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 31^st 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 1^st 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.