Wednesday 28 December 2022

No name across this land - the cancelled Temple of Love tour, Autumn 1983

 This new post on the blog is yet another in a series about cancelled gigs which never took place in The Sisters of Mercy’s early 80’s heyday. With their star very much in the ascendancy, The Sisters of Mercy set off in the late summer and early autumn of 1983 for their first dates in mainland Europe and the USA, gigs which we have covered in earlier posts on this blog, which were an opportunity for the band to tighten up their live sound before their first main headlining tour in the UK, which was to be in support of what was always going to be their biggest selling single to date, Temple of Love.



                    Picture by Paul S of the 1980-1985 TSOM Facebook fan group

With the test pressings completed as usual by the Mayking plant in France in August of 1983 for the release of both the 7” and 12” single versions of Temple of Love, the first time that a new single of theirs had simultaneously been released in the two prevailing formats of the day including of course the significantly extended mix on the 12" (this was the year of Blue Monday after all), the band seemed poised to make their major breakthrough on a national scale, but in the end, the single was released with very little fanfare, despite achieving impressive sales figures which made it their first number one hit in the UK Independent Chart.

That the accompanying tour was planned in some detail has been confirmed by this extract from a type-written letter from Andrew Eldritch to a fan back in the early summer, with the UK dates to straddle the two months of September (on the band’s US return) and October 1983, the tentative release date for Temple of Love. Incidentally, Eldritch has got his ex-Jam members mixed up, as it was drummer Rock Buckler's new band (Time U.K.) which The Sisters were on with in Sheffield, not Bruce Foxton's.




I personally have vivid recollections of seeing a TSOM gig advertised in a list of forthcoming attractions at the legendary Rock City venue in a local Nottingham newspaper during the summer of 1983, and of going to the club the next day only to be told that tickets for the show were not yet on sale. Before long, the gig was quietly dropped from the venue's schedule, and I have never subsequently been able to track down the precise date for the gig, tickets for which were priced at just £2.50, I recall.

The reason for the pulling of the proposed tour was, of course, the sudden departure of second guitarist Ben Gunn, who had become increasingly disillusioned with life in the band, as discussed by Eldritch in one of the New York interviews just three days before the tour was due to have started : "We've just cancelled a British tour that we were gonna go back and do, because we need to write some new songs and restructure the band a little. Ben's going, I don't know what we're gonna do about it, we could do almost anything!" After a brief dabble as a label Svengali, promoting his friends’ band Anabas, Ben Gunn withdrew from the back-biting world of the music industry and became in some ways the Syd Barrett of goth, enjoying to this day a normal existence of work and family life in his native South of England, away from the crazed world of goth fandom.


It was thought that one gig might have survived from the advertised UK trek. Allegedly taking place at Manchester’s Hacienda club, where the band had allegedly played a gig dressed fully in women’s clothing earlier in 1983 on the Gun Club tour (see above), although this may just be (we cannot but hope) NME humour and hyperbole extrapolating from Gary's choice of blouse that evening (and, as fellow Sisters fan Koen van T has reminded me, the tongue-in-cheek onstage apology made by Eldritch about the incident, the following night in Norwich).




This UK September survivor gig has long since been included in gigographies of the band, although there was and continues to be considerable scepticism about whether or not the gig went ahead, despite the existence of a poster advertising the gig alongside other future concerts at the legendary Manchester venue.



These doubts seem to have been largely removed, however, when Sisters fan Gary S looked into his archive and found a hand-written list (above) which he had penned, detailing gigs which he had attended in 1983/1984, with the September 22nd Hacienda not only clearly listed, but with a setlist attached –

Burn/Valentine/Anaconda/Heartland/Alice/Emma/Temple Of Love/Floorshow/Adrenochrome/Gimme Shelter/Body Electric

When he shared this on the unofficial TSOM 1980-1985 Facebook fan page, group administrator Phil Verne pointed out that this is the exact same track listing and in the same order as the New York Danceteria just a week before, the 15th September, a recording of which only appeared in the mid 1990’s. Whether this was a one off gig in the UK without Ben or whether it was his swan song, or whether it took place at all, has not yet been formally proven, however, and Mark Andrews’ outstanding recent biography of the band, Paint My Name In Black and Gold, is unequivocal about the fact that Gunn’s last gig was the second Danceteria show in New York, with only the three overseas dates (Stockholm, San Francisco and L.A.) being played at the end of the month, once the band had had the time to work out a temporary Plan B.



Apart from the Rock City gig for which I personally saw an advert, other dates on the cancelled tour have emerged through flyers which have been shared on other Facebook pages in recent years. The  most interesting are a pair of ads for the Tin Can Club based at Fantasy in Birmingham, where The Sisters would famously go on to play their first gig with Wayne Hussey on 7th April 1984. It appears that the Ben Gunn line-up had been booked to play at the same venue exactly six months earlier, listed as being on stage on Friday 7th October in the blurry blue image. Nearer the time, however, their place has been taken by Under Two Flags on the second (clearer) white flyer.



The other date, midway between the Hacienda and the Tin Can gigs was due to take place on Friday September 30th according to the announcement listed on the bottom of this flyer from the Gala club in Norwich, which, like the Hacienda, had been a successful stop on the Gun Club tour in the spring of 1983, another gig already covered on this blog.




Clearly, other dates would have been sketched in – a hometown Leeds date almost certainly, a return to Glasgow after the packed Night Moves gig in April of that year, and a London show at the very least – but no complete list has yet been assembled. Gary S’ hand-written notes do also refer to a “cancelled” gig at Bradford University, but as he pointed out, in his own short-hand this often meant that his own plans were cancelled, not the gig itself, and it may be a reference to the May 1984 show at that venue.




Almost certainly, the UK trek would have primarily visited places where the band had a decent following (Birmingham being the most obvious example outwith Yorkshire), and whilst gigs in Newcastle (with the Gun Club) and Sheffield had been successful (and these cities would doubtless also have received a return visit on this tour), dates in the south earlier in 1983 (such as Bournemouth and Swindon) had been far less well-attended, and as a result there may well have been a northern bias to the tour overall. All this remains speculation, with just Manchester, Birmingham and Norwich dates known (in addition to the cancelled Nottingham gig from my own memory), but it is hoped that as more flyers emerge from dusty attics and newspaper archives become digitised, other shows from the cancelled UK sojourn will ultimately emerge…

My thanks for help with this post are once again due to Gary S, Phil Verne, Paul S, Koen van T, LG and other members of the unofficial The Sisters of Mercy 1980-1985 fan group, where more information on this era is shared and discussed. New members and rare artefacts always welcome!

Friday 15 July 2022

Sussex and drugs and rock'n'roll

 As The Sisters of Mercy began to spread their wings beyond the confines of West Yorkshire after the first John Peel session and with the recording of the breakthrough Alice/Floorshow single complete, over the 1982/1983 academic year they played mostly in the two English major cities (London and Birmingham), with Manchester also featuring prominently on the gigography, but shows further south were few and far between.

The gigs at Swindon and Bournemouth in the spring of 1983 were notoriously poorly attended, but the band did pay two relatively successful visits to the coastal county of Sussex during that time, the first show being in Brighton in early October of 1982 as part of the support tour with The Furs, who were promoting their own classic Forever Now album. This handful of dates (Leeds, Manchester, York and Leicester were also visited) was the first real “tour” which the band had undertaken, and as with other high profile support slots earlier in 1982 (for example, with the Clash at Newcastle City Hall or the ZigZag Club in London with The Birthday Party), gave the band the chance to play in front of the fans of already established acts on the alternative scene.

This was especially true of the Brighton gig, for reasons which only became apparent after a relatively recent post on a Brighton musical memories Facebook page. Indeed, until the posting there by David McL of this picture of a flyer for the gig:

 


little was known about the show, other than the name of the venue, Sherrys, styled here as Sherrys Lazer Discotheque, to highlight the venue’s recent investment in the then must-have latest dancefloor enhancement (effectively a green lazer light which could be focussed on a mirror ball and other light refracting devices to create shafts of light, a technique well-known to fans of the Sisters’ stage show over the years).

Sherry’s (to give the venue its original name) was a well-known Brighton dance hall which had opened at the end of the first World War, and was something of a rite of passage for young people in the bohemian Sussex resort. Andrew Eldritch would have been pleased to hear that it even gets a mention in English writer Graham Greene’s seminal work Brighton Rock (first published in 1938), and after being restyled as a disco in 1969 (after a twenty-year stint as a roller rink and amusement arcade) and seemingly losing its apostrophe in the process, by the early 1980’s it was hosting bands on a Monday evening as part of a regular Futurist night, featuring shows by some of the coolest acts on the scene such as Fad Gadget, Heaven 17 and, erm, * checks notes * Blue Rondo a la Turk.




The night of the Sisters/Furs gig was a memorable one for local fans of post-punk music in West Sussex with The Damned (promoting their Strawberries album with punk band Charge – featuring their memorably-monickered singer Stu P. Didiot - as support act) also playing that evening at the Top Rank club, just across West Street in Brighton from Sherry’s! The enterprising local promoters of the Sisters gig (Kelitech and Dave Steward) clearly decided to stagger their start time in order to attract Damned fans, according to those posting on the Brighton FB page in response to the flyer. David McL, the curator of the page and who posted the gig advert, commented “The Sisters of Mercy as support and it started straight after The Damned had played over the road at Top Rank, so I saw both gigs!” to which another fan (Doug G) replied “Indeed, two gigs in one night and memorable for me as the gig that got me hooked on the Sisters of Mercy and led to me following them about the country.” Any doubts about whether The Sisters played that night were dispelled by a third poster, Dean D, who stated “I went to this gig myself, definitely the Sisters supporting...great night!”. A fourth, later commenter (Robin T) confirmed these basic facts: “The Sherry’s gig was the same night as the Damned at the Top Rank, so we did the Damned first than all headed over the road to the Furs with the Sisters of Mercy as the support act.” When the flyer was later reposted, another group member commented “I was at this gig. I remember The Sisters of Mercy very well. The Furs arrived late and wanted to soundcheck, so we had to move away from the stage. Microphone and bass cut out during their set.”

Sadly little else has surfaced from the Sisters’ performance – no photos, or audio for example (although there is one picture of Richard Butler, the singer of the Furs, and even one of the DJ at the club that night!) – and the venue continued under a variety of names (from The Pink Coconut to its final incarnation as Hedkandi) until its demolition in 2021, as reported by local newspaper the Argus. The Sisters would go on to headline at the Top Rank themselves, both on the Black October and Tune In, Turn On, Burn Out tours in October 1984 and April 1985 (Gary Marx’s last gig) respectively.

The following year, The Sisters made a return to Sussex, being booked to play at The Crypt venue in Hastings in East Sussex, another well-loved local club which, I am pleased to report, is still going strong today, unlike the majority of the venues which the band visited nearly four decades ago. The gig is usually listed as having taken place on Wednesday 16th March, as this was the date that was read out by David “Kid” Jensen when playing the band’s BBC Radio One session (recently released on CD and vinyl), amongst the list of the band’s then-forthcoming shows.

Since then, despite extensive searches, and appeals on a Hastings music forum and on Phil Verne’s seminal The Sisters of Mercy 1980-1985 Facebook fan page, no further information about whether the gig had actually taken place had surfaced, except for a photo of some graffiti in the band room at The Crypt, which read “The Sisters of Mercy played here ‘83”, under which some wag had added “+ ‘69” a reference to the Stooges cover.



Last year, however, a flyer advertising gigs in March 1983 at Rumours club (as The Crypt was temporarily renamed in the early 1980’s) was posted on a Hastings music memories Facebook page, with not only a different date but also featuring the name of the support band, The Dicemen. The new date, Friday 18th March, seemed most likely to be more accurate than the previously circulated one, as the venue’s other gigs also took place at weekends, and The Sisters tended to play most of their own shows at that time on a Friday or Saturday night.

Under the FB post containing the flyer were a series of comments, with Myles D stating “I was at The Sisters of Mercy gig” and James J saying that “the 18th was a great night.” Even better, Richard J B commented, “That was a highlight, supporting The Sisters of Mercy. My favourite band at the time!”, clearly implying that he was a member of the support band, The Dicemen. A quick google confirmed that there was indeed a member of the band with that name, so I contacted him directly and asked him if he had any memories to share with this blog.

I was delighted when he confirmed that he had indeed been in The Dicemen and would be happy to talk about The Sisters gig at Rumours, which he remembered very well, despite it taking place over 39 years ago! After confirming the date as the 18th March 1983 by double-checking in a contemporary diary – but “the poster wouldn’t have been wrong” – Richard informed me that not only did he perform at the gig, but that he was also involved in the decision-making process which resulted in The Sisters being engaged to play the venue in the first place: “I remember the booking of the gig. We had already seen the Sisters in London, at the Klub Foot I think, and I had Alice on 7”. They were my favourite band of the moment. [My band] The Dicemen had a support residency at The Crypt and, as we were so young, the guy who booked the bands used to ask our opinion on who he should get. When he asked us whether he should get a band I don’t remember or The Sisters of Mercy, we jumped for joy!” Asked about what he remembered about the actual gig, again Richard’s memory was clear: “I remember the Sisters as being tired, as they had just travelled all the way from Leeds, having played a gig the night before I think.” According to the band’s gigography, there was no gig in Yorkshire the night before (and I would have been there if there had been one!), although for a while it was thought that they were a late addition to the Sex Gang Children/Play Dead bill at the Brixton Ace on Friday 17th March, because of a recording (later proven to be of a different gig) which circulated amongst collectors with that date and venue attribution. A mystery to resolve another day …

In terms of the actual show, Richard added “The Sisters played a great gig, and it was a highlight of my career to grace the same stage!”. Wondering about the size of the crowd, given the famously low attendances at Swindon and Bournemouth, I asked Richard if he could remember how well-attended the show was. “I think that there were more people than usual that night, but there was a low threshold for The Crypt those days!” he told me.

In addition to those enticed to the show by the presence of the Sisters and their growing fame, The Dicemen were a local attraction in their own right, and as well as featuring on a website about musical memories in that part of Sussex, also have their own page on Discogs, courtesy of their only release, the Shadows EP which was also released in 1983. Did they come close to making it big, I wondered? “The Shadows EP got us a distribution deal with Rough Trade and some radio plays in the South-East,” Richard told me, “but in those days it was hard to tell...” Along with fellow Diceman Nick B, Richard went on to form a second band, Play for Today, some of whose music he has uploaded to YouTube in the recent past. With The Cure also hailing from the county of Sussex, I surmised that Richard must have also been a fan of Robert Smith’s ensemble (whose song Play For Today featured on the first of their gothic trio of albums, Seventeen Seconds). “Yes, I am very much a fan of The Cure, the darker side anyway!” he told me, before filling me in on his projects since then. “I'm still involved in music using computers, but the last proper band I was in was Mood For Tuesday around 1986.” The latter band had a track featured on a 1987 compilation of indie bands, copies of which now sell for over £30 on Discogs.

