Greetings everyone,
I did this clickbait for "Louder".
As well as being a bit of fun, I'm hoping it will raise the profile of the book.
It should go live on Andrew Eldritch's 60th birthday - 15 May.
Check here, if you want to read it: https://www.loudersound.com
Of course, I'm certain to have not included your favourite song in the 25. The Editor of "Louder" has already told me his favourite Sisters song is not in there. It's 'Black Planet'.
Here are some other Sisters songs that didn't make it in - and which are great:
Heartland (Temple of Love B-side, 1983). The excellent Kid Jensen radio session version of ‘Hearland’ is fuzzier and more Suicide-y than this one, which was polished up in 10 CC’s Strawberry Studios in Stockport. 'Heartland' is one of the most (Gary) Marxist of Sisters songs: he wrote the music, the title and a draft lyric, which Eldritch then pulled apart and rewrote, including bringing in "lay me down a long white line" from a demo called ‘Driver’. 'Heartland' and its oddly pretty lead guitar was yet more evidence that Marx was far more than the yahoo of the stage who charged around in a gaffer-taped winkle-picker, sometimes so boisterously he fell over.
Gimme Shelter (Temple of Love 12” B-side): “War, children, is just a kiss away” sings Eldritch. By flipping Jagger’s lyric from rape, war and murder being a shot away and love being a kiss away, Eldritch encapsulated the horror of Altamont and the utter cluelessness and hubris of The Stones’ attempt to have their piece of counter-cultural peace and love. ‘Gimme Shelter’ (also the title of the Maysles brothers' documentary that must surely have been in Eldritch’s extensive video collection of the time) made Eldritch’s 1969 fetish even plainer. Indeed, The Sisters’ legendary Albert Hall show in June 1985 was billed - with wicked humour - as “Altamont – A Festival of Remembrance.” Fortunately, the only knife that was flashed that night was one backstage by Lemmy, his loaded up with speed as an inducement to get Eldritch back on stage for an encore. The Sisters’ recorded version of ‘Gimme Shelter’ – as if to show contempt for The Stones, but also because they couldn’t play anything too tricky – removes most of what made the original brilliant. The Sisters’ version is heavy and bludgeoning, although Marx does a beautiful approximation of Keith Richards’ lead riff. It ends – as did most of their pre-encore live shows – with Eldritch a capella, intoning his twisted lyric, the guitars, bass and drum having dropped out one after the other. Even at his most brutally cynical – or because of it – Eldritch opted to lay on the rock’n’roll shtick the thickest: Eldritch as both Cassandra and diva; early Sisters sets weren’t over until the thin man sang.
Good Things (Peel Session, 1982) ‘Good Things’ is a very early Sisters song. Despite being recorded at KG in mid-1982, it never made it to vinyl. The Sisters included it in their first recordings for John Peel in August 1982 and they continued to play it live into 1983 but Eldritch turned against it. He sings in character – a mode he abandoned until “Vision Thing” in 1990 – as one of the wilfully ignorant who have so retreated from outside world where “out there the snipers work the ridges/Building bombs and blowing bridges/Out there on a darkened road/The lines are dead and the cars explode.” That “a people stoop, once stood tall” might be a clue that 'Good Things' is a predecessor of 'Valentine'’s “people on their knees.” Musically it's quintessential early Sisters.
Anaconda (7” single, 1983) ‘Anaconda’ was not much loved in some quarters at the time of its release. Marx and Adams felt Eldritch at his first attempt had botched the production and there was a sense it was a stop-gap after the epochal ‘Alice’. This all sounds harsh in retrospect. The heroin-as-a-huge-constricting-snake metaphor is one of Eldritch’s easier to read and whether he meant it or not, Anaconda has a hint of the mutant funk of The Stooges' ‘Scene of the Crime’ in its verses. The real treat in ‘Anaconda” is the interplay between the squeal and the fuzz of Gary Marx's and Ben Gunn’s guitars.
Body Electric (7” double A-side single, 1982): Body Electric has a great sleeve (Eldritch borrowed one of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes for the front and already had the iconic Head and Star logo for the back), a great title (after Walt Whitman and/or Ray Bradbury) and was The Sisters' first great song. It was also – not uncoincidentally - their first with Craig Adams on bass and their first with a drum machine, whatever make or model, always called Doktor Avalanche. This one was a 606. 'Body Electric' was also their first single to be made at Kenny Giles Music, an 8-track studio one block from the seafront in Bridlington. KG became The Sisters go-to studio for their run of superb independent singles and EPs in 1982 and 1983. ‘Body Electric’ is one of the rare times you can hear some punk in The Sisters’ DNA: hectic and with bursts over-driven barre chords over a riff that sounds not unlike Adam and the Ants’ ‘Zerox’. 'Body Electric' is heady with bad vibes. Usually assumed to be also about bad drugs, one theory has it that it is in fact about how much Eldritch was repulsed by Le Phono, a basement alternative club in Leeds. Indeed, imagined as the screaming internal monologue of a man stuck in a heaving Goth disco – a man who disliked crowds and loud noises at the best of times – ‘Body Electric’ is vicious and hilarious. That Le Phono was infamous for its foul toilets could explain the line “acid on the floor so she walk on the ceiling.”
No.22 on the list will be a controversial one. It has already raised eye-brows with a couple of people who have seen the list.