Live Review: Sisters of Mercy @ The Roundhouse, London

They say you should never meet your heroes. They should add, you should never go to see your heroes twenty five years after they’ve done anything meaningful. John Deering does just that...

Jayne Robinson

Date published: 22nd Nov 2011

Date: 13th November

Words: John Deering

Washes of sparkling twelve-string glitter over spikey, angular single-note riffs. Deep below, a core-shuddering Musicman bass connects with a crushing beat. Thin, pale, crepuscular men occasionally loom out of the hypnotic swirling light and smoke, whilst their leader, one foot behind the other, head down, face hidden by a battered black hat, grips the microphone like a Victorian psychic healer.

When he turns his face upwards towards that mic it is at white as the moon, skeletal cheekbones supporting mirrored glasses that hide his eyes. We can only guess at what horrors they have witnessed as he murmurs his peculiar cautionary tales of destruction and woe, his reverb-swathed breath occasionally permeated by a barn owl shriek.

Alice tells of the fake fortune teller who scares her clients into taking her phoney prophecies for real. Marianne is a gloom-laden shanty of a long-drowned maiden calling sailors to join her in the depths of Hamburg harbour.

The songs, pulled like black pearls from creatures that would be at home in a Guillermo del Toro movie, are passed down to us like sermons and lessons by Andrew Eldritch, whilst his men illuminate his manuscripts. Wayne Hussey supplies the singed Altamont stylings. Craig Adams crunches his bass home like Jean-Jacques Burnel in a crypt. Gary Marx delivers the rock and roll like a demented Johnny Cash, reading Burroughs and listening to the Fall. Together they define a time, and tonight it all comes together. They are a powerful living organism, commenting on the dark days we inhabit.

Unfortunately, the show that I speak of was at The Lyceum in October 1984, and the dark days were the long battles between the yoot of Britain and Thatcher. The miners’ strike was a sharp, recent memory, and the poll tax just an evil twinkle in the eye of the iron-haired tyrant.

The Lion King has been playing for eleven years at The Lyceum, now.

The refurbished Roundhouse, an old turning shed for locomotives, is 21st Century London’s most evocative venue. How tragic, then, that one of the most atmospheric groups of the latter part of the last century should choose these boards to desecrate the memory of those glittering dark nights in the mid-80’s.

The only noteworthy component of the foursome still standing is Eldritch himself. I use “standing” in the loosest form of the word. Scuttling around in a day-glo football shirt, cueball head deflecting the spotlights, he resembles a child doing an impression of a fiddler crab. If fiddler crabs wore jackets with the sleeves rolled up. If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed that this man’s appearance on stage had been preceded by him saying, “Tonoight, Maaatthew, oi am gunner be Andrew Eldritch, oat of them Sisters of Mercy.”

When he opens his mouth, it is sadly apparent that age has not only dimmed his sense of style and occasion. The distant rumble of his youth has been replaced with a nasal squawking that recalls Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil long long before Lou Reed or Leonard Cohen. In fact, Lorraine Kelly would beat them to the nod.

To his right, a man with long hair and a vest – I shit you not – plays guitar. To his left, another man, this one resembling Captain Sensible after a pie-eating contest, plays another guitar. Neither of them sounds like they have ever heard a Sisters of Mercy song. They would seem to be much more familiar with setting up a webcam in their bedrooms and posting the results on youtube, labelled 'Me Doin Metallica'.

Perhaps most sadly of all, the original drummer, an Oberheim drum machine by the name of Doktor Avalanche, has been replaced by a karaoke friendly backing track that plays all of the music as if it was recreated on a Casio home keyboard.

Even the more electronically minded numbers in the back catalogue are methodically undressed and humiliated. The once-glorious combination of Dominion / Mother Russia features the man who used to be Eldritch frantically squeaking about being stuck in a mobile home like a pensioner in Pevensey Bay.

In the words of Kyle Gass, “That was amazing… ly bad.”

They say you should never meet your heroes. They should add, you should never go to see your heroes twenty five years after they’ve done anything meaningful.

Next time Eldritch hears Marianne calling his name, he’ll probably be a lot closer to her. He’ll be in the lounge of a cruise ship. Probably filling the early evening slot.