Sisters Of Mercy - Sacrilege in the temple of love

The Sisters Of Mercy served as a genuine "point of no return" for British darkwave, especially in the span between 1983 (the year of the sublime run of singles that culminated in the legendary "Temple Of Love") and 1987, the year of the album Floodland. From this point on, their trajectory would be an unstoppable decline, with the exception of one last proud surge in 1992, when the reissue of "Temple Of Love" gave the band some fresh momentum, even propelling them to the top of the charts. Right in the middle of their golden period came, above all, their first full-length, First And Last And Always, the "manifesto" of the intentions of Andrew Eldritch, the band's singer and leader, later nicknamed "the messiah of goth", though at the time not yet the absolute master of the group he would soon become.

It took the band just a few years, however, to forge an utterly unique and inimitable style, one that actually arose from taking every stereotype of the genre to its extreme: their atmospheres were perhaps the most morbid and sickly of the whole movement, thanks above all to Eldritch's catacomb-deep vocals - which nonetheless owed a great deal to Ian Curtis - and his endless repertoire of perverse, infernal litanies; the scratchy guitars, the constant rumble of the bass, the spectral breath of the keyboards, by contrast, displayed an almost "polished" sound of extraordinary cleanliness, which served as the perfect "sacrificial altar" on which Eldritch could intone his black masses.

But above all, the Sisters Of Mercy emphasized danceability like no one else: their songs were as unsettling as any, yet their occult aura barely registered thanks to a constant alternation of powerful, driving rhythms. Their use of the drum machine would remain the most unmistakable trait of their sound: in fact, a specific technical term would even be coined, the "Avalanche" drum machine, to describe that synthetic, "Sisters Of Mercy-style" beat.

Gothic avalanche

The band formed in 1980 in Leeds, England. The "Sisters of Mercy" are the prostitutes in the song of the same name by Leonard Cohen: "We liked the ambiguity between the original meaning of the phrase, which referred to an order of nuns, and the one Cohen adopted," Eldritch would explain, "and prostitution also seemed like a great metaphor for a rock band."

The band's debut, the catacomb funk-punk of the single "The Damage Done", fails to make enough of an impact to break through in the hyper-competitive underground circuit of the early Eighties. But Eldritch's personality (born Andrew Taylor) soon takes over from the other "Sisters", namely Gary Marx (guitar) and Craig Adams (bass). Thus is born the lycanthropic Cramps-style voodoobilly of the new 45, "Body Electric", which updates that kind of sound to new wave standards with a demonic charge in the arrangements and a hammering beat that leaves no escape.

1983 is the year the band is consecrated into the dark pantheon of Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus and Joy Division. The Sisters of Mercy establish themselves with an ultra-electric rock, driven by obsessive jolts and steeped in esoteric references. A formula born of British dark-punk, but one that also draws on the morbid ballads of Velvet Underground and Stooges, the art-rock pantomimes of Pere Ubu, the neurasthenic electronics of Suicide, as well as Eastern litanies and Slavic folk. Their first hits follow in quick succession.

Alice, the title track of their debut EP, echoes Siouxsie's esoteric liturgies, conjuring a witches'-sabbath atmosphere with the barest of frills: a masterful guitar riff, the obsessive march of the drumming, and Eldritch's gloomy vocals, warped with echo effects guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. It is their first unsettling masterpiece.

In the other EP, Reptile House, also from 1983, Doors-like (Doors) atmospheres (“Lights”) merge with ceremonial thriller moods, as in the unsettling “Kiss The Carpet”.

Other successful singles from the period include “Anaconda”, a new claustrophobic hallucination driven by an infernal rhythm section, the spectral cover of “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, and the hypnotic “Heartland”, which unleashes yet another of their sick, irresistible melodies.

