Banter

One of the main purported disadvantages of having a drum machine rather than a live drummer was a perceived lack of spontaneity, but at Sisters gigs in the early 80s, the opposite was true. Whilst Ben Gunn disappeared off to the back of the stage to re-programme the Doktor, Eldritch would be left front and centre stage, in the direct firing line of a motley crew of hecklers and jokers shouting out comments about his appearance (boy, would they have a field day nowadays), requests for songs, random words etc. Fortified like a stand-up comedian by the reassuring fact that most of the audience can only hear one side of the conversation, Von was happy to fill the inevitable gaps with a bit of banter with the audience, revealing himself as a master of the witty one liner, his rapier retorts as impressive as his fencing apparently was. This audience interaction was all part of the appeal in the early days, and in the late 80s one of the music weeklies even printed a chart of his best quotes, taken from bootleg recordings of live gigs. Sadly, as the venues became more cavernous and technological "advances" made the Doktor more and more like a real drummer, botht he lengthy pauses and Eldritch's fondness for banter seemed to decline. Indeed, these days the level of chat is reduced to the stage where it's hard to tell one gig's bootleg from another, with the great man on some nights having difficulty in exceeding Carl McCoy's average gig word-count of three ("Thanks, good night !")' despite the return to more modest venues. Last year's radio, press and TV interviews showed that his sense of humour and linguistic dexterity remain as sharp as ever, so let's hope that the next time the band are touring some poor idiot who's drunkenly shouting out for "home of the hitmen" at every opportunity will get the verbal roasting of his life. Bring back the banter !

Anaconda XXX

Anaconda has always seemed to be the runt of the MR litter, barely played live between 84 and 93, the track shoved to the end of the SGWBM compilation, and the last single not to get a 12” release. Popular wisdom held that it was weaker than what preceded and succeeded it, a simple riff extended into a song, lacking the production sheen ofAlice/Floorshow, the bombast of The Reptile House, and the commercial hook of Temple of Love. Amazingly thirty years have passed since it seemed to almost leak out (different shops seemed to get the band’s releases at different times, and although the usual release date is given as March ’83, I seem to remember getting a copy only a few weeks after the Leeds gig of January 83), so maybe it’s time to re-evaluate the song. Its genesis can be heard in the Portastudio demo widely believed to have been recorded around the time of the Alice single, and it made its way into the setlist in time for the first Sisters gig I personally witnessed at Leeds in October 82. Ironically for someone whose attitude to drugs has often been viewed as ambivalent at best, Eldritch’s lyric is fiercely anti-drug. Following on from imploring a tranquiliser addicted Alice not to “give it away”, Von likens heroin’s grip on a female as being serpentine, extending the metaphor to include the constriction, drawing clear parallels between a user’s tourniquet and the anaconda’s preferred method of killing its prey. The addiction, like the snake will end up squeezing the life out of her, ending in her death, which the singer is unwilling to imitate “baby go where I don’t follow…to the other side.” As Eldritch said in a contemporary interview, “There's far too many smack songs which are a bit too callously irresponsible,” and here he was clearly intending to redress the balance. Although some of the imagery used - “china doll”, “marble figure” “face turn to a mask” etc may seem hackneyed, the extended metaphor works well and, unusually for an Eldritch lyric, the  message is both powerful and clear. Musically the song is also one of the band’s finest. The upgraded Doktor Avalanche gets a ten second solo at the start, as on so many songs of this period, and his beefed up beats and mechanised slaps pin reverberate through the listener before, uniquely,  Eldritch comes in virtually at the same time as the band to grab the attention. However, the fact that Craig Adam’s bass riff features so prominently in the mix makes him the dominant player on this track, as he had been on the classic Alice/Floorshow single which preceded it. Marx was reduced to a discordant riff between verses and Gunn virtually redundant until the song’s highlight, a magnificent fifty second instrumental section immediately after the first chorus, showing just what a tight unit the “other three” had become at this stage. The overall impression is of a more muscular Joy Division, a factor accentuated by the close similarity between the “let it wrap itself around her” riff and the main riff of Macclesfield miserabilists’ finest moment, Dead Souls, from the sequence of guitar chords right down to the high bass note at the end of the bar. Eldritch’s vocals, which increasingly dominate the rest of the four minute plus song, become more dramatic as the song reaches its inevitable cautionary lyrical denouement, but are never as mannered in a Bowie-via –Richard-Butler way as they were on Alice. Dismissed as lightweight at the time and ignored for many years, the song has enjoyed a millennial renaissance with fans and band alike as one of the old songs given new life by a faster pace (in pure BPM it was always one of the quicker tracks anyway) and a transformed chorus. The only disappointment was the B side, Phantom, the Spaghetti Western instrumental version of Floorshow, which would also turn up on the 12” of Alice originally allegedly intended only for the overseas market. This was the first inkling of the disappointing policy towards B sides which would dog the band in theFloodland and Vision Thing eras, with a few notable exceptions, but the A side was so magnificent that most diehard fans were prepared to forgive them anything.

get your goth on...

