Will I-Beam ? - October 31st 1983

The Sisters of Mercy played their first Halloween gig on 31^st October 1983, and it proved to be a memorable occasion for many different reasons. The gig was one of a pair of West Coast USA dates (the other gig which was down in LA will be covered in another post on this blog in the near future) which the band fulfilled as a three-piece, following the sudden departure of rhythm guitarist Ben Gunn at the end of the East Coast tour the previous month. Prior to flying out to California, Eldritch, Marx and Adams had played together for a one-off gig at Stockholm’s Electric Garden, a concert covered in an earlier post on this blog, as the band reverted to its core (early 1981) original live line-up.

British indie and goth bands were (and remain) incredibly popular in the Golden State (for example Depeche Mode’s “101” live album of 1988 was recorded at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl in front of an audience of 66,000 fans!), and cosmopolitan San Francisco’s I-Beam venue played host to most of the alternative bands of the era, from Siouxsie to Killing Joke , Motorhead to Big Black. Originally opening in 1977 as a gay club at 1748 Haight Street, the I-Beam had branched into live music with bands playing most Monday and Tuesday nights, and thus TSOM were booked to play at their Halloween show on Monday 31st October 1983, as part of the "Monday Night Live" series.

(the sign which hung over the doorway of the club)

The Sisters’ show at the I-Beam was fortunately recorded by an audience member and released as the bootleg LP "Tender Mercies" (with the usual missing definite article, poor artwork, mis-spellings, incorrect date etc) and ultimately circulated around the fan base, again allowing us to appreciate the starker sound of the band as a three-piece. 

The crisp recording starts with someone (the local compere judging from his accent) speaking numbers apparently randomly ("one"....one"….”six”…”one”…"three"....."ten".....eight") into a microphone, like a manic bingo caller rather than the usual UK roadie mantra “one, two…one, t-t-t-t-two,” and the band instantly burst into set-opener “Burn”. It’s immediately clear that both Eldritch’s vocal and Adams' bass are much higher in the mix than in earlier 1983 gigs, and the subsequent “Valentine” and “Anaconda”, though a little thinner in sound than usual, retain their original power as a result. The version of the new single - announced as “This is a new song called Temple of Love” – is arguably the best of the live versions of the latter part of 1983, and is followed by a dynamic "Heartland" with Craig’s buzzing bass to the fore over a more-intricate-than-usual backbeat, and in general the sound has more of the rougher edges which characterise most 1982 recordings. A somewhat fitful "Emma" comes next, with the Doktor misfiring slightly in the introduction and Marx getting a little carried away towards the end at the expense of the original melody, and "Adrenochrome"'s usually wonderful instrumental sections are truncated somewhat to disguise the lack of the second part, a sonic space amply filled by Adams on his trademark "Floorshow" riff which follows. After a storming “Body Electric” is played, Eldritch dedicates the next song, the set-closing ("This is the last one..") "Gimme Shelter" to American contemporaries, True West, one of the many American bands (Green On Red, Long Ryders, R.E.M etc) who were championed in the UK music press in the mid 1980's and whose praises Eldritch had sung in one of the radio interviews on the East Coast tour, and here he seems to suggest that the band had also been on the bill at one of the Sisters’ two shows at the Danceteria and that they had borrowed their equipment, although no other evidence of this has emerged. In order to find out more information, I contacted Russ Tolman, guitarist, songwriter and founder member of True West, who is still very much involved in the music business, and he was only too happy to answer my queries. "I'm delighted to hear that Andrew had nice things to say about True West," he told me. "I remember meeting him at KQAK radio in San Francisco where we were both being interviewed around the time of our show together at the I-Beam in Fall 1983. We played two shows with the Sisters: the I-Beam in San Francisco where we opened for the Sisters, and Danceteria in NYC where the Sisters opened for us. I don't recall much about the Danceteria show but I do remember the I-Beam show and vaguely remember the Gimme Shelter dedication."

As had been the case in Stockholm, the band return to play “Kiss The Carpet” as an unlikely first encore, with Eldritch prefacing the song (in response to the incessant audience member shout of "Turn it up!") with the comment “In that case we're now going to play something that you really won’t like…it could be anything, couldn’t it?!”, but the Reptile House opener gets the same rapturous reactions as previous songs before the final encore of “Alice”. Most recordings end there, but one version continues with what appears to be a bizarre fancy dress competition, with an announcer describing some of the competitors, as can be heard in this extract kindly uploaded to Soundcloud by Phil Verne all of which remained something of a mystery until a very recent interview.  

