Tag: Sisters Of Mercy

Categories
Playlists

Playlist: “1993 mix vol. I” (a mixed tape)

Much like the last time I posted one of these playlists based on an old mixed tape, I was downstairs in my basement recently, this time cleaning rather than looking for something, and I came across the same shoebox full of old cassette tapes. Of course, I stopped what I was doing for a good twenty minutes or so and went through said box to remind myself what was in there and to allow the memories of each to come flooding over me. I haven’t played any of these tapes in decades because I have long since dispensed with the last sound system that I had that could play cassette tapes and so I have no idea of any of them even play. I suppose I could get rid of some of the tapes I bought when I was a teenager because I likely now have it digitally or on vinyl format but I’m not certain I’d ever want to throw out any of the mixed tapes. They are as much a document of my own personal history as the photos, yearbooks, letters, and other random bric-a-brac I have stashed away.

Going through these cassettes, I decided it was time to do another of these playlists and opted to replicate one that I created myself, rather than one that was made for me, like the “Raging retro” playlist I previously shared. I chose “1993 mix vol. I” this time around because, as an artifact from 30 years ago, there’s a few fun things you can glean about it’s creator.

Who was 1993 JP Robichaud?

Well, he wasn’t yet inventing creative titles for his mixes, that’s for sure. For a tape called “1993 mix vol. I”, he wasn’t necessarily as concerned with putting together music from the year, indeed, given that it was the first volume, it was likely too early in the year for a mixed tape’s worth of music. Instead, the tape includes music to which I was listening at the time and going through the playlist, it’s obvious to me that I started with songs from the handful of CDs I had in my still new collection and then, moved into the purchased cassettes before finishing off the second side with songs from albums or mixes that had been recorded for me. I can also tell that it was still early on in my mixed tape making career because I hadn’t started strictly following my own self-imposed rule of one song per artist. Indeed, the two appearances by The Wonder Stuff on the tape’s first side betrays how big a fan I was of the band in the early days of 1993.

Some of the photos I’ve included here of the cassette and its J-card sleeve hint that I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I cut out letters from magazines to cobble together a cover and used stickers from old VHS cassette tapes to decorate the cassette. It reminds me that I would later get even more inventive in decorating these things, especially when I made them for others. And finally, the volume one in the title suggests that I fully intended to make more mixes before the year was up but memory does not serve at all as to whether there ever was a second volume created. There definitely isn’t one in the box.

Now before I get right into the playlist itself, here are some highlights that you definitely should check out:

      • The opening song, “Take 5” by Northside is the first song I’d ever heard by the lesser-known Factory Records product and the song that goaded me into purchasing my first CD, given that I was never able to find the band’s only album on cassette
      • I discovered the second edition of Mick Jones’ second band, Big Audio Dynamite II, before I ever really became familiar with his first band and the words to “Rush” were rarely far from my mind after I committed them to memory
      • As I mentioned above, The Wonder Stuff appears here twice, with two very different sounds: “No, for the 13th time” from their debut and “Welcome to the cheap seats” from their third album
      • The version of Spirit of the West’s “Political” here is the re-recorded rocked up version from “Go figure” because at the time, I was blissfully unaware of the far superior folkier original
      • The Barenaked Ladies were a few years from massive world status but they were already pretty big in Southern Ontario and “Hello city” was just one of the excellent tracks that graced their now classic debut album, “Gordon”
      • The Smiths’ “Please please please let me get what I want” closes things off as it did on many a mixed tape because its short length was often a perfect way to fill up the last bit of remaining tape

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist as it appeared on the original mixed tape:

Side A:
1. Northside “Take 5”
2. Teenage Fanclub “Is this music?”
3. The Wonder Stuff “No, for the 13th time”
4. The Lemonheads “Alison’s starting to happen”
5. The Cure “High”
6. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Suave & suffocation”
7. Depeche Mode “World in my eyes”
8. Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
9. The Charlatans “Weirdo”
10. The Wonder Stuff “Welcome to the cheap seats”
11. R.E.M. “Stand”
12. The Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack “Time warp”
13. Spirit of the West “Political”