As with the Brighton gig, no audio or video evidence exists of the Sisters’ performance in the historic town of Hastings (non-UK readers may not be aware that the decisive battle of the Norman invasion of England occurred just outside the town in the year 1066 and remains its main claim to fame), but the recent discovery of not only flyers for both shows, but more crucially, the detailed memories of those who attended the gigs, means that both concerts can now be confirmed in the band’s official gigography, albeit with an amended date for the Hastings show.

My thanks for this post are due to all those who have contributed their memories to local Facebook sites chronicling the concert history of their areas, and in particular to David McL for posting the artefact from the Furs gig, and especially to Richard J B for his contributions regarding the Hastings gig. Anyone with an interest in Sisters’ gigs and history of that era is warmly invited to join the twelve thousand members of The Sisters of Mercy 1980-1985 unofficial Facebook fan page.

 

Saturday 25 June 2022

TSOM at the Free Concert, The University of Sheffield, Saturday 25th June 1983

 (This is a second post about this particular gig, to be read in conjunction with what was one of the very earliest posts on this blog in its embryonic phase)

My favourite Sisters show of the 81-85 era took place on the last Saturday of June 1983, at the very end of the university year, and the finale to my own first year of living away from home whilst a “fresher” at the University of Leeds, three terms gradually but increasingly illuminated by the music of local bands The Sisters of Mercy, The March Violets and The Three Johns, who were all starting to make waves on the national alternative music scene. Many students had already left Leeds to return to the welcoming arms of (the bank of) Mum and Dad by the time exam results were published in mid-June, but I’d managed to eke out my grant with a few meagre savings and was able to continue to enjoy  the student lifestyle with my new-found friends to the bitter end (of the accommodation contract), the lecture-free weeks punctuated still with regular trips to the Phono.

With funds running low, you can imagine our delight when lurid lime green posters began to appear in studentsville (aka the Headingly/Woodhouse/Hyde Park districts of Leeds) advertising an appearance of The Sisters of Mercy just down the road in Sheffield, at a free end of term gig at the rival redbrick university there. Having already embraced the Yorkshire dictum of never refusing “owt for nowt”, the chance to see the Sisters again was too good to miss, so we quickly made plans to attend, working out the cheapest way to travel and organising someone’s house to crash at. Although I’d already seen the band five times that academic year, TSOM hadn’t played in Leeds since the Gun Club joint tour in April and would not do so again until the following May, so this turned out to be a wise decision.



The poster, a copy of which is now (in all places) in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (which hosts the national design archive), made it clear that there would be “no entry restrictions, all welcome, no union cards needed”, so with the new band of a founder member of The Jam (my first musical love half a dozen years earlier), Rick Buckler’s The Time (U.K) also on the bill, we decided to make sure that we were there by the 7 p.m. “doors open” time to ensure we didn’t have a wasted journey.

Indeed, by the time we arrived, the queue already snaked all the way from the main door to the university’s Students Union, over the broad footbridge which led to it and onto the pavement alongside the road which ran past it. Looking around, there were a lot of familiar faces, and it seemed as if half of Leeds had decided to head down the M1 for the gig, with very few “neutrals” or obvious fans of soul diva Ruby Turner, new romantic great white hope Matt Fretton or mod revivalist Rick Buckler on what was a typically eclectic bill for that time.




For geographical context, on the attached pic from Google Maps 3D, the Union is the building bottom right, with the Octagon Centre, where the band would play on future tours to the left. The Octagon was, if memory serves, still being constructed at the time of the June 1983 gig. The handsome red-brick Edwardian buildings higher up the hill on the other side of A57 (the main and very picturesque route from Sheffield to Manchester, passing Ladybower reservoir and the infamous Snake Pass over the Pennines) by Weston Park are original university building Friary Court and its neighbouring Rotunda, once the university library and clearly the source of architectural inspiration for the Octagon.

After about half an hour’s wait, presumably whilst the final band loaded in and soundchecked, the crowd was finally allowed into the venue, which was the downstairs refectory. Once inside the main doors, it still took an age to get down to the venue, but it soon became clear that the blockage was due to one Mr A Eldritch, who was chatting to his then-girlfriend Claire Shearsby and a few others from the God Squad inner circle halfway up the stairs, with people either stopping to gawp or engage with the diminutive singer as they made their way down.

Eventually we made it into the hall, hoping that TSOM would be on first, but to our disappointment the compere first introduced Matt Fretton (cover star of that week’s edition of Smash Hits). He wailed and nervously posed his way through his then minor synthpop hit It’s So High over a backing tape (featuring an Oberheim DMX of all things) to a mixture of jeers and indifference. How he must have wished that night, during his mercifully brief set, that he had stayed true to his punk rock roots, rather than becoming the latest major label clothes horse. After his very short-lived pop career, Fretton later had a successful career as a classical music agent, but tragically he passed away in 2013.


                               Pic of Andrew Eldritch onstage, Sheffield University June 1983 by NVL


Back in Sheffield, with the growing crowd becoming ever more impatient by the minute, The Sisters came on next, to the then-traditional set-opener Kiss The Carpet, that on-stage opportunity to complete the pre-set tuning up (which always needed repeating between virtually every song, such was the punishment Marx inflicted on his guitar), with Eldritch musing “Back in the smelly city…” at the end, as this was just two months since their show at the city’s Dingwalls in the city known around the world at that time for its pungent metalworks. With bright sunshine streaming in through the gaps in the already inadequate garish curtains, it was a strange mixture of lighting compared to the usual near darkness, but neither band nor followers seemed to care.

