(In a series of four
previous posts, we examined the events that resulted the definitive splits in
the band in 1985, shortly after the release of debut album First and Last and
Always. In this and two subsequent posts, we are going to look at how the band’s
follow-up might have sounded, if the “classic” line-up had managed to stay
together, beginning from the perspective of the first member to leave that year, Gary Marx).
“I’d like to see the
second album go to number one in the LP charts…Second and Last and Always…we’ve got the title already!” – Gary
Marx, Artificial Life fanzine interview, March 1985. Although founder member Marx was clearly joking about the LP’s title, it was obvious that for a
long time he still planned to stay in the band before his decision to leave the
band after the Old Grey Whistle Test recording on April 2nd 1985.
Had he stayed, and
had the format adopted on FALAA remained the same (i.e. a side of largely
Hussey compositions, followed by a side of tunes primarily penned by Marx),
then we can have some idea of how the songs may have sounded, thanks to the
very detailed notes which Marx produced for a Recording Diary for the sadly now
defunct Ghost Dance website, for followers of the band which he formed with
Ann-Marie Hurst, former vocalist with Bradford band Skeletal Family who had
been the support act on TSOM’s legendary Black October tour the previous Autumn.
In these detailed
accounts, Marx explains that a number of Ghost Dance tracks had their genesis
in riffs which he had originally created for use with The Sisters, and although
Eldritch’s lyrics and melody would clearly have been different to the finished
GD versions, these nonetheless give an insight into the direction in which Marx
would have wanted to take the band.
(Leeds Student preview April 1986, written by Gordon Taylor)
Yesterday Again (recently played live again by the now-reformed Skeletals) is one such
song which had a noble lineage, as Gary explained: "The Sisters minus
Eldritch had actually recorded a version of the song which became Yesterday Again in Strawberry [Studios}.
It was originally titled Frail and Torn
and Wayne sang my half-finished lyric one afternoon along with the first draft
of The Mission’s Garden Of Delight.
We used to refer to Frail and Torn
jokingly as a potential Christmas single for the Sisters." This would
indeed have been a welcome alternative to 1985’s actual Christmas number one
hit, Merry Christmas, Everyone by Shakin’ Stevens. Sadly, no version of Frail and Torn has yet surfaced amongst
collectors, so we will just have to take Gary’s word for its commercial potential,
which does not seem over-fanciful given the typically epic spaghetti western guitar riff
underpinning the song.
Another relic from the
Strawberry Studios sessions for FALAA was Ghost Dance’s debut single in 1986, River Of No Return, of which Marx wrote
: “The songs and the recording came about fairly quickly and Anne Marie and
Etch pretty much stepped into ideas I carried over from the Sisters. The
lineage is fairly evident in the songs and the packaging. I had the ideas for the
original songs mostly in place by the Summer of 85 - I came up with the riff
which features in the middle section of River…
sitting in the reception area in Strawberry Studios during the first phase of
recording for First And Last And Always.
At the time I thought it would form the main part of a new track, but I played
around with some variations and came up with the bass line which is the real
focus for the verses in River. The chorus guitar line
is pure Sisters (‘ ..all on one string and job’s a good un’ as Choque from
Salvation was keen to point out). The way the riff steps up a string halfway
through the verse was also something we did on the early Sisters stuff - Floorshow, Alice, Good Things…kind of a
nod to bands like the Cramps who we all loved. The artwork followed the formula
the Sisters had used to some extent with the famed Lady Of Shallot
unceremoniously nicked and planted on the front cover. The back featured the
wings logo I’d drawn based on a picture I’d seen in a book about American
architecture (the full photograph formed the cover for Gathering Dust).”
(Live review by "Papi" in Leeds Student, May 1986)
A third idea originally
sketched for the Sisters which Gary may have developed for the FALAA follow-up
had he remained in the band surfaced in a further Ghost Dance song, Cruel Light, and the recording notes (written
in the early part of this millennium) shed further light on one of the more
curious episodes of 1984/5. “"[Ghost Dance producer] Steve Allen ...
originally had a tiny studio in a rehearsal complex off Armley Road where I’d
been with Wayne to record some new demos with him singing. We attempted the
track which became Cruel Light but
never finished it....The lines ‘I see them cut and die, see the flowers
bleed..’ from Cruel Light was
actually first used as part of a draft of another Sisters’ song I’d written
called Temple Of Love (not the song
we now know and love by that name)." You certainly don't
need to be a musicologist to spot this as a Sisters-style riff. Whilst Eldritch
may have suffered (and still does) from writer's block, Marx's creative juices
were certainly flowing strongly (albeit with variations on a similar theme) in
the mid-1980s. Eldritch mentions in a
later interview (in Q magazine in 1988) how the other members of the band had
had a go at singing at a time in 84/85 when he was thinking of withdrawing from
the role to become the band's svengali manager (“and so discreetly, abroad,
everybody had a go at singing, and decided that they weren’t very good”) and
the original Cruel Light demo with
Wayne singing may well be the kind of experiment he was referring to, albeit
much closer to home.
