Forty years ago today (11th March 1985) on the third day of their ‘Armageddon’ tour across the UK (which was revisiting University of Sheffield that evening after the traditional tour openers in Glasgow and Edinburgh), The Sisters of Mercy finally released their debut LP, First And Last And Always, on the WEA label. FALAA, to give it its usual acronym, went on to become one of the true monoliths of gothic rock, recently ranking as high as second in the Uncut magazine special, The 200 Greatest Goth Albums. But as we shall discover, intriguingly the album might have enjoyed similar success in the main UK album charts, which would clearly have helped to reduce some of the pressure on the band for commercial success, with their three WEA singles all having failed to dent the official UK Top 40 singles chart.
Advert for FALAA in the German magazine Spex
In the same way as there were very few other bands who clung to the punk DIY spirit of putting out their own records for so long before signing with a major label, The Sisters of Mercy were also unique amongst their peers in taking well over four years from releasing their debut single to producing their first album. This is usually attributed to Eldritch’s “perfectionist’s perfectionist” reputation, which possibly explains not only why there has been no new album over the past thirty-odd years, despite there being a gigging band with a multitude of unreleased new songs (a topic to be covered in Mark Andrews’ much-anticipated forthcoming book Here), but also the over-long genesis of FALAA once recording and begun. Jane Simon referred to this in her contemporary interview with the band (published in Sounds on March 30th 1985): “people make albums every day, but the length of time between The Sisters’ rather messy birth and their debut into this well-trodden adult territory makes this something of an Event.”
Photo from the gatefold sleeve limited edition of FALAA, taken by the late Ruth Polsky
FALAA was originally intended for release to tie in with what became the Black October tour in October 1984 (with an advert in the York Rock Festival programme in September 1984 announcing its release), before being put back to a potential January 1985 launch, a date which was eventually further put back to March 11th 1985. The reasons for these delays - Andrew Eldritch’s health issues and ongoing attempts to secure mixes of these songs which the various parties could agree to - have been very well-documented in Mark Andrews’ essential biography of the band (Paint My Name In Black And Gold) and Robert Cowlin’s seminal blog article on the recording process and the various mixes in existence, All I Know For Sure:The Making Of First And Last And Always. In this post, we will focus instead on the contemporary reaction to the much-delayed album, the band’s first release to make a significant impression on the UK Official Charts and one which brought them more column inches than the previous nine single releases combined.
US promo cassette version of the album
As was the case for many albums now considered to be absolute classics of their genre, FALAA was met with more hostility than acclaim on its release, but unusually, much of the disappointment came from diehard fans of the band in addition to the more expected source of the music press. This was acknowledged by the band themselves in the Jane Simon interview, with the journalist summarising the point before quoting Eldritch’s himself. “They think this LP will possibly lose them quite a bit of their old following, and if they’re not exactly worried about that, perhaps concerned isn’t too strong a word. Andrew: ‘A lot of people didn’t realise that once we’d found the ability to do it, we’d be quite happy to make records where you could hear all the instruments and all the words and it would sound ok on the radio. A lot of people get pissed off when you make records like that - they figure you’ve changed somehow.’”
Personally speaking, I was not alone amongst long-term fans of the band of my acquaintance who found FALAA to be a profound disappointment on first hearing, although not unexpectedly so after the previous two singles had set the tone for the band’s enhanced but less powerful sonic template. The overall sound seemed tinnier, weedier and less attention-grabbing than the earlier singles, the lyrics on some songs seemed a bit more simplistic (on Walk Away, for example), and the band seemed to have somehow mislaid the drive and the attack in their music (which, to be fair, still very much characterised their live shows at that time) on the way to the studio. In Paint My Name In Black And Gold, the band’s then-manager and long-term Eldritch’s associate Boyd Steemson expresses similar misgivings: “It should sound enormous…but it’s like listening through a seashell”. The band’s case was not helped by the fact that the very same month Red Lorry Yellow Lorry had released Talk About The Weather, which featured the same muscular FX-heavy guitar and whip-smart primitive drum-machine sound which had been the hallmark of The Sisters’ outstanding 1983 single releases.
