Sisters Of Mercy Alice Ep
2021年7月16日Download here: http://gg.gg/vf7ga
Sisters photographs either by Les Mills or unknown
‘Alice’ – the song that more than any other changed Andrew Eldritch’s life - was written in ten minutes while sitting on a sofa.
Eldritch recalls that he “didn’t sit down to write an attitude-adjusting single with more ambition [than previous songs] but the success of ‘Alice’ made me have a re-think. Things were different after that.”
The Sisters of Mercy’s Alice / Floorshow / Phantom / 1969 EP was a 4-song EP including both the a- and b-sides from the Alice / Floorshow single, the b-side from Anaconda / Phantom, and one of the b’s from Good Things (i know little about that release. Don’t even know if the song is the same version). Bypassing some of the earlier soul-searching efforts, this could arguably be the true. The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice EP - Amazon.com Music. Skip to main content. Try Prime CDs & Vinyl Go Search EN Hello. On this date in 1982, The Sisters Of Mercy released their third single, ’Alice’. It was backed by ’Floorshow’. Neither track appeared on an album. Discover releases, reviews, credits, songs, and more about The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice at Discogs. Complete your The Sisters Of Mercy collection. The Sisters of Mercy Alice / Floorshow (1982) Single Alice Pass the crystal spread the Tarot In illusion comfort lies The safest way the straight and narrow No confusion no surprise Alice in her party dressed to kill She the thanks you turns away She needs you like she needs needs her pills To tell her that the world’s okay.
‘Alice’ transformed him from Andy Taylor – an “unprepossessing youth”, unemployed, and a college drop-out twice over – into the mesmerising, near mythical Andrew Eldritch.
Before ‘Alice’, Andy Taylor was just one of many habitués of a grimy Leeds punk club who had a band on the side. “Eldritch” was just a name Taylor used when he made records and played gigs, neither of which he did that often.
’Alice’ began a sequence of stunning EPs and live shows that made Eldritch the most compelling British rock & roll performer of his generation. And this is the story of how on earth that happened.
Taylor was born in Ely; Eldritch was born in Leeds. This is also the story of where on earth that happened.
History has been kinder to other vibrant post-punk centres - Manchester, Glasgow, Coventry, Sheffield or London – than it has been to Leeds. Yet, to know these Sisters - no hats, no dry ice, pre-Warners, pre-Hussey - one must also know Leeds. Red Leeds, post-punk Leeds, post-industrial Leeds, post-Yorkshire Ripper Leeds, post-Division One Leeds; Leeds before it became Gotham City.
Andy Taylor – a 19-year-old Deep Purple fan, with “shoulder blade length red hair” and “one pair of shoes, this old pair of trainers I’d been wearing since I was fifteen” – arrived in Leeds to study Chinese at the University in October 1978. It was his first time in the city. His knowledge of the north of England had been limited to episodes of Coronation Street. “I discovered it was a documentary,” he says.
He had parted company with St John’s College, Oxford so late in the previous academic year that the University of Leeds had very little student accommodation left. Taylor was lodged way out of town near Leeds United’s Elland Road ground “in a housing estate of utter grimness, which has since been declared uninhabitable and knocked down.”
Yet, Taylor liked Leeds instantly. That The Ramones were playing The University the week he arrived, no doubt eased his transition. “I must have gathered from that, from fliers or talking to people that there was this F Club.”
If there is one place in Leeds that can claim to be the birthplace of Andrew Eldritch it was “this cellar dive.”
The F Club was the Leeds equivalent of Eric’s in Liverpool. It was in the basement of Brannigan’s nightclub down the bottom end of town near The Dark Arches, a complex of vaults under Leeds railway station.
The F Club was run by the great Leeds promoter, John Keenan. “I used to do at least two nights a week down there,” he recalls. “The manager of Brannigan’s was very forward thinking: two discos on top, punk club below.”
Danny Horigan who roadied for The Sisters (and would later sing in Salvation under the name Danny Mass) remembers The F Club thus: “At the bottom of the stairs, there was a pool room and then you went round the corner to where the bands were on – stage at one end, DJ at the side of the room. Really low ceiling, proper dirty, sweaty punk club.”
A decade later The Duchess of York pub in Leeds became legendary because Keenan put on Nirvana, Oasis, Pulp, Coldplay and Radiohead before they were massive, but for Keenan, “The F Club at Brannigan’s had the more important bands.”
Pere Ubu with The Human League supporting sticks in Keenan’s mind. Eldritch’s too: “That’s my favourite gig ever. I’m still haunted by the dual genius of it. I just can’t think of that happening anywhere else, at least not with the same intensity.
“The big bands played the Uni so we’d trot up there from time to time but it definitely wasn’t home, whereas The F Club had all the new stuff, all the time. I practically lived in The F Club.”
As well as the draw of the bands, there was the lure of the DJ, Claire Shearsby. The unprepossessing youth found himself “going out with the glamorous DJ and we lived together for years.”
Shearsby and Taylor were sketched by The Mekons:
’In the flat above the chemists
Andy and Claire are dressing to kill
But they don’t come out till after dark
In Charlie Cake Park.’Sisters Of Mercy Alice Ep 1
“He’d be down at every gig with Claire,” recalls Keenan. “When Claire was DJing and wanted to go to the bar or to toilet or whatever, Andy would take over for a bit and all he ever played was Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Gary Glitter.”
“You could always tell when I’d taken over,” Eldritch confirms “because on came the Glitter.”
October 1978 - the month Andy Taylor came to Leeds – was when the F Club had moved to Brannigan’s
Keenan had first begun putting bands on at the height of punk in the summer of 1977 in the Common Room of Leeds Polytechnic. He billed these nights as ‘Stars of Today’. The music was “basically punk – The Slits, Slaughter & The Dogs, XTC,” he says. “When the students came back after the holiday, the new Common Room Committee wouldn’t let me have the regular weekly club. So basically I said ‘Fuck the Poly’”.
This was the “F” in F-Club.
“It was such a good group,” remembers Keenan. “All the intelligent kids - not necessarily university kids; there were kids from the estates - who realised change was in the air and had attached themselves to the club.”
“When I moved from the Poly I thought ‘How am I going to keep them together?’“ Keenan’s answer was “to form a club and give them a club card that cost a quid and would get them reductions at some of the punk shops in Leeds, like X Clothes.”
The F Club’s first home was The Ace of Clubs – a decaying cabaret joint - where it only ran from September to December 1977. “I put a fair selection on - Wilko, Siouxsie,” remembers Keenan, “but there was a fire and the insurance wouldn’t pay out.”
After the Ace of Clubs, Keenan moved The F Club to The Roots Club, a primarily West Indian venue in the Chapeltown area of Leeds. This was a former synagogue that had gone under various names: The International Club, The Cosmopolitan Club, The Glass Bucket. As the venue of The F Club it hosted, among others, Suicide, Joy Division, Magazine, Wayne County and The Electric Chairs and Wire.
Claire Shearsby DJ’ed at all the locations of the F-Club, even at the ‘Stars of Today’ nights at the Poly. “She was there at the birth of it,” states Eldritch. “Absolutely. People don’t give her enough credit. A lot DJs would have baulked at playing the stuff she did. She was like the John Peel of Leeds.”
Brannigan’s was the longest lasting of The F Club’s locations. It was there that the three young men who would become The Sisters of Mercy met. Craig Adams from Otley, a market town about 10 miles outside Leeds; Mark Pearman from Hull; and Andy Taylor were some of “the bright kids with some style about them”, in Keenan’s words, who were drawn to The F Club, in Adams’ case, illegally so, since he was underage.
In the Leeds post punk music scene, “there was a very definite divide between art school uni types and the townies”, recalls Eldritch. “The F Club was very much a townie affair. I was much more townie than student and my academic record proves it; I fell in with the dirty crowd.”
The ur-F Club townie band were The Expelaires. “The Expelaires were like the house band,” remembers Eldritch. “They had their tendrils in pretty much everything,”
Bass player Mark Copson went on to sing in Music For Pleasure; guitarist David Wolfenden joined Red Lorry Yellow Lorry; Carl “Tich” Harper became the drummer with Girls At Our Best; and the singer Paul “Grape” Gregory formed 3000 Revs with future Sister, Adam Pearson. Craig Adams the rhythm guitarist-cum-keyboard player went on to form a Soft Cell-ist electro pop duo called Exchange before becoming the bass player in The Sisters.
In the art school camp were Gang Of Four, The Delta Five and The Mekons.
