MY DINNER WITH ANDREW

MY DINNER WITH ANDREW

Talkin’ movies with the frontman of the Sisters of Mercy

Zachary Lipez

CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES

“I mean, our life is tough enough as it is. I’m not looking for ways to get rid of a few things that provide relief and comfort. I mean, on the contrary, I’m looking for more comfort because the world is very abrasive. I mean, I’m trying to protect myself because, really, there’s these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look!”

—WALLACE SHAWN, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE

The Sisters of Mercy, a rock ’n’ roll band, have not put out a new song since Aug. 16, 1993. The band tours regularly, to a fan base that retains its ardor despite the band’s reputation for a live show commonly described as “erratic.” Some years back, Andrew Eldritch promised that a new album would be released if Donald Trump was elected president. If this promise had been fulfilled it would have been his first since 1990’s Vision Thing, an album inspired by the sort of casual “you had to be there” carnage that could only be tossed around by an empire that didn’t know what was coming. In Eldritch’s defense, the Sisters of Mercy frontman didn’t say which Trump administration would trigger said release of new music.

“I don’t need to do this. I like cats and I like living on the Mediterranean with my orchard. I wouldn’t be out there singing every night in Idaho if I didn’t believe in it. I’m being Prospero,” Andrew Eldritch says over the phone, from a tour bus either in Idaho, or in the larger Idaho that constitutes the America between NYC and L.A. in the weary imagination of touring European bands. “Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, he’s being Macbeth. Oh, he’s being Lear.’ But if you wanted to define what the Sisters are all about, right now, you wouldn’t say Macbeth (though we did flirt with Macbeth). It is definitely The Tempest.”

As my writing career owes more to Sisters of Mercy lyrics than anything by Shakespeare, it was important to me that Andrew Eldritch didn’t consider me a fool. Therefore, I opted against mentioning that I’d never read The Tempest and had no idea what being Prospero might entail. I grew up in a time before Hawke’s Hamlet or Stiles’ 10 Things I Hate About You. If you wanted the Bard, it was school plays and the occasional episode of Moonlighting. For the dramatically inclined, videos of Eldritch in a high-elf mullet and aviator sunglasses, intoning, “I hear the roar of a big machine/Two worlds and in between/Hot metal and methedrine,” was enough and then some. If what’s past is prologue, I blame 120 Minutes. I’ve since read the Wikipedia entry for The Tempest, and I got the gist of what Eldritch was saying. Sorcery. Dream stuff. The distant possibility that an audience’s applause might set a magic man free, etc.

The Sisters of Mercy began in Leeds, in 1980, with Andy “soon to be Andrew Eldritch” Taylor, a precocious polyglot, fresh from leaving Oxford. Eldritch’s bandmates were the guitarist Mark “Gary Marx” Pearman, bassist Craig Adams, and a baby-faced DR-55 “Dr. Rhythm” drum machine with the surname of “Avalanche.” Jon Langford of the Mekons was in the band for what Eldritch refers to as “an afternoon.”

“And now he is the Prince of Darkness

He holds old friends in such high esteem

He sees a red town and wants it painted black

For the Catholic girls at Halloween”

—JON LANGFORD, THE MEKONS, “THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS,” A SONG ABOUT ANDREW ELDRITCH

In one of his first U.K. interviews—with only a handful of singles under the band’s belt, and a debut LP three years off—Eldritch summed up Sisters by saying, “There was one great heavy metal group and that was the Stooges, and there’s only two bands around that can touch them, and they’re Motbrhead and the Birthday Party. We’re not as good as Motbrhead, but we’re better than the Birthday Party. That makes us pretty damn good."

The Alice 12-inch from 1983 contains two songs, “Floorshow” and a cover of the Stooges’ “1969,” which serve as good examples of the band’s ethos. The band’s version of “1969” hews closely to the original in structure but replaces Ron Asheton’s free-floating wah with a strychnine guitar tone and updates Iggy’s drawl as a series of Suicide-al yawps. The beat (banged out by TR-808 edition Doktor Avalanche) keeps the original’s Bo Diddley-lifted boogie but makes the kick as monotone relentless as the handclaps are thin and unashamedly artificial. In comparison, the heft of “Floorshow” is prehistoric. In Paint My Name in Black and Gold: The Rise of the Sisters of Mercy, author Mark Andrews describes Craig Adams’ bassline for the song as “a low budget punk interpretation of Motbrhead...aggressive, distorted, devoid of any subtlety or sense of fashion.”