However, to a certain extent, this was part of the natural cycle of the 80’s alternative music fan, always looking for the next big thing to discover, only to leave the bandwagon they had (in a very minor way) helped to create when the artist began to find commercial success and became public property. This factor was alluded to by NME journalist Paul du Noyer during his interview with The Sisters of Mercy that March: “Already, the fanzine boys have turned on him [Eldritch], as we all do when our pet products go public.” And there is certainly evidence that any departing fans were quickly being replaced by a wide army of new followers who were attracted by the band’s image (FALAA was the first TSOM release to feature photos of the band), live performances and yes, the new, more accessible sound.
The album’s chart trajectory seemed to follow an established pattern for ‘cult’ acts, with a high first week placing (no. 14 in the chart in this case), followed by fairly rapid decline (second and third week sales placing The Sisters at number 21 and 38 respectively in the UK’s official album charts). Strangely, at that point, with the Armageddon tour having ended, the album’s chart trajectory recovered to the number 31 position the following week, possibly on the back of word-of-mouth spread amongst those who had seen the band in concert or on their UK TV début on The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2, then fell again slightly to 45, spending a further three weeks in lower reaches of the Top 100 before leaving the countdown, not a bad overall run for a band without a Top 40 single. By way of comparison, Killing Joke, who had charted with five previous albums (Revelations, peaking at 12, being their most successful at that point), only reached number 11 in the album charts (the same high point attained by another well-established act The Damned’s Phantasmagoria later that year) with Night Time during an equally brief nine-week stay starting a month earlier, despite the advantages of both already being better-known and of having a hit single Love Like Blood, which reached number 16 in the singles chart.
Interestingly, FALAA seems to have fallen foul of rules brought in after early 80’s chart-rigging scandals, whereby record companies had inflated the sales figures of their releases by a variety of means (bribing record shop employees, dispatching sales teams to buy their own record, offering discounted copies or special editions of a single only in chart return shops, etc) in order to boost a chart position so as to gain more airplay/coverage and potentially increase future sales. As a result, records which recorded suspicious variations in sales across the country would be “down-weighted” in the chart, and this was the case with FALAA in its release week, as confirmed by Wayne Hussey in an interview with International Musician and Recording World. The guitarist told the magazine, “We sell a lot of records in places like Birmingham, and none in Cornwall, so they figured that we were being hyped up North. But what happens is our very diehard following go out and buy it in the first week; it’ll go down from now on, though it seems we sold as many records as Howard Jones in the first week.” As Jones was also a WEA artist, the record company would have access to detailed actual sales figures for both LPs in the week both were released, when Jones’ album Dream Into Action entered the chart at number two! Even allowing for some exaggeration of The Sisters’ comparative sales in the in-house information shared with Hussey, in terms of actual sales it is likely that FALAA merited a place in the national top 5 in the week of release, a feat which would in turn have lead to much greater airplay for No Time To Cry, which had disappointingly and somewhat embarrassingly entered the singles chart a couple of places lower than comedian Billy Connolly’s rendition of the Super Gran children’s TV theme song.
Neil P’s amazing FALAA collection which contains 55 items!
FALAA also made the album charts in Sweden (peaking at a respectable number 23) and scraped into the (West) German Top 40, but only really became a big seller retrospectively, finally gaining a silver disc (60,000 sales) just after the release of Floodland in 1987 before being certified gold (100,000 sales) two years later. Floodland itself made number nine on its initial release, on the back of This Corrosion’s breakthrough, but left the charts having clocked a mere seven weeks, before the singles chart success of both Dominion/Mother Russia and Lucretia, My Reflection added a further thirteen weeks to the album’s stay in the Top 100 LP listings.