But triumph for Sisters Of Mercy comes above all with the single “Temple Of Love”, the definitive manifesto of their compelling gothic creed, made of dizzying rhythms, sinister vocalizations and relentless accelerations that stretch the tension to breaking point. It’s a tribal, horror-laced dance, vibrating on the strings of a hard-rock guitar struck by electric shocks, amid constant changes of pace, with Eldritch growing ever more delirious, playing a kind of David Bowie of darkness as he declaims lines like “In the temple of love, shine like thunder/ In the temple of love, cry like rain”. It’s the pinnacle of their art of horror ceremony and one of the masterpieces of darkwave as a whole.

Meanwhile the line-up settles – albeit with difficulty – into a quartet of unrepeatable quality: alongside Eldritch are the two guitarists Wayne Hussey (ex-Dead Or Alive) and Gary Marx (authors of most of the music) and bassist Craig Adams. A line-up inevitably overshadowed, however, by Eldritch’s messianic charisma, and one that would in fact dissolve right after the release of the debut album, with Hussey and Adams going on to found the excellent Mission.

The catchy Body And Soul, title track of the third EP, and the relentlessly rhythmic “Walk Away” serve as a prelude to the release of the English band’s first full-length work, which came out in 1985, by which point the first darkwave blaze was already nearly burnt out.

Across the water, across the wave

First And Last And Always (1985), being their first long-form effort, is a showcase of their entire aesthetic. And above all it contains what stands as the absolute masterpiece of the Sisters Of Mercy’s whole output, as well as unquestionably one of the greatest masterpieces of “dark” rock, not to say of rock in general: the extraordinary “Marian”, their darkest and most diseased esoteric ceremony, a ritual of eternal damnation recited by Eldritch in a register so low and deep it becomes almost an indistinct rumble, all married to one of their most irresistible cadences, an overwhelming rhythm that “Avalanche” detonates relentlessly for all six minutes of the track, while Hussey and Marx paint formidable guitar-arpeggio interplay and keyboard gusts in the background, and Adams’s bass pulses catatonically. “Marian” is the classic track that alone is worth an entire record, it is the “danse macabre” par excellence of dark music: an infernal whirlpool that, while inexorably dragging one toward darkness, still lets through one last glimmer of light and salvation: and thanks to the pounding cadence of “Avalanche”, it also becomes an exhausting, draining rite of self-purification, a dizzying nightmare impossible to resist. Placed, not by chance, at the exact midpoint of the album, “Marian” is the climax toward which this immense calvary moves, conducted to a disco beat rather than a processional one, which is First And Last And Always.

“Black Planet”, placed at the opening, is depressive, funereal (complete with liturgical choirs) and hypnotic in the best dark-punk tradition, but the following “Walk Away” immediately raises the heartbeat set by “Avalanche”, launching into a frenzied, paranoid dance that recalls – perhaps a bit too closely – the best of Cure. “A Rock And A Hard Place” is a technological, futurist version of the searing existential torments of Joy Division. Coming right after the tour de force of “Marian”, the title track almost seems to want to catch its breath for a moment, even as the electronic beats grow steadily heavier and more oppressive.

"Possession", on the other hand, is the track most steeped in the Ossianic atmosphere of a grim ritual of evil: slow and enveloping, it marks the beginning of the bottomless pit that is the album's final stretch. The first "circle" is "Nine While Nine", which like "Marian" launches into a frantic gallop, but this time the entire structure of the song seems held back by its own primal anguish: there is no release, only suffocating tension. "Logic" starts to lose the stability and geometric order that have characterized the songs so far: Eldritch's booming voice becomes a desperate invocation, a cry for help hurled into the desert, while around him the rhythms, keyboards and guitars all go mad and crumble into a thousand pieces.

The tormented journey of the dark messiah embodied by Eldritch thus reaches its endpoint with the album’s other masterpiece, the lengthy “Some Kind Of Stranger”, a melodrama worthy of the finest moments of “Closer” (Joy Division), that is, worthy of a place in the annals of music that makes the most heart-rending despair its very reason for being. The relentless beat of the drum machine finally eases off (in frequency, certainly not in tone, which remains devastating as ever), and instead of staging urgent, unbridled rituals of liberating the basest instincts, it offers this time for our contemplation a march of the damned led toward infernal shores. The apotheosis could not be more effective, with the splendid figures drawn by Wayne Hussey’s guitar, the tragic bursts of the keyboards, and above all Eldritch’s voice, which behind its solemn, pompous tone drips tears of genuine pain as only the best Nick Cave knows how to do.

