Thirty-Six Years Ago Today - , Wake, The Royal Albert Hall, London - June 18th 1985

 

Today marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of arguably the most famous gothic music event of all time – it would seem churlish to describe it as a mere “gig” – when The (remaining) Sisters of Mercy took to the stage for the final time in the 1980’s, in the suitably grandiose surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall, in the early evening of Tuesday June 18^th 1985.

It mattered little that the promised “last stand” of founder member Gary Marx never happened, that guitarist Wayne Hussey was still suffering the after-effects of a heavy night out and that singer Andrew Eldritch was in chronic pain from a rib injury.

It mattered little that the gig was heavily undersold (what would have been the first of two planned nights on Monday 17^th June 1985 never even reached the advertising stage), that the unusually early start time meant that many fans missed the beginning of the band’s final performance, nor that many also missed the final encore which took place after the house lights had come on, the traditional signal that the night’s entertainment had reached its conclusion.

The crucial fact was that the performance was professionally recorded and released as a live video the following year, as the split between the Eldritch, Marx and Hussey/Adams factions drew deeper, guaranteeing all-important inches in the columns of the then-influential music press. As a result, rather than the four thousand or so souls present on that warm London evening, many hundreds of thousands of (potential) fans were able to witness the band’s magisterial performance from the comfort of their own living rooms, spell-bound by the punishing metronomic beat of Doktor Avalanche rising and reverberating around the Royal Albert Hall’s impressive dome, the deep incantations of mysterious singer Eldritch echoing evocatively around the cavernous venue, the pulsing basslines of the static Adams making the ancient walls shake and the joyous, ringing guitar tone of Hussey swirling around the hall.

That the next release of The Sisters of Mercy (This Corrosion) was a worldwide hit was no doubt in no small part due to its catchy chorus, the outstanding production skills of the late Jim Steinman, the classic Beauty and the Beast pairing of the visually stunning Patricia Morrison and the bearded biker chic of Eldritch, and of course the donkey work done by The Mission in slowly building further a willing market for goth-tinged product. Absence is said to make the heart grow fonder – witness the sudden rise to significantly wider prominence of Joy Division after Ian Curtis’ untimely death in 1980 – and the band’s split, with the wonderfully fitting epitaph of the Wake video release of the performance of the final show a year later, certainly grew both the band and the brand at a time when Eldritch was sheltering behind the low-key and enforced Sisterhood releases whilst finalising the next stage of his masterplan.

Good quality live footage of The Sisters of Mercy in their 1981-1985 heyday has always been hard to find, to the extent that this year’s (re-)discovery of somewhat shaky material from their 1983 Retford Porterhouse and 1985 Gothenburg gigs has been treated almost like the discovery of the Holy Grail by hardcore fans. Wake however stands alone as the only multi-camera professionally shot film record of the band, giving huge extra significance to what was always going to be a momentous gig.

This recently rediscovered review of the show, published in June 1985 in trade magazine Music Week, reveals just how perfectly the video captures the spirit as well as the sound of the evening. Journalist (and future Britpop promoter) John Best enumerates the reasons why The Sisters attracted (and indeed, continue to attract) such devotion amongst their fanbase. Humorously adding a word to the opening couplet of Rosemary Clooney’s famous song Sisters from the classic Irving Berlin film White Christmas, Best focussed as much on the crowd as on the band, fascinated by the rituals which they had adopted both independent from and inspired by the group itself.

Whilst the music on offer was, to most hardened hacks who had seen it all before, a basically tired re-tread of the bloated rock behemoth which punk had gleefully banished – referenced here in the first paragraph with the mention of time travel, unfashionably (in the 1980’s) long hair and the obligatory Led Zeppelin reference (the “house of the holy” pun) – the antics of the crowd, who “did strange dances atop each others’ shoulders, piercing smog-choked shafts of light with flailing limbs” never failed to fascinate, and director Mike Mansfield and his team captured this from the very beginning of the Wake video, with the famous freeze-frame at the end of the introduction to set-opener First And Last And Always. This incident was later referred to in a discussion about this gig on Phil Verne’s excellent unofficial 1980-1985 TSOM Facebook page, with Steve F commenting “We (Gilly and Scooby) were drinking on the Albert Memorial when someone shouted over that the Girls were coming on. We legged it across the road and straight into the dance floor. Neil T was straight up on somebody’s shoulders and you can see him waving his arms and freeze-framed on the video as the FALAA intro launches into the main riff.”

