Gothic nightmare

Probably the most gothic venue that TSOM ever played at, Middlesbrough Town Hall, was the second stop off on the Spring 84 tour, and Wayne Hussey’s third UK date with the band. The Town Hall, typical of post Industrial Revolution northern civic architecture, was officially opened by the then Prince of Wales in 1889 (the year the Eiffel Tower opened) and was widely regarded as one of the best examples of the French Gothic revival style in Yorkshire. Some ten years prior to the Sisters’ visit in 1984, Middlesbrough had officially ceased to be part of God’s Own County and was at the time of their visit formally part of the new (but subsequently abolished) county of Cleveland.

The Town Hall, which is being lined up for an £8m revamp next year, features two music venues, the smaller, 300 capacity low roofed Crypt, and the main hall, which can hold more than four times as many. With its plush red seats, arched windows, and (appropriately for the town which provided much of British Steel) wrought iron roof struts, the sumptuous Main Hall is used for everything from weddings to graduations as well as concerts. The Town Hall (see more photos of the magnificent interior here ) is one of the few 80s venues with a recent Sisters connection, with Chris Catalyst having played there in his Robochrist days in 2005 as part of Middlesbrough Music Weekend, shortly before he joined the band.

Various artefacts have surfaced from the Sisters gig at the Town Hall, including this poster (like many other promoters, the Teeside Poly – now University – Students’ Union who organised the gig omitted the definite article in the band name) which I am very grateful to legendary Sisters collector LG for allowing me to share here :

and several tickets, including a signed one on the Sisters’ wiki (a photo kindly provided once again by Bruno Bossier) and this one, number 1027, which proves that the band could draw a decent crowd by that stage.

A recording of the gig (which like many of that era began with Burn and ended with Ghostrider) is widely available on the internet, but despite being of reasonable sound quality, it wasn’t a vintage performance, for reasons which became clear only recently. Writing to Heartland Forum Admin Quiff Boy, Gary Marx explained that the gig was the first he played without his trusty Shergold Maquerader guitar. For reasons which remain unclear, during the encore of the first night of the tour at Nottingham’s Rock City (where the band is to return in a fortnight), Marx “started smashing the guitar to pieces against the stage and the monitor wedges….The next day, the tour bus detoured (en route to Middlesbrough) through Leeds and stopped off for me to buy a second-hand guitar from a pawn shop on Boar Lane. Apologies to anyone at that gig – it was possibly the strangest sounding electric guitar I have ever heard. I can only assume that I borrowed guitars for the remaining days.”

If Middlesbrough Borough Council are looking for a suitable act to re-open the Hall after its forthcoming refurbishment, they could do far worse than contacting Mr Catalyst and getting TSOM back to the grandiose arena – with a proper guitar sound this time.

(As usual, my thanks to all those who have helped – wittingly or unwittingly – to provide the detail in this post, including Phil Verne, LG, Bruno Bossier, QB and of course Mr Marx himself)

Sisters Mysteries III part 2

Another candidate for smallest audience for a Sisters gig would be a further 1983 gig, that on 27th April  at Swindon's Solitaire club. Swindon, famous for its connections with Brunel and the Great Western Railway, the infamous traffic Magic Roundabout and an enormous Honda factory, has a population almost ten times that of Retford, but the Wednesday night gig by TSOM at the Solitaire venue drew only a small crowd. Fortunately amongst those who were present was stalwart Sisters fan Simon Clifford, who says "I don't think that there were that many people at the gig, 30 at the most I would say." For many years there was a doubt that the gig had even taken place at all, until Simon generously shared his recording of the gig with the MyHeartland community of Sisters fans, and listening to that recording,

the small smattering of applause that follows each track gives a strong indication of the size of the gathering.

The venue itself was not a natural choice for a goth gig. As Simon recalls, "The venue was fairly small and was more of a nightclub than a concert venue. I can't remember if there was a support band - if there was, they obviously didn't make much of an impression on me.I only went to the Solitaire for two gigs, the Sisters being the first, and Xmal Deutschland was the second a few months later. The most interesting thing about that gig was that Liz and Robin from the Cocteau Twins were in the audience." A further indication that the nightclub had not really grasped the kind of clientele its series of alternative gigs would attract can be seen in this picture of a Hanoi Rocks gig there in 1983 which I found on the net (no tickets having surfaced from the TSOM gig).