"TOM CRUISE'S PEOPLE (WANTED) HIM TO WEAR A SISTERS T-SHIRT IH SOME MOVIE. I TOLD THEM IT WOULD TAKE A LOT MORE THAN $5,000."

—ANDREW ELDRITCH

Which is true, in that what the Sisters of Mercy were creating was a new fashion. Amphetaminedriven post-glam boogie rock. Lizard king grandiosity tempered by Detroit-indebted grit. String-laden drama, one part Wagner and one part disco. Bowie sensuality cut with acerbic world-weariness indistinguishable from true romanticism. A beat you could dance to. Endless sunglasses. And hair like you wouldn’t believe. Essentially, the Sisters of Mercy were reinventing hard rock. If they’d called what they were doing “hair metal,” they might have spared themselves a lot of genre-name hassle.

Now, four decades later—with the Stooges existing only as canon, Motbrhead having fulfilled Lemmy’s contractual obligations as laid out in the chorus of “Ace of Spades,” and most of the members of the Birthday Party having, one way or another, graduated into sainthood—Andrew Eldritch finds his band (with Doktor Avalanche as the only other original member) beloved by the heavy metal community while maintaining its own peculiar landscape.

“If you are determined to be yourself at every turn,” Eldritch says, “with the tech, with the local crew, with everything that you touch or think about; if you’re determined to be yourself, you will be.”

Despite a span of influence that should demand respect, the Sisters of Mercy haven’t historically garnered the kind of critical praise that bands like Joy Division have enjoyed (as it were). CREEM’s Cynthia Rose consigned the band to the “poseur’s pits.” Christgau called their style “sepulchrally stentorian.” How much of the critical ire was due to the band’s singer—in a time when counterculture frontmen were, as David Lee Roth famously pointed out, penalized for not looking like they wrote for The Village Voice—carrying himself like a proper rock star (complete with skintight and overstuffed leather pants)? How much was due to Eldritch’s disinclination to authenticate his genius by dying young? Questions for the ages. History is written by the winners. Which doesn’t leave a history made up of post-punk musicians and rock critics with a lot of options. Anyway, everyone is entitled to their own opinions regarding a showy display of boy crotch.

Which brings us to the singer himself. In Lol Tolhurst’s book Goth (which is about goth), the former keyboardist of the Cure is effusive about nearly every musician he references. In the two pages the author devotes to Sisters, the closest the author comes to offering any praise is when he describes Eldritch’s voice as a “dark baritone,” which is just saying “he sings real low” twice (for what it’s worth, Eldritch’s vocal range is El>2-C5, so not technically a bass-baritone). Tolhurst’s restraint might be explained by the section immediately following, where the author devotes four pages to Wayne Hussey, the frontman of the Mission (UK), whom he refers to as “a symbol of the healing and redemptive power of music.” Hussey cowrote a number of the band’s most beloved songs. Eldritch and Hussey eventually fell out. Recriminations and lawsuits followed. Perhaps unaware of the healing and redemptive power of music, Eldritch proceeded to write “This Corrosion,” a nine-minute industrial funk operetta (produced by Meatloaf’s songwriting partner Jim Steinman) that was notable in being cruel (as a parody of Hussey’s writing style), and then crueler (the song was a hit and is better than anything Hussey did after leaving the Sisters of Mercy).

At the risk of sounding like an apologist, it’s also worth noting that, over the course of three hours, Eldritch is gracious. Despite claiming to “not pay much attention to bands,” Eldritch is generous in his praise of other artists. He’s fond of Sleaford Mods, saying, “If people like the Sleaford Mods are getting money behind them, that’s a great thing.” Eldritch calls the B-52s “life-affirming. Militant, but so entertaining that you don’t notice.” The lyricists Eldritch feels closest to are Richard Butler and Michael Stipe. Andrew Eldritch thinks both songwriters are probably good at crossword puzzles.

The only times any coldness enters his voice is when his relationship with his family is brought up and, later, when I make a joke about shitting on tour buses. As we’d already established that Eldritch had parents (“I was brought up with attendance at the Church of England, because that’s what aspiring middle-class parents forced their children to do”), and can assume Eldritch has a tuchus, neither topic is pressed.

