![]() Emma finally made it onto record in 1988 when Eldritch was effectively a solo artist, but its arrangement was essentially the one The Sisters had played live almost every gig as a band between 19. It is even more perfectly camp than Jolene a masterpiece of artifice and exaggeration, yet deeply and truly emotional. Emma is incredibly moving, and yet such fun. ![]() Hot Chocolate’s version was already a slow-burning, sparse heartbreaker, The Sisters made theirs even slower, even sparer and even more of a tear-jerker. Some Kind Of Stranger is therefore simultaneously devastating and witty. Hussey’s playing of the guitar figure that runs through the verse is superb, as is Marx’s of the higher guitar line that dips in and out of Roxy’s If There Is Something. The collision of Eldritch’s dissection of his own promiscuity over Marx’s transliteration of The Wedding March is alone so ironic that Eldritch seems to have been freed to offer up some of his most openly confessional lyrics, albeit ones that clearly draw on Don’t Sleep In The Subway by Petula Clark. Yet some vestigial connection remained: it cannot be co-incidental that Eldritch summoned up his greatest lyrics for Marx’s best music. Some Kind Of Stranger, which closes out First And Last And Always, marks the end of their recorded output together, their personal relationship in utter disintegration at the time. They had begun inauspiciously with Damage Done and Watch, but they ended with this brilliance. Some Kind Of Stranger (First And Last And Always, 1985)Īndrew Eldritch and Gary Marx had started The Sisters of Mercy together in 1980. Eldritch, minus swordstick, but with white suit and beard, went on Top Of The Pops, seemingly channelling Bryan Ferry.Ģ. It was accompanied by The Sisters’ best promo video by far: Morrison and Eldritch looking magnificent in Petra, but possibly in Greeneland or Under The Volcano. And of course, it’s a pop song you can shake your ass to. ![]() By the end of Mother Russia, Eldritch has mashed-up of a Cold War-era mini-treatise on the geopolitics of West Berlin and fantasised about the fallout from Chernobyl raining down on Americans “stuck inside of Memphis with the mobile home” – Dylan, again. In essence, this is The Sisters at their most Gang of Four: groove + back-up singers + lit-referencing disquisition on human relations in an Age of Imperialism. Eldritch, himself not averse to the occasional “sneer of cold command” repurposes Shelley’s Ozymandias to point out the futility of both. This is Floodland's opening diptych that elides dreams of inter-personal and political domination.
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