Like today, the average young guy preparing for a night out in the 80's did not need to spend long getting ready. Put on the new shirt bought hours earlier on a lightning trip to Top Man, a quick comb of the hair and an over-liberal application of Joop and off he went. For the goth, however, things were much more complicated. The day would start early with a trip to Boots the Chemist for their legendary own brand black hair dye, reputedly the blackest on the market, followed by the lengthy rigmarole of applying the  pungent purple gloop and waiting for it to set. Then there was the inevitable scrubbing of skin areas the dye had seeped on to. There would also be an hour of crimping/backcombing and liberal amounts of hairspray to ensure everything stayed in place for the evening. Clothing-wise, it was barely less time-consuming, with studded straps to fit onto suede effect pixie boots, Astburyesque scarves to tie onto artfully distressed straight black jeans (with studded belt, natch), the agonising choice of the correct t-shirt (Sisters of Violets ? Lorries or Prunes ? Bauhaus or KJ ?), plus of course the obligatory biker jacket (with band artwork done in white paint by a Art student for a tenner). It's hard to say when I stopped putting the gear on for a night out, but it was probably around the time I started to enjoy a spot of gardening, reading car magazines and trimming my nasal hair. Nowadays, the average goth festival is full of paunchy, balding, grey haired goths who have kept not just the faith but the look, like those middle ages teddy boys we used to laugh at back in the early eighties. Andrew Eldrith may have changed his own appearance beyond recognition since the early days, but for a large part of the Sisters' following it seems that it will be forever 1985 ...

Sister Ray

The highlight of any live Sisters show in the 80s was undoubtedly Sister Ray, played as the final encore at the end of particularly successful gigs. From the first gig in York in Feb 81 until the European festivals of 98 the format would always be the same, based on a legendary repeated drum loop from the good Doktor. The drum machine would often rattle on for a good minute before the rest of the band plugged in for the Velvets' classic, and would also continue for another minute after the last guitar had been dumped on the stage in a squeal of feedback as the band left the stage one by one. In between times, Von would have "sung" his way through several other songs with a similar beat to Sister Ray, usually "Louie, Louie" and "Ghostrider" in the early days, but snatches of anything he fancied were possible on a good night. The overall impression was always of a band on the top of their game enjoying jamming together, with Eldritch's impassioned vocal rising and reverberating hypnotically around the venue. This week's welcome news (via Chris Catalyst on Formspring) that the band sometimes end up jamming the song including Hawkwind's "Silver Machine" gives hope that on day soon this Sisters classic will soon be restored to its rightful place.

Dust Up

The summer of 83 saw a new band on the Merciful Release roster, with Salvation seemingly replacing the March Violets as Eldritch's pet project once Simon Denbigh had formed the Rebirth label for his own band's future releases after their first two MR's.
The Salvation website confirms popular wisdom that through his friendship with Sallies' frontman Danny Mass, Von agreed to produce the band's first single on the MR imprint and took them off to Kenny Giles' Bridlington Studios just after recording The Reptile House EP there. Released in a white sleeve to differentiate Salvation's hippy roots from the usual black-tinged MR doom-rock, the Girlsoul EP was an indie chart hit and the A side was a regular on alternative radio at the time.
Legend has it that Mr E was paid in "speed" for his time and investment, and that is one possible explanation for the pure genius of the track lurking on the AA side of the 12" version of the Girlsoul EP. Whilst the title track (and the AA side of the 7" and second track on the A side of the 12", Evelyn) were fairly awkward, stilted pieces of sub-Sisters "North-doth-rise-again" drum machine (Dr A)-driven angst rock, "Dust Up" was a magnificent ten minute psychedelic wig-out that would presage Eldritch's interest in "techno" a decade later.
The total antithesis of the rest of Salvation's lukewarm recorded output, " Dust Up" remains one of the undiscovered highlights of Von's precocious talent, an unsurpassed mash-up of low-fi synthesised drum beats, blissed out guitars and insistent bass - if only "Gift" had sounded half as innovative as this.
Incredibly, the 12" of Girlsoul continues to trade for around ten dollars on auction sites despite the relatively small number of copies in circulation, as "Dust Up" continues to sneak beneath the otherwise very effective AE/TOM netscape radar. It still sounds ominously futuristic (in the proper sense of the word) today, but back in the summer of 1983 it was yet another (seemingly missable for the music press) sign for the cognoscenti that here was a major talent emerging, rather than just anther indie chart five-minute wonder. The message scratched on the run-out track says it all : "Salto nel vuoto" - "Leap into the Void".