If you’ve heard the recording of the show – and thanks to one of my fellow moderators on The Sisters of Mercy 1980-1985 Facebook fanpage, you can find the entire gig song-by-song on YouTube, you’ll know that Eldritch was in fine form that night, not just vocally but in terms of the inter-song banter, none more so than when Doktor Avalanche lost the plot at the start of Emma (with a sheepish Ben Gunn banished to the back of the stage to sort the problem).



The whole atmospheric was euphoric, a celebration of a band who “knew what they were fighting for” with their “God Squad” followers, an air of invincibility and a certainty that here was a band that would make it big. There was an air of camaraderie and of friendly banter which those who still go to see The Mission these days report, but with the crucial difference that we knew that this band was at the cutting edge, the very epitome of cool and almost certainly the next big thing, all on its own terms. Eldritch really was in imperious form, the band were now technically suitably proficient (with the notable exception of the good Doktor!) but still looked like they were enjoying themselves, and the venues were still small enough for the band and audience to feel that essential electricity between them. I managed to sneak a couple of photos for posterity when down at the front, one of which is also attached to this post, before the set ended all too soon, apparently with an electrifying Body Electric (but I had to look that up, so there could have been a further encore).

As soon as the band had finished, the black-clad masses headed for the exit, leading to the desperate compere’s futile attempts to coax us back with promises of “the legendary Ruby Turner”. I’m sure that she was excellent entertainment (and I feel a bit guilty that the four hundred strong crowd the compere was no doubt excitedly promising to the artists backstage had dwindled in a matter of minutes to a mere handful of locals), and I would imagine that The Time (UK) were also not bad but rather dull (as they were on record), but like many others we headed down the road to the Leadmill club instead for what was an excellent night, until we unwisely stayed on the dancefloor for what turned out to be a “winner takes all” Sisters fans versus bare-chested (although my memory might be exaggerating somewhat here!) flat-topped locals slamfest which suddenly erupted in the chorus of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”. We quickly decided on self-preservation and therefore the latter of the options suggested by Mr Jones, but we still ended up getting chased half-way back to the house of the local who’d offered us floorspace for the night. A strange end to a great night!


Flyer for The Sisters of Mercy's May 1984 show at the Octagon, University of Sheffield.

 A recently rediscovered flyer for TSOM's next visit to Sheffield the following May attests to the success of the June 1983 show, stating "Those of you who saw them in the Lower Refectory last year will already have bought tickets. Not only did they delight their hardcore fans but they also made many more friends with their classic Alice and Temple of Love. Look out for their version of Dolly Parton's Jolene." Of course, The Sisters hadn't in fact played Temple of Love live in 1983 (indeed, it wasn't played at any UK shows in the 1980's), and Jolene had been retired from the setlist almost immediately after the Lower Refectory show, but this hand-written tribute (clearly to drum up further sales for the Octagon visit) captures perfectly the impact of that memorable night.

Thanks as ever to Phil Verne, Ade M,  LG and other archivists, collectors and members of the unofficial 1980-1985 TSOM fan page for their contributions to this post.

 

 

 

Sunday 15 May 2022

Rare radio interview with Andrew Eldritch from March 1985

 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.

Sunday 1 May 2022

Forty Years Ago this Spring ... the release of the Body Electric/Adrenochrome single

This Spring marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of The Sisters of Mercy’s seminal second single, the Body Electric/Adrenochrome double A side, the band’s only release on the CNT label, to which they had signed almost a year earlier according to the announcement in Music Week trade magazine, in May 1981.




The band’s relationship with CNT, and the details of the recording of the second single, are recounted in wonderful and precise detail in Mark Andrews’ essential biography of the band’s early years, Paint My Name In Black And Gold, published last year. Andrews tells the tale of the band’s first visit to the KG Studios in Bridlington in early November 1981 (around the time of their one and only gig with Tom Ashton of The March Violets guesting on rhythm guitar, at the University of Leeds) the studio where the majority of their other pre-WEA releases would be recorded, but also reveals other details of the studio session which would help to explain the significance of the Body Electric/Adrenochrome single to the band’s future. The fact that the expected one-day session required a second visit to Bridlington later that month at the singer’s insistence is an early indication of Eldritch’s perfectionist streak, whilst an interested visitor to the extra session (a fortnight after the original recording) was none other than Ben Gunn, who had recently agreed to join the band and would play a significant minor role in the band over the next twenty months. Even more presciently, there was the feeling amongst the band themselves that they finally had “something”, as revealed by Gary Marx in this quote from Paint My Name In Black And Gold: “There were points within the actual recording of the second single where we sounded great”, before admitting that this doesn’t necessarily come across well on the finished product.

