INTRODUCTION The following reviews I transcribed from an NME one off special about Goth that collected various clippings from old NME and Melody Maker magazines. They are transcribed in sic; hence the few spelling errors you may notice. Enjoy. Josh Passmore ADRENOCHROME MM, 15 April 1982, p22 Ha! So there’s life in the old beast yet, the creature in question being “a form of music characterised by a simple repetitive beat and extremes of volume, popular among the young during the post-war economic boom.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1993 edition.) Rock, that is. The Sisters come from Leeds, wear young rebel trousers and make a din so glorious they sound like they stumbled on rock music by accident without ever having heard a note of it before. About six plays after first digging this from the bottom of the vinyl junkyard, the brain-wiping riff of ‘Adrenochrome’ still sounds like the greatest four-chord sequence ever invented. Look, the Stones, The Kinks, The Byrds, the Pistols, the Stooges, The Clash and all the other morons were just testing our a few ideas. THIS was the riff they were looking for. Put it this way: it’s not bad. Vocal-wise the lead Sister (a male) sounds like Lux Interior if he were given a decent group and some proper songs instead of a collection of musical cripples like The Cramps . . . or Ian Curtis on ‘Transmission’, even. Purchase. Lynden Barber ALICE/FLOORSHOW NME, 27 November 1982, p17 They’re sounding not unlike The Psychedelic Furs, this group - he said, crushing their chances of a fair hearing in one feel swoop. No, don’t be put off. This is dark and powerful stuff from Yorkshire’s Sisters. Maybe a bit too dense for extended listening, but this much I like a lot. And a big improvement on their ‘Adrenochrome’ debut. Paul Du Noyer BODY AND SOUL NME, 4 August 1984, p16 Here’s a nugget to start with. As I write, ‘Body And Soul’ has crashed into the Hot 100 at - let’s see, now - number 100. Oh well, it’s magnificent all the same: a gorgeous swell of sensurrounding warmth. Where will the indie charts be without them? . . . Paul Du Noyer FIRST AND LAST AND ALWAYS MM, 16 March 1985, p28 James Dean is alive! He’s living in a flat in Leeds disguised as Andrew Eldritch - a 24-hours-a-day enigma, complete with permanently affixed shades. Last year it seemed that success had alluded the Sisters once and for all. But their new album is packed with glistening gems, and just as Andy’s beat up crow hat appears to be riveted to his head, so his lugubrious baritone-drone rivets the attention - in turns commanding, then inviting, following a path wrought with morbid depressing and reeking of misery. “I have heard a million conversations going where they’ve been before/I don’t care for words that don’t belong.” Ah, music to hum over the three-minute warning. Yet the doom-ridden, gloom-trodden world of the Sisters is but half their appeal. Delicacy showers the spheres of ‘Black Planet” as Wayne’s infectious guitaring slopes and spirals around words cradled with dark innuendo, rhymes invested with sparks of aggression, and a chorus that once heard, is never to be forgotten. The Sisters supplement the intensity of ‘Walk Away’ with the bittersweet tang of ‘No Time to Cry’, while ‘A Rock And A Hard Place’ breathes life into the ossified remains of post-punk using Eldritch’s dulcet tones to bind together the ornaments of instrumentation as they dance on the grave of circumstance. The second side unveils Celtic guitars that career through arid wastelands until they’re swept up by the blistering chorus of ‘First And Last And Always’. The surge of drums finally yields to a sustaining piano note that stretches suspense to a point only dreamt of by Hitchcock. God forbid, but these songs are almost explosive enough to launch a goth revival (the third this year?). Have Mercy! And pass the razor blades. Andrew’s sense of humour rattles with such ominous overtones that laughter takes fright and takes flight. His prowling voice veers dangerously close to Pastiche, but the songs are so striped with splinters of power and pain, his words remain dangerous. Here, all past promises have been fulfilled: the Sisters have successfully accumulated a startling array of timeless jewels. It can only be a matter of time before they accumulate success. Ted Mico NO TIME TO CRY MM, 16 March 1985, p27 First Killing Joke, now Andrew and his wonderful Sisters. Whether it’s a remarkable and strangely coincidental coming together of the untouchables and the pop marketplace or something a lot more contrived is hard to say, but who really gives a tinker’s diddly one way or the other? What counts now is that this is the Sisters’ best ever slice of slime, with Andrew down in his boots as always but the rest of the band delivering an edge that must make this a monster hit with the previously uncommitted housewife. Laugh if you want, but far better Crazy Andrew than 100 cuddly toys. Barry Mcllheney GIFT MM, 26 July 1986, p28 It all looked so obvious. Minimalist packaging and one of those