The LP debut, however, also marks a final milestone, because the magic of the quartet formed with Adams, Marx and Hussey would never return: it was with this lineup that Sisters Of Mercy established themselves as the band that managed to transcend their genre, becoming the most “total” experience of Eighties dark-rock. The tensions, the fears, the depressions, the anxieties into which one sank alongside Ian Curtis and company finally found, with Sisters Of Mercy, an outlet: unbridled dance. Letting yourself be carried along by their relentless electro-rock odysseys, by their ritualistic, visceral drive, being enveloped by Eldritch’s voice, and not being afraid to sink with him into whirlpools of dark perversion, always breathless, dancing, unable to stop: Sisters Of Mercy present themselves above all as a “physical” sensation, even before a musical one.

Eldritch meets Steinman

The growing distance between Eldritch and the rest of the group, however, undermines the health of the project. The worsening of the leader’s health and psychological problems deteriorates it further. Just before the album’s release, in 1985, Gary Marx parts ways with the band during the tour, claiming that continuing to work with Eldritch had become impossible. The group nevertheless keeps the scheduled shows going, performing as a trio and bidding farewell to their fans with a final concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 18 June 1985. A video recording of this show was later released under the title “Wake”. Hussey too quits, joining Adams in a new gothic outfit, initially named Sisterhood and later – following Eldritch’s objections that it was too similar to the original name – Mission. The new group’s repertoire would also feature two songs (“Dance On Glass” and “Garden Of Delight”) that had already been recorded by Sisters Of Mercy with Eldritch on vocals, but which the leader had decided not to release.

Cornered, yet stubbornly determined to carry on, Eldritch moves to Hamburg, Germany, and rebuilds his project with renewed ambitions.

Sisters Of Mercy thus continue their journey into rock’s underworld with the excellent Floodland (1987), which draws on arrangements by Jim Steinman (the man behind the hits of Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler and many others) and the dark bass of Patricia Morrison (ex-Legal Weapon and Gun Club). The mighty hand of the “Wagner of rock” proves to be a tonic for the group, who change their skin, staging a new, memorable collection of psychodramas painted in dark hues.

The sound veers toward an even darker, more synthetic electronic palette, still pervaded throughout by an underlying wild violence, of which the opening (and monumental) “Dominion/ Mother Russia” is a superb synthesis, with its driving beat marked out by the drumming and bass underpinning the magnetic guitars and the contrast between Eldritch’s deep voice and Morrison’s softer one; the alternation of the medley’s two parts is perfectly judged: the first more explosive, the second slower and more syncopated.

Apocalyptic tones and the leader’s cutting timbre dominate the following “Flood 1”, an inescapable nightmare drowned in an abyss of sacred darkness: it is the fitting prelude to the apotheosis of “Lucretia My Reflection”, a new, gripping sepulchral dance revolving around an obsessive, relentless bassline, with Eldritch masterfully playing on the most theatrical inflections of his otherworldly crooning.

The frontman also looms large on the grim lied of “1959”, a ballad of enchanting sweetness brushed onto the piano, where the gentle chiming of the keys delicately wraps around a vocal that here turns into a melancholy whisper. And while “Flood 2” is the logical continuation of “Flood 1” – with new, precious and magnetic keyboard inlays opening up a glimmer of light, almost a narrow way out of the tunnel – the grandiloquent new tour de force of “This Corrosion” (with a forty-strong choir!) seals the climax of this unsettling electronic sound, propelled by icy synths and carried to glory by the “corrosive” backing vocals of Eldritch and Morrison. It's almost a grandiose negation of the bare post-punk austerity from which the English band had originally set out.