Nevertheless, the band was clearly satisfied at the time with the sound of the second single, which Eldritch would in future take as the band’s debut release, dismissing The Damage Done as effectively the work of a previous band. This was underlined when Richard Newson interviewed The Sisters of Mercy in late November 1982 for their first cover feature in one of the UK music weeklies, Sounds, a story he recounted on Phil Verne’s excellent The Sisters of Mercy 1980-1985 unofficial Facebook fan page: “The interview began awkwardly. I mistakenly described Alice as the "second" Sisters single when it was actually the third, after that April's Body Electric - which I'd loved - and 1980's The Damage Done, which predated my interest in the band and had somehow escaped my notice. Eldritch clearly wanted Body Electric to be treated as their debut release, and was eager for The Damage Done to be airbrushed from history. But despite this, my ignorance of the Sisters' early history led to mild irritation on Eldritch's part, followed by giggles from Ben Gunn.”

The band clearly shared the tape of their new single far and wide as they sought to obtain gigs and press features, with X Moore (the nom de plume of Chris Dean of the band The Redskins, who were also about to release their debut single on CNT and would perform alongside The Sisters at the 1984 York Rock Festival) referring to the then-forthcoming release of CNT002 in his review for the NME of the band’s performance at Vanburgh College at the University of York in early February 1982: “The band whip out the single (Body Electric), flash both sides (…Adrenochrome), and the dancers call for more poison”.




However, the test pressing from French pressing plant MayKing (this photo is from the vaults of renowned TSOM collector Erzsebet von Rona) is clearly stamped 16th March 1982, some six weeks after the York gig, a further indication of the slow pace of progress at CNT that would frustrate both band and label.




Curiously, one week before the test pressing, the single featured in the Top Ten Independent Singles in Melody Maker’s chart, which was supplied that week by guest retailer Jumbo Records (of the Merrion (shopping) Centre in Leeds, which always seemed to acquire new Sisters’ releases in advance of their official outing. Even by their standards, selling copies of a single that has yet to be pressed seems somewhat far-fetched, so one can only assume that the chart’s compiler was doing the band a favour by once again getting their name in the music press.






The official release date for the single is usually given as Friday 23rd April 1982, and it was touted as such in that week’s music press (see above), although the reality of precise national release dates for independent records at that time is unclear. The label's own publicity (below, from the collection of Bruno Bossier) claims that the release date was March 1982, so it may be that the record enjoyed a local release in advance of the official release date.




The single had received a major accolade the week before the official release date in April in being awarded “Single of the Week” in the Melody Maker, being treated to the kind of hyperbole that even Eldritch himself would have struggled to match: “Adrenochrome…sounds like the greatest four-chord sequence ever invented. Look, the Stones, the Kinks, the Byrds, the Pistols, the Stooges, the Clash and all the other morons were just testing out a few ideas. THIS was the riff they were looking for….go and purchase.”




Other reviews were largely equally as positive. In May 1982’s edition of ZigZag magazine, reviewer Marts, spoke of the band’s “unbridled potential”, and that “with a better choice of producer and a supportive record company, this band WILL work wonders”. Sounds joined the praise, stating that “Motorhead compared to SOM are Mickey Mouse material. These two songs drill into your skull with the sort of electric persistence that the Human League tried early on.” The only dissenting voice, beginning a pattern that would continue pretty much throughout the 1980-1985 phase, was the NME, who complained of the “choked voice” and “monotonous passages” of a release that was “not remarkable enough”, even though they too praised Adams’ and Marx’s efforts respectively, with an “inventively insistent bass” on a song with “quite a few Buzzcockian echos [sic] to recommend it”, stating that Body Electric “throbs like punk with some of the rough edges ironed out.”




Although Adrenochrome was one of the band’s earliest compositions, and had featured on their demo cassette of 1981 in a segue with their cover of Leonard Cohen’s Teachers, Body Electric (treated as the lead track by reviewers) was a new song, which according to Mark Andrews was still untitled when the band went into the studio. In Paint My Name in Black and Gold, Andrews additionally explains that despite the music press accolades, the record sold barely more than The Damage Done had done, leading to some disillusionment with the music press, whose influence seemed to be less great than the band had imagined. The new single did however catch the attention of John Peel, although whether or not the tongue-in-cheek bribery attempt with his legendary producer John Walters (see cover sheet below, from the collection of Dav E Cheris) had any part in this is open to conjecture.




Peel played the single’s A side (Body Electric, with Adrenochrome the AA side) several times, as recently digitised episodes of Peel’s shows on the British Forces’ Broadcasting Service reveal. BFBS was a service aimed at British military personnel based primarily at huge bases in (West) Germany at that time (providing a ready audience on the continent for touring British bands at that time, as TSOM would discover over the next few years), and Peel would play a typically eclectic mix of tracks on the John Peel’s Music show, including Body Electric on at least three occasions, 19th May, 2nd June and 25th August 1982. On the first occasion, Peel pre-announced the track by The Sisters of Mercy, who come from somewhere like, erm… York, I think…the band’s debut single, I think it is”, clearly forgetting that he had in fact played the band’s first release on his Radio One show some eighteen months earlier. On the 2nd June show, Body Electric followed Peel’s then-favourite reggae artists, Eek-a-Mouse: “I think I’ve played you this one before, well worth playing again though” the DJ enthused as he cued up The Sisters’ track. On the third and final show which has surfaced from that year, after allowing the full fade, as was his wont, Peel merely added “They do sound as though they care” before moving onto something more mellow. Peel would almost certainly have also played The Sisters on his BBC Radio One show in the UK, but the tapes of those shows from April 1982 (presumably) have yet to surface.

