Sisters Mysteries VI - The Damage Done sleeve church found!

Ring out the bells! Release the bats! Let there be joy throughout the Kingdom of Goth! At long last, the “The Damage Done church” has been located, after years of searching be eager fans desperate to the first to identify the building featuring in the background of the cover photo of The Sisters of Mercy’s legendary debut single, copies of which regularly sell for more than £500 on online auction sites!

The Sisters were probably as famous for their record sleeves as for their music in the first three years of their existence, with the band relying on word of mouth to spread their fame. With little radio play, token coverage from the London music weeklies and no PR support, the stark iconography of the covers of the earliest TSOM releases played a key role in establishing the band’s identity. Looking back at the first single, created because Marx and Eldritch wanted to hear themselves on the radio, the sleeve seems incredibly professional compared to most contemporary debut releases, which were more amateurish cut’n’paste, fanzine style.

In stark contrast, even on their debut release, the Sisters used a distinctive font - Caslon Antique – selected from a book on typography by Marx and Eldritch in the Leeds Central Library, and borrowed other images – a classic dissection diagram from Gray’s Anatomy for medical students for the Merciful Release logo, and an old black and white photo for the single’s front cover, allegedly taken from a book on photography found in the same library.

With the advent of the internet, a search began amongst Sisters fans in response to a seemingly innocent enquiry for the location of the churchyard photo, initially in the Leeds area, but soon spreading to Southern and Eastern areas of England on account of the flint construction of the wall surrounding the church. As the months and years went by, fans became experts on the ecclesiastical architecture, and traded ideas on Heartland Forum as to clues which may ultimately reveal the church’s identity, but to no avail. Even Gary Marx could no longer remember where the photo came from exactly.

The search began to take on epic proportions, heightening further a couple of years ago with the first real piece of evidence, tracked down by Robert John Fakes. Fakes later told Phil Verne, curator of the TSOM 1980-1985 FB group about how he discovered the photographer’s identity entirely by chance:  “Essentially, a few years ago on Charing Cross Road while buying several books related to the author Frederick Rolfe I picked up a copy of issue five of the 1940s/50s periodical The Saturday Book, which was a mine of articles on unusual Victorian and Edwardian literature, early photography and English eccentricity. Almost immediately I noticed that it included the uncropped original of the photograph featured on the cover of Damage Done. At the time I just shared it among my friends on FB who I know from gigs of the modern Sisters as a light hearted "I wonder if this is where Von found the photo?" post. When the subject came up again I shared an old mobile photo to the 80/85 group, but unfortunately the Saturday Book's only image attribution was the photographer's name: Paul Martin and the title Sunday Morning (alongside The Policeman's Funeral, a different Paul Martin photo).”

With the photographer identified, it seemed only a matter of time before the church would be found, but this was not the case. What did become apparent is that Martin was a major figure in early urban photography. Many of Martin’s photos had ended up in the much-respected Hulton Picture Archive, now part of Getty Images: he was famed for his “hidden camera” technique which enabled him to take realistic shots of London life, specialising in “street urchins”. This was in stark contrast to other contemporary snappers, whose pictures had a staged, lifeless quality to them – much like the Damage Done cover photograph in fact. The uncropped image of the latter featured an extra person in the tableau, a boy in a white shirt, but also revealed an extra porch section on the church, and an unusually angled tree outside the churchyard, closer to the photographer, but despite the number of fans now involved in the search, none of these features enabled the church in question to be identified. 

With the trail again cold, it would take the discovery of another book of French-born Martin’s photos, Victorian Snapshots, to narrow down the geographical search. The same (Damage Done) photo appeared in this publication, but this time the photo bore a caption “And so to church. A photographic gem of forty years ago, near Portsmouth”. With this revelation, the search went into overdrive, with obscure Hampshire Church Buildings groups suddenly receiving a plethora of emails from all over the world, demanding to know the location of the church in question. Incredibly, no-one seemed to know the answer to the mystery. Perhaps it was slightly further afield, say on the Isle of Wight, or could it be a private chapel of a long-demolished country house?

Never one to give up, long-time collector LG decided to have one more go, showing pictures of his Paul Martin collection on the TSOM 1980-1985 FB group last weekend and launching an appeal for further information. After 24 hours of the usual semi-informed speculation and “nearly but not quite” lookalike churches, veteran fan Robin Wardell posted an old image of St Andrew’s Church in West Tarring, Worthing, West Sussex, which seemed to feature both the distinctive gateposts and the angled tree, plus another antique photo of the same church from a different angle which showed the equally distinctive windows. Although not particularly close to Portsmouth, it was clear that at last, the search was at an end.

Other posters quickly added other images of St Andrew’s Tarring, revealing that a few years after the DD photo was taken, the gateposts were replaced when a Lych Gate was added, although otherwise the church remains remarkably similar to the way it did in 1906 (the date attributed to the original photo by Getty Images), although large leylandii-style trees now sadly obscure the view from the gate. The angled tree on the original uncropped photo remains however, and can clearly be seen on Streetview.

Robin Wardell told Phil Verne how he had finally tracked down the church : "I looked for something that would identify the building: the most obvious was the window so I Googled "church window designs" and found that it was called a "lancet window". Then I Googled "lancet windows" and looked through lots of pictures until I found one similar, and the description said "13th century". Robert John Fakes had posted "There's very little further info' than the photographer's name in the book as their image attribution was amazingly haphazard as a publication." This made me think to ignore the Portsmouth tag especially as many people had already checked that area. I started near "Ely" as that was Andy's [lead singer Andrew Eldritch] birthplace but soon decided that the style of churches was wrong, so I moved to "13th century flint churches south coast" and found that one. I searched for about another hour looking for older pictures and different angles but decided that that was all the evidence I needed”.

So the search is finally over, and a pretty church in a quiet seaside resort near Brighton can brace itself for unlikely visits from goth tourists, leading local resident Tim H to quip that Worthing will become “the Whitby of the south”!  

Congratulations to Robin Wardell on tracking down this goth holy grail, and many thanks to all who helped significantly in the search, such as PiB/Ez Mo (who drove the search on over many years), Mark Fiend, LG, Phil Verne, Jost 7, Being645 and Robert John Fakes.