Gary Marx commented on this mini-tour in the excellent summary of 1983 published by The Quietus at the end of August 2017. “The shows were actually great with the three of us,” Marx told Mark Andrews, a fact which you can confirm for yourself by clicking on the track names above to hear the songs kindly uploaded to YouTube by Ade M for us all to enjoy. The guitarist clearly enjoyed the buzz of being solely responsible for the guitar parts, as in the earliest days, but now possessing the requisite degree of professional competence, and for me these October 1983 shows are easily a match for the much-vaunted Hussey-only gigs of late Spring 1985. “We didn’t even have guitar cases, you had a guitar in a plastic bag with your cable, fuzz box and your other cable. That’s how we landed in Los Angeles!” he recalled. Of the I-Beam show, Marx also had very clear memories of the bizarre event which can be heard going on after the show:  “We had to judge a fancy dress competition after we finished the set. There was a woman naked apart from three very small pieces of sticky tape and a great 'Jackie O' complete with butcher’s shop brains all over her jacket. Andrew had to do his game-show host bit…” Not your typical night down at the Warehouse, then, but this does explain Eldritch's clearly audible withering put-down to an audience member at the end of "Gimme Shelter" - "You look like my mother- you should get the prize" (presumably for the most ghoulish Halloween fancy dress outfit)!

One of the anglophile musicians in the Sisters’ US fan base at the time (along with Alan Vega) was Angel Corpus Christi, who last year shared this photo of herself (not sure from her outfit if she was entering the competition or not!) and Craig Adams at the venue on her Instagram account, describing it as “the nite I partied with The Sisters of Mercy at the I-Beam in San Francisco. This is bass player Craig Adams. I loved his playing, he was so in sync with Doktor Avalanche”.

The publication of the Adams photo allowed the sharp-eyed curator of The Sisters of Mercy 19801985 unofficial FB Fan Page to date precisely the picture above, another informal shot of Eldritch without shades, which had been the rounds for a number of years. ACC is clearly wearing the same outfit, with Eldritch wearing a t-shirt often seen on the autumn 1983 dates, so this was definitely also taken on the evening of the I-Beam gig.

By the time TSOM returned to California some nineteen months later, including a gig at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco on 1^st June 1985, Wayne Hussey had joined but Marx had left the band, who once again appeared as a three-piece. The Halloween 1983 San Francisco show therefore marked the end of a major chapter in the band’s life, their last gig pre-Hussey and pre-WEA, the final gig of the “golden year” that began with the release of “Alice” as the breakthrough single, and ended with perfect symmetry with the same song as the final encore. It's also interesting to note that Eldritch chose to end the gig after the final encore with the same words which end the "Wake" Royal Albert Hall video of the subsequent line-up, "Thanks...(dramatic pause)...and goodbye!".

Inevitably, the original I-Beam was bulldozed and replaced by some upmarket condos with trendy shops below (as shown above), but it is still fondly remembered and there are many websites devoted to its seminal place in the SF disco scene.

My thanks as ever to all those who have helped with this post, particularly Russ Tolman for for his detailed reponse, Ade M who uploaded the entire gig a few years ago, Mark Andrews, Victoria, and of course Phil Verne of the 19801985 The Sisters Of Mercy Unofficial FB Fan Page

Rock'n'roll Suicide - Eldritch and Vega

Of all of his heroes to pass away over the past few years (we covered the untimely deaths of Lemmy and Bowie in a recent post), the departure which will have affected Andrew Eldritch the most will be that of his former collaborator and long-time friend, Alan Vega.

(Eldritch, A&R man Howard Thompson, Vega) - photo by Kevin Patrick, Room 825, Gramercy Park Hotel, June 1985

Vega was of course one half of the innovative New York synth-punk band Suicide, whose eponymous debut LP had been a huge influence in the late 1970s. Melding cutting edge electronica with rockabilly cool, Suicide’s sound was intriguingly different to anything else around at the time, and their arty avant-garde noodlings made them the natural successors of the Velvet Underground’s crown as New York’s coolest alternative band.