glossy black sleeves that’s covered with thumbprints before you’ve even got the record out. It all looked like an attempt to carry on precisely where The Sisters Of Mercy left off. So we’re barely into the first track, ‘Jihad’, when I think I hear a Mantronix-style handclap. Surely not. Must’ve put the wrong record on. No, there it is again, and over a stomping Eurobeat that would make the boys from DAF proud. Things, I think, could be looking up. None of that silly singing-into-my-boots from Andrew Eldritch that always made the Sisters slightly comical. And when he does sing, on the version of the single ’Giving Ground’, it sounds like Peter Murphy having a dark moment. Eventually I’m ground under by a relentless synth beat that crushes all colour in its path. What the hell is this? Check the credits. Ah, Alan Vega from Suicide. It fits. It’s the kind of music you’d call industrial if there was any industry left in this country. The kind of music you’ll hear on a train travelling through the Frankfurt conurbation. Phil DC GIVING GROUND MM, 1 February 1986, p26 Can’t quite understand what’s going on here. ‘Giving Ground’ was apparently written and produced by Sisters Of Mercy Andrew Eldritch along with the hideously old Lucas Fox, whom hairier readers may remember from the original 1902 Motorhead line-up. The great man doesn’t actually appear on the track, however, and it’s up to someone called James Ray to inflict terror via the tonsils. It doesn’t quite work and sounds at times a little like the tune to Lytton’s Diary - that is until those Banshees baselines creep in, then it sounds like something you get pissed to in dodgy German discos. The instrumental version on the B-side fares a little better and is probably nice background music for those nights you have to stay in and wash the blood off the walls. Mat Smith FLOODLAND MM, 21 November 1987, p31 Facing up to the fact that nothing is new tends to separate the mice from the men. Some, like George Michael, plagiarise. Others, like The Cult, feign ignorance. Eldritch mocks, uses choirs and Coleridge, taunts pop with its elders and betters. ‘Floodland’ is more and less the same album as ‘First And Last And Always’. It’s more in that Eldritch’s awareness of mortality has spread from the knowledge that nothing is new to the opinion that nothing is worthwhile; and it’s less in that being incapable of contemplating nothing, it reacts to time running out by amputating all the curlicues of guitar and replacing them with stark, essential foundations. ‘Floodland’ is an edifice to decay in which Eldritch unleashes all his paranoia and obsession. The gargantuan ‘Dominion/Mother Russia’ finds out hero forsaking that job in the diplomatic corps and pleading with Mother Russia to “rain down”, while the magnificently minimal ‘This Corrosion’ cleaves through its own pompous austerity to admit “I got nothing to say I ain’t said before”, a revelation which, far from suggesting a lack of imagination, indicates a surfeit of it. That admission, alongside the metallic Luftwaffe slap of ‘Lucretia My Reflection’, the breakdown of language during ‘Floodland II’ or the (surely)sampled nuclear depth charge drums from Led Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’ on ‘Neverland’, is a mark of shocking honesty. When Eldritch sings “Seconds to the drop but it feels like hours ...” the red light starts winking on the dashboard and we realise that ‘Driven Like The Snow’ is ‘Nine While Nine’ revisited because he can do nothing else - we’re all waiting. Dying on record’s a dicey business, especially when it’s world destruction that nags your every waking minute because there’s nowhere to go artistically. Facing up to that, ‘Floodland’ is a triumph of sorts, neither optimistic enough to suggest there’s a Noah’s Ark nor pessimistic enough to accuse us all of navigating a ship of fools. It simply says rust never sleeps and this is what it sounds like. Great. Steve Sutherland THIS CORROSION NME, 26 September 1987, p19 Yes, the King of Goth is back! Heeeeeeere’s SPIGGY!!! Andy ‘Drac’ Eldritch (real name - Stan Sunshine) has made a record and it’s the lamest thing to crawl out of Leeds since Norman Hunter’s last sparring partner quit town. Steven Wells DOMINION NME, 20 February 1988, p19 And from the eagle has landed to the ego has landed and here we go with Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison and The Sisters Of Mercy, who are probably the most enigmatic post-goth group in Britain. It’s not mere accident that Eldritch has shifted his base to Hamburg. It’s a move that taps into a vein so deep we could even suggest that the thin white spook is to contemporary pop what Wagner was to the composers of his day. Such a claim would at least be within the same boundaries of camp satire that flit in and out of the ‘Floodlands’ LP and indeed most of the Sisters’ work. Throughout ‘Dominion’, Eldritch’s vocals and music roar with enough confident pomp to silence any critic’s whinge in seconds. If Alvin Stardust had ever read Byron then he would