To celebrate Andrew Eldritch 63rd birthday today, the blog is publishing the summary of an extremely rare radio interview
conducted during the March 1985 UK tour.
Discovering an interview with The Sisters of Mercy from the
1981-1985 era which you’ve never come across before is always a real treat, and
even more so if it’s an audio recording, where you get to hear Andrew Eldritch's words uncensored and unedited by a journalist looking for an “angle” on The Sisters’
story, which was so often the case “back in t’day”. In most audio interviews
Eldritch, contrary to the ridiculous taciturn-yet-rude “Godfather of Goth” stereotype,
invariably comes across as extremely patient, tolerating the most ridiculous of
questions and slowly and carefully reciting his well-rehearsed masterplan for
sometimes barely-interested interviewers, although on rare occasions his
legendarily sharp tongue does get the better of him and the journalist is put in
his/her place with a piece of withering sarcasm.
When Phil Verne of the unofficial 1980-1985 The Sisters of Mercy Facebook fan page (a private group whose membership is now well into five figures - genuine new members always welcome!) told
me that he had been given temporary streaming access to a digital copy of a
rare cassette marked “Leicester interview 1985” to listen to and authenticate,
I offered to transcribe the interview, particularly as Phil had told me that
the quality of the recording was not great and that as a non-native speaker of
English there would be sections and subtleties that would be difficult for him
to decipher. The owner (the collector LG) generously agreed that the contents
of the interview could be shared via this blog as a gift to TSOM fans, in order
to add to the archive of contemporary interviews about the band.
This somewhat fuzzy partial recording of what sounds like a
radio interview for a BBC/independent local radio station (BBC Radio Leicester?
Mercury?) starts in the middle of a sentence with Eldritch clearly talking
about the city of Ely, his place of birth back in May 1959. Although under 60 miles as the crow flies from
Leicester, the apparent locus of the broadcast, Ely is in the neighbouring
region, East Anglia, and therefore not particularly within the daily consciousness
of a Leicester resident, but clearly conversation had strayed onto this topic. “Most
people get to see where they were born,” intones Von, pausing for dramatic
effect. “But not me. I was only there
for a week!” the singer comments, in a rare reference to his early life
pre-Sisters as mere Andrew Taylor, whose family was nomadic as a result of his father's career.
As tracks from the then recently released First and Last
and Always album continue to play in the background (a well-known radio
trick for eking out a short interview into a longer segment whilst simultaneously
allowing listeners to experience the music under discussion – in this case a
longer interview had clearly been edited out-of-sequence with short bursts
played between tracks from FALAA) the next interview snippet covers life
on the road, with the interviewer asking, “Having been on the road for a bit,
do you feel..?” only to be interrupted by a clearly relaxed Eldritch, who in a
jocularly overdramatic tone replies “I feel stateless.” Joining in the
badinage, the journalist suggests other words with the same suffix. “Stateless?
Homeless? Witless?” Cackling, the vocalist’s retort is “Talentless!”, a summary which even his harshest critic (the NME’s Paul Morley) would have disagreed with.
It’s unusual to find the singer in such openly good-humoured
and self-deprecating form in an interview, and he clearly feels that he is on
the same wavelength humour-wise as the interviewer. The discussion has
obviously now moved on to the band’s fanbase, and from the next extract it
sounds as if the DJ has passed comment on the people who had attended the then recent
(and now infamous) Blackburn gig. Given that the Leicester gig on that March
1985 tour took place the following week, it’s perfectly plausible that the
journalist had travelled to East Lancashire from the East Midlands to witness
the Blackburn gig and conduct the interview, to be broadcast shortly before the
gig at Leicester’s Mr Kiesa’s club, to drum up interest in the latter show.
Photo of the Leicester Haymarket shopping centre from the late 1980's showing Mr Kiesa's "International Discotheque and Night Club" on the first floor behind the bus.
“(There’s) weird hippies in Dusseldorf, you know, and
there’s sort of crazed [“fans”] in Japan some place, and there’s a few strange
people everywhere that get off on it and they’re not all like the people you’ll
see turning up in Blackburn. That’s just a part of it.” The interviewer
immediately picks up on this point, asking somewhat philosophically “Do you
think that the people turning up in Blackburn are particularly strange, because
inevitably however strange they may look inevitably they’re all very ordinary…?”
Again, Eldritch talks over the end of the question: “Everyone’s very ordinary,
people generally just get marked out by the way they dress which doesn’t mean
very much at all. It’s not the fault of the [“fan”] in Japan or the weirdo
rocker in Dusseldorf that that he looks the way he does. Although I dare say it
involves a fair degree of training! We just go out and play songs with good
tunes, loud and somewhat violently and we leave it up to everybody else to form
tribes or wash dishes or whatever the hell people do out there when they listen
to our records.”
