseback. The barman sensed our nostalgic excitement at the old Fighting Cocks gigs and asked if we wanted to go up to where the bands used to play. “What? It’s still there?”. “Yeah. No one uses it now: come and have a look.”He unlocked the door and up we went. It was left virtually untouched from the last gig, decades ago. Dusty old glasses and cans. Holes in the well pounded floorboards. A wonderful accidental museum of rock, indie and post-punk.

Uniquely for the three TSOM Birmingham gigs of the Ben Gunn era, the show was (bootleg) recorded, and thanks to well-known Sisters fan Ade Matthews' upload to YouTube we can enjoy an extract from one of the recordings to surface so far, “Valentine.” Legendary TSOM collector Phil Verne tells me that indeed this was possibly the final gig before the band headed to Kenny Giles’ studio in Bridlington once again to record The Reptile House EP. The rest of the setlist was the same as at the previous night’s gig at the Leeds Warehouse, except that they omitted Lights and Damage Done. Like most concerts of that era, they started with Kiss The Carpet, and ended with Sister Ray, after one of the last playings of 1969. The band again went down a storm with the local fans at the Fighting Cocks, with Clive Whittaker saying “(Blurt blew the house down and) Sisters of Mercy ground it into the dirt.” At least I think he’s being complimentary!

Phil Verne recently shared a cleaned up version of the gig on the TSOM 1980-1985 Facebook fan page, allowing some of Eldritch's onstage comments to be finally deciphered, four decades after the event. Interestingly, it hints at problems at the previous Birmingham gig a couple of months earlier, possibly explaining the quick return to the Second City. " "This is to make up for the last time when we only played twenty minutes," the singer intones after the curiously breathless second track, Floorshow, before asking "Better than last time, huh?" before penultimate track 1969. Overall, the audience reaction is enthusiastic, and the band respond in kind, with an emphasis on energy, humour and power rather than a slavish adherence to correct notes and on-pitch vocals, with the traditional Doktor Avalanche misfire at the beginning of a typically wild final encore rendition of Sister Ray completing the picture. In other words, all the ingredients of a classic TSOM gig of the Gunn era before the new professionalism of the WEA iteration of the band.

My thanks for this post are due to Phil Verne, Ivan, Andy D (for the new tape), Ade M (for the old one), Bruno B for the poster and all others mentioned.