The "solitaire" diamond ring logo hardly seems apt for a rock club, and the request that patrons wear "smart casual dress" might be judged a tad optimistic. Perhaps this clause and the management reserving the right of admission might account for the relatively low number of attendees at the Sisters gig! The gig itself saw the band rip through a familiar setlist, Von bigging up the then forthcoming Reptile House EP after "Burn" in his only real onstage comment, the rest of the songs following on from each other after only a few seconds left for the enthusiastic but unsustained applause from the small crowd. Even adding in the misfiring start for encore Body Electric, the whole gig weighs in at under 40 minutes, certainly not the longest they played that year, but the versions of Jolene, Floorshow and Gimme Shelter towards the end of the main setshow that the band could always rise to the occasion even if crowd numbers were disappointing.

Visitors to Swindon today would struggle to find the venue, as it has changed hands - and name - many times since. Like many of the other TSOM venues in 1983, it was in fact a part of a pub complex, in this case the Rolleston Arms in central Swindon.

A popular traditional pub built in 1890, the 300 capacity basement accessed via a separate entrance (under the red sign to the left of the picture) was the location of the Solitaire Club in the 1980s. As this BBC News article shows , the venue briefly hit the headlines two years ago when it closed shortly after an ill-fated revamp from the much-loved "The Furnace" rock club to the unsuccesful "Basement 73". After a period of uncertainty, the venue has reverted to its' post-Solitaire and pre-Furnace name, "Level 3", and hosts a fairly broad range of rock bands, many of which are tribute acts. If ever Ben Christo reactivates NightxNight as a touring band, he could do worse than seek out this dark and sweaty historic venue which rightly has a place in The Sisters' history.

(I would like to record my special thanks to Simon Clifford for his assistance with this post, and for sharing the reording of the gig. Not for the first time, I would also like to thank legendary archivist Phil "spiggytapes" Verne for his advice and support, including the extract from the contemporary NME gig guide above. Sounds like an interesting night in Sheffield - Leo Sayer or The Angelic Upstarts !)

Sisters Mysteries III

What was the smallest audience the Sisters ever played to ? Unfortunately, there are few eye witness accounts from the every earliest gigs in 1981, and those that there are tend to be very sketchy on details such as the size of the crowd.
There was of course the infamous gig in 1992 in the front room of competition winner Sabine Retz in Oberhausen, Germany (I remember being relieved at that time that I was not the "lucky" winner of the UTR subscriber prize draw and therefore did not have to submit the relative squalor I was then living in to a worldwide audience), but for regular gigs it would be hard to beat the tiny gathering at Retford's Porterhouse venue several months after Alice/Floorshow when the band had already been Sounds cover stars.
The tiny Georgian market town of Retford might be on the East Coast mainline of the UK railway system, but the sleepy North Nottinghamshire market town was a culture free zone before becoming famous in the 70s and 80s for the Porterhouse. The venue became a stop off for all up-and-coming bands making their way in the UK, and far more famous bands than TSOM (e.g. U2, AC/DC) also played there. The club was owned by the enterprising South Yorkshire businessman Sammy Jackson, and was situated on the pedestrianised Carolgate right in the town centre. Operating over two floors, the club hosted bands upstairs at weekends whilst DJs spun the usual chart fodder downstairs for the TopShop masses (on the same night !).
Generally speaking, the Porterhouse was a massive success, so much so that Jackson was able to scrape together the finance to launch Rock City in nearby Nottingham, which with similar excellent promotion and attention to detail has become one of Europe's top venues, and celebrates (like TSOM) its own thirty-fifth birthday this year.

The night TSOM played at the Porterhouse (a Saturday), 12th Feb 1983, must have been a real disappointment to Mr Jackson, however, as the two reports which have surfaced will testify. One fan, who posted their reminiscences on the My Heartland Forum, states that there "only about thirty or forty people there, and about ten of them (myself included) had travelled down there from Wakefield". The other account was discovered on a fitness website, with one poster stating that she saw TSOM "with ten others in Retford Porterhouse many moons ago". (an average of the two estimates gives us just twenty-five punters to see the number one indie band of the time !). Not surprisingly, no photos or tapes have emerged from the gig so far, but as with so many such cases, collectors live in hope that one day some artefacts will materialise.

