Vinyl Fetish record store appearance - Los Angeles, October 1983

This post is the 150^th on this blog, which was originally intended as a way for me to note down and publicise for those who weren’t lucky enough to be there at the time, what life was like in Leeds in the early/mid 1980’s when The Sisters of Mercy were at the heart of the musical zeitgeist.

Before long, collectors and other old goths began to get in touch with their own memories and artefacts, with Phil Verne ultimately starting The Sisters of Mercy 1980 – 1985 unofficial Faceboook fan page, with the result that over the past few years we have managed to track down amongst other things full details of the band’s first gig, first single, first demo tape and first interview. What’s more, we’ve between us managed to confirm some new, long-lost dates on the band’s gigography of that era and eliminate other gigs for which some doubtful evidence had previously existed.

In the last eighteen months, the latter seam of information seemed to have been fully exploited, so you can imagine my delight when the picture above was shared on Flickr recently by US punk flyer specialist Superbawestside1980, referring to an apparent in-store appearance by The Sisters at legendary L.A. record shop Vinyl Fetish. The flyer appeared to refer to Sat 29^th October, date of the band’s West Coast debut show at the Alexandria Hotel in 1983, recently covered by another post on this blog.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted that Vinyl Fetish was one of the record stores where tickets for the Alexandria show had been available, and this clearly hastily-made poster, with crudely drawn time and date in tippex around a promo photo of the band, implied that the band would be making an in-store appearance at the shop in the Melrose area of LA at what for the band at the time would have been the ungodly hour of 1 p.m.

In the conversation in the comments under the flyer, Flickr user Riot Nrrrd had stated “Weird….I don’t remember this. Was this before their Halloween (?) gig at The Alexandria Hotel? I went to that.” Superbawestside1980 reassured both Riot Nrrrd and the reading public with the reply “Yep! It happened, and Henry actually took the time to film it and take pics as well. Who knows where that stuff is now although it would be great to see it.”

This whetted my appetite further – video footage of the first TSOM US tour has yet to surface, so this would be an amazing find, if only I could find out who “Henry” was. In true “online sleuth” mode, I begin to research Vinyl Fetish, finding a great blog post by a former employee of the store, Michael L Compton who wrote with real enthusiasm of his time working at the seminal record shop. “This period was the beginning of the dark Goth scene, and while many of those people were embracing the likes of The Sisters of Mercy, Death Cult and Sex Gang Children, they would come into the store and complain whilst I was playing my current favourites, such a Virgin Prunes and Einsturzende Neubauten…People seemed to accept it as part of the Vinyl Fetish Experience.” Compton had begun his post by stating that “Vinyl Fetish was owned and operated by two local scene makers named Henry Peck and Joseph Brooks. They were well-known in the Hollywood post-punk crowd for running several popular late-night dance clubs around town.”

                                (pic on Flickr by Patrick Houdek)

              The Vinyl Fetish premises still stand today and still host a record store (Google Streetview)

Eagerly googling Henry Peck, I was saddened to learn that he had passed away a couple of years ago, and read the very affectionate obituaries that L.A. Weekly, the L.A. Post Examiner and The Los Angeles Beat had published in honour of a genuine pioneer of the alternative scene in California, which remains one of the movement’s bastions to this day. There was also this excellent pencil portrait by Mark Vallen, showing a smiling Henry outside the store, with the description adding more local colour to the Vinyl Fetish story. “Henry’s establishment was quite a hangout, with every punk (or curiosity seeker) in LA dropping in at one time or another. You could buy weird clothes, browse the hundreds of offbeat records – or just watch the never-ending cavalcade of humanity.”

This was exactly the kind of uber-cool shop that I can imagine Eldritch and co hanging out in, harking back to the singer’s days at Priestley’s in York at the start of the decade as he started up his band. The Sisters had certainly not yet reached the point in 1983 where they were in demand in the UK for in-store signing sessions, so this appearance would have been a new “first” for the band. However, with Henry’s passing, it seems as if the evidence of this momentous event would also have been lost forever.

As a final attempt to find out more about the event, I decided to track down Peck’s former business partner Joseph Brooks, which proved to be surprisingly easy as he has become one of America’s most collected celebrity jewellers, with clients including Madonna, Siouxsie Sioux and Samuel L Jackson. Clearly a highly busy and successful man, so it was without much hope of a reply that I emailed Joseph Brooks with a plea for more information.

However, I was astonished when he got back to me within five minutes! He told me that there was “really not much to say about it….Henry and I were the DJ’s for the Alexandria Hotel show but the band cancelled the Vinyl Fetish appearance. That night they came to our club called Fetish….Andrew just stood in the club watching people dance….I never really got to know him at all.”

Whether it was the early start, the distance between the Melrose Avenue store in Hollywood and the downtown Alexandria Hotel (see map above) or that the band had found other distractions on their first visit to L.A., the in-store appearance therefore didn’t take place, and Andrew’s image as a rather diffident conversationalist with those he didn’t know well accompanied him on a visit which was clearly in fact inspirational to him. The fact that the in-store appearance was in fact cancelled was confirmed to me by The Sisters of Mercy's premier unofficial expert on the band's history in the US, Trevor R, who told me that he had spoken to others who were in L.A. at the time and that they had told him that it did not take place.

Therefore the band's first known and confirmed in-store appearances are still those on the tour in support of the release of First and Last and Always in March 1985 when they visited stores in several towns, including HMV in Leeds, and the legendary Selectadisc in Nottingham (see photo below, courtesy of mega TSOM collector LG).

But if anyone does know anything about the video footage of the band from this visit, please do get in touch!

I would like to thank Superbawestside1980 for sharing the flyer on Flickr, LG, Phil Verne, Trevor R, Michael L Compton for his informative blog, and in particular Joseph Brooks for helping to elucidate events surrounding The Sisters of Mercy’s first visit to L.A.