Whilst Suicide were an influence on many post-punk bands, the Sisters probably owe more than most to Vega and Martin Rev, and the drastic change in the Sisters’ sound between the first two singles is testament to this. Whereas the jagged low-fi punk of Damage Done is pure Gang of Four mixed with Pere Ubu, Adrenochrome is the bastard son of Suicide, with the drum machine adding a novel mechanisation to the punk aesthetic and Eldritch’s now heavily reverb-ed vocals a breathy staccato replica of Vega’s 50’s rock’n’roll pastiche, down to the last yelp and scream. Eldritch readily confesses to Vega and Rev’s influence on this change in the band’s sound, saying on the band’s official website “We bought [a drum machine] because we all loved Suicide. Everybody loved Suicide.”

Having already foisted demo tapes on other heroes such as The Psychedelic Furs and Iggy Pop, Eldritch also worked his charm on Alan Vega who in 1983 was in Europe promoting his comeback album Saturn Strip, his first for Elektra Records, which featured a young Al Jourgensen and was enjoying some success both in the UK and in particular on the Continent, where the song Wipeout Beat was an unlikely minor hit. By now, The Sisters had of course added Suicide’s Ghost Rider to their live set, usually in a medley with Louie Louie (although in this superlative version here with Sister Ray) and played as a free-form encore.

Vega’s tour brought him to London for a date at the Venue on October 20^th 1983, just when Temple of Love was out in the UK and before The Sisters' final trio of gigs that year (Stockholm, L.A. and San Francisco) played as a three piece after Ben Gunn’s departure. Surprisingly, Vega appeared on stage at the London Venue that night wearing a TSOM head and star t-shirt, and legend has it that during the gig the singer briefly gave the mic to Eldritch, who was on the front row of the crowd, and who continued the song note-perfect in Vega’s much imitated style.

Photos of Vega wearing the shirt were taken during the gig by gothic music journalist Mick Mercer, editor of ZigZag magazine, and his publication in its December issue (recently shared by Tony J Pooley on the ZigZag Magazine Appreciation Facebook Group) featured an interview with Vega by journalist Paul O’Reilly which was recorded just after the Venue show.

Responding to O’Reilly (who would nominate Vega’s show at the Venue and TSOM’s gig at the same club some six months earlier as his highlights of the year)’s question about the t-shirt, Vega told him : “Well the guys from the Sisters came to see me with a tape they’d got of the Stooges at the Whiskey in LA in 73. I would have killed to get that tape but all I had to do was wear their t-shirt onstage that night, which was no problem at all. The Sisters really excite me as a band as well, more than any band since The Stooges or The Dolls and wearing their t-shirt was no hardship. I like the guys a lot and I know Iggy does as well.”

The exact timing of the band’s first meeting with Vega remains a bit of a mystery, bit it could possibly have been on the occasion of the band’s (Eldritch’s?) brief promo visit to America in the Spring of 1983. This was mentioned on the press release for the Brain Eater Records US release of the Alice 12” EP (originally apparently planned as a US only release), which states that the promo visit is to take place in the near future, and there is a further clue in one of the radio interviews Eldritch did during the September 1983 East Coast tour, where he mentions a “record that I brought back from America last time I went home,” implying that he was spending an increasing amount of time in the States.

Vega had certainly visited The Sisters in their dressing room at one of the Danceteria shows in New York on that inaugural East Coast US tour, as Gary Marx recalled in an interview with Mark Andrews for his incredible article on TSOM’s “golden year” of 1983 for The Quietus earlier thisyear. “[Vega] was wildly funny and could quickly take over a room,” the guitarist recalled.

Seeking more information about the promo trip and Eldritch's first meeting with Vega, and having drawn a blank amongst fellow Sisters archivists and collectors, I decided to ask for the help of the man who was the catalyst for most of Eldritch’s high-profile contemporary musical friendships, Howard Thompson of Columbia Records, a high-flying Englishman in New York at that time, and the man responsible for the photos of Eldritch and Vega which have done the rounds of the internet in recent years (and which are reproduced here). Thompson was understandably vague about the details of events some thirty-five years ago, but told me “I wish I could be more helpful, but it’s all a massive blur, these days. I was originally turned on to The Sisters by Duncan Kilburn and John Ashton [of The Psychedelic Furs] who told me about the band when I was at CBS Records in Soho Square. I was an A&R man there and had brought The Furs to the label. I must have gone to see The Sisters shortly afterwards [a check of his diaries later confirmed that this was probably at Leeds University on 13^th June 1981] but I didn’t pursue anything with them because it looked like I was going to be moving to the USA. I ended up at Columbia Records in Feb 1982 and caught The Sisters whenever they came to New York. Their promoter, [the late] Ruth Polsky was a close, dear friend and she took the pic of me and Eldritch backstage at the Music Machine [Camden Place] with me wearing his shades."