Twice bringing up his difficult reputation (unprompted), Eldritch offers up two compelling defenses:

(1) “Somehow, I seem to have developed a reputation for having guitar players and killing them. But most of my relationships with musicians have lasted longer than most marriages.”

(2) “I think I’m pretty good at getting along with people. On the other hand, I’m not.”

Prior to speaking to Eldritch, his publicist had three requests: Don’t mention Patricia Morrison or Wayne Hussey. Don’t forget the “the” at the beginning of “the Sisters of Mercy.” And...“don’t mention the ‘g’ word.” With those guidelines set, and given how the Sisters of Mercy took their name from the soundtrack of the ’71 Altman flick McCabe & Mrs. Miller (and have always blurred the lines between cinema and theme park ride), Andrew and I talked about movies.

“I’m a reasonably cultured person, but the problem with discussing specific films is one gets bogged down in certain items of trivia when what’s really interesting about those films is how and why they were made.” This is valuable because the next thing Eldritch says is, “Whenever I have a new lighting person for the band (and we get to have a few of them because loyalty is an increasingly rare thing in this business), I always suggest to them—because it directly relates to my view of how the Sisters should be presented on stage—I always suggest that they watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

The fact that the singer starts out by expressing his admiration for a tentpole of German Expressionism, famous for its surrealist set design, and follows up with high praise for “the lighting and the mise-enscene, the set design, particularly the chiaroscuro, the contrast, the patches of darkness” of directors such as Mario Bava, feels almost like a provocation. If the ooky spooky is off the table, Eldritch doesn’t make avoiding the topic easy. But he does give permission to infer like a motherfucker.

“I’m not crazy about getting everything right,” Eldritch says later. “And the point of speaking a lot of languages is to get the gist and to get along with people.” He’s talking about the literal benefits of what he considers his “only superpower,” his gift for mastering multiple languages, but this too can be taken as an invitation to translate.

Hard as it might be to imagine in a world where Taylor Swift describes her electro-trash concept album about what a bitch Katy Perry is as “a goth-punk moment of female rage,” goth used to be a term to avoid. Insisting that one’s band wasn’t goth was a proud tradition within the goth community, with the Cure, the Banshees, and the Bad Seeds—counterfactual to their own band names—all doing their part. Eldritch was an early adopter to this denialism. His denials have been greeted with the sort of indulgence one would greet a teenager who still believes in Santa Claus. In her book Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, Cathi Unsworth registers Eldritch’s protestations but still compares one of his songs to the Bronte Sisters. John Robb, in his book The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth, describes Eldritch despising the designation with “acidic derision” and, after a beat, writes “but (if Eldritch wasn’t goth) then who was!”

During our interview, Eldritch refers to goth only once, not by name, while big-upping his regional peers. Of the “M62 bands”—named after a road that goes from Liverpool to Hull, which Eldritch uses as shorthand for bands such as Psychedelic Furs, Gang of Four, etc. whose sound was “a revolutionary response to what Thatcher did to us”—Eldritch says, “The whole of the northern English music scene, which has been very recently called post-punk or that other word...produced some amazing stuff.” The way he elides the term is telling. He isn’t playing dumb, and he isn’t projecting stupidity upon his fans, a fan base he knows is full of ankh-wearing voluptuaries and lil’ vampires. He’s being cute, which is cute. In this way, choices throughout his career—from wearing white suits to the band’s choices of covers—ABBA, Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” Hot Chocolate’s “Emma"—can be seen not merely as disavowals of goth, but also as expressions of the man’s genuine enthusiasms.

One could argue that a cover of Dolly Parton’s minor-key masterpiece about a vampire-skin-toned bank teller (later covered by Strawberry Switchblade) is evidence of the gothic undercurrents of country music. One could further argue that the Sisters’ cover of the funereal “Emma” simply proves that Hot Chocolate invented goth rock. Regardless of whether one feels like dying on either of those incredibly brave hills, you can’t accuse Eldritch of being just ornery. He may have a voice like the mist around Mary Shelley’s grave, but the man loves a toe-tapper.

When Eldritch says, “Even though we try to be the world’s best pop band and also the world’s best metal band, and the world’s best industrial band (on occasion), the fact is that we are seen as being niche,” he might be underselling the band’s appeal, but he’s not lying. Especially about the metal part. After all, it did take Sick New World, a Las Vegas nii-metal/industrial metal festival—coupled with the exhortations of System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian—to get the band back in America for the first time in 15 years.