As this wonderful archive photo of a Meteors gig (from a Porterhouse appreciation FB page) will demonstrate, the venue was relatively small, only holding 200 poeple, the walls were black and there was a tiny stage which offered no barrier between the band and fans, and was barely raised because of the low ceiling.This video of the UK Subs at the venue (which those with musical taste might want to view with the sound turned down) gives some impression of the atmosphere and intimacy of the club.

Sadly, like so many venues wehere TSOM played, the Porterhouse became a much trendier club with little or no emphasis on live music, and eventually closed its doors, being sold at auction in 2011 for £114,000, despite an online campaign to save it as a venue.

Sisters Mysteries II

One of the strange things about The Sisters of Mercy’s first European jaunt in 1983 (Trans Europe Excess) is that although there seems to be plenty of memorabilia and evidence from one country (Germany, with audio from three of the four gigs – including video for one - plus photos), there seems to be much less available for the Dutch leg of the mini tour. Naturally, for the Amsterdam Paradiso gig, the last gig of the four, there is plenty to be found, including superb audio recordings and the following review which was published in West Yorkshire fanzine Whippings and Apologies.

But for the others, very little evidence remains. In fact, no tickets, photo or audio have surfaced for the gig at the Effenaar in Eindhoven on Friday August 26^th 1983, although a copy of the legendary poster (with the band’s name on the back of a leather jacket) was sold on Ebay some years ago for a mind-boggling price, whilst for the following evening’s show at the Rotterdam Arena, only a poster advertising gigs that month (listing the Sisters as “pop uit Engeland”) under a much larger advert for Jo Lemaire (who was to support the band in Genk two short years later) has materialised.

The first gig of the tour, and the first indoor Sisters gig in Europe, is much better documented, partly because the venue, the Vera in the northern university city of Groningen, is still very much thriving today, and on its website can be found the results of their annual poll of gig-goers nominating their favourite concert of each year. As can be seen below, the fledgling band came in a very respectable fifth place, well ahead of Sonic Youth, Killing Joke and The March Violets (down in 29^thplace), and indeed one place higher than their gig at the same venue the following year managed in the 1984 poll.

Whilst a recording of the 1984 concert has been in circulation for many years (including the infamous soundcheck which included the likes of Heartbreak Hotel and, many years before Von would finally have the courage to sing it ‘live’, Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around), unfortunately there was no audio recording of the ’83 gig, although one collector has unearthed the original poster for the gig.

The Vera itself is something of an institution in Groningen, with its distinctive fish carving above the door, and was founded as a debating club in 1899 according to Dutch Wikipedia, and was an acronym of the Latin for “true and sincere friends”, becoming a more left-wing youth centre in the 60s and 70s. TSOM returned to Groningen on their thirtieth anniversary tour in 2011, playing at the much larger and more modern Oosterpoort.

 

Sisters Mysteries I

As we have seen in recent posts (particularly covering the Plan K alleged gig in Brussels), one of the biggest difficulties for TSOM aficianados trying to piece together the early 'live' history of the band is the lack of precise information available, even in these days of the internet and social media.
It's even harder when the gig took place at a tiny venue in a small town, and with a population just a couple of thousand shy of Retford's 20,000, Colne in Lancashire wins the accolade for the smallest town visited by the band on their early peregrinations across the UK, with the band stopping off to play in the Franc's club (allegedly named after the owner manager) in March 1983. Various other bands also played there on tours around that time (including King Kurt, New Model Army, Skeletal Family and the touring Batcave evening), but the precise date for the gig remained a mystery until recently, with two dates circulating, Monday 14th and Saturday 26th March.
It has become apparent that the former date was entirely due to the date on this pass :

which a fan had in his collection. However, the current owner of the pass, French TSOM specialist Phil Verne has been in contact with the original owner, and as the club was members only, this pass was in all likelihood issued in advance and the date marked on it was not necessarily the date of the gig. All other tour adverts and listings at the time, including the dates read out on The David Jensen show on Radio 1, indicate that the gig actually took place on Saturday 26th.

