Rare radio interview with Andrew Eldritch from March 1985

 To celebrate Andrew Eldritch 63^rd 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.

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 16^th 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 23^rd 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, 19^th May, 2^nd June and 25^th 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 2^nd 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.

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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.