(That the Sisters of Mercy’s last American show was December 2008, right around the time the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act passed in 2009, outlawing the sale of clove cigarettes, is probably a coincidence.)

If heavy metal has finally granted the Sisters of Mercy a context that the band has been claiming all along, they don’t seem concerned that it took a few decades for some metal bands’ early appreciation for Doktor Avalanche’s punishing bop to translate into enough money on the table to justify another American tour. To ponder too deeply the fashion difference between the band’s old lineup (shamanistic finery mixed with undead biker club) and the current iteration (a head-shaved Eldritch supported by three young buckaroos dressed like MySpace pages) is the kind of parsing of minutiae best left to post-punk physicists. As the man says, “The songs that we do are so good, you could make them techno, you could make them country, you could do anything with them, because musically they have an essential greatness to them. Sorry, but they do. We choose to perform them as hard rock because it’s fun, we’re good at it, and why not?” Further taking a place within Heavy Metal’s lineage as a given, Eldritch will say, “The only jewelry I brought on tour with me is a silver chain made from tiny little handcuffs with a big silver star on it, which I sometimes wear hanging off the trousers. And I’ve got that ’cause I’m in a rock ’n’ roll band at the moment, right? And I’ve got a belt with a skull on it because, of course I do. It’s one of the Motbrhead traditions that I intend to keep up in their absence.”

Eldritch’s appreciation for metal fans is such that, when discussing the reception that the Sisters received at a festival populated by Hoobastank fans, the singer starts with a mix of self-effacement ("the terrain in front of me seemed to be a number of people in varying stages of undress having a good time.... Nobody threw anything...”). Then insight ("...thought that could be because of security, because security is such a thing in America. Most of the nation’s been encouraged to be permanently in fear of something”). Before veering into something akin to solidarity:

"The town was taken over by the people that 20 years ago were still the scum of the earth,” Eldritch says about the community in a Newly Sick Las Vegas. "And now we are apparently lords, ladies, and masters.” Eldritch seems positively tickled to have his early-’80s bravado vindicated.

This gratitude is notable. Getting back to movies, Eldritch says, “Tom Cruise’s people [wanted] him to wear a Sisters T-shirt in some movie. I told them it would take a lot more than $5,000.” When asked about the song "Vision Thing" being used in the sexploitation demi-classic Showgirls, he’ll say, “I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to get myself off of films, and that would have been one of them.” Being appreciated is nice, but he’s not begging for scraps (that said, the Showgirls soundtrack is good as hell). In a point he returns to: He doesn’t need to be doing this.

Eldritch hasn’t seen a movie in the theaters in “many, many, many, many years.” Because, he says, “even an hour and a half is a long time to go without a cigarette. While I’m sitting there desperate for one, I don’t want to be sat next to people loudly munching popcorn or cheering bits that I don’t find funny at all.”

Despite his skipping out on the communal joys of theatergoing, Eldritch carries with him a hard drive with thousands of movies. He tries to watch “at least a couple a day.”

He’s “terminally bored by the Lord of the Rings nonsense.” He loves Empire Strikes Back but thinks George Lucas (“not a thinker”) quickly lost the plot. He loves Star Trek but thinks that some of the “essential optimism and the egalitarianism of Roddenberry’s Trek has got a bit lost in all the exploding stuff of recent years.” He follows this by saying his favorite Star Trek movie is “whichever one it is where the Klingons get trapped in a vacuum or in zero gravity, and there’s globs of Klingon blood all over the place.” Eldritch thinks "Robert Rodriguez is a genius.” His favorite Tarantino is Jackie Brown. He says he liked Bullet Train, but the way he compliments it ("a psychedelic version of a Guy Ritchie movie parodying itself") kind of makes it seem like maybe he didn’t. He loves My Beautiful Laundrette and didn’t love My Dinner With Andre (which is unfortunate). He thinks John Waters is “a national treasure,” plans on eventually seeing every single movie set in outer space, and—when asked if he liked the Solaris remake—will take a long pause before saying, “Interstellar was great. Annihilation was particularly great.”

At one point, Eldritch gushes about discovering the films of John Waters in his 20s, carrying himself along as he recalls trying to turn his guitarist on to Hairspray, before finally saying, with a near-crushing enthusiasm, “I love that scene where Tracy is doing the Madison! Oh, it’s...it’s so...it brings out the Mary Poppins in you, doesn’t it?”