The contemporary critical reception from the music press was as mixed as the response from fans had been. Chris Heath of glossy fortnightly chart hit mag Smash Hits seemed a little confused about the album, not least because of his reference to the title as First and Last and Everything (a subtle gravel-throated Barry White reference?!?), awarding the LP the lowest score of albums reviewed that issue (six and a half out of ten) but ending with one of those ‘damned with faint praise’ but supposedly encouraging phrases that Eldritch would have been familiar from his grammar/public school reports: “Quite a promising start”. Heath appears to have spent longer studying the band’s individual photos on the sleeve (“The Sisters of Mercy have long, unkempt hair, always scowl in photos”) than on the music, for having stated “[They] generally look like the sort of people who’d make an unpleasant din. Thankfully, they don’t”, goes on to complain of “ten repetitive tunes,” some of which are “very ordinary”. Few fans would agree with the Smash Hits scribbler that Marian would fit into the latter category, but here it is decried as “endless.”
Readers of the other UK small format music magazine, Record Mirror, would have little idea of the contents of the album, with reviewer Jim Reid spending three short paragraphs to state his theory that bands like The Sisters perform a social service for suicidal teens. The only evidence that he actually might have listened to the record was that “it’s sung through a tunnel darkly and it’s all pretty inoffensive”, before awarding it a very banal three stars out of five.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic review came from Kerrang!’s Dave Dickson, a genuine fan of the band’s music, whose piece was stuffed with superlatives and hyperbole - “the arcane splendour that is the Sisters’ first album”, “one of the most frightening albums I have ever encountered … because it works on fears, real fears, that we all have and try to keep hidden and in check”, “most of all, it’s the Stygian chill of Andrew Eldritch’s voice…this is the beast that Jagger raised and quickly abandoned, this is the moment of no return”, with the rather pompous parting shot (with a subtle reference to the lyrics of the album’s title track): “This is music for those on the very edge of the abyss, this is music of power, of black and liquid romance, this is music for the end of time…and I am awed by it, Gimme Shelter.”
Ted Mico of Melody Maker was only slightly less effusive in his praise, stating that FALAA “is packed with glistening gems, unsullied by overproduction”, as Eldritch’s “baritone-drone rivets the attention - in turns commanding, then inviting, following a path wrought with morbid depression and reeking with misery.” Mico also praises Hussey’s “infectious guitar slopes and spirals” which would go on to successfully sustain The Mission over the following four decades, and the songs themselves, with the telling prophecy “These songs are almost explosive enough to launch a gothic revival (the third this year!)”, a comment which will raise many a wry smile in 2025 as the annual “Goth Is Back!” articles filter through the mainstream media’s late winter gloom. Deliberately misquoting the LP’s final track, Mico comments “All I know is that here, all past promises have been fulfilled. With First And Last And Always, The Sisters of Mercy have successfully accumulated a startling array of timeless jewels. It can only be a matter of time before they accumulate success.”
Sadly if predictably (particularly in the case of the NME), the other two main music weeklies at the time took a very different view. Sounds had been the first to give the band a main feature (a mere fifteen months after their appearance at Futurama 3) and a front cover slot in December 1982, but by March 1985 reviewer Dave Henderson was clearly uninspired by FALAA, despite awarding it a very specific three and two-thirds stars out of five, accusing the band of merely being effectively an amalgam of the genre’s past, citing Bauhaus, Banshees, Velvets, Joy Division and Doors amongst others. Failing to predict the hordes of second-rate second-generation gothic bands trailing in The Sisters’ sonic wake (pun intended), Henderson erroneously proclaims “No generations will breed from THIS diamond. Let’s merely shelve the platter as a classic over-produced and over-dramatic outing.” Contrary to conventional contemporary wisdom, the writer further states that with FALAA, The Sisters are “preaching to the converted”, but admits that they “do sound convincing, they’ve done their homework well”, although in the final analysis, “the album’s a reasonable enough collection of semi-commercial rock, but the raunch is AWOL.”