(Eldritch with Howard Thompson wearing the former's Aviators - pic Ruth Polsky)

Thompson continued : "I may – or The Furs may – have introduced her to Andrew. Anyway, one of the cheap, “rock & roll” hotels that UK bands used to star in – the others were the Mayflower and the Iroquois – when they came to the States was the Gramercy Park Hotel and The Sisters were duly booked there when they first came to America. Alan Vega used to live at the Gramercy too, so it might have been there that I introduced them, although I can’t honestly say. Suffice to say, Vega was another close friend of mine (I’d licensed the first Suicide album when I was at Bronze Records) and I always tried to introduce fascinating people to each other just to see what might happen. One of my best friends – Max Hole – was running A&R for WEA and I told him about the Sisters (Columbia were so old-fashioned that they would never have been interested) and Max ended up signing the band. In 1984, I joined Elektra as Head of A%R and it so happened that all WEA acts were available to the Warner, Elektra and Atlantic labels in the States for no cost, so I jumped in quickly and picked up The Sisters, which is how Elektra got ‘em.”

(Eldritch, Vega, Hussey, Adams - photo Howard Thompson)

A fascinating account, and a clear explanation for those photos of Eldritch, Hussey, Adams and Vega taken outside the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York at the start of the June 1985 US tour. By that time, Eldritch had already sounded Vega out about joining him and Patricia Morrison (another friendship which involved the singer making frequent visits Stateside) in a “supergroup” to replace the seemingly doomed Hussey-era Sisters, as mentioned in Italian fanzine interviews at the end of 1984 and covered in a previous post on this blog.

Eldritch himself returned to the subject of how Vega became involved with the Sisterhood’s Gift LP (he and Morrison allegedly contribute vocals to the Chorus of Vengeance on Rain From Heaven, and some even claim to have heard a demo of This Corrosion with Vega on vocals) in a revealing interview with The Quietus in November 2011 : “Andrew [Eldritch speaking in the third person!] went back to Vega’s apartment with a DAT recorder, played him the tracks and explained the scenario. Andrew has a permanent visa to Planet Vega, because the two of them get on very well. Nobody else talks to Vega like Eldritch talks to Vega.” This was confirmed by Marx in his more recent interview for The Quietus, saying that Vega “was drawn to Andrew rather than to the band.” Eldritch was clearly equally struck by Vega, with the run-out groove on the band's next release, 1984's Body and Soul bearing the dedication "For Spiggy and Alan Vega", and with some future Sisters/Sisterhood releases benefitting from the insistent, almost krautrock drone pulse which underpinned both Vega's solo work and Suicide's later studio albums.

Eldritch summed up their rapport in this wonderful exchange from a great interview conducted by Kiran Dass for New Zealand’s “Under The Radar” in February 2012:

Dass: Suicide, they’re the perfect group really, aren’t they?

Eldritch: Yes they are, yes they are. I have very strong feelings for Alan Vega in a man-love way [under his breath] if only he hadn’t hooked up with Ric Ocasek

Dass: What?? No way! Saturn Strip is an amazing record. I love it!

Eldritch: Do you really ? […] Well, we’re just going to have to disagree on that one, Kiran!

Whilst agreeing with Dass that Eldritch should reappraise his view of the excellent Saturn Strip (which has arguably aged better than that seminal debut Suicide album), one cannot help but agree also with Eldritch about the depth of his friendship with Vega, a man over twenty years his senior: for a man who seems to have been able to sustain very few professional relationships in his four decades in the music business, Eldritch’s admiration of Vega continued right through until the latter’s untimely death last year.

Eldritch himself summed it up when asked about Alan Vega's passing by Portuguese journalist Rui MIguel Abreu in an interview for Blitz last year (in my own approximate retranslation) : "I was very proud of Vega. I would have been surprised if he'd lived to be thirty, but he managed to live on to the age of 78, which is incredible. He always lied about his real age. I first met him many, many years ago and I thought to myself, "This fella's not destined to live a long life." But he did, and after all this time, despite the growth of industrial rock and the growth of dubstep, there's still nothing out there that sounds remotely like Suicide. Nobody has even tried to imitate them, because it would just be impossible. He really was a uniquely talented man."