Chinese at Leeds

It's strange to think that like many things in life, the Sisters of Mercy would never have happened were it nor for a series of coincidences which brought people (in this case Marx and Eldritch) into each other's company. Andrew Taylor was clearly a highly academic linguist as a young man, having acquired sufficient proficiency in both French and German (two languages being a minimum there in the late 1970s) to satisfy the dons at Oxford. Having failed to make the most of that educational opportunity, where weekly essays and tutorials during the infamously short terms push even the most asiduous undergraduate to breaking point, his previous qualifications were impressive enough to grant entry onto Leeds University's Chinese B.A. degree programme, an intensive four year ab initio course and one of the few universities in the UK offering such a course (there having been a UK government plan to promote Far Eastern languages as long  as fifty years ago, long before phrases such as "tiger economies" were coined).
Most language degrees require(d) students to spend the third year of their course in a country where the language was spoken, but Leeds students of Chinese, most of whom were total beginners, spent their second year abroad, after only a year's exposure to the language (the average European language undergraduate would in contrast have spent a decade learning French or Spanish, for example, before living abroad for a year). The fact that unappetising stories about the year in China - students were allegedly housed in a bleak academic residence outside Beijing and chaperoned on all excursions by "guides" - were circulating in the student community at the time made the year in China seem even more unappealing to some, and Eldritch was not the only student to bail out rather than face the apparent ordeal of the year in China at a time when most students were still struggling to master basic characters and intonations, despite Leeds' ground-breaking language labs.
Dropping out for a second time, Taylor's academic career had clearly come to a grinding halt, and it would be interesting to speculate as to which path his life may have taken him had his initial partnership with Marx not blossomed within a few years into the innovative and dramatic rock beat which we all know and love.

The March Violets

Of all the gigs I paid to see in Leeds back in 1983, the best value by far must have been a triple bill on May 14th at the legendary Riley Smith Hall at the Uni. U2 proteges The Alarm, promoting their latest single "Marching On", which they played twice that night, were the headliners, with Mike Peters' combo touted as the new Clash in the more easily excitable quarters of the music press. The Alarm had been support on some of U2's recent "War" tour but The Nightcaps did the honours for the Leeds Uni refectory show some two months earlier.
The main attraction for most local music aficianados however were the other two bands on the bill that night, The Three Johns and The March Violets, both vying with the Sisters in the indie charts at that time and featuring the distinctive Leeds drum machine sound. The Three Johns featured (and still do) ex-Mekon Jon Langford on guitar who had played with the Sisters for some very early live shows but now kick-started (literally) the pedal-operated drum machine track that was the backline to the Three Johns live sound,with singer John Hyatt's Lydonesque croon soaring melodically over the scattered shards of Langford's jagged chords. This was the time of their more indie rock second single "Pink Headed Bug" ("I was a pink headed bug, crawling up the side of the City Hall") which brought them greater success than the angry anti-apartheid debut single "English White Boy Engineer", which was also aired that night in an energetic performance which showed why they were to become Indie Chart residents over the next five years. (Incidentally the band are back and touring in 2012 and seem to have lost none of their youthful vigour).
Second on the bill but main focus for many were The March Violets playing a homecoming gig on their Tetragrammaton (goth ? us ??) tour, back in the days when Rosie still shared vocal duties with Simon (think Ben Gunn to Cleo's career-minded Wayne Hussey).  Visually the Violets seemed to be the template for Floodland-era Sisters, Denbigh bearded and full of cock-rock testosterone, Garland the feminine counterpoint. Tom and Loz created a rather diluted version of the Girls' rock beat but which was nevertheless still powerful, and songs such as The Undertow, 1-2 I Love You and Children on Stun all had more impact live than on record. New single Crow Baby and breakthrough hit Grooving in Green were the highlights though, and it seemed as if the band had the potential to go as global as the Sisters already seemed destined to become.
And back in May 1983, three bands of the future for a measly two pouns ticket cost seemed like the bargain of the century - a shame there were only about 250 there !