THE SISTERS OF MERCY : LONDON FORUM 18-19 APRIL 2003

Jesus. Who goes to see The Sisters Of Mercy these days? Aren’t they washed up? Split up? Over the hill?

Or are they still a thorn stuck in the side of an increasingly stupid industry? An industry that thinks a band that’s sold five million albums just isn’t commercial? Man. What record companies would give for five million albums sales these days.

Screaming into the abyss, surfing the howling edge of wilful corporate ignorance, The Sisters are still Utterly Bastard Groovy. Anger is an energy. Still, in a world that’s always closing, The Sisters are our last chance at a rock’n’roll apocalypse.

Sure. They almost definitely won’t be another Sisters album. Shame. Because this is The Sisters going to The Third Place. Beyond Rock. Beyond Roll. To somewhere that’s like the best disco in town. Where you can’t see a thing, all the sounds come out the prettiest, shiniest machines, and guitars rock like asteroids. Where you know that all of this, that life, the universe, everything, is stupid, ridiculous, doomed and absurd, but it looks great if you slap on some shades, a bunch of fuzzboxes and a black t-shirt.

Hang on, too many metaphors.

I don’t want to write about The Sisters. I want to yell about them at the top of my voice in sweaty ballrooms across the British mainland whilst I’m dazzled by Smoke and Mirrors. I want to wonder why their guitarist looks like he’s been cloned from the "This Corrision" video and has his feet glued nine feet apart. I swear with that posture he’s going to need surgery soon.

Opening with a definitive statement of guns-blazing intent, "Vision Thing", The Sisters rock like bastards. From here on it’s feedback and screaming. We get the panzer-attack riffarama of "Crash’n’Burn". We get the delicious "Ribbons". We get the thrilling, thrashmetal gonzoid amphetamine filth medley of "Dr.Jeep" and "Detonation Boulevard" that’s more relevant now, in the wreckage of war, than it was when it was released. Thirteen long years ago. Doctor Avalanche is the best drummer I’ve ever heard because he sounds like the grinding wheels of industry painted in child-friendly colours. And there’s "Summer". A love song that sounds like a threat.

That’s how The Sisters work. By their own agenda. By doing what they want when they want. Autonomy. And semi-automatics. Get in the car.

There’s new stuff. Oh, well, stuff that you first heard a decade ago that still isn’t on an album. There’s the frankly dirgey "Romeo Down" and the unexceptional "Slept". Can we have more gung-ho wide-eyed speeding-off-your-tits stuff please? That’s more like it, being intellectual love gods and all that. We appreciate the intellectual subtexts of Eliot. We just love fast songs with big guitars and primal howling even more.

Why do I love The Sisters? Because they start their gigs with the only denouncement of American hypocrisy that makes you want to rock like a bastard for four minutes and thirty two seconds? Because they’ve made "Marian" (which was always hokey goth nonsense on vinyl) sound as good as it always could have been?

Nah. It’s because they play "Lucretia, My Reflection". And it starts off as a pounding incessant heartbeat inside your skull. Before it suddenly takes off, leaves the runway, leaves us all behind staring at it as it rips our guts out in a squall of screaming guitars, relentless drums, and primal screaming.

Scratch that. I Was Wrong. It’s because "Dominion / Mother Russia" is the best hymn to the Communist Apocalypse ever made. It’s because that song makes the thought of being obliterated by 20 megatons of Socialist radiation sound like beach-surfing, California-dreaming fun.

Lose yourself, find yourself, I don’t care. This music speaks to my inner angry young man : gimme sex, death, and guitars. Gimme The Sisters. Get on the love train baby, next stop Rock’N’Roll Armageddon.