Unlikely corroboration for the gig having taken place comes from well-known anti sex abuse campaigner and Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk, who last year had the following Twitter exchange with former Word presenter Terry Christian amongst others :

Danczuk confirms that he saw TSOM at the venue, which he correctly describes as being on the corner of a shopping street. The two floor 250 capacity venue has undergone many different name changes over the years since the TSOM gig there, and was for a long time known as Zebras nightclub. These photos give some

indication of the size and location of the venue next to a pub, as does this one earlier this decade in the short-lived guise of the T3 club, before it became The Sugar House a couple of years ago, a name it retains to this day.

Remembering Wayne Hussey

Having recently commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the departures from the band of Gary Marx then Craig Adams, it would be churlish (temptingly so) to fail to do the same for Wayne Hussey, one of the dozen or so guitarists who have been members of the band over the past thirty-five years.

In terms of longevity, Hussey would barely make it into the top ten TSOM guitarists, having survived a mere eighteen months in the band, but his absence still casts a shadow over the band today for many fans of that era, particularly those whose love affair with the band started with First and Last and Always.

Leaving aside (for now) the bitter circumstances of his departure, Hussey was always a polemical figure amongst Sisters fans. For those who had followed the band closely throughout 1982 and 1983 (the Ben Gunn years), the era of blistering love performances and the “golden run” of Merciful Release singles topping the independent charts, there were already suspicions of the band’s direction now that a major label deal had been signed, and the recruitment of Hussey hardly served to allay these fears. The guitarist’s recent past as a seemingly willing clothes horse in Dead Or Alive’s ever more desperate attempts to crack the charts certainly didn’t help to convince any doubters, but neither did the first release from the new TSOM line-up (the insipid Body & Soul) nor his growing presence in interviews and live shows. Whereas Marx and Gunn had been happy for Von to do the talking, and had shyly kept their distance from the media, Hussey relished the limelight and seemed to have a growing influence over events, with Eldritch’s health apparently beginning to decline.

The same was true at gigs, with Hussey happy to flirt with the audience and mingle freely with the fans before and after shows, never far from a bottle of wine, seemingly breaking down some of the mystery and mystique his leader had deliberately created and indeed increased during that era, with the introduction of hats, dry ice, more subtle lighting etc.

Worse was to follow, with some blatantly chart-friendly compositions (Walk Away, for example) a far cry from the Reptile House and Floorshow days. Tensions within the band inevitably came to a head, and it came as little surprise to many that Marx (his role and influence diminished) left the band, shortly followed by Hussey and Adams. Eldritch had always made it clear that TSOM was effectively his band (with Marx seemingly willing to play a secondary role), but Hussey’s increasing dominance and apparent megalomania meant that a parting of the ways could not be avoided.

In the war of words which followed, I found myself clearly in Von’s camp, and was delighted that he won the battle for the band’s name. As much because of Craig Adams as anything, I tried to like Hussey’s new band, but found the predictable melodies and vacuous lyrics not to my taste, although they quickly built up a sizeable following which they retain to this day. I found the live spectacle even less palatable, the turgid, bombastic music matched by the over-bearing self-congratulatory pact between singer and audience, as he eagerly lapped up the adulation he had always craved. On both occasions I saw them (Sheffield Uni, November 1986 and Birmingham Hummingbird, March 1988) it was the support band (Rose of Avalanche and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry respectively) that stole the show in my (admittedly minority) opinion, and I have not been back to see them since.

Over the years, my opinion of Wayne Hussey has mellowed significantly. He now seems to be a sorted, humorous guy who respects the fact that the fans have stood by him, and his song-writing and singing have both improved, to the extent that I enjoy watching clips on YouTube of recent solo tours. And I’ve even revised my view on his time in the Sisters. Although a major disappointment to me at the time, FALAA is still an excellent album by most standards, and in Marian he contributed significantly one of the band’s signature songs. Subsequent revelations about Von’s health and working practices in the mid-80s might also lead one to a more generous appraisal of some of Hussey’s decision-making at the time, and he himself probably had demons which were also an influence on his actions. TSOM's subsequent releases and media game playing (particularly in the Floodland era) also helped me to cast Hussey less in the role of pantomime villain. 

All that being said, however, I can't imagine any circumstances in which I'd like to see him back in TSOM, and there's more chance of Mrs L convincing me to go and see Blood Brothers the musical than me going along with old goth pals to see The Mission.