But after the electronic explosion, the record seems to almost implode in its final stretch, with the new electropop keyboards of the sinister “Driven Like The Snow”, set to the pulse of the bass, and Eldritch singing in an almost restrained, desolate way, in a pneumatic void, right up to the closing, dreamlike “Never Land”, with its synthetic trills proceeding mournfully in step with an increasingly shadowy, apathetic vocal.

These are formidable new chapters, which consolidate the English group's stature as one of the greatest incarnations of gothic rock, even though musical trends were by then shifting towards other genres. The gamble of bringing in an all-or-nothing producer like Steinman makes post-punk purists wince, but delights everyone else. The chart results bear this out too: number 7 on the UK chart and number 1 on the US alternative chart.

The following album, Vision Thing from 1990, is however something of a misstep, only partly redeemed by tracks like the title track and the tour de force “More”, in which Steinman's skilled hand can still be felt. By leaning harder into more classically rock sounds at the expense of the murkier shades, Eldritch – who has always rejected the “gothic” label pinned on him by critics and fans – ends up distorting the very alchemy that had made the band's fortune.

The lineup, meanwhile, has changed again, with the arrival of Tony James (ex-Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik).

Temple of the East

It's a 1992 coup de theatre, however, that revives the band's fortunes. A new version of “Temple Of Love” is released, embellished by a battalion of overdubbed heavy-metal guitars, but above all by the magical vocalizing of Israeli singer Ofra Haza, which unleashes the oriental soul of Eldritch's imagination. The track reaches number 3 on the British charts, becoming the British band's biggest commercial success.

That same year also saw the release of the compilation Some Girls Wander By Mistake (1992), an effective summary of their body of work, though it's missing the gem “Marian”.

The following year came the single “Under The Gun”, in which Eldritch duets with the sultry voice of Terri Nunn (ex-Berlin), edging close to lightweight pop.

A subsequent American tour with Public Enemy, however, fails to achieve the hoped-for results, and from this point on the Sisters of Mercy, in a dispute with their label (East West), release no new material, while bootlegs of every kind proliferate. “Yes, we're the band with the bootleg record,” Andrew Eldritch would later admit, while continuing in the meantime to write compelling songs, such as the solemn “We Are The Same Suzanne” or the sinister “Romeo Down”.

The Sisters' leader is a singular character. A fan of computers and philosophical sciences, he loves Depeche Mode and Pere Ubu, and is a skilled polyglot. “I've written a lot of material in German,” says Eldritch, who today lives between Germany and Holland, “and I spent fifteen years studying French. My Italian is decent, and I also know Latin. I can get by in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, but I've almost completely forgotten the Mandarin Chinese I learned at Leeds University. Chinese people in Europe, in fact, tend to speak only Cantonese. Finally, I can also translate texts written in Dutch, Flemish, Spanish and Portuguese. But I can only speak three languages fluently...”. Eldritch, known for his battles against Thatcherism in Britain, describes himself as “a Labour supporter with anarcho-syndicalist leanings” and has repeatedly denounced the damage done by individualism in 21st-century society: “We're trapped in a vicious circle of incoherent utilitarianism, in which no one has a value left to believe in. We've lost the ability to communicate with each other, we're all part of a game whose rules nobody knows. And even the fundamental cultural points of reference have gone missing. That's why even the Sisters struggle to get their message across. It's increasingly hard to break through general indifference. But I believe our lyrics, full of references and symbols, are still important”.

Thus, in 1998 Eldritch freed himself from his contract with East West, delivering the long-awaited new record under the pseudonym SSV. But “Go Figure” offers only disappointing techno music over which his voice mechanically repeats lines. Circulated unofficially on the internet, the work would never be officially released. The following year the English band embarked on a new US tour, reviving a legend that showed no sign of fading. The English outfit's live activity would continue for years afterward, bringing back old hits and new gems that had lain buried in the dust of time.

The Sisters of Mercy's odyssey along the routes of the afterlife marked a fundamental chapter in darkwave, and Andrew Eldritch's shamanic voice from the darkness remains, alongside those of Peter Murphy and Siouxsie Sioux, the most thrilling in the entire gothic genre.

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