Today marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of arguably the most
famous gothic music event of all time – it would seem churlish to describe it
as a mere “gig” – when The (remaining) Sisters of Mercy took to the stage for
the final time in the 1980’s, in the suitably grandiose surroundings of
London’s Royal Albert Hall, in the early evening of Tuesday June 18th
1985.
It mattered little that the promised “last stand” of founder
member Gary Marx never happened, that guitarist Wayne Hussey was still
suffering the after-effects of a heavy night out and that singer Andrew
Eldritch was in chronic pain from a rib injury.
It mattered little that the gig was heavily undersold (what would
have been the first of two planned nights on Monday 17th June 1985
never even reached the advertising stage), that the unusually early start time
meant that many fans missed the beginning of the band’s final performance, nor that
many also missed the final encore which took place after the house lights had
come on, the traditional signal that the night’s entertainment had reached its
conclusion.
The crucial fact was that the performance was professionally recorded
and released as a live video the following year, as the split between the Eldritch,
Marx and Hussey/Adams factions drew deeper, guaranteeing all-important inches
in the columns of the then-influential music press. As a result, rather than
the four thousand or so souls present on that warm London evening, many
hundreds of thousands of (potential) fans were able to witness the band’s
magisterial performance from the comfort of their own living rooms, spell-bound
by the punishing metronomic beat of Doktor Avalanche rising and reverberating
around the Royal Albert Hall’s impressive dome, the deep incantations of
mysterious singer Eldritch echoing evocatively around the cavernous venue, the pulsing basslines of the static Adams making the ancient walls shake and the joyous,
ringing guitar tone of Hussey swirling around the hall.
That the next release of The Sisters of Mercy (This Corrosion)
was a worldwide hit was no doubt in no small part due to its catchy chorus, the
outstanding production skills of the late Jim Steinman, the classic Beauty and
the Beast pairing of the visually stunning Patricia Morrison and the bearded
biker chic of Eldritch, and of course the donkey work done by The Mission in
slowly building further a willing market for goth-tinged product. Absence is
said to make the heart grow fonder – witness the sudden rise to significantly
wider prominence of Joy Division after Ian Curtis’ untimely death in 1980 – and
the band’s split, with the wonderfully fitting epitaph of the Wake video
release of the performance of the final show a year later, certainly grew both
the band and the brand at a time when Eldritch was sheltering behind the low-key and enforced Sisterhood releases whilst finalising the next stage of his masterplan.
Good quality live footage of The Sisters of Mercy in their
1981-1985 heyday has always been hard to find, to the extent that this year’s
(re-)discovery of somewhat shaky material from their 1983 Retford Porterhouse
and 1985 Gothenburg gigs has been treated almost like the discovery of the Holy Grail by hardcore fans. Wake however stands alone as the only
multi-camera professionally shot film record of the band, giving huge extra
significance to what was always going to be a momentous gig.
This recently rediscovered review of the show, published in June
1985 in trade magazine Music Week, reveals just how perfectly the video
captures the spirit as well as the sound of the evening. Journalist (and future
Britpop promoter) John Best enumerates the reasons why The Sisters attracted
(and indeed, continue to attract) such devotion amongst their fanbase. Humorously
adding a word to the opening couplet of Rosemary Clooney’s famous song Sisters
from the classic Irving Berlin film White Christmas, Best focussed as
much on the crowd as on the band, fascinated by the rituals which they had
adopted both independent from and inspired by the group itself.
Whilst the music on offer was, to most hardened hacks who had seen
it all before, a basically tired re-tread of the bloated rock behemoth which
punk had gleefully banished – referenced here in the first paragraph with the
mention of time travel, unfashionably (in the 1980’s) long hair and the
obligatory Led Zeppelin reference (the “house of the holy” pun) – the antics of
the crowd, who “did strange dances atop each others’ shoulders, piercing
smog-choked shafts of light with flailing limbs” never failed to fascinate, and
director Mike Mansfield and his team captured this from the very beginning of
the Wake video, with the famous freeze-frame at the end of the introduction to set-opener First And Last And Always. This incident was later referred
to in a discussion about this gig on Phil Verne’s excellent unofficial 1980-1985 TSOM Facebook page, with Steve F commenting “We (Gilly and Scooby)
were drinking on the Albert Memorial when someone shouted over that the Girls
were coming on. We legged it across the road and straight into the dance floor.
Neil T was straight up on somebody’s shoulders and you can see him waving
his arms and freeze-framed on the video as the FALAA intro launches into
the main riff.”