Jon Langford, the drummer in The Mekons agrees that, “the distinction was quite pronounced at first; there was a class/geographical element to it. The Mekons and Gang of Four were mostly public school boys from the south of England. Me and Dave Allen (from Gang Of Four) and Ros (from The Delta 5) were more regional and hickish.” To complicate this matrix, Jon King, Gang Of Four’s singer was both working class and a public school boy.
“The F Club was a wonderfully accepting and inclusive place, except for Nazis,” Eldritch recalls. His own trajectory from private school to Oxford and his accent - close to Bowie’s well-spoken Bromley – mattered little to the working class West Yorkshire locals of The F Club. The long red haired Southerner was made more than welcome.
Although Taylor had oriented himself away from the University, he was still acquainted with the Gang of Four, but not within their inner circle. He was impressed by them then – not least because they were unemployed and in a band – and he remains so, nearly 40 years later: “They had these amazing songs and they played so well. They were hard and bouncy. They had everything but they couldn’t fully commit to the glorious stupidity which is being in a rock & roll band.”
Taylor – as Eldritch – could and it made him a star.
Taylor’s path crossed with the other ‘art school’ bands more.
“Claire and I used to hang out with Ros from The Delta 5 because she lived a few doors away from us,” remembers Eldritch. “She was – probably still is – a lovely, lovely person.”
“The Mekons were fun to hang out with too,” he adds. “They were doing stuff like ‘Teeth’ at the time, which is very good indeed. We used to get on very well with Kevin Lycett and Jon Langford.” Langford recalls that he “used to go round to Claire and Andy’s flat and watch old Doctor Who episodes on a tiny black & white TV.”
Eldritch pays particular tribute to Lycett: “I owe a lot to him. He encouraged me in my quest to learn a little bit about being in a band and scrimp and save for visits to the studio and keep hammering away at it. By the time he stopped being that kind of mentor, we still had nothing to show for it, but his encouragement never wavered.”
One version of The Sisters of Mercy story casts Andy Taylor - or rather his alter ego, Andrew Eldritch - as a Machiavelli with a masterplan for rock stardom, pulling the strings from his lair in west Leeds.
It isn’t Eldritch’s version. At least not before ‘Alice’ came out.
In their first year and a half of existence, The Sisters of Mercy made one awful record, rarely played gigs and didn’t have a stable line-up.
Eldritch explains it thus: “We were taking a lot of medication, going down The F Club - gigs weren’t going to watch themselves - and we hadn’t got any money.” The Sisters “were too busy hanging out” to be effectively charting a course to rock stardom.
One regular haunt was The Faversham Hotel “which happened to have a very late night bar, so that could be quite useful,” Eldritch explains. “He was in The Fav quite a lot playing pool with Claire,” recalls Danny Horigan. “Claire was really good and people thought because she was blonde and looked like Debbie Harry they could beat her.” Challengers were regularly disabused of that notion. “The fact that she could do that on a serious amount of medication was quite impressive,” remembers Eldritch fondly.
There were also videos to be watched. The VCR was a big deal at Taylor and Shearsby’s. There weren’t that many tapes but they were watched repeatedly. Visitors recall AC/DC, Doors documentaries, Motorhead and Apocalypse Now! being on the playlist.
Eldritch believes that the instability of early Sisters’ line-ups was inevitable due to the “fluid nature of relationships around The F Club. Everybody slept with everybody else; the line-ups of every band changed absolutely regularly. Everybody else who had a bit more nous musically (than me) would move from one band to another.”
Dave Thompson in Twenty-Five Years In The Reptile House correctly describes The Sisters as “floundering in slow motion and taking a long, and not especially scenic route to the stars.” The version of this band that made ‘Alice’ – only their third single - was effectively The Sisters of Mercy Mk III. That line-up was not established until March 1982.
Over two years earlier, Jon Langford had sold Taylor The Mekons’ legendary fish tank drum kit. Langford recalls that “it was my second ever drum kit that Corrigan from the Mekons and I lovingly covered with Woolworth’s bathroom fish tank vinyl. We took all the fittings off and did a really amazing job. Andy painted it black. He painted it black, maaaan!”
Whether Taylor did much more then redecorate his instrument is not clear, he certainly didn’t form a functioning band with it. Paul ‘Grape’ Gregory has a tentative memory of a proto-Sisters that “originally had my friend Keith Fuller as the singer. I was round Claire and Andy’s place off Belle Vue Road and Keith was on the mic.” Pearman was on guitar and Shearsby seems to have played keyboards.