Although Eldritch himself no longer seems able to mimic the full range of Vega vocal theatricals on stage, it’s pleasing to note that the new (cold)wave of proto-goth bands have rediscovered Suicide’s low-fi aggressive charm, none more so than Turkish band She Past Away, whose alternative dancefloor hit Asimilasyon will serve here as a wonderful if unwitting tribute to a man whose influence will continue to be felt for decades to come. Vega continued to make music until his last days, and his final album IT was released posthumously earlier this year.

My grateful thanks are due to all who have helped with this post, including Phil Verne of The Sisters of Mercy 19801985 Facebook fan group, Tony J Pooley, Luca, Artemis, Mark Andrews and of course the hugely influential Mr Howard Thompson.

The first demo tape 1981

One point of interest in the first-ever TSOM interview published in Whippings and Apologies and featured on a recent post in this blog is the reference to the demo tape sent to John Peel which was “out at the moment”, and “which just about covers the whole range of what we do,” according to Eldritch speaking around 20^th March 1981).

This is highly likely to be the cassette which became known as “The Floorshow EP” (after a bootleg vinyl version), containing early versions of Floorshow, Lights and the Teachers/Adrenochrome segue. Weighing in at around sixteen minutes, this is probably also the “eighteen minute” long tape referred to in the band’s first national interview (with Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker in February 1982), which Eldritch had played to Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, who had dismissed the band (much to Eldritch’s uncomprehending disgust) as sounding like Bauhaus! “We made a tape once and took it down to Rough Trade. GeoffTravis gave it one listen, it was 18 minutes long, lots of tracks, tapped his feet all the way through and turned round and said, “It’s like Bauhaus.”

Although an original copy of this demo tape has yet to be found, a copy of a cassette MR2 has emerged from sources close to the band, which contains the Floorshow EP plus the tracks of the Damage Done single (including the brief but uncredited Home of the Hitmen fragment), along with some live tracks recorded in the later spring of 1981 (i.e. after the W+A interview). These feature on “Side B”, but the listing of these tracks is printed at right angles to those on the other side, and there is no mention of Side A at the top of that list or track lengths or details of composers as for the first side of the tape, which has given rise to speculation that the cassette MR1 would have indeed only originally contained the Floorshow EP tracks.

The Floorshow tape was certainly popular, and I recall it being listed in a 1981 Top Ten chart provided by The Warehouse club in Leeds (and presumably compiled by Eldritch’s girlfriend Claire Shearsby who was a DJ there) and printed in one of the music weeklies (probably Sounds, but I no longer have the cutting, sadly).

The opening bars of Floorshow reveal the dramatic change in the band’s sound since Damage Done a few months earlier, with Craig’s buzzing bass starting proceedings off and the original Doktor rattling away in the background. Eldritch “sings” the first verse an octave higher than normal, before returning to his now-familiar baritone for the second. His full dramatic range is well in effect in what became his traditional reverb-heavy style, with blood curdling screams echoing round the rehearsal room. Lights is remarkably similar to the version that would appear on The Reptile House EP some two years later, showing that the band understood the dramatic power of slowing their music down even at this early stage of their career. The Leonard Cohen cover, Teachers, is the closest in style to Damage Done, all jagged guitars and mumbled vocals, whilst a slightly-slowed down Adrenochrome is the most conventionally rock song of the four, and was unsurprisingly chosen as the next single the following year in barely changed form.

The source of the tracks listed on side B of the demo tape, which was shared in great quality for the first time by Phil Verne on Dimeadozen along with the 1979 Gary Marx Naked Voices tape (and was later the opening post of the unofficial TSOM 1980 1985 Fan Page), have long been the subject of speculation, with most having been released on two bootleg vinyl 7” singles in the mid-1980s on the Portuguese Pan Vox label. 1969 and Sister Ray are listed as having been recorded at York University on 7^th May, and listening to them some crowd noise is evident, with Eldritch interacting with the audience, thanking them for their applause at the end of 1969 and then telling them “this is the last one, that’s all you’re getting!” at the start of Sister Ray, with the usual “Good night!” scream at the end. This was the only current evidence for this York gig having taken place, until this very week when further details have emerged thanks to John Spence, former engineering assistant at KG Studios in Bridlington, where TSOM famously recorded their classic singles in the early 80s. Addressing the 1980-1985 unofficial TSOM FB group, Spence spoke of his early involvement with the Sisters : “In 1979 he [Ken Giles] asked me to fill in as a monitor engineer on his PA system for four nights. I stayed two and a half years. During this time on the PA we were doing a gig at York University with a band called Reluctant Stereotypes. The support band was The Sisters of Mercy. When we’d sound-checked the main band we asked the support band to get their gear on stage. One of them (probably Andy) pointed at a small guitar combo amp and said, “That’s our gear!” So one amp, with four inputs into which were plugged a drum machine, a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar and a vocal mic … all overloaded and distorted, but they seemed happy enough. That meeting may have been the catalyst for them recording at Bridlington … possibly.” 

