Just in: music icon Andrew Eldritch was taken into custody on suspicion of…..
As a writer and a person in general, I have spent a lot of time looking back and thinking on prior choices, discoveries, and early drug-related derailments over the past three COVID-constricted years, like many of us have done, and not always comfortably. Over my chaotic, colorful 46-year career, I have made a few blunders, and in 20/20 hindsight, I can plainly see them all today. Let us say, however, that there is one thing I have consistently defended. In such instance, it is this: The sheer artistic delight of finding an amazing, unique rock and roll group like Sisters of Mercy from Leeds, England. The band was centered around the eerie, funeral-style singing of Andrew Eldritch, one of the band’s founding members, usually early on (one of the few benefits of working in this field for so long), and he relentlessly promoted them to readers from that moment on. Has anyone followed me on my selfless, art-loving journey” I hope so. But basically, I have no idea since I loathe Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and never took the effort to create any kind of social media following. I just did not care; I always thought that a single Sisters piece would be sufficient, much as the first one I wrote on the band for a daily newspaper in the middle of the 1980s, honoring their definitive official debut disc First and Last and Always.
And now that I have almost died three times since 2017 (do not ask; I am still here), I am incredibly grateful to have had such life-altering epiphanies as that transcendent Goth-rocking album, as well as the rest of their limited but impressive catalog (its quantum-leap 1987 followup Floodland, a 1990 Goth/metal mashup, Vision Thing, backed by Tony James, plus an early anthology of singles and EPs, Some Girls Wander By Mistake”). I always felt like I had a strong wind behind me, billowing my hair, when I wore the equally imaginative ensembles from the heyday of post-punk, like The Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, and its later version of New Order.