The first iteration of The Sisters proper was the rump left after failed rehearsals: a duo of Taylor and Pearman. Taylor played the drums and sang. Pearman played the guitar and sang. They were both poor.
“I ended up with Mark because we were basically the last two kids to be picked for the team in the playground,” recalls Eldritch. Pearman had actually been in a band before (called Naked Voices) and had played a few gigs, which would have made Taylor the shortest of the two short straws.
Acetate for ’Damage Done’ single, thanks to Phil Verne
’Damage Done’ invoice, thanks to Phil Verne
They never played live but did make a single, ‘Damage Done’. An account of this shambles was written by Eldritch (we assume it was he, despite the third person) for the The Sisters’ official website. “So it came to pass that our intrepid sonic explorers booked themselves half a day’s studio time at RicRac Studios, which was (and possibly still is) a shed in Wortley. Wortley is a run-down industrial area south of Leeds … The studio owner was, naturally, the only one who knew how to operate the studio, so he did the engineering. With a beard. Our heroes found it difficult to convey to him what a non-cabaret act might sound like. As a result, nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing. The engineer lost himself in a place where no engineer had gone before (or since), somewhere near the worst of both worlds.” Alice Sisters Of Mercy Lyrics
Despite the evidence on ‘Damage Done’, other Yorkshire bands were not put off recording at Ric-Rac. They included Skeletal Family and The Danse Society. And The Grumbleweeds.
Despite the debacle in Wortley, Pearman and Taylor were back at it a few months later, this time in front of an audience. “Our sonic explorers” now had a drum machine and an actual musician in the line-up. More than that, the musician in question had made records infinitely better than ‘Damage Done’, had played gigs supporting The Teardrop Explodes and The Bunnymen and had and had even recorded a Peel Session. This was Craig Adams from The Expelaires.
This second iteration of The Sisters was therefore Taylor as the lone singer, Pearman on guitar, Adams on bass and a Boss DR55 Dr Rhythm as the drums. The simplicity of the early drum machines coupled with Adams’ love of Hawkwind at their heaviest, gave The Sisters genuine attack and a primitive, brutal groove, if nothing else. Whatever – and whoever - else might malfunction, the bass player was rock solid.
Taylor also shared Adams’ taste for Space Ritual: “We wanted to be The Stooges. We wanted to be Suicide. We also wanted to be Hawkwind. Their ‘… and the wizard blew his horn’ stuff is patently nonsense and rubbish and sullies their reputation, but their psychedelic space rock is outstanding.”
The trio’s first gig was a CND benefit on Monday February 16 1981 in Alcuin College in the University of York. They were support for the Thompson Twins, well before The Thompson Twins trimmed town to a trio and had pop hits.
Eldritch – in website third person and vivid present - recounted the first show at Alcuin College show thus: “Marx has connected his guitar to a record-player pre-amp which feeds back uncontrollably and Eldritch has shifted the vocal echo into overdrive. It’s metal dub without any spaces, on a shuddering mechanoid backdrop.”
It is entirely possibly that this is more fun to read than it was to listen to.
The Sisters of Mercy’s second gig - on Thursday 19 March 1981 – was their Leeds debut. They were support for Altered Images. Fittingly, it was in The F Club at Brannigan’s. Keenan’s first impressions were that “they didn’t have the drum beat right … and Andy was trying to sound like Bowie doing ‘’Heroes’.” Taylor was immediately making excuses for it in the Leeds fanzine Whippings and Apologies: “That was a real balls-up because of the bad sound … A lot of the stuff we do depends on us having a good PA. Without a decent PA, we sound really crap.”
“It was basically kids learning to play on stage,” comments Keenan. The Sisters of Mercy did get better but progress was slow, not least because they played live so rarely. Taylor claimed to Whippings & Apologies, that this was tactical. “We don’t see the need to play in every toilet every week because there’s no percentage in it. We could play The Pack Horse or The Royal Park every week but it wouldn’t be worth it. It’s not that we think we’re better than those places, it’s just that we know we’d sound shit in them.”
At The F Club Keenan “had a night called ‘The Sheepdog Trials’ – four bands on at a time to give them a chance. Some of them were really bad, some were really good,” he recalls. “I’d use the better ones as support to decent bands.
https://diarynote.indered.space
Sisters photographs either by Les Mills or unknown
‘Alice’ – the song that more than any other changed Andrew Eldritch’s life - was written in ten minutes while sitting on a sofa.
Eldritch recalls that he “didn’t sit down to write an attitude-adjusting single with more ambition [than previous songs] but the success of ‘Alice’ made me have a re-think. Things were different after that.”
The Sisters of Mercy’s Alice / Floorshow / Phantom / 1969 EP was a 4-song EP including both the a- and b-sides from the Alice / Floorshow single, the b-side from Anaconda / Phantom, and one of the b’s from Good Things (i know little about that release. Don’t even know if the song is the same version). Bypassing some of the earlier soul-searching efforts, this could arguably be the true. The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice EP - Amazon.com Music. Skip to main content. Try Prime CDs & Vinyl Go Search EN Hello. On this date in 1982, The Sisters Of Mercy released their third single, ’Alice’. It was backed by ’Floorshow’. Neither track appeared on an album. Discover releases, reviews, credits, songs, and more about The Sisters Of Mercy - Alice at Discogs. Complete your The Sisters Of Mercy collection. The Sisters of Mercy Alice / Floorshow (1982) Single Alice Pass the crystal spread the Tarot In illusion comfort lies The safest way the straight and narrow No confusion no surprise Alice in her party dressed to kill She the thanks you turns away She needs you like she needs needs her pills To tell her that the world’s okay.
‘Alice’ transformed him from Andy Taylor – an “unprepossessing youth”, unemployed, and a college drop-out twice over – into the mesmerising, near mythical Andrew Eldritch.
Before ‘Alice’, Andy Taylor was just one of many habitués of a grimy Leeds punk club who had a band on the side. “Eldritch” was just a name Taylor used when he made records and played gigs, neither of which he did that often.
’Alice’ began a sequence of stunning EPs and live shows that made Eldritch the most compelling British rock & roll performer of his generation. And this is the story of how on earth that happened.
Taylor was born in Ely; Eldritch was born in Leeds. This is also the story of where on earth that happened.
History has been kinder to other vibrant post-punk centres - Manchester, Glasgow, Coventry, Sheffield or London – than it has been to Leeds. Yet, to know these Sisters - no hats, no dry ice, pre-Warners, pre-Hussey - one must also know Leeds. Red Leeds, post-punk Leeds, post-industrial Leeds, post-Yorkshire Ripper Leeds, post-Division One Leeds; Leeds before it became Gotham City.
Andy Taylor – a 19-year-old Deep Purple fan, with “shoulder blade length red hair” and “one pair of shoes, this old pair of trainers I’d been wearing since I was fifteen” – arrived in Leeds to study Chinese at the University in October 1978. It was his first time in the city. His knowledge of the north of England had been limited to episodes of Coronation Street. “I discovered it was a documentary,” he says.
He had parted company with St John’s College, Oxford so late in the previous academic year that the University of Leeds had very little student accommodation left. Taylor was lodged way out of town near Leeds United’s Elland Road ground “in a housing estate of utter grimness, which has since been declared uninhabitable and knocked down.”
Yet, Taylor liked Leeds instantly. That The Ramones were playing The University the week he arrived, no doubt eased his transition. “I must have gathered from that, from fliers or talking to people that there was this F Club.”
If there is one place in Leeds that can claim to be the birthplace of Andrew Eldritch it was “this cellar dive.”
The F Club was the Leeds equivalent of Eric’s in Liverpool. It was in the basement of Brannigan’s nightclub down the bottom end of town near The Dark Arches, a complex of vaults under Leeds railway station.
The F Club was run by the great Leeds promoter, John Keenan. “I used to do at least two nights a week down there,” he recalls. “The manager of Brannigan’s was very forward thinking: two discos on top, punk club below.”
Danny Horigan who roadied for The Sisters (and would later sing in Salvation under the name Danny Mass) remembers The F Club thus: “At the bottom of the stairs, there was a pool room and then you went round the corner to where the bands were on – stage at one end, DJ at the side of the room. Really low ceiling, proper dirty, sweaty punk club.”
A decade later The Duchess of York pub in Leeds became legendary because Keenan put on Nirvana, Oasis, Pulp, Coldplay and Radiohead before they were massive, but for Keenan, “The F Club at Brannigan’s had the more important bands.”
Pere Ubu with The Human League supporting sticks in Keenan’s mind. Eldritch’s too: “That’s my favourite gig ever. I’m still haunted by the dual genius of it. I just can’t think of that happening anywhere else, at least not with the same intensity.
“The big bands played the Uni so we’d trot up there from time to time but it definitely wasn’t home, whereas The F Club had all the new stuff, all the time. I practically lived in The F Club.”
As well as the draw of the bands, there was the lure of the DJ, Claire Shearsby. The unprepossessing youth found himself “going out with the glamorous DJ and we lived together for years.”
Shearsby and Taylor were sketched by The Mekons:
’In the flat above the chemists
Andy and Claire are dressing to kill
But they don’t come out till after dark
In Charlie Cake Park.’Sisters Of Mercy Alice Ep 1
“He’d be down at every gig with Claire,” recalls Keenan. “When Claire was DJing and wanted to go to the bar or to toilet or whatever, Andy would take over for a bit and all he ever played was Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Gary Glitter.”
“You could always tell when I’d taken over,” Eldritch confirms “because on came the Glitter.”
October 1978 - the month Andy Taylor came to Leeds – was when the F Club had moved to Brannigan’s
Keenan had first begun putting bands on at the height of punk in the summer of 1977 in the Common Room of Leeds Polytechnic. He billed these nights as ‘Stars of Today’. The music was “basically punk – The Slits, Slaughter & The Dogs, XTC,” he says. “When the students came back after the holiday, the new Common Room Committee wouldn’t let me have the regular weekly club. So basically I said ‘Fuck the Poly’”.
This was the “F” in F-Club.
“It was such a good group,” remembers Keenan. “All the intelligent kids - not necessarily university kids; there were kids from the estates - who realised change was in the air and had attached themselves to the club.”
“When I moved from the Poly I thought ‘How am I going to keep them together?’“ Keenan’s answer was “to form a club and give them a club card that cost a quid and would get them reductions at some of the punk shops in Leeds, like X Clothes.”
The F Club’s first home was The Ace of Clubs – a decaying cabaret joint - where it only ran from September to December 1977. “I put a fair selection on - Wilko, Siouxsie,” remembers Keenan, “but there was a fire and the insurance wouldn’t pay out.”
After the Ace of Clubs, Keenan moved The F Club to The Roots Club, a primarily West Indian venue in the Chapeltown area of Leeds. This was a former synagogue that had gone under various names: The International Club, The Cosmopolitan Club, The Glass Bucket. As the venue of The F Club it hosted, among others, Suicide, Joy Division, Magazine, Wayne County and The Electric Chairs and Wire.
Claire Shearsby DJ’ed at all the locations of the F-Club, even at the ‘Stars of Today’ nights at the Poly. “She was there at the birth of it,” states Eldritch. “Absolutely. People don’t give her enough credit. A lot DJs would have baulked at playing the stuff she did. She was like the John Peel of Leeds.”
Brannigan’s was the longest lasting of The F Club’s locations. It was there that the three young men who would become The Sisters of Mercy met. Craig Adams from Otley, a market town about 10 miles outside Leeds; Mark Pearman from Hull; and Andy Taylor were some of “the bright kids with some style about them”, in Keenan’s words, who were drawn to The F Club, in Adams’ case, illegally so, since he was underage.
In the Leeds post punk music scene, “there was a very definite divide between art school uni types and the townies”, recalls Eldritch. “The F Club was very much a townie affair. I was much more townie than student and my academic record proves it; I fell in with the dirty crowd.”
The ur-F Club townie band were The Expelaires. “The Expelaires were like the house band,” remembers Eldritch. “They had their tendrils in pretty much everything,”
Bass player Mark Copson went on to sing in Music For Pleasure; guitarist David Wolfenden joined Red Lorry Yellow Lorry; Carl “Tich” Harper became the drummer with Girls At Our Best; and the singer Paul “Grape” Gregory formed 3000 Revs with future Sister, Adam Pearson. Craig Adams the rhythm guitarist-cum-keyboard player went on to form a Soft Cell-ist electro pop duo called Exchange before becoming the bass player in The Sisters.
In the art school camp were Gang Of Four, The Delta Five and The Mekons.
Jon Langford, the drummer in The Mekons agrees that, “the distinction was quite pronounced at first; there was a class/geographical element to it. The Mekons and Gang of Four were mostly public school boys from the south of England. Me and Dave Allen (from Gang Of Four) and Ros (from The Delta 5) were more regional and hickish.” To complicate this matrix, Jon King, Gang Of Four’s singer was both working class and a public school boy.
“The F Club was a wonderfully accepting and inclusive place, except for Nazis,” Eldritch recalls. His own trajectory from private school to Oxford and his accent - close to Bowie’s well-spoken Bromley – mattered little to the working class West Yorkshire locals of The F Club. The long red haired Southerner was made more than welcome.
Although Taylor had oriented himself away from the University, he was still acquainted with the Gang of Four, but not within their inner circle. He was impressed by them then – not least because they were unemployed and in a band – and he remains so, nearly 40 years later: “They had these amazing songs and they played so well. They were hard and bouncy. They had everything but they couldn’t fully commit to the glorious stupidity which is being in a rock & roll band.”
Taylor – as Eldritch – could and it made him a star.
Taylor’s path crossed with the other ‘art school’ bands more.
“Claire and I used to hang out with Ros from The Delta 5 because she lived a few doors away from us,” remembers Eldritch. “She was – probably still is – a lovely, lovely person.”
“The Mekons were fun to hang out with too,” he adds. “They were doing stuff like ‘Teeth’ at the time, which is very good indeed. We used to get on very well with Kevin Lycett and Jon Langford.” Langford recalls that he “used to go round to Claire and Andy’s flat and watch old Doctor Who episodes on a tiny black & white TV.”
Eldritch pays particular tribute to Lycett: “I owe a lot to him. He encouraged me in my quest to learn a little bit about being in a band and scrimp and save for visits to the studio and keep hammering away at it. By the time he stopped being that kind of mentor, we still had nothing to show for it, but his encouragement never wavered.”
One version of The Sisters of Mercy story casts Andy Taylor - or rather his alter ego, Andrew Eldritch - as a Machiavelli with a masterplan for rock stardom, pulling the strings from his lair in west Leeds.
It isn’t Eldritch’s version. At least not before ‘Alice’ came out.
In their first year and a half of existence, The Sisters of Mercy made one awful record, rarely played gigs and didn’t have a stable line-up.
Eldritch explains it thus: “We were taking a lot of medication, going down The F Club - gigs weren’t going to watch themselves - and we hadn’t got any money.” The Sisters “were too busy hanging out” to be effectively charting a course to rock stardom.
One regular haunt was The Faversham Hotel “which happened to have a very late night bar, so that could be quite useful,” Eldritch explains. “He was in The Fav quite a lot playing pool with Claire,” recalls Danny Horigan. “Claire was really good and people thought because she was blonde and looked like Debbie Harry they could beat her.” Challengers were regularly disabused of that notion. “The fact that she could do that on a serious amount of medication was quite impressive,” remembers Eldritch fondly.
There were also videos to be watched. The VCR was a big deal at Taylor and Shearsby’s. There weren’t that many tapes but they were watched repeatedly. Visitors recall AC/DC, Doors documentaries, Motorhead and Apocalypse Now! being on the playlist.
Eldritch believes that the instability of early Sisters’ line-ups was inevitable due to the “fluid nature of relationships around The F Club. Everybody slept with everybody else; the line-ups of every band changed absolutely regularly. Everybody else who had a bit more nous musically (than me) would move from one band to another.”
Dave Thompson in Twenty-Five Years In The Reptile House correctly describes The Sisters as “floundering in slow motion and taking a long, and not especially scenic route to the stars.” The version of this band that made ‘Alice’ – only their third single - was effectively The Sisters of Mercy Mk III. That line-up was not established until March 1982.
Over two years earlier, Jon Langford had sold Taylor The Mekons’ legendary fish tank drum kit. Langford recalls that “it was my second ever drum kit that Corrigan from the Mekons and I lovingly covered with Woolworth’s bathroom fish tank vinyl. We took all the fittings off and did a really amazing job. Andy painted it black. He painted it black, maaaan!”
Whether Taylor did much more then redecorate his instrument is not clear, he certainly didn’t form a functioning band with it. Paul ‘Grape’ Gregory has a tentative memory of a proto-Sisters that “originally had my friend Keith Fuller as the singer. I was round Claire and Andy’s place off Belle Vue Road and Keith was on the mic.” Pearman was on guitar and Shearsby seems to have played keyboards.
