A Shirt on Sunday: Sisters of Mercy - 20/09/19 - Roundhouse

Sisters of Mercy was another ‘right album; right time’ band.
In 1987 I had my first real job, as presentation controller at Super Channel, a long-gone pioneer of satellite broadcasting, back when Sky had one channel and was our direct competition. My role was to oversee the computer system running the playout machines and ensure the right tapes were on the right machines so that everything went out in the right order at the right time. It’s the job responsible for putting up the “We apologise for this temporary fault…” caption. We played a lot of music videos, and one day, a video by Sisters of Mercy appeared.

‘This Corrosion’ was the meeting point of 1980’s club music and heavy metal. I didn’t realise for ages that it was produced by Jim Steinman, but in retrospect it’s obvious. A massive over-production with a choir and operatic flourishes, it hit the top-10 in the UK. The video showed the band performing in a rainy, post-apocalyptic night-time London back alley. As did most pop videos of the late 80s. I loved it! And the follow-up ‘Dominion’ (same video, but in the desert in daylight). The third single ‘My Lucretia’ was blue-tinged monochrome in a factory. Thus they covered all three possible music video scenarios in one album.

The Sisters arose at the start of the decade as a bedroom project in Leeds, with its only constant member being the singer Andrew Eldritch. Eldritch started off as drummer but quickly gave it up and they have since relied on Doktor Avalanche - a Boss drum machine, which over time has evolved in to a Mac laptop running Cubase and also added bass guitar to its arsenal. At one point Wayne Hussey was in the band, but they broke up and he went off to form The Mission. For a while Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik was played the bass, and for a while they even had a bass player who didn’t play bass but she looked great on the videos…

For whatever reason, I’d never seen the live. They haven’t released a record since the early 90s and I’d figured there was nothing going on, until a guy I was working with said he’d “seen Sisters of Mercy at the weekend”. They seem to tour irregularly, mainly in the autumn, when they play at the Roundhouse. For various reasons I’ve not been able to go see them, but this year I finally got a ticket.

The support was Amenra, a bunch of Belgian miserablists whose music involves a wall of guitar noise, with screaming. It’s an acquired taste and somewhat hypnotic with the cheesy Hammer Horror back projections and concern over the singer’s larynx.

The Sisters’ stage set appears to be the Brandenburg Gate with a bunch of mirrors angling down. It’s all very jagged, so much so that the safety curtain gets stuck and the dramatic flourish of dropping the curtain takes a few minutes to resolve. But that’s okay because the dry ice then envelops the stage, the lights blind us and the band arrives (not that we can see them) and launch into ‘More’. These days Eldritch has a shaven head and looks like Hunter S Thompson in his later years. He still stalks around the stage and throws a mean shadow when backlit. The guitar players bounce around like they should be in Guns’n’Roses and in the back some pillock dances around in a loud shirt and looks after the computers.

Performance-wise, this confirms my suspicion that a band with bass and drums pre-recorded lose a lot of impact. There’s a lack of dynamic on stage and a feeling that they could play faster and harder but the speed and attack are set by the computer. You can hear Doktor Avalanche, and you can hear the two guitarists, but Eldritch himself is just a murmur. In the choruses, the guitarists’ voices are clear as bell, but still Eldritch is barely there. I decided it was just bad sound at the front, so moved back to near the mixing desk, where the balance was definitely a bit better. Then Eldritch shouts and it’s bloody loud, making it clear that for a lot of this he is just murmuring into the microphone.

Song-wise we got all the hits, a few of the recent unreleased songs and some obscurities, including the wonderful ‘Flood II’. The encore is the big singles and finally Eldritch raises his voice and the clarity give a boost to the performance and the audience.

This was the first of the tour, so maybe they just need to settle in or compress the vocals a bit to lift them in the mix. So this gig was a tick off the list, but I’m not sure I’d go to another one.

Setlist

Videos

Taken off the web so credits on the pages

First and Last and Always

Taken from at the gig, and one of the better offers on the web. Some are just dire, so here's a couple of classics...

This Corrosion

Temple of Love

The Ofra Haza remix, 10 years after the original was released, marking pretty much the end of the band as a recording entity.