have cut it to this day like the Sisters do. James Brown LUCRETIA, MY REFLECTION MM, 4 June 1988, p32 Like a shrouded owl and a tattered pussycat sitting claw in paw in a barge made of weeds, Andrew Eldritch and his reflection essay the bare bones of a furious, curious passion. Torment, terror, tears; black eyes, bruises, some blood; reckless driving, one way or another. Isn’t it all about this? I’ll never stop listening. Carmen Keats VISION THING NME, 27 October 1990, p40 There was nowhere to go after ‘Floodland’. Eldritch stood on the brink of the void, posing an ever more crushing question: what do you do when you’ve grasped the glory of the global death kick and the holocaust just don’t come? So Eldritch did a whole lot of nothing. He hung around Hamburg and laughed his hollow self hoarse at the black joke he’d played upon himself until, well, finally he had to do something. So he did what the rest of us do. He plunged headlong into life’s little pleasures - sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll - all the sideshows that, whether we care to admit it or not, we employ to distract us from our inevitable end. And guess what? When the smoke cleared and the sweat dried and Eldritch stood there blasted and brazen and sore to his soul, he realised something that raised a pulse in his dead creativity. He realised that all our little pleasures fuck us up too. At last Eldritch had stumbled upon the rudimentary impulses of rock, something his intelligence had shielded him from before - betrayal and revenge in all their devious guises. So ‘Vision Thing’ is a beauty of vindictive bile, a self-inflicted bruise. It’s a paradigm of self-delusion, Eldritch apparently under the impression that, if he adopts a cruel, devil-may-care attitude, that bitter power will serve as a temporary salvation, a vacation from the doubts that gnaw at his vanity. It’s probably the best he could hope for. I think it’s quite magnificent. With a truly epic petulance, Eldritch has cast himself in a series of imaginary movies so audacious, one can do nothing but crack a grin and salute him. “Twenty-five whores in the room next door” - that’s the way it starts! The Sisters’ characteristic brooding is blasted to shreds by a riff ransacked from Eldritch’s favourite comic book heroes, The Screaming Blue Messiahs, and kamikaze driven into a collision of sweet ass and brutal assassination by ex-Only One John Perry. Cut to the perv parlour game - ‘Ribbons’, in which Eldritch, a victim of his own desires, is taunted for his weakness by the god of his disgust. “Love is a many splintered thing”, he puns, smug bastard, and men with more sin than sense nod knowingly. If ‘Detonation Boulevard’ is more Billy Idol napalm than Iggy Pop art nihilism, ‘When You Don’t See Me’ is a wicked conceit. “Get real”, he advises the babe he’s using, “Get another”. This macho Eldritch is one wounded beast and, when he makes emotional demands in ‘More’, the single Steinman spiced up with wailing chicks, it’s as if his spite is leading some poor stray into committed suffering. If I can’t escape the pain, he seems to be saying, it amuses me to pass it on. My favourite Mr E is ‘Doctor Jeep’, where, across a riff like an accelerating Harley, our wretched matinee idol St Vitus dances through a rush of TVOD, the inanity, the corruption, the hypocrisy, the lies all embraced as evidence amassed in his case against the world. It’s ridiculously petulant, of course, puerile even, but what great rock ‘n’ roll ain’t? Eldritch wants us to think he’s beyond worrying - it’s his greatest con yet. He’s calling the trials and tribulations down upon his head because it makes him feel alive. That’s why he’s hauled out Tony James, a figure unfairly but hopelessly ridiculed by many. It’s Andy’s big ‘Fuck you’. Even when he gets vulnerable in ‘I Was Wrong’ and ushers us into a bar-room confessional, he draws us in just close enough to slip a metaphoric blade down his sleeve and deliver devastation. “I can love my fellow man”, he says in an awful whisper, “But I’m damned if I’ll love yours”. His quick wit even betrays the crisis of heartbreak and ‘Something Fast’, a melancholy anthem to the elixir of hedonism, is a fragile masterpiece of staged suffering. “I’ve seen the best of men go past”, he sings in pained contradiction of resignation and melodrama, “I don’t wanna be the last”. it’s harrowing and hilarious and, behind the theatricality, more honest than he ever hopes we’ll know. Steve Sutherland MORE MM, 13 October 1990, p40 I don’t mean to be a killjoy. I do realise that Andrew Eldritch is the funniest cartoon character this side of Bart Simpson and Bart’s big brother Billy Idol. But I have a horrible suspicion that there are people over the age of 12 who take this laughable nonsense seriously, and that’s truly sad. ‘More’ is the usual dull, gruff, absurdly pompous rumble punctuated with plastic soul wails about needing love - as if Eldritch didn’t adore himself with more than enough torrid passion to make any other lover redundant. Dave Jennings