David Quantick’s review for the NME is best remembered for its multiple Joy Division references which so angered Eldritch (and which was discussed in a separate post on this blog), and he states that the album is an “oddity”, but the same could be said about Quantick’s critique. After a lengthy double-paragraph dense introduction in which he attempts to deconstruct the Sisters by focusing on their look, sound and alleged influences, there is some relevant analysis of FALAA, as he points out the obvious differences between the two sides of the album - side one being “a good piece of rockist pop”, containing “natural singles”, whilst side two is “a different kettle of flash”(??) and “thinly produced”, before proceeding to a further lengthy concluding paragraph which suggests that by ditching the “post-79” element of the sound and adding some “hammy glammy rock”, they could be both “tongue in cheek” and “tongue in charts”. For those struggling with Google Translate to make sense of Quantick’s neo-English, it would appear that in this passage he is effectively advising Eldritch to do exactly what he proceeded to do next with This Corrosion.
The international response to the album was also rather mixed. (West) German magazine Spex, who had been following the band closely for two years, called the album “highly recommended as a mysterious introduction to the mystical world of black cloaks”, and focussed on the similarities between FALAA and The Cult’s most recent album at the time, Dreamtime. This was because of the bands’ modern take on psychedelia-influenced rock, with the journalist stating that these were the best two albums to come out of the genre, but bemoaning the lack of a follow-up hit to Temple of Love and Body and Soul, which were seemingly gaining mainstream airplay locally.
Peter Koops in respected Dutch daily paper (with the third largest circulation in The Netherlands) de Volkskrant agreed with the more lukewarm UK reviewers, stating that Hussey’s songs on side one were “better” than Marx’s on side two, that the “intense melancholy” that emanates from the Sisters’ sound makes them “unmistakeably part of the Joy Division school,” with “Somberman” Eldritch’s vocal rising from the deep “just like Ian Curtis.” Dutch magazine Oor felt the timing for the album was good, with Si leaving their “main rivals” The March Violets, and felt that FALAA was “a strong record…that shows that The Sisters of Mercy have developed into a mature and progressive rock band that has finally shaken the post-punk monkey off its back, without losing its sources of inspiration.” The reviewer, Swie To, feels that the band is “equipped with a clear and powerful production for the first time,” contrary to the view of most UK reviewers and fans, and is impressed with band’s “new driving force”, Wayne Hussey, praising his “smooth and graceful songwriting as well as the “goose bump” 12-string guitar work on No Time To Cry and “the moving Marian”. The critic is less impressed with Eldritch and his “cheap textual clichés” which reveal his “obsession” with “human decay, sexual aberrations and death.” As a result, the reader is advised to “think carefully before buying” the album!
The LP was generally well reviewed in the US, although there were usually diametrically opposed views on the production and on Eldritch’s vocal, as was also the case elsewhere. On the former point, in Heaven Down Here fanzine, Robert Roman Conway began by saying “I, for one, don’t find this record as weak as everyone made it out to be,” hinting at disappointment amongst longer term fans of the band. He goes on to criticise Dave Allen’s production which “did its best to blunt the band’s sharper edges…but the material for the most is so strong that it can sidestep Allen’s blanderisms.”
Over the subsequent forty years, whilst debate has continued about the merits of Allen’s production, First and Last and Always has become arguably the most quintessential album of the gothic rock pantheon, although the band was even then keen to avoid the “goth” name tag. No doubt aided by the visual accompaniment of the Wake concert video filmed live at the Royal Albert Hall finale three months later (although not released until the following year), FALAA came to represent a key strand of the a dark aesthetic which continues to thrive to this day, granting Eldritch his much longer-for place in the mythical rock’n’roll hall of fame.
My thanks for this post are due to the usual suspects: Messrs Andrews, Ristow and Cowlin for their outstanding publications, and to Ade M, LG, Neil P and other members of the unofficial TSOM Facebook fan page for the 1980-1985 era of The Sisters expertly run by Phil Verne.