Sisters gegen Nazis pt 2

One of the lingering issues at gigs for post-punk bands, along with the occasional "spitter" trying to recreate 1977, was the unpleasant presence of Nazi skinheads. Mark E Smith, famous for performing with his back to the audience, was not averse to jumping into the moshpit himself to sort out such unwelcome guests, and your humble scriobe was present at a Siouxsie gig in Derby in 1981 when, fed up with being heckled by a handful of Nazi punks, she returned to the stage resplendent in her "Israel" gold Star of David t-shirt. That shut them up.
The most infamous incident of this nature at a Sisters gig took place on the Dutch leg of the 1984 spring tour at the De Kapel club in Maastricht on the 6th of June (D-Day !), the night after the legendary Nijmegen gig featured in a recent post on this blog. Possibly as a result of over-indulgence the night before, the gig was not one of the band's best, featuring more bum notes than usual and some over-lengthy pauses between songs, as can be heard on the recording of the gig kindly uploaded onto YouTube by a friend of the original taper ("Hubert").

The incident of note takes place towards the end of the gig, at the end of Ghost Rider/Louie Louie when Von announces at the end of the main set "Unfortunately, we don't really feel like coming back and singing some more, whilst this man's got that t-shirt on. So until he takes it off, we're going." There then follows some audible"Sieg Heil"ing from the individual in question, roundly booed and whistled by the crowd. Von is then heard to say"We really don't want to hear any more about "white power", thank you. We just want you to take your shirt off". There then follows a huge cheer from the crowd, followed by more booing as the stand-off continues. Whilst this episode takes a few minutes on the YT version, on the original master it is an incredible 23 minutes between the end of the main set and the start of the encore, which says much about Von's principled stand and the crowd's patience. When the situation is eventually resolved, Von returns to the stage saying, "Sorry about that", before Craig launches the riff for quite probably the best ever rendition of "Fix", the lyrics seeming more appropriately ironic than ever as Von passionately spits them out. The incident was later mentioned by Adam Sweeting during a Melody Maker interview with the singer published later in the year, which gives more detail about the offending t-shirt.

Like many of the venues of that era (rather than today's custom-built barns), De Kapel itself had an interesting history. The gig poster above (another one kindly submitted by Belgian completist Bruno Bossier to the Sisters wiki) gives the venue as Capucijnengang, and the combination of monastic order street name and the venue name ("The Chapel") would lead a TSOM venue pilgrim to believe that this building :

which dominates the short street and is clearly no longer operating as a chapel, was the venue. However, the poster gives the address as "no. 3" whereas the fine whitewashed ex-chapel above is at no. 6 Capucijnengang. The real number three, although a fine old stout terraced mansion, would seem to be an unlikely gig venue, as this picture would suggest :

Catalogues of historic monuments in Maastricht (you can get a glimpse here of the fascinating life I lead) list no 3 Capucijnengang as the first home of the Jesuits in the town, an order known as (what translates as) "The Brothers of Masstricht" (a good name for a tribute band ?). In the second half of the nineteenth century, behind this rather unpromising and austere facade lay an enclosed courtyard in the traditional Low Countries style (like the famous Begijnhof in Amsterdam) containing a boys' boarding school and, of course, a chapel. The order was not immune to the gradual fall in numbers across the Christian faith in Western Europe in the post-war years and by 1968 the order had no need of its large premises any more.

According to my research, a 1960's Jesuit priest, noting the lack of facilities in the city for local youths, started a club for young people at the premises known as the Kombi, and as the 70s turned into the 80s this had become the major gig venue in town, where many post-punk bands played. In the early 80s as the Kombi came to an end, the venue lived on briefly under the name De Kapel, after the large former church (built in 1881) which dominated the site, and can be seen on the right of this archive rooftop shot of the series of rooms at the back of number three.

Sadly, however, the venue did not last much longer, and like many other previous TSOM gig hosts, the elegant chapel has now been fairly sympathetically converted to some rather swanky flats, with the buildings to its left (above) replaced by some rather brutal and architecturally inappropriate new flats no doubt intended to hark back to De Stijl but which would have Prince Charles in apoplexy.

The private courtyard can be reached through wrought iron gates by number 7 Capucijnengang, but sadly there is no blue plaque acknowledging its place in the town's - and The Sisters' - history.