The first iteration of The Sisters proper was the rump left after failed rehearsals: a duo of Taylor and Pearman. Taylor played the drums and sang. Pearman played the guitar and sang. They were both poor.
“I ended up with Mark because we were basically the last two kids to be picked for the team in the playground,” recalls Eldritch. Pearman had actually been in a band before (called Naked Voices) and had played a few gigs, which would have made Taylor the shortest of the two short straws.
Acetate for ’Damage Done’ single, thanks to Phil Verne
’Damage Done’ invoice, thanks to Phil Verne
They never played live but did make a single, ‘Damage Done’. An account of this shambles was written by Eldritch (we assume it was he, despite the third person) for the The Sisters’ official website. “So it came to pass that our intrepid sonic explorers booked themselves half a day’s studio time at RicRac Studios, which was (and possibly still is) a shed in Wortley. Wortley is a run-down industrial area south of Leeds … The studio owner was, naturally, the only one who knew how to operate the studio, so he did the engineering. With a beard. Our heroes found it difficult to convey to him what a non-cabaret act might sound like. As a result, nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing. The engineer lost himself in a place where no engineer had gone before (or since), somewhere near the worst of both worlds.” Alice Sisters Of Mercy Lyrics
Despite the evidence on ‘Damage Done’, other Yorkshire bands were not put off recording at Ric-Rac. They included Skeletal Family and The Danse Society. And The Grumbleweeds.
Despite the debacle in Wortley, Pearman and Taylor were back at it a few months later, this time in front of an audience. “Our sonic explorers” now had a drum machine and an actual musician in the line-up. More than that, the musician in question had made records infinitely better than ‘Damage Done’, had played gigs supporting The Teardrop Explodes and The Bunnymen and had and had even recorded a Peel Session. This was Craig Adams from The Expelaires.
This second iteration of The Sisters was therefore Taylor as the lone singer, Pearman on guitar, Adams on bass and a Boss DR55 Dr Rhythm as the drums. The simplicity of the early drum machines coupled with Adams’ love of Hawkwind at their heaviest, gave The Sisters genuine attack and a primitive, brutal groove, if nothing else. Whatever – and whoever - else might malfunction, the bass player was rock solid.
Taylor also shared Adams’ taste for Space Ritual: “We wanted to be The Stooges. We wanted to be Suicide. We also wanted to be Hawkwind. Their ‘… and the wizard blew his horn’ stuff is patently nonsense and rubbish and sullies their reputation, but their psychedelic space rock is outstanding.”
The trio’s first gig was a CND benefit on Monday February 16 1981 in Alcuin College in the University of York. They were support for the Thompson Twins, well before The Thompson Twins trimmed town to a trio and had pop hits.
Eldritch – in website third person and vivid present - recounted the first show at Alcuin College show thus: “Marx has connected his guitar to a record-player pre-amp which feeds back uncontrollably and Eldritch has shifted the vocal echo into overdrive. It’s metal dub without any spaces, on a shuddering mechanoid backdrop.”
It is entirely possibly that this is more fun to read than it was to listen to.
The Sisters of Mercy’s second gig - on Thursday 19 March 1981 – was their Leeds debut. They were support for Altered Images. Fittingly, it was in The F Club at Brannigan’s. Keenan’s first impressions were that “they didn’t have the drum beat right … and Andy was trying to sound like Bowie doing ‘’Heroes’.” Taylor was immediately making excuses for it in the Leeds fanzine Whippings and Apologies: “That was a real balls-up because of the bad sound … A lot of the stuff we do depends on us having a good PA. Without a decent PA, we sound really crap.”
“It was basically kids learning to play on stage,” comments Keenan. The Sisters of Mercy did get better but progress was slow, not least because they played live so rarely. Taylor claimed to Whippings & Apologies, that this was tactical. “We don’t see the need to play in every toilet every week because there’s no percentage in it. We could play The Pack Horse or The Royal Park every week but it wouldn’t be worth it. It’s not that we think we’re better than those places, it’s just that we know we’d sound shit in them.”
At The F Club Keenan “had a night called ‘The Sheepdog Trials’ – four bands on at a time to give them a chance. Some of them were really bad, some were really good,” he recalls. “I’d use the better ones as support to decent bands.
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