Advert from "Beaten to the Punch" fanzine

This, then was obviously the Reluctant Stereotypes support which Gary Marx had referred to in a 1985 interview, and which I had erroneously assumed must have taken place at The Warehouse in Leeds on 10^th March. I asked John if he could confirm the date of the gig as 9^th May, as listed in the advert attached. He promised to check his records, and incredibly shared this photo of his diary for the month, revealing that the date of the gig was in fact 7^th May 1981, the exact date and venue listed on the demo tape. He also revealed that at this time he was working on the PA with another sound engineer named Pete Turner… a name familiar to TSOM fans, as he mixed The Sisters of Mercy’s live sound from their early WEA days up until the mid-1990s. So it appears that this one York University gig not only provided the band with a live recording of a couple of cover versions for their demo tape, but also introduced them to both (indirectly) the studio where they would record their breakthrough singles and to their future live sound engineer.

Photo courtesy of John Spence

The other five tracks on the “Live” side have always intrigued me, being listed as having been recorded at “St John’s, Leeds” some three days earlier on 4^th May, 1981, although that night is listed as “Leeds Warehouse” on the band’s own website’s gigography. I have always been somewhat sceptical of the name of the venue (“St John’s Hall” on some listings), as there was no such venue when I arrived in Leeds to study a year later, and in the Whippings and Apologies interview Eldritch had made it clear that the band had no intention of “playing in every toilet every week,” ruling out more parochial venues. There is also, curiously a complete lack of crowd noise on the five tracks, even allowing for the fact that they have been edited together, apart from right at the end of a truly amazing Sister Ray, the end of the “set”, when two whooping voices can be heard (through the echoing mic), one male, the other (presumably Claire’s) female.

Photo from Google Streetview

The demo cassette lists the band’s contact address as 12, St John’s Terrace, part of a grand row of Victorian four storey terraces just off the northern end of the university campus. Number 12, pictured here with a light green door, was by the early 1980s (as today) a HMO (house of multiple occupancy), divided into a series of study flats, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that these tracks were recorded at a live rehearsal for the forthcoming York gig at the flat on St John’s Terrace, effectively a trial run after the self-confessed disaster of the Altered Images support at the Warehouse on 19^th March.

The contact phone number provided for the band on the demo cassette insert is the same as on the insert for Damage Done, although the address provided on that occasion was the Hares Avenue house which also features on the invoices for the first single, associated with Gary Marx. St John’s Terrace was in fact the location of the “flat” shared by Eldritch and Claire at this time which friends of the couple have referred to, its handy location just off the university campus on Bellevue Road making it a more likely stopping-off place for passing visitors than the rather distant house in Village Place, Burley which became MR headquarters by the time of The Reptile House EP. In Jon Langford’s 2016 interview on his links with the Sisters, the bassist stated that “Andy lived on the same street as me as well. On Bellevue Road,” thus confirming that the demo cassette address was the singer’s residence.

Only a band member or one of the immediate early entourage would know whether or not my hunch that the "St John's" alleged "live gig" was in fact just a taped rehearsal round at Andy and Claire's place, but the power of the tracks is undeniable and the recording clearly helped to grow the band's reputation both within Leeds and with out of town promoters, and the fact that (if St John's was just a rehearsal) the first three gigs would be supporting The Thompson Twins, Altered Imaged and Reluctant Stereotypes, exactly as Gary Marx stated in a 1985 interview already discussed on this blog. Any confirmation of the theory or evidence to the contrary would be very gratefully received!

My especial thanks are due to Phil Verne of the unofficial FB group The Sisters of Mercy 19801985 for his huge help with this post, and to Mark Andrews and other researchers who have delved into the very earliest days of the band's history as a going concern.