Another little-known contemporary review, published by London’s
prestigious national paper of record The Times and written by David
Sinclair, also acknowledges the importance of the staging in the overall impact
of The Sisters’ live show, referring to “shafts of light…from the back like
sunlight though disused castle windows … while burning red orbs hovered above the
floor like Jupiter’s moons shining grimly on a version of Hades.” Dramatic and
poetic stuff, and a glowing tribute to the work of Phil Wiffen, the band’s long-time
collaborator who recalled the gig in 2018 for the 50th anniversary
of Entec (the Royal Albert Hall gig having been chosen as one of the company’s
“50 Golden Moments” for a celebratory website retrospective: “By the time of the Albert Hall gig, I had
been with the Sisters for nearly three years. My design was similar to the
approach I’d taken for recent tours and, at Andrew’s request, smoke effects
played a huge part. For this show, I positioned smoke and wind machines in
front of some balcony boxes, so at any given moment I could blast the
auditorium with smoke. With a light behind that, I could achieve a really
stunning effect – in fact, despite everything else that was happening, the
smoke is what most people remember about that night, The thing is, if you use
too much, everything starts to look a horrible brown! In terms of lighting, I
concentrated on floor-based fixtures and side lighting with bars of six Thomas
PARs on tank traps, or bars of 12 as was the case when we got to the Albert
Hall. As there was no drummer, Andrew programmed the band’s new Oberheim DMX
drum machine [a.k.a. Doktor Avalanche] and I accentuated the high energy beats
and fills with plenty of fast changes on the Alderham 60-way console. As this
was being filmed, we had to rig some Profiles on a back truss to gain height. I
remember we had nine- and 12-inch Lekos, and I used either break-ups or the
shutters to create a slit of light. At this point
in the band’s history, The Sisters Of Mercy logo borrowed the head from the
cover of ‘Gray’s Anatomy’, inside a star, and I was able to create that by
using five Profiles. Due to the amount of smoke, you could easily distinguish a
star shape. Moving lights had begun to come on to the market but they were
beyond our budget. Of course, this presented a great opportunity to be creative
and conjure something interesting from a less sophisticated palette of tools.
These tools also included strips of black cloth that were used to break up the
background. It was quite normal for bands to have painted backdrops of their
latest album cover but the Sisters didn’t want anything like that. In the
Gothic tradition, the black strips which broke the beams up were very
effective when blown by a wind machine. Earlier in 1985, I had joined the BBC,
so I was using up part of my annual leave [to do this show]. Due to my very limited availability,
there was a lot of rush and dash, but Entec were very helpful with the
preparation, and I ended up having great fun.”
Whilst the contemporary reviews and the Wake
video certainly captured the essence of the evening, they don’t tell the full story.
The three songs which were omitted from Wake for example - Train
presumably because it didn’t seem as good a way to end the video as Knockin’
on Heaven’s Door, which therefore had the portentous closing comment “Thank
You … And Goodbye” (which actually followed Train) tacked on after it; Gimme
Shelter, because according to the band’s official website “The Rolling
Stones apparently refused to grant the so-called ‘synchronoisation rights’
which are necessary for visual cover versions”; and Ghostrider/Louie Louie
because (same source) “by the time we hit the stage for the last encore, some
of the necessary machines had been switched off. Various film technicians had
decided that we had finished….The band hit the stage again - but too speedily
for the aforementioned technicians. There was some audio-visual material from
the last encore, but Polygram "lost it" shortly after the film was
edited and released."
The video also omits some classic Eldritch banter, with a pointed dedication
of Walk Away to “the Wakefield branch of the Pete Best Fan Club”,
clearly a dismissive reference to Gary Marx, although prophetic in that the
next iteration of the band went on to major success (albeit nowhere near as
stratospheric as The Beatles) without Marx in the band, and a reference to
Christopher Marlowe (author of Dr Faustus) – “where are you when your country
needs you?” which clearly amused himself if no-one else, hardly a novel
experience for the erudite and literate singer.
And however good Wake is, nothing can replace the spirit of actually being there, as the
following comments from fans who have joined in discussions on the 1980-1985 Facebook fan page will hopefully demonstrate:
Vince B: “They must have come on pretty close to, or just after
7.15pm as they played an hour set for Wake, disappeared for 15-20 minutes, then
about 8-10 minutes for the medley at the end. As I was leaving after the final
encore, people were coming in, expecting the Sisters not to have started yet,
which must have been around 9pm. There was still some daylight outside as we
left.”
Adrian R: “[At the end of the main set] My mate Pete said ‘Bloody hell, look who that is!’ and
we turned round to see (I'm almost sure) it’s Ian Astbury, Lemmy and Youth from
Killing Joke. Being young and stupid were too scared to say anything when
suddenly the music started again .We were shocked and looked around to see very
few people in the Albert Hall. The band did the encore and we thought ‘Wow’ and
we got ushered out very quickly.”
Martin W: “Billy Duffy was there. He was just leaving one of the
boxes as we were making our way out after the shower of tickertape. I remember
he was wearing a jacket with something about Vietnam painted on the back of
it....”
Jack K: “Dave Vanian sat behind us too.”
The final word must go to Craig O: “A night I'll never forget. The
streets of London paved with Sisters fans and Von lookalikes. The end of an era
for me, very sadly. A fantastic night though.”
