It has often been retrospectively claimed that
Andrew Eldritch played all of the instruments on many of The Sisters of Mercy’s
early releases (for example The Reptile House EP), sometimes by the great man
himself, and his performance on the drums (dropped sticks’n’all) is there for
all to hear on the first single. However, his prowess on the guitar has been
less a matter of public record, excepting a tale that the only reason Temple of
Love didn’t feature regularly in the live set in the 1983-1985 era was that
Eldritch was the only one who could play the song all the way through without
making a mistake.
However, a German press clipping (probably from
Spex magazine) which had lain in a major collector’s filing system for many
years sheds light on a more public possible Eldritch appearance on guitar,
alongside many other legendary figures on the Leeds music scene in the early
80s. As part of the magazine’s piece on the Three Johns, there was mention of
an earlier, post-Mekons incarnation called the Botha Boys, who had also done a
“hugely impressive” version of English White Boy Engineer, the first Three
Johns single which was released in 1982, the year after the band was formed in
Leeds. The song was written by Langford and originally recorded by him for a Mekons
BBC John Peel session in December 1980, and satirizes self-justifying
middle-class British engineering graduates who would accept inflated salaries
to work in apartheid South Africa, then of course ruled by President PW Botha.
The German magazine then quoted Jon Langford (who
famously filled in for Craig Adams at a York University TSOM gig in February
1982) as saying, “The Botha Boys were actually The Mekons. It was a long time
ago, but on stage there was me, John Hyatt from the Three Johns, Kevin, the
Mekons’ bassist on drums, and Andrew Eldritch from The Sisters of Mercy was
playing guitar, I believe”. Langford went on to describe the circumstances of
the song. “Basically it was an attack on one member of the audience…She started
crying and had to leave. We were living in the same house at the time, and her
boyfriend had moved to South Africa, which we used to argue about all the time.
All she could ever say was rubbish like “he’s going over there to make things
better”, so she deserved it. Naturally she didn’t like the song, and she sent
me a postcard from Zimbabwe some time later. I hate people who go to South
Africa.” The lyric, "You won't know until you've been there, there've been changes since last year, blame it on the Afrikaner, English White Boy Engineer" was a withering attack on her attitude, so typical of the numerous shoulder-shrugging Leeds engineering graduates who took the krugerrand route to fortune.
The Kevin mentioned in Langford's Botha Boys roll-call is Kevin Lycett, whom Andrew
Eldritch credited (in Mark Andrews’ wonderful article on the band’s early years for The Quietus last year) as being a major formative influence on his career :
“I owe a lot to him. He encouraged me in my quest to learn a little bit about
being in a band and scrimp and save for visits to the studio and keep hammering
away at it. By the time he stopped being that kind of mentor, we still had
nothing to show for it, but his encouragement never wavered.”
The exact date of the alleged Botha Boys’ show has
never been established, but the live version of English White Boy Engineer which
the German magazine was referring to appeared on a UK indie compilation on
Norwich based Grunt Grunt A Go Go records in 1985 called Good Morning Mister Presley. The LP featured a variety of excellent bands including The Bomb Party and
Marc Riley and the Creepers, and featured a front cover designed by Langford (see pic below from Discogs website).
I contacted Kevin Lycett to see if he could shed
any more light on the story, but he had no recollection whatsoever of the Botha
Boys, and certainly didn’t think he had ever played drums on stage at any
point, so wondered if something had got lost in translation for the initial
interview. He added that it was not Eldritch’s style to take part in such an ad
hoc ensemble (although of course he did join Skeletal Family on stage in
Hamburg in 1985, and famously strummed a bass at a charity benefit gig in 2001).
Undeterred, I tried to get in touch with Jon
Langford himself, to see if he could confirm the details in the German
magazine, albeit some thirty years after the event, but sadly no further
information was forthcoming. Langford has recently spoken extensively about his very brief time in The Sisters, and has not made any mention of the Botha Boys,
so it seems likely that the original
tale is apocryphal. However, as ever, I would be only too delighted to be proved wrong.
My thanks to collectors LG and Phil Verne of the
unofficial FB TSOM 1980-1985 group (where discussion of this post will no doubt continue), journalist Mark A, and Kevin L for their
help in exploring one of the enduring TSOM myths.
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