This is typical of Eldritch’s rejection of the black-clad
hordes at that time, and he always liked to stress the broad range of the
band’s appeal. Incidentally, I have substituted the word “fan” to describe the
archetypal Japanese aficionado the singer refers to here, although he appears
to use a word which would nowadays be considered to be an unacceptable racial
slur. However, the audio quality of the tape is not perfect and I may be doing Von
a disservice as he may in fact have used a different word. For those with more
fevered imaginations, as far as I am aware “wash dishes” is meant literally and
not a euphemism for one of the more rock’n’roll activities which Eldritch and in
particular the other members of the band of this era were normally associated
with. In fact, Eldritch referred to this fantasy of being a “housewife’s
favourite” several times in interviews of that period.
Following Eldritch’s claim that the Sisters play “loud and
somewhat violently”, the discussion then turns to The Sisters of Mercy’s contemporary
WEA labelmates, East Kilbride’s finest, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and again
Eldritch’s playful mood is very much to the fore. When the interviewer asks
him, “Do you think that violence is returning to rock music, with The Jesus and
Mary Chain, and you talk about your band..?” Eldritch is yet again not in the
mood to allow him to finish his question. “It’s not returning because of four
pre-pubescent Scottish wimps who are probably trying to prove something, God
knows what, probably something everyone proved ten years ago,” the singer says,
scathingly. “No! Not that we’ve got anything at all against The Jesus and Mary
Chain, God bless their little cotton socks,” he quickly adds in a faux-chummy
tone before whispering close into the mic what appears to be “I’ll kill you!
I’ll kill you”!
Sticking to his original theme, the DJ asks Eldritch “Do you
think that you have an overtly violent..?” only to have the singer again start
speaking over him, this time in a fake angry voice, “Isn’t it strange that you
can really learn to hate some people really quick,” before adding, sotto voce,
“but of course, nothing to do with The Jesus and Mary Chain,” continuing in a
mock angry tone “I really want to kill them bad!”. Rather than steer clear of
the topic, the interviewer gamely sticks to his guns, again mentioning The
Jesus and Mary Chain. “Fine boys!” interrupts Eldritch, continuing the banter,
“Always said so, fine boys!”. “But going downhill very fast,” counters the
journalist, before adding either ironically or sycophantically, “unlike The
Sisters of Mercy who are on the way up, and up and up”. Suddenly, Von is back in
regular interview mode and spitting out the soundbites most fans of the band
will have heard many times before. “Everyone gets their fifteen minutes (of
fame), we just decided to play the game by a different version of the rules and
try to get rather more.”
After another short musical interlude, the interviewer
questions the singer’s typically grand plans and self-important sense of place
in the rock pantheon: “Do you think that you have to do everything on a grand
scale? Do you think that you deserve it?”. Without pausing for thought,
Eldritch retorts “That’s just our taste, we were brought up that way,” a familiar
theme which he will return to later in the interview.
Those (especially Andy R!) whose interest in TSOM began more with the band’s
image than with the music will be delighted with the rather more prosaic next
line of questioning, with the broadcaster asking the singer a more Smash
Hits-style query, “Where do you get your taste in hats from?” There is an
ominously long silence from Eldritch, one which those who interviewed him at
the time always found very disconcerting. Presumably, this was when he was asked a question for which he hadn't pre-rehearsed an answer, rather than saying something off-the-cuff which might come back to bite him. Eventually, he retorts: “Stealing,
mostly. I mean, there’s some Leeds phrase which runs something like, ‘Thieves
can’t be choosers’ [the last phrase said in a very poor approximation of a Craig
Adams-style Leeds accent]. We’re not very good at stealing from, like,
really flash places and you make do with what you can get. This one was stolen
from Birmingham, this one…” (presumably on the Black October tour the previous
year).
Returning to a more intellectual line of questioning more
likely to engage Eldritch in lively debate, the journalist asks “Where did you
get this love of ritual from, is it too much religion at an early age?”.
Eldritch returns to the theme that none of this was his choice, that it was in
his DNA: “It’s part of the English subconscious, it’s like people going out of
a weekend and parking on a common, it’s amazing that they’ll park in regimented
rows, in the middle of nowhere they’ll do it. Can’t help it, an accident of
birth, heritage...”
At this stage, the interviewer cleverly picks up on
Eldritch’s last word to delve even deeper, sounding like Anthony Clare on famed
BBC Radio Four programme In The Psychiatrist’s Chair: “Tell me about
your heritage. Do you class yourself in the mould of the greats of English
literature, Byron, Keats, Shelley..?”. This line of questioning is right up
Eldritch’s street and he continues the list with a few of his sporting heroes: “Grace,
Boycott…Don Revie. Yes, is the answer, simply. Not too grandiose for you?
Thought not, Yeats, Eliot, Shakespeare, Joyce, Eldritch. It sort of fits,
doesn’t it?” Is the singer being tongue-in-cheek here, or does he genuinely
believe that his lyrics are worthy of such comparisons. Either way, Yeats,
Eliot, Shakespeare, Joyce, Eldritch would make a great t-shirt slogan in
the style of the recent copyright-side-stepping band member list vests (I for one would certainly buy one - Etsy rip-off merchants please note), or
perhaps the title of the next TSOM album...