Side B:
14. The Housemartins “I smell winter”
15. The Farm “Love see no colour” (unavailable on Apple Music)
16. Buffalo Tom “Velvet roof”
17. 808 State “Lift”
18. The Sisters of Mercy “More”
19. UB40 “Red red wine”
20. Barenaked Ladies “Hello city”
21. Primal Scream “Movin’ on up”
22. Suzanne Vega “Blood makes noise”
23. Morrissey “Tomorrow”
24. The Smiths “Please, please, please let me get what I want”

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Categories
Playlists

Playlist: Time to get your Goth on

Happy World Goth Day everyone!

Er… To be honest, it’s not a holiday I observe but it did give me occasion to start in on an idea that I’ve kicked around in the past. And that is making and sharing genre-themed playlists on these pages. So, yeah, starting things off with Goth.

Goth is easily the music genre, lifestyle, and subculture that is most misunderstood by mass media and the public in general. I remember the going joke amongst a few of my coworkers, some years ago, which centred around the term ‘practicing Goth’ (as in, ‘Look at all that black, it looks like Jennifer is practicing Goth today’). It’s a term we culled from an article, one of many that had wrongfully attributed the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre as members of the ‘Goth community’.

I’m not sure I even fully understand the idea of being and ‘practicing’ Goth and all of the different offshoots that now exist but I do enjoy some facets of the fashion (the adoption of Victorian dress, for instance). I am also quite a big fan of a lot of the music that inspired the original scene, though I completely missed out on it, being too young at the time.

Some people sneer at the term Goth as a genre of music, calling it gimmicky, and the truth of the matter is that many of the original artists attached to the genre disliked the tag and tried to loosen its hold. I can remember going to a Sisters of Mercy show in Toronto in 1998, seeing all the youngsters in the audience wearing black, leather, S&M gear, etc., and wondering what they thought of lead singer Andrew Eldritch coming out on stage with his hair bleached blonde and cut short, and wearing a loud red Hawaiian shirt.

The idea in creating this playlist was not to define what is and what is not goth but to celebrate those artists that inspired generations to wear black. It is somewhat chronological, starting with those post-punk artists that toiled in darkness (Joy Division, Bauhaus), continuing with those that took up the mantle (The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy), squeezing in some acts that are not technically goth but definitely don’t sound out of place (Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen), and finally, gently transitioning to those that felt honoured to play in the originators’ shadows (She Wants Revenge, The Horrors), many years later.

For those who don’t use Spotify or if the embedded playlist below doesn’t work for you, here is the entire playlist:

1. Joy Division “She’s lost control”
2. Bauhaus “Bela Lugosi’s dead”
3. Tones On Tail “Christian says”
4. Love and Rockets “Haunted when the minutes drag”
5. The Cure “The hanging garden”
6. Killing Joke “Love like blood”
7. Siouxsie & The Banshees “Cities in dust”
8. Sisters of Mercy “Alice”
9. The Mission “Tower of strength”
10. The Cult “She sells sanctuary”
11. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds “Red right hand”
12. Concrete Blonde “Bloodletting (The vampire song)”
13. Leonard Cohen “Waiting for the miracle”
14. Dead Can Dance “Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove”
15. Cranes “Shining road”
16. Interpol “Obstacle 1”
17. She Wants Revenge “Tear you apart”
18. The Horrors “Do you remember”
19. Esben and the Witch “Marching song”
20. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness “According to plan”

Enjoy.

For those of you who are on Spotify, feel free to look me up. My user name is “jprobichaud911”.

Categories
Tunes

Top five tunes: The Sisters Of Mercy

Who? The Sisters of Mercy

Years active: 1980 – present

Band members*:
Andrew Eldritch (lead vocals, keyboards, guitars, drum programming) 1980 – present
Doktor Avalanche (drum machine) 1981 – present
Gary Marx (guitars, vocals) 1980 – 1985
Craig Adams (bass) 1981 – 1985
Wayne Hussey (guitars, backing vocals) 1983 – 1985
Patricia Morrison (bass, backing vocals) 1987 – 1989
Chris Catalyst (guitars, backing vocals) 2005 – present
Ben Christo (guitars, bass, backing vocals) 2006 – present

*The above is only a selected list of band members. There have been a number of members throughout the band’s existence, of which Andrew Eldritch is the only constant.

Discography:
First and last and always (1985)
Floodland (1987)
Vision thing (1990)

Context:
So it’s October and Hallowe’en is just around the corner. I didn’t do anything holiday-themed last year and typically don’t observe the holidays too much on these pages but well… I’m due for another Top Five Tunes post. I thought about doing a Top Five favourite Hallowe’en tune post but didn’t have the energy to dig too deeply into my iTunes collection. Then I thought about going Goth and even that felt like I would have to wrack my brain a bit too much. (You’ll have to bear with me, I’ve already started looking at narrowing down my favourite albums for the end of the year series and it’s taking a lot out of me.) So I settled on making October Sisters of Mercy month this year.

Interestingly, if frontman and driving force behind the group, Andrew Eldritch, ever read these words connecting his group with Hallowe’en and anything remotely goth, he’d likely shudder, scream, and want to scratch my eyes out. He’s never been happy with the label, finding it quite offensive that the genre itself exists and even worse that anyone connects his work with it. I’ll never forget the only time I saw them live, back in 1999, and having noted all the black clothing, dyed hair, and heavy eye makeup in the audience, imagined all the collective jaws dropping in the dark when Eldritch took the stage with bleached blonde hair and a Hawaiian shirt. (If you’re wondering, yeah, it was a freaking awesome show.)

It was my friend Tim that got me into the Sisters of Mercy. He could tell you for sure but I feel like before he sold off his vinyl collection in the early 90s, he had a boatload of their 12″ singles. He started me off by including one of their songs on each of the many mixed tapes he made for me in our last couple of years of high school. But I think the night that really sold them for me was a night he was driving us all home from a drama performance night (yeah, I was a thespian back in high school) and “Ribbons” was blasting in the car. Tim hit a speed bump just as Eldritch was screaming “Incoming” and a good portion of the soft drink I was holding was dumped on whoever was sitting in the back seat behind me. The song stuck. And the rest is history.

Eldritch formed the group in 1980 with guitarist and friend, Gary Marx, taking their name from a Leonard Cohen song. He started off as drummer but quickly put that aside to concentrate on vocals, replacing himself with the first in a line of many different drum machines, all nicknamed “Doktor Avalanche”, that would provide the group’s rhythm throughout the years. This drum machine would be the only other constant in the group besides Eldritch to this day. You might have noticed above the strange fact for a group that has been in existence for almost 40 years: they’ve released only three studio albums (I’ll get to the why in a minute). But it’s also interesting to note that each of those albums were recorded by an almost completely different group.

After those three iconic records and a bunch of singles and compilation albums, recorded output from the band stopped. The recording hiatus started out as a protest against their record label but East West (Warner) released them from the contract 1997. Still nothing. The touring continued, however, and apparently so did the writing of new material, as was evidenced by the appearance of unreleased songs performed at these shows over the years. Rumours have abounded of new albums in the almost thirty years since “Vision thing” but the closest I think we have come was recently when Eldritch himself posited that they may have to finally get back to the studio should Trump be elected president. Well… the unthinkable has happened, perhaps we’ll see a new Sisters record soon. Until then, these are my own favourites from the old back catalogue.

The top five:

#5: Alice (from “Alice”, 1982)

“Alice” was The Sisters of Mercy’s third ever single but the first to gain any real traction. With its initial release in 1982, it got play on John Peel’s radio show, which led to its re-release the following year on a four song EP. It is one of the group’s best known songs and still regularly appears on set lists. It was re-recorded in 1993 and released as a B-side to the Sisters’ final ever released recording: the single “Under the gun”. Both version are quite good but I actually prefer the more austere and claustrophobic production of the original to crisp and flashy do-over. The song is about drug addiction, the title and name of the protagonist being a nod to the Alice of the children’s stories, and how little else matters to a junkie but the drugs. It is dark, edgy, and haunting, so post-punk and goth, even tending toward industrial before there was such a thing.

#4: Dominion / Mother Russia (from “Floodland”, 1987)

“Dominion” was the second single released off of “Floodland”, which some of you might remember made an appearance on my Best albums of 1987 series that wrapped up last month. Many different versions and remixes of varying lengths have been released but I prefer the seven minute version on the album that includes the “Mother Russia”. It adds a whole other element to the song, with lines comparing the US and Russia, almost equating the two as one. But even without this final piece, the song is very much reminiscent of the Cold War. With the clattering drum ominous guitars, and choral backing vocals, it evokes austerity and totalitarianism and propagandism and the threat of nuclear war. “Some say prayers – I say mine.” Yup.

#3: More (from “Vision thing”, 1990)

This one has already appeared on these pages when it peeked its goth rock face out at number seven on my best tunes of 1990 list last October (coincidence?). It was released as the first single off the outfit’s final studio LP, “Vision thing”, and features heavy handed piano and synth washes, muscular, machine gun guitars, and the backing vocals of Scottish singer Maggie Reilly. Like the rest of their catalogue, it is dark and sinister in sound but if you actually sat down and read the lyrics without the music, you might question it being penned by Andrew Eldritch. It reads like a straightforward love song, albeit one bordering on obsessive, almost junkie territory. “All I want, all I need, all the time is more of your sweet love. Too much just ain’t enough. I never needed a fix like this before.” A great tune for driving in the middle of the night with tears streaming down you face… or… wait… just a great tune, really.

#2: This corrosion (from “Floodland”, 1987)

Recorded during the same sessions as the song at number three above, “This corrosion” has Jim Steinman written all over it. The song is epic big in length, scope, and sound, as well as a budget epic enough to cover forty members of the New York Choral Society, whom you can hear opening the ten plus minute song. It is perhaps The Sisters of Mercy’s best known song, recently appearing in the Simon Pegg comedy, “The World’s End”, and his character sports a Sisters shirt throughout. Given the post-apocalyptic imagery of the video, I used to think there was deep, anti-war message/meaning to the song but I’ve since learned that the song and its “over the top” lyrics are really just a shot ex-band member and The Mission frontman, Wayne Hussey. “I got nothing to say I ain’t said before. I bled all I can, I won’t bleed no more. I don’t need no one to understand.” Learning this hasn’t changed anything for me, it’s still a great song in my books.

#1: Temple of love (1992) (from “A slight case of overbombing”, 1992)

Much like the song at number five, “Temple of love” was an early and popular non-album single that was re-recorded a decade later, but in the case of this song, I prefer the redo over the original. The 1982 version, while excellent as well, is more spare, definitely of its time and place, very much in its post-punk and goth element. Doktor Avalanche’s work here on rhythm is almost too obvious as a machine, the synths and guitars, though dark, are light in comparison with the band’s later work. The remake has the benefit of Andreas Bruhn’s chainsaw guitars and likely more apparent to the listener, the backing vocals of Israel singer, Ofra Haza, who adds a whole other layer of melodic beauty to the song. Doktor Avalanche appears to have learned a thing or two over the years and is more aggressive. The song is long but tailor-made to kicking it up on a Friday night (or a Thursday night pub party) and letting loose all that pent-up anxiety from the week. This song is one that always found me on the stage of the Underground’s dance floor at my own university‘s pub night, dancing with abandon and my pals Sam and Josh, whenever DJ Stephen Rigby thought to put it on, which was practically every week. So much awesome here.

For other top five lists in this series, click here.