Interviews

Lone Sister – Cutting Edge July 1993

On the eve of their first appearance for sometime in the UK with Depeche Mode, Neil Perry talks to Sisters Of Mercy Mainman Andrew Eldritch

Wearing cowboy boots, cream suit, white shirt, and a quite choice from an otherwise very loud collection of ties, Andrew Eldritch looks dapper. An aspiring politician from America’s deep South, maybe, or a well-connected coke dealer with a GQ subscription.

The Sisters Of Mercy are about to make a return to the live arena when you support Depeche Mode next month. Where’s your head at right now, Andrew?

"Stressed to death, because I’m not happy with the way the band’s been managed the last few years, so I’ve addressed that with extreme prejudice. Which temporarily gives me a lot of work to do on the telephone. One of my problems is that I’ve got this whole huge machine to look after. Once it’s built up momentum it’s fairly unstoppable – that’s good – but on the other hand I can make this big machine more responsive to my musical whims, so I can indulge myself more, because I believe that’s healthy."

Are your defences up?

"No… I’m not hungover, but I was up till six drinking. I’m just trying hard not to bad-mouth anyone too much."

"It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through stygian space."

H.P. Lovecraft – "Imprison With The Pharaohs"

Flights of journalistic fancy, bolstered by the occasional literary gem such as that above, still haunt Andrew Eldritch, although not like they used to. For a while – back in the dark days of the mid-80’s, when The Sisters’ hippy hate began burning in earnest – it was a symbiotic relationship between press and artiste, and the perceived image of Andrew as Pop Prince Of Darkness was a mildly diverting sideshow to the main attraction of the band’s rock ‘n’ roll burlesque. 1993, and the singer has moved on. The press, one feels, still want the guy from the Sandeman Port bottle to float in on a flack cloud and deliver deathly curses.

He’s and interviewer’s dream, talking as he does in great quotable chunks bereft of the ers and ums that pepper most musicians’ dialogue. There may be pregnant pauses, but that’s fine as long as you learn to use them like he does. He will chat lucidly and happily about nearly any subject you care to throw at him, throwing in the odd factoid – such as "We have less day-care centres for children aged 3-5 that anybody in Europe apart from Portugal" – for startling good measure. But while Andrew has long since learnt to live with his clichéd press image, it bugs the shit out of him.

"Well, you know I’m very tired of having shows reviewed on the basis that, well, its Andrew's after all, so it’s inevitable that he wore black. I’ve been over-compensating for a while, and I don’t think that a long yellow coat is any dafter than black leather trousers, to be honest. And I think there’s got to be some kind of acknowledgement that singing in a rock band is a fairly strange way to live one’s life."

Are the fans still hung up on the Goth Overlord trip?

"Not the ones I see and talk to regularly, because they know it’s not the case. If they really though that, they wouldn’t have given me a football shirt in Lorelei and made me promise to wear it at the NEC. The Prince of Darkness doesn’t go onstage in football shirts, heh heh…"

There was a quote from a previous interview you did, something along the lines of "When I went to Oxford I didn’t foresee becoming a gonzoid speed overlord…"

"No, I didn’t, heh, heh… one of the functions of rock ‘n’ roll that I did pick up on quite early as a consumer was that it does enable you to see that you can make more of your life than you’d otherwise figure you could. When you grow up reading very highbrow books no one tells you that if you really want to you can spend the rest of your life with long orange hair doing drugs. It wasn’t until I saw pop bands that I though, ‘Hey, great’, and if I wanted to I could spend the rest of my life with long orange hair doing drugs! And it’s good to know you have these choices, ha ha!

"My own production manager asked me last week if it was true that I’d learnt Chinese… it’s incredible how many things one thinks of as central to oneself that just don’t sink in with other people. Or that they have such an impression of you that they can’t assimilate stuff they actually know. I don’t regard myself as such a strange mixture of things, but some people can’t equate, for example, me onstage with me sat in a library learning Chinese. I can. If that part of me doesn’t come through in the songs then I guess it must be irrelevant… I guess I should find ways of making more of it, just to counteract a of the bullshit that’s spread about the band, deliberate or inadvertently, all this narrow bastard overlord business."

Which is a facet of your make-up…

"Yeah, undoubtedly. And in context, it’s one that I’m proud of, because it’s enabled the band to survive. It’s noticeable that all the offshoots of the band, who musically have as much talent as I do, haven’t done that well at surviving. I don’t feel any sense of malicious glee, but I can’t be displeased that whatever constituted a goth movement doesn’t exist anymore. I’m confident of the bands ability to be judged in the same way as, say, REM are, and to judged against them, The Cure, Nirvana, whatever."

Whatever the Sisters do, and however much you may go about arranging things just so, it seems that The Sister Of Mercy never quite get there.

"Yeah… I’m told that so often by third parties that it must be true, And I don’t know why that is. But I’m much more relaxed nowadays. I don’t know when the turning point was… at sometime in the late ‘80s I realised that I don’t have that much to prove anymore. I can just enjoy doing things. The band may have a lot to prove but as a person I don’t."

Are you good at admitting when you’ve made a mistake?

"I don’t know, I like to think so."

Are you a lonely person?

"No, I know who my friends are and I can always get hold of them. I don’t need to live next door to them. I’m one of those people that starts a conversation two later exactly where they left off. And most of my friends cope with that and don’t take it too badly. I spend a lot of time alone, but that’s different from being lonely. I would like to be at home enough to have a cat, but that’s a different kind of need, that’s not a surrogate for a wife and kids."

Some years ago, you mentioned how you used to sit on Hamburg docks, trying to work out how much the sea weighs…

"Yeah, I still do that sometimes. That’s my mantra, it’s quite a zen occupation. Like lying on your back looking at the stars on a warm evening. Quite a mindfuck, but a good zen mindfuck. It puts you in your place. It’s important to have an absolute scale of values in that sense, that every so often you can look out and think, ‘What am I worrying about here?’ Because it’s very easy to perspective in this business, very easy to go too weird for your own good. I think I little weird is probably necessary to do the job."

Are you good at gauging weird?

"Better than I was, but not good enough. Which is why it’s necessary to figure out how many stars there are up there, and what’s on the other side of them!"

Leeds and Hamburg (with Amsterdam is reserve) remain Andrew’s favourite environments; as he says, "Europe generally is an issue quite close to my heart. I’ve decided I believe in a Federal Europe. If we have such a strong identity as a nation, being part of a Federal Europe couldn’t take that away from us, At the moment Britain is whinging because it doesn’t look like the European Central Bank is going to be based in London. Hardly surprising, if Britain intends on being the only country not committed to monetary union. Get a grip guys! The French and Belgians and everyone else aren’t into it because it’s going to be mutually damaging, the idea is for it to mutually beneficial."

There’s an aura of stocks and shares around Andrew Eldritch; an atmosphere of triple G&T, please, and damn the torpedoes. You can picture him, no problem, Panama hat tipped at a rakish angle, sipping the appropriate drink on the verandah of some far flung embassy, Arranging things.

"That’s cool, that’s what I figured I was headed for when I was at university until I got hi-jacked by punk rock. And I was quite happy with the idea, you know, our man under the volcano."

And if it all collapsed tomorrow, you’d be out there somewhere, working your way up…

"Yes, if I could convince anybody that I hadn’t been in a band for ten years. I’ve been very attracted lately to the idea of running the Hong Kong Police, heh heh… I certainly intend to go there before we hand it back. Chris Patten, you have to wonder what he was on to make his voice so firm. If he’d worn the ambassador’s plumage, the exact nature of his position would become glaringly obvious.

"I did spend a year in Singapore when I was very small, but I don’t remember much about it. It might have left some vague traumatic impression… I’ve actually got cigarette burns on my feet. My parents told me it was the Chinese nurse, although I’m more inclined to believe it was my parents. I remember the voyage back home, we came back on, erm, a slow boat from China. I was apparently continually traumatised by monkeys, they where strangely attracted to me."

Now, this is the sort of exotic detail that the press would love to imagine was part of your background.

"Yes, but I don’t see how any of that makes you a Bastard Overlord."

Do you think of your childhood often?

"No, although I’m sure it’s all very relevant. I’m quite proud of it. What it taught me and the things I think I still carry from that time, but I think I tend to think a lot of that comes through in what I do. I don’t consciously go back and refer to it for material. I wouldn’t dream of going into analysis, for instance, to find out what happened one black night in 1963."

Is that because your comfortable with it, or scared of it?

"I’m comfortable with it. You’ve got to have something twisted in you somewhere – not to want to be a rock star, ‘cos I never really wanted to be one – but to fuel you, and there’s a very good theory that says, Hey, would you want to straighten that out? I find what I do very fulfilling."

Is your family ever a consideration?

"No completely and utterly irrelevant."

How about a family of your own?

"I have no desires, none whatsoever, but don’t go through life trying to avoid it."

Brothers and sisters?

"One of each."

Do you ever see them?

"No."

And it’s about here that public Andrew ends and private Andrew begins. It was as far as both of wanted to go, and as he say, "I do get upset when my privacy is invaded. I mean, I accepted the fact that in order to do my job I sometimes do have to… well, I do draw the line somewhere, and when you drag family into it, it’s an invasion of their privacy. And it’s the first thing the tabloid press tries to get a grip on; you know, Elton John isn’t a composer, he’s just a bald guy, heh heh heh…"

It’s official: Andrew Eldritch, regular bloke, is on a roll. He’s even trying to like the French.