![]() Eldritch was both Billy Fury and his own Larry Parnes. Marx’s analogies also give a sense of how far Eldritch was prepared to push his stage act into the ridiculous, but not how sexy it was. Or Rob Davis to his Les Gray gives some idea of the incongruity of us as a pairing.” Marx refers to it as him playing “Dave Hill to his Alvin Stardust in some weird Glam era mash-up. “Most obviously I wasn’t Andrew.”Īdams and Gunn and a Roland TR-808 drum machine, christened like all its predecessors Doktor Avalanche, held things down while the Marx/Eldritch dichotomy ran rampant. “In terms of what I brought to the party,” Marx recalls. The key dialectic was stage right: Marx, tall and broad-shouldered, winkle-picker held together by gaffer tape charging around slashing at his guitar and Eldritch in shades, a riot of black leather, svelte and sinuous, wafting his cigarette around, manipulating his mic stand and twitching his crotch. Left to right: Marx, the lead guitar player Andrew Eldritch the singer Adams the bass player Ben Gunn, the second guitarist. These unlikely environs witnessed the band at their live peak, an encapsulation of what was special, even odd, about them.įirstly, there was the austerity of the visual presentation: no smoke, minimal light show, no drummer, not much backline, just four men virtually in a row. On ApThe Sisters of Mercy played a gig in in the sports hall of the Technical College in Peterborough, a town, then as now, rarely visited by travelling rock bands. ![]() “I knew the band was bigger and better than the four of us.” “We had some good tunes but it was always about much more than the notes.” “Damn right, we were formidable then,” believes Gary Marx, The Sisters’ guitarist. Their ascent would not have been possible without their own peculiar tastes and talents but it also depended upon the fervour of their friends, the myriad kindnesses of strangers and the devotion of their followers. Thought became deed: The Sisters murdered rock & roll and kept it vibrantly alive at precisely the same time. In their golden year, the two came together. However, long before they became a great band, they were a great idea. The Sisters in some form or other had existed since 1980 and had meandered through two years of intermittent gigging and sundry line-up changes without much attention being paid to them. Yet, the Sisters’ rise – unlike that of The Smiths – had been a slog. Both bands’ most recent singles – ‘Temple Of Love’ and ‘This Charming Man’ - had just been to Number 1 in the Indie Charts. In November 1983, The Sisters and The Smiths were in similar, if trans-Pennine, positions: both bound for glory, yet still to make an album, their reputations based on the stage and short-form vinyl. Nor could The Sisters afford a graphic designer, so they created their own logos, posters and record covers with Letraset sheets, Pantone colour charts and by deploying found images: the sleeve of an Alice Cooper album, an anatomy textbook, a photo in National Geographic and a print of a Matisse Blue Nude. We were just making it up as we went along, but you catch some bands early and they have this energy and this thrust.” “We didn’t really know what we were doing. Very basic,” remembers their bass guitarist Craig Adams. Their equipment was primitive - sometimes borrowed, sometimes homemade, often junk – and playing their own repertoire properly was often a stretch for them. When things did click during 19, they were operating on a shoestring budget and with limited musical ability. For all its shortcomings, Leeds made The Sisters.Īs their own shortcomings made The Sisters too. The bond between band and city were unshakeable. Yet, The Sisters remained steadfastly a Leeds band during their golden year, even as they outgrew the city that had birthed and nurtured them. ![]() ![]() So The Sisters started their own and ran it as a cottage industry out of that self-same semi. So The Sisters made their records in Bridlington, a Yorkshire resort town, in an 8-track studio near the seafront. It had places for bands to play, but it didn’t have a decent recording studio. Leeds - one of the least lauded cities with a post-punk scene – was at the time being laid waste by the pyroclastic cloud of Thatcherism. Yet, this unlikely ascent was incubated in a non-descript semi-detached house in an area of north-west Leeds better known for its high concentration of students and takeaways than rock action.
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