However, on this occasion the singer has seemingly met his
intellectual match, with the DJ drolly replying (quoting a well-known English
saying), “If the hat fits, wear it!” For once, Eldritch is out-bantered, his
own instant reply “If your head’s not too swollen today, if you don’t have those
funny growths coming out of the side..” falling somewhat short (even if it does
interestingly hint that he would not permanently sport a titfer out of choice,
an issue covered at length in recent books about the band, or perhaps a reference
to the singer’s occasional cuts and bruises allegedly caused by jealous
boyfriends…), especially as the interviewer is able to extend the analogy with
his next question, “Do you think you may have stolen the crown off them, I
mean, ..” Eldritch angrily interrupts, warming to a familiar theme, his dislike
of the music weekly, the NME: “What have they got to compete with at the moment.
Steven Wells? [a journalist] It doesn’t bear thinking about. It might as
well be us, really.”
The radio interviewer sees this as his chance to dare to ask
the one question on everyone’s lips at the time: “Do you mind being classed as
a gothic rock band, because if you think of who the gothic writers were, I mean
it’s good, isn’t it?” the latter phrase faltering somewhat, as if the
journalist feared a vituperative response. Eldritch is now back on familiar
territory: “Yes. Unfortunately, David Quantick [whose review of FALAA which
mentioned Joy Division no fewer than five times had just been published] and
the NME have got an awful lot to answer for. I hate the whole bastard ‘positive
punk’ genre. I think the whole band does. As soon as we realised that we were
lumbered with it, it’s a coincidence of time, when we were playing London at
the same time as those bands did [this is probably a reference to the shows around Christmas 1982 in the UK capital when the band played gigs with UK Decay, Theatre of Hate, Sex Gang Children, Alien Sex Fiend and less well-known scene bands within the space of one week]. As soon as we realised that we were lumbered
with it, we started playing at being really severe hippies to see what that
would do to the media, but they don’t seem to have actually picked up on it, they
don’t look at our records they don’t look at our shows enough anymore to see
beyond their original impression which we definitely… .. don’t understand it, “quick,
find a bracket” for us, “find a pigeonhole”.”
Having clearly not fully understood the “playing at being
severe hippies” comment, the DJ refers to how the band had reacted to being
lumped in with the black-clad gothic artists: “Is it fair then to say that perhaps
the longer hair and the pink shirts is a conscious move?” Eldritch agrees,
saying “Yeah, we always had ‘em, we didn’t use to look for them quite so hard!”.
Continuing the theme of the band’s
current attire, the journalist wonders whether TSOM are looking further back in
time for influences: “Do you see yourselves as a kind of return to the Doors
kind of mystical aspect of rock, very ..” Yet again, the singer interrupts his
question: “Yes, yes. We don’t go full-scale return to the Altamont, Woodstock
era, hippy trash, which isn’t really very mysterious or very intellectual or even
good at all. [this is a clear contradiction of other Eldritch statements about that era]. Not …even …good…We just don’t really pay much attention to our
contemporaries. They’re very puerile, they’re very facile, they don’t excite us
on any particular level, we find that in the older music there’s a good portrayal
of some more levels, something that’s completely bozo, something ridiculously
intellectual.”
The recording of the interview extracts end with a humorous exchange of
further Eldritchian mock outrage about that NME review of the debut album, with
the interviewer pretending to be very coy at bringing the topic up:
Interviewer: “People
often say that there’s a tendency..”
AE: “But
well of course we’d kill them for saying it, wouldn’t we? But be careful, you
bastard!”
Interviewer: “But
that there is quite, perhaps just a little, a tiny little bit, you probably
wouldn’t notice it…”
AE: “Careful.
Be nice.”
Interviewer: “You
wouldn’t notice…perhaps something that separates you from others, that you
follow the better aspects of, perhaps some..”
AE: “He’s
putting his guard up...getting his armoured clothing on…”
Interviewer: “…some
of the..”
AE: “…the
boys have just come in with a baseball bat…”
Interviewer: “..
just …”
AE: “…it’s
looking bad…”
Interviewer: “a little
bit…”
AE: (imitating
the public school teachers he had clearly endured as a teenager) “Spit it
out, boy!”
Interviewer: “…an insignificant little bit… … of Joy
Division!!”
AE: “AAARRRGGGHHH!!!”
That would have been a perfect end to what has been an
enjoyable interview for DJ, musician and listener alike, but instead there’s a
further short extract that may have taken place earlier in the interview after
one of the previous snippets (“older music”?), with Eldritch saying, seemingly a
propos de rien: “We’re talking well early here, we’re talking Tyrannosaurus
Rex”. “What’s going to happen next, do you think…?” asks the interviewer,
leaving Eldritch with the final word: “We’ll probably hit you. Do you mean after that? We’ll probably hit
everybody else…”
My thanks for this post are due to the indefatigable Phil V and to the collector LG, both of whom have been instrumental in keeping interest in the classic era of TSOM alive over the past thirty years.