Another little-known contemporary review, published by London’s prestigious national paper of record The Times and written by David Sinclair, also acknowledges the importance of the staging in the overall impact of The Sisters’ live show, referring to “shafts of light…from the back like sunlight though disused castle windows … while burning red orbs hovered above the floor like Jupiter’s moons shining grimly on a version of Hades.” Dramatic and poetic stuff, and a glowing tribute to the work of Phil Wiffen, the band’s long-time collaborator who recalled the gig in 2018 for the 50^th anniversary of Entec (the Royal Albert Hall gig having been chosen as one of the company’s “50 Golden Moments” for a celebratory website retrospective:  “By the time of the Albert Hall gig, I had been with the Sisters for nearly three years. My design was similar to the approach I’d taken for recent tours and, at Andrew’s request, smoke effects played a huge part. For this show, I positioned smoke and wind machines in front of some balcony boxes, so at any given moment I could blast the auditorium with smoke. With a light behind that, I could achieve a really stunning effect – in fact, despite everything else that was happening, the smoke is what most people remember about that night, The thing is, if you use too much, everything starts to look a horrible brown! In terms of lighting, I concentrated on floor-based fixtures and side lighting with bars of six Thomas PARs on tank traps, or bars of 12 as was the case when we got to the Albert Hall. As there was no drummer, Andrew programmed the band’s new Oberheim DMX drum machine [a.k.a. Doktor Avalanche] and I accentuated the high energy beats and fills with plenty of fast changes on the Alderham 60-way console. As this was being filmed, we had to rig some Profiles on a back truss to gain height. I remember we had nine- and 12-inch Lekos, and I used either break-ups or the shutters to create a slit of light. At this point in the band’s history, The Sisters Of Mercy logo borrowed the head from the cover of ‘Gray’s Anatomy’, inside a star, and I was able to create that by using five Profiles. Due to the amount of smoke, you could easily distinguish a star shape. Moving lights had begun to come on to the market but they were beyond our budget. Of course, this presented a great opportunity to be creative and conjure something interesting from a less sophisticated palette of tools. These tools also included strips of black cloth that were used to break up the background. It was quite normal for bands to have painted backdrops of their latest album cover but the Sisters didn’t want anything like that. In the Gothic tradition, the black strips which broke the beams up  were very effective when blown by a wind machine. Earlier in 1985, I had joined the BBC, so I was using up part of my annual leave [to do this show]. Due to my very limited availability, there was a lot of rush and dash, but Entec were very helpful with the preparation, and I ended up having great fun.”

Whilst the contemporary reviews and the Wake video certainly captured the essence of the evening, they don’t tell the full story. The three songs which were omitted from Wake for example - Train presumably because it didn’t seem as good a way to end the video as Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, which therefore had the portentous closing comment “Thank You … And Goodbye” (which actually followed Train) tacked on after it; Gimme Shelter, because according to the band’s official website “The Rolling Stones apparently refused to grant the so-called ‘synchronoisation rights’ which are necessary for visual cover versions”; and Ghostrider/Louie Louie because (same source) “by the time we hit the stage for the last encore, some of the necessary machines had been switched off. Various film technicians had decided that we had finished….The band hit the stage again - but too speedily for the aforementioned technicians. There was some audio-visual material from the last encore, but Polygram "lost it" shortly after the film was edited and released."

The video also omits some classic Eldritch banter, with a pointed dedication of Walk Away to “the Wakefield branch of the Pete Best Fan Club”, clearly a dismissive reference to Gary Marx, although prophetic in that the next iteration of the band went on to major success (albeit nowhere near as stratospheric as The Beatles) without Marx in the band, and a reference to Christopher Marlowe (author of Dr Faustus) – “where are you when your country needs you?” which clearly amused himself if no-one else, hardly a novel experience for the erudite and literate singer.

And however good Wake is, nothing can replace the spirit of actually being there, as the following comments from fans who have joined in discussions on the 1980-1985 Facebook fan page will hopefully demonstrate:

Vince B: “They must have come on pretty close to, or just after 7.15pm as they played an hour set for Wake, disappeared for 15-20 minutes, then about 8-10 minutes for the medley at the end. As I was leaving after the final encore, people were coming in, expecting the Sisters not to have started yet, which must have been around 9pm. There was still some daylight outside as we left.”

Adrian R: “[At the end of the main set] My mate Pete said ‘Bloody hell, look who that is!’ and we turned round to see (I'm almost sure) it’s Ian Astbury, Lemmy and Youth from Killing Joke. Being young and stupid were too scared to say anything when suddenly the music started again .We were shocked and looked around to see very few people in the Albert Hall. The band did the encore and we thought ‘Wow’ and we got ushered out very quickly.”

Martin W: “Billy Duffy was there. He was just leaving one of the boxes as we were making our way out after the shower of tickertape. I remember he was wearing a jacket with something about Vietnam painted on the back of it....”

Jack K: “Dave Vanian sat behind us too.”

The final word must go to Craig O: “A night I'll never forget. The streets of London paved with Sisters fans and Von lookalikes. The end of an era for me, very sadly. A fantastic night though.”