Body Electric and Adrenochrome would ultimately feature on The Sisters’ compilation of early tracks Some Girls Wander By Mistake, but in 1985 the tracks also featured on the CNT (cash-in?) compilation They Shall Not Pass, which completists will wish to track down as the version used is a slightly longer edit, with the fade coming about eight seconds later than on the original single. Body Electric would of course also be the first of the early songs re-recorded for WEA releases (Alice and Temple of Love would follow many years later), allowing fans the opportunity to see if the earlier ZigZag reviewer’s view that better production would result in a better version holds water. Almost forty years later, the jury is still out amongst TSOM fans as to whether or not this is the case.

What IS clear, however, is that the Body Electric/Adrenochrome single (a copy of which in mint condition would sell today for £150+ ) was an important staging post in the band’s career, opening the door to London support slots, a John Peel session (in August of that year), and most importantly, a self-belief that this project had potential and was worth the considerable sacrifices the band was making to ensure its survival. In Eldritch’s world view, the real The Sisters of Mercy started here, and on this occasion, it is hard to argue with his perspective.

 _________________________________________________________________________________

Further information about this release can be found in Mark Andrews’ Paint My Name In Black And Gold. My grateful thanks for this post are also due to old friends and contributors of artefacts on numerous occasions to this blog Phil Verne, Tony J Pooley, Erzsebet von Rona, Dav E Cheris, Bruno Bossier, Richard Newson and others who have shared reminiscences about this release on the TSOM 1980-1985 unofficial Facebook fan page. Thanks also to those who curate and contribute to the wonderful John Peel wiki.

Sunday 24 April 2022

Goth heaven - Nick Cave, Ian Astbury and Andrew Eldritch on the same bill, forty years ago tonight?!?

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first of these, for the next two posts on the blog, continuing an irregular series, we’re going to focus on some of the noteworthy advertised gigs which never actually took place during the golden period of 1982/1983, a time when The Sisters of Mercy stepped up live duties and honed their unique sound. At that time, the band’s gigs seemed to be arranged on a fairly hap-hazard basis (via the band's manager and the boss of Merciful Release, Mr Andrew Taylor himself), with the dates supporting The Gun Club in April 1983 the first which resembled anything which could be dignified with the term “a tour”, and as we have seen in previous posts, for a variety of reasons, some billed concerts from those early years failed to take place in reality.

Since we last covered one such gig on the blog a couple of years ago – the proposed Spear of Destiny show at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester in December 1982 -  several more flyers have re-surfaced from that era advertising shows which never actually took place, and the earliest of these dates from 1982 and is significant as it would have been the first (near) home-town gig for Mark Pearman (aka Gary Marx), who several years earlier had left the hinterland of the culturally somewhat dull (at that time) city of Kingston-upon-Hull (to give it it’s official name, although then as now most people simply refer to it as just “Hull”) for the bright lights of Leeds.

The Sisters’ first actual gig in Hull probably took place the following year at the city’s recently opened branch of the Dingwalls venue chain on Thursday 31st March 1983 (although that date itself is still in doubt for many TSOM historians), but thanks to the research skills of renowned gig archivist Chris B (author of the seminal coffee-table book 16 Years: Gigs in Scotland 1974-1990), we now know that The Sisters’ debut on Humberside should in fact have taken place eleven months earlier. Whilst researching another “positive punk” band, Theatre of Hate (who would have split and transformed into Spear of Destiny by the time of the Christmas 1982 gigs – such as the cancelled Leicester gig referred to in the previous paragraph, in addition to the London gigs later that month), Chris unearthed this ad for a gig by the band (featuring future Cult guitarist Billy Duffy at that time, as he had joined the band shortly after the album Westworld - which as the ad states, was in the UK Top 40 Album Chart - had been recorded), which took place at the Tower venue in Hull on Thursday 1st April 1982, which listed on the right hand side (and written at 90 degrees) a couple of forthcoming attractions...




Incredibly, one of these featured The Birthday Party with support from not only The Sisters of Mercy but also The Southern Death Cult! Looking into the gig further, Chris gathered that the concert must not have taken place, despite the fact that a) The Birthday Party were on tour at the time and b) with the Australian act having played Edinburgh the night before, and Reading the next night, it would have been logistically ideal. He shared the ad in the TSOM 1980-1985 Facebook group anyway, to see if anyone could shed any light on the mysterious advert.



Well-known Sisters fan and Hull post-punk gig expert Richard J was quick to respond, confirming the disappointing news that the gig never actually took place: “It very definitely didn't happen, I'm afraid! Theatre of Hate played there twice, and I saw both gigs. The first one was in '81 and it was VERY poorly attended, but an amazing gig. This was the second one in '82, and it was after they'd been on Top Of The Pops [performing Do You Believe In The Westworld?] and it was considerably fuller! I saw this flyer with the Birthday Party touted as "upcoming"... I ran home from the bus after school and phoned the Tower, and they weren't entirely sure what was going on, and didn't know it was confirmed... [but] it didn't go ahead. I'm not sure if it ever deserved the term "cancelled", to be honest, as even the venue seemed unsure about whether it was happening beforehand. It would have been a hell of a gig to see here in humble old Hull, that's for sure! Killing Joke were billed to appear with 1919 for the Revelations Tour as well, but then Jaz went off to Iceland and that fell through as well! I saw some great gigs at the Tower though. It was a lovely venue, a classic old cinema/theatre conversion... UK Decay, New Order (early on when there was only the Movement LP and a couple of singles out), Stiff Little Fingers (good but not great), and Bauhaus on the Mask Tour. I still have the original flyer for the 1981 Bauhaus gig.”

Looking at the Theatre of Hate ad in detail, it seemed to bear the hallmark (i.e. handwritten additions to attract the wavering punter) of Leeds promoter John F Keenan, who had given the Sisters their first Leeds gig some thirteen months previously. Although I knew that Keenan had briefly promoted gigs in Bradford, whose outer suburbs are contiguous with those of Leeds, I was unaware of any link he might have with Hull, which although historically in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was one hundred kilometres away from Leeds, and the flyer appeared to mention a different company - “A Last Minute Promotion”. John has been very helpful to this blog over the years (as indeed he was to The Sisters in their early days), so I decided to bother him once more to see if he had indeed promoted this series of gigs at the Tower.

Typically, John (who still promotes to this today, having promoted many thousands of gigs over the intervening decades) kindly got straight back to me with what he could remember of events which took place nearly forty years ago. “Yes, it was one of my flyers!” he told me. “The Theatre of Hate gig was Thursday 1st April 1982 and it did mention The Birthday Party for 24th April and Crass for 1st May (which did happen). The ToH gig was literally a last-minute promotion and not the name of the promoter!! I cancelled very few shows in those days. I promoted The Tower in Hull and bands such as Bauhaus, New Order, The Slits, The Au Pairs, Crass and Theatre of Hate were all my promotions. Whenever I could, I gave the support spot to local bands. ToH support was Nyam Nyam [Peter Hook protégés who later signed to Situation 2] . However, Claire (Andy's girlfriend at the time) DJ'd my gigs. So there is some kind of connection... I'll rack my brain, but I don't remember a Birthday Party / Sisters gig in Hull, although it is on my flyer in my handwriting. If it was cancelled, the cancellation would have come from The Birthday Party, because I always tried to make my shows happen, no matter what.”

The reason for the gig failing to happen therefore remains something of a mystery – it could be that The Birthday Party were offered a media engagement that day, or simply that a tour manager, like so many others at that time, had a look at a map of the UK and decided that Hull was just a little too far off the direct route between shows. Either way, the cancellation robbed the Sisters of the chance to promote their then brand new single "Body Electric/Adrenochrome" (whose official release date was FRiday 23rd April 1982, i.e. the eve of this proposed Hull gig), which would be well-reviewed in the music press, at a time when out-of-town gigs were still relatively hard to come by for the band: apart from various shows in York and Leeds, TSOM's only other gig to that date had been the Futurama festival in September 1981 in Stafford, again promoted by John Keenan, apart from a short trip to exotic Keighley to play at Nick Toczek's Funhouse club night one month earlier. Keenan's willingness to promote new bands and ear for talent was also clear in the selection of Southern Death Cult as potential second support. This April 82 proposed gig was a month before the Bradford act's debut Peel session, and the band's first single would not be released until the end of that year, hardly likely therefore at that stage to attract the punters, although both The Sisters and Southern Death Cult were starting to stir a buzz in West Yorkshire at that time.



Incidentally, although now over one hundred years old, the Tower continues as a club venue to this day, having changed names and hands numerous times since 1982. It would have been better named “The Twin Towers” as like its Wembley Stadium namesake of the same architectural era, it features twin domed towers topping its wonderful (and B-listed) Art Nouveau façade, and is situated on Anlaby Road next to the main railway station near Hull city centre. The domes sadly fell into disrepair and were removed, but then (at the insistence of the council) replaced by beautiful reproductions around a decade ago, at a time when there was a campaign to return the venue to its original use (from 1914 to 1978) as a cinema.

As for The Sisters of Mercy, they would eventually get to play with their heroes The Birthday Party at a gig at London’s Zig Zag Club not long afterwards, an event covered in an earlier post on this blog. But sadly TSOM never shared a stage during the 1980’s era with any incarnation of [The Southern] (Death) Cult (although when still called The Sisterhood, Craig Adams and Wayne Hussey's post-Sisters band would accompany The Cult on their first tour), so this advertised but never-played gig can be put down as one of the alternative rock world’s “what might have beens", as the gig-goers of Hull sadly missed out forty years ago today on what would have been a unique opportunity to see arguably the three iconic frontmen of what would become the “gothic” scene, Nick Cave, Ian Astbury and Andrew Eldritch, gracing the same stage on the same evening.

My thanks for this post are due to Chris B, author of 16 Years, original promoter John F Keenan, TSOM fan Richard J and Phil Verne of the 1980-1985 FB group.