When the interview turns to the similarities between Eldritch’s current favorite film—a highly stylized ("like the 1966 Adam West version of Batman’f 2010 kung fu flick starring Josh Hartnett and Demi Moore called Bunraku—and the 2005 Rodriguez adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City, it occurs to me that certain strains of Eldritch’s personality are coming together. When I point this out, Eldritch responds by archly agreeing, saying, “My flirtation with style and the fourth wall is...only through my conversation with you do I realize how deeply I am into style over substance.”

When he says this, Eldritch is kidding. But coupled with his repeated avowals of not needing to be doing any of this, a theme—something about a performance that doesn’t end, and that might be of greater interest to the performer than what they do on stage—becomes apparent.

“You’ve got the protagonist as a voice, sometimes as an antagonist. Sometimes the protagonist is the hero. Sometimes it’s an antihero. Then you’ve got the narrator’s voice, and above that you’ve got the author: our voice. On top of all that is the performance, which can fuck with any of those things. Because I understand that, I have fun.”

In a bar that’s always closing

In a world where people shout

I don’t wanna talk this over

I don’t wanna talk it out

—ANDREW ELDRITCH, THE SISTERS OF MERCY, “l WAS WRONG,” A SONG ABOUT NOT WANTING TO TALK IT OUT

A few weeks after the interview, my wife and I attended the Sisters of Mercy show at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. The audience was made up predominantly of goths of a certain age, with a smattering/ overlap of industrial and heavy metal types wearing enough mixed metaphors of steampunk leather and indiscernible band logos to stock a Hot Topic at the end of time. The crowd was enthusiastic, but with expectations that had been made reasonable by online chatter about Eldritch hardly singing and songs transformed into stuff unrecognizable from their original recordings. Word was that the singer was drinking from dusk till dawn and paying an overkill amount of tribute to Motbrhead in terms of speed intake. My wife and I had decided early on that we were going to have a nice time even if we had to set aside all metrics of what might be considered a “good" show.

And we did set those metrics aside. And we did have a nice time. Because it became clear that Andrew Eldritch had neither lost his voice nor was he inclined to waste his time utilizing that voice for the duration of an entire set, or even an entire song. Sometimes he cookie-monstered a verse. Sometimes he imitated a goblin keening for his mother. Sometimes Eldritch let his bandmates sing while he paced the stage. Sometimes he did all these things during the span of a single verse. And sometimes Andrew Eldritch let loose multiple verses and choruses in a row, in the same gorgeous and evocative low howl he’d set as a dark prince template in 1983.

At one point Eldritch disappeared for a span of time that would normally imply a costume change. When he reappeared, he was wearing the same costume. Maybe he changed his skin.

Eldritch didn’t need to be there. He hadn’t been lying! But he was having fun. With our intentions already set, and happy to sing along whether there was singing coming from the stage or not—like we were watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show performed by our own sweet but simple child—my wife and I had fun too.

In Mark Andrews’ book, the author describes the Sisters playing Royal Albert Hall in 1985, for what was intended to be a final performance. Supposedly Eldritch refused to play an encore. He was persuaded to return to the stage by Lemmy Kilmister brandishing a knife (the blade of which the Motbrhead singer, understanding the importance of balancing stick with carrot, used to put some amphetamine up Andrew Eldritch’s nose).

Even with no corporeal Lemmy in attendance the night at Kings Theatre, the Sisters of Mercy did play an encore, with the crowd handling the singing for the majority of “This Corrosion.” And since the Brooklyn performance, two members of the Sisters of Mercy have been replaced, putting Eldritch’s exmembers at 20.

Near the end of our interview, when I pressed him about recording new music by implying that—setting aside any trite notions of "owing the fans”—he might owe something to his own desire to communicate, Eldritch was first coy ("I think it’s become a unique selling point. It wouldn’t be if you didn’t keep asking about it”), then almost candid (“In conversations with Universal Records I’ve been reminded that I don’t enjoy sucking dick”), then Zen-koan philosophical (“We started off as troubadours. We’re troubadours again. We had a period of being corporate playthings. We didn’t like it. Not going to do it again").

Eventually, after every argument had been exhausted, Eldritch closed the topic: “I agree with your reasoning. But it just doesn’t suit me.”