A fourth Ghost Dance
song which in a different guise might have featured on Second And Last And Always is A Deeper Blue, one of the strongest melodies in the Ghost Dance canon. It
obviously made a similarly positive impression on Wayne Hussey, who borrowed
the chorus melody (with song title repeated) note-for-note on The Mission’s UK
Top 40 hit Beyond The Pale a couple
of years later. The intro has shades of FALAA’s
title track, but Gary’s comments in his Recording Diaries reveal that a
different song of that era was the main source : “A Deeper Blue was one of the last of the ‘carry-overs’ from the
Sisters. I had written a lyric to the tune which became Nine While Nine which started with the lines ‘the colours fade
somewhere inside…’ I had the tune in my head long after and just finished it
without a guitar while walking in Wakefield – it all happened very quickly, I
was imagining the guitar hooks and coming up with the words at the same time. I
always think of it as a Wakefield song. I went back to the guitar and figured
out the riffs I’d been whistling and found they worked with roughly the same
chords as Nine While Nine.” Intriguingly,
a later post (by Marx) on the Ghost Dance Forum revealed that A Deeper Blue has more in common with an
early demo for Nine While Nine with a
different working title which has yet to surface: “I have often wondered how
the Marianne (Red Skies Disappear)
song leaked out on bootleg, and naturally assumed that if it was doing the
rounds, then the Nine While Nine
version recorded at the same time was out there too. It has the working title Child of Light and contained a line
which mentions “the children of the dust.” When we were deciding on a title for
FALAA I pitched that one in, even
though it didn’t seem likely that the [i.e. Marx’s own] lyric would surface on
the finished version. Quite reasonably, Von then pointed out that we were
over-egging the “something of something” being called The Sisters of Mercy
after all.”
The final Ghost Dance song
with a TSOM link is probably the one which would have been most likely to gain
Eldritch’s approval back in 1985, given that he was listening to a lot of soft
rock in the Stevie Nicks vein, and is evidence that the original duo’s musical
tastes were not that far apart. When the song When I Call finally came out in 1987 on the A Word to the Wise EP, Ghost Dance were still on indie label
Karbon, but had they saved this song for a few months until they had the
commercial might of Chrysalis behind them, they might have achieved the chart
success which The Mission, All About Eve and The Sisters were by then achieving,
a source of considerable frustration to the band. In his Recording Diaries,
Marx states that When I Call was one
of three tracks on the EP that "were among the first I’d written and date
back to that period in ’85 when it wasn’t clear if I was going to carry on in
the Sisters or go my own way....When I
Call was there from day one of Ghost Dance – we played it in the first gig
when we were still a three-piece, we demoed it in the Slaughterhouse in late
’85, and although it assumed epic proportions in the final recording, the core
ingredients were much the same. Again there are fragments of lyric which had
surfaced on Sisters demos – the original version of the song FALAA [Marianne (Red Skies Disappear)] had contained the line ‘only you can say the
words I need to hear’ which forms part of the chorus to When I Call...The version of When
I Call [on the EP] included multiple guitar tracks, Hammond organ and guest
vocals from Daniel Mass of Salvation. Richard and John both proved to have
decent voices so they feature on backing vocals as well. The producer allowed
Anne Marie to sing in the control room without headphones, something she’d been
keen to try for a while and he got some good performances out of her."
Poignantly, there is
one further Ghost Dance song with a clear link to The Sisters of Mercy, but not
musically. Gary Marx's birthday thirty three years ago might have been a
personal celebration with friends rather than the expected final appearance at
the RAH with the Sisters, but at least we got another great song out of it. As
he later explained : "Celebrate
was sort of written in my head on my birthday while out in the Black Swan in
Wakefield. My birthday was the same day as the Sisters’ Royal Albert Hall Show,
recorded for posterity on the Wake video. I was going to play the gig and then
didn’t (far too hideous a tale to go into here). I knew by then it was going to
mark the end of the Sisters as a real band and knew a good many of the crew and
the following who would be at the gig and the emotion surrounding the evening –
Celebrate was sort of a song for and
about the event I wasn’t taking part in. I viewed it fairly positively – it
wasn’t meant to be a rant by the injured party or anything. Lines like ‘and on
this hallowed ground..’ were really about the reverence the venue and the
occasion seemed to invite and a sort of mental picture I had of the human
pyramids, arms aloft and the smoke reaching up into the dome. I probably wrote
the first verse separately at a later date after I’d sobered up!"
Imagine if Gary had had a change of heart and had rejoined the Sisters after the Albert Hall gig, and the band had kept the same songwriting split as for the first album: what better way to close the second Sisters’ album than with a song about their greatest live show?
My thanks for this post are due of course to Mr Gary Marx for his wonderful recollections on the old Ghost Dance website, and to the many fans (Don, Martin, etc) who are always keen to ensure that Marx's key role in the band is fully acknowledged. This one's for you! The next post will look at the Hussey/Adams pairing and what their contribution to "Second And Last And Always" might have been.
Imagine if Gary had had a change of heart and had rejoined the Sisters after the Albert Hall gig, and the band had kept the same songwriting split as for the first album: what better way to close the second Sisters’ album than with a song about their greatest live show?
My thanks for this post are due of course to Mr Gary Marx for his wonderful recollections on the old Ghost Dance website, and to the many fans (Don, Martin, etc) who are always keen to ensure that Marx's key role in the band is fully acknowledged. This one's for you! The next post will look at the Hussey/Adams pairing and what their contribution to "Second And Last And Always" might have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment