By the time The Sisters of Mercy’s début album First And Last And Always hit the record store racks in March 1985, the UK music press had largely already dismissed the band as Joy Division/Bauhaus copyists and crowned them as the leaders of the nascent “gothic rock” movement, much to the band’s evident horror.
Despite Eldritch’s regular proclamations that his troupe was just a “rock’n’roll band” who were in tune with the “spirit of Altamont”, and the fact that their choice of cover versions (Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones, The Stooges etc) marked them out as a very different musical and spiritual kettle of fish to the house bands of the Batcave club night in London, the die was cast.
The Sisters may not have referenced all things Halloween or horror movie tropes in their lyrics, but the stark monochrome iconography of the band’s record sleeves, the use of a certain colour in lyrics (“devil in a black dress”, “black planet, black world”, “far beyond the black horizon” etc), Eldritch’s habit of sporting clothes of that hue and singing in a sepulchral bass-baritone, and a couple of ill-advised locations for photo-shoots saw the group pigeonholed into an unwanted genre from which they still struggle to escape some forty years later. But if not ‘goth’, which other categories might be appropriate? In previous posts on this blog, we have confirmed that TSOM developed out of the Leeds punk and post-punk scene based around the F Club, but by 1985 the band were also flirting with early 70’s classic rock, having been able to obtain the entire Led Zeppelin back catalogue from the WEA archives.
So whilst many music journalists within the insular UK scene were happy to label the band as “gothic”, their colleagues across the Channel and the Atlantic were much more able to view The Sisters in the wider context envisioned by the band’s singer and primary decision maker, and the band’s status in 1985 and its immediate aftermath (which saw record company purse strings opened considerably further for the ambitious and ultimately successful Floodland project) owed more to this broader appreciation than to the narrow “godfathers of goth” stereotype.
Whilst both the band and their UK (and European) record company (WEA) seemed to have become obsessed with obtaining a Top 40 single and an appearance on famed BBC TV chart show Top Of The Pops as an indication of current and future success - after all, the band’s initial ambition on forming in 1980 had been to hear themselves on the radio in the John Peel show - as we observed in the recent fortieth year anniversary post on this blog celebrating the release of FALAA, the début album in contrast to the singles sold surprisingly well, not just in the UK, but also in Europe, hinting at the band’s future longevity.
Buoyed by successful tours of both the UK and mainland Europe, the album spent an impressive nine weeks in the European Top 100 Albums chart that spring, as compiled by the European Music Report and published by Dutch industry magazine Euro Tipsheet. As can be seen from the chart of 29th April reproduced below, the album was still in the Top 40 in its sixth week on the chart, and featured in the national album charts of the UK, Belgium, West Germany and Sweden, one of very few alternative albums to grace the list.
The broader appeal of The Sisters of Mercy to music fans beyond the UK was certainly clear from the noticeably heterogenous appearance of those attending the gig at the Zaal Voruit in Gent (Belgium) which I witnessed that same month, but is further explained in a second extract from Euro Tipsheet published exactly forty years ago today, 10th June 1985.
In an opinion piece about how fragmented and unpredictable the music scene was becoming, the author “Yuro D. Jay” (geddit??) excitedly singles out The Sisters for their physical appearance as evidence of a hippy psychedelia revival, which apparently but understandably included Prince (this was the year of Raspberry Beret, after all). Many music industry figures had been shaken to the core by the dogmatic Year Zero approach adopted by punk and its followers, and signs that new, hip and happening (“and believe me they are in”) bands like The Sisters were adopting a more nuanced approach gave them hope that their professional careers might not have been in vain, with The Sisters gaining support whilst harking “back to the days of joints and incense, love and peace and good old poetry”.
As previously noted, in common with many ‘alternative’ bands, The Sisters of Mercy chose not to have band photos or identities on the sleeves of their vinyl releases (and they had put out no fewer than nine singles and EPs by this stage) meaning that for many journalists, the portraits by rock snapper extraordinaire Jill Furmanovsky on the inner sleeve of FALAA were their first introduction to Eldritch, Marx, Hussey and Adams. The unfashionable long hair, the paisley shirts and shades owed much to the hippy and beatnik era of the late 1960’s, leading to a reappraisal of the band’s worldview in the minds of these journalists.
Although Andrew Eldritch has made the unlikely claim that “it took years to realise that I even had an image”, the more colourful band wardrobe at this stage was clearly meant to send a signal to those still erroneously convinced that the band had a funereal worldview. “If we were a goth band, would we allow two members to wear paisley and one to wear what seems like a tie-dye poncho of some sort??? Huh, would we???” (from a 2024 interview with Creem). A further band promo photo taken by Furmanovsky at the same time (and recently shared by her online), on a visit to the band’s recording sessions at Genetic near Reading, is further evidence that Eldritch was correct to feel exasperated by the music press’s incorrect assumptions about his band.
It was not only in Europe, however, that the band were seen as heralding a new dawn of psychedelia rather than a gothic apocalypse. Another revered trade paper, this time in the USA, The Gavin Report, was fulsome of their praise of the Sisters’ début album, finding it “hard to hang a label on” (unlike their UK counterparts) in their review which highlighted tracks for radio DJ’s to focus on.
Indeed, such was the success of the album that it featured at number 25 in The Gavin Report’s annual rundown of the most impactful alternative albums of 1985, sandwiched between some unlikely bedfellows (Bronski Beat and Dire Straits)!
The “p” word (mercifully, rather than the dreaded “g” word) was again in evidence in seminal US music mag Billboard’s brief review of FALAA in the issue dated 27th April 1985.
This was particularly interesting as the illustrious publication had previously listed The Sisters (alongside The March Violets, Crown of Thorns and … Dead or Alive, who had up to this point featured Wayne Hussey on guitar) as the vanguard of a new wave of UK psychedelia in a piece on the return of the genre, which featured on the front page of the 13th August 1983 edition. Roman Kozak’s piece suggested that “new psychedelia” was the “next big thing”, based mainly around West Coast acts such as Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, The Bangles, Green on Red and True West, and East Coast garage bands like The Chesterfield Kings and The Fuzztones.
These bands would soon find themselves pigeonholed as the “Paisley Underground” movement, due to their shared love of the music of the likes of earlier US acts like Byrds and Love. Contemporary journalist Pat Thomas described the sound as a “marriage of classic rock and punk”, with serious musicianship blending with a “punk DIY ethic,” so with a talented guitarist with a penchant for a twelve-string (an an earlier band called the Ded Byrds) and a singer whose commitment to the DIY punk ethic is legendary, it is perhaps no surprise that The Sisters should find more in common with bands of this genre (who, incidentally, all rejected the label attached to them!) than with the Alien Sex Fiends and Sex Gang Childrens of the UK scene.
Two names which stand out from that list of Paisley Underground artists are True West, who played two gigs with The Sisters (New York and San Francisco in the Autumn of 1983) and a band positively namechecked by Eldritch in college radio interviews, during which he also stated on several occasions that he had tried to licence The Chesterfield Kings’ LP as a Merciful Release in the UK, but without success.
Although the public never really warmed to the Paisley Underground acts despite heavy promotion (for example, Green On Red’s 1985 classic album Gas Food Lodging peaked at 99 in the UK album charts and was only 95th on The Gavin Report’s annual countdown above), preferring the similar but more immediate folky jangle pop of REM, it’s clear that outwith their native UK The Sisters of Mercy were viewed as far more than merely a cartoonish goth act, but rather as a bona fide alternative rock act who could straddle genres and had the potential to achieve the substantial commercial success that the next iteration of the band (and one of its offshoots) would indeed attain.
With WEA boasting other bands with psychedelic leanings (Echo and the Bunnymen and The Jesus and Mary Chain) on their roster garnering commercial and critical acclaim, the positive and open-minded reception afforded to The Sisters of Mercy’s début LP in both Europe and the US will have only encouraged the label to continue to back Andrew Eldritch’s musical instincts, even to the lengths of the budget for the Jim Steinman excesses on This Corrosion. For all its perceived failings at the time, and despite being burdened with the label of the “quintessential goth album” ever since, rather than confining the band to the gothic ghetto, First And Last And Always opened up a world of wider possibilities which Eldritch (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hussey and Adams) would skilfully exploit over the next decade.
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