Official Sisters site renamed

[Victim of Circumstance]

With my first Sisters gig being back in 1984 I'd consider myself an 'old' fan, too. On the one hand I agree to Taylor that most of the old songs are better than most released after FLAA. But on the other hand some post FLAA songs are very good (e.g. ribbons) and I still like to go to Sisters gigs and the ones in 2010 with songs like Rain from heaven were brilliant compared to other music around.

[James Blast]

Its romanticism....and blah, blah..., so yeah.

Ignore (the machine) followers, Goth got a look and a tag and a snoud - The Sisters were the no.1 act, they'll never shake it even though Mr.E is doing his best to wreck it and the good name of a once great combo.

He's convinced me, they're not even an half decent live band.

Me 0-1 Mr.E

[million voices]

I don't really understand
If the three albums that the Sisters have released are broadly speaking "Goth" then the band is Goth
The only way you change your image is to release an album that is totally different and have an image to go with it
i.e. Bowie with Young Amercans, suit and tie and appearing on Soul Train
You can't just say I am something different and churn out the same stuff with same stage act from the time of Thatcher and expect to be taken seriously.

[James Blast]

Excellent point!

[Big Si]

Yeah I'd like new releases but am glad isn't stuck in 1983. It's been and gone.

I couldn't agree more. For me it's a very scary thought to imagine him now, in 2011, as stuck in 1983, or in 1985. I have a question to those of you who miss the 80s Sisters so much, can you honestly confess that you can actually imagine AE as an artist stuck in the 80s, now, without being freaked out by the thought? What songs would he be writing? What albums would he release, with what lyrics, now as a man in his 50s who's been through this and that in his life? What would he wear on stage? To what extent would he seem true? Would you believe him, would you love him, would you still travel to see him perform? Just try to think about it and answer to yourselves.

So how do you explain the fact that his last recorded efforts were merely re-recorded songs he originally wrote and released in 1982-1983!

[Sita]

Look guys:
the term "Goth" wasn't even widely used back then - at least not in Germany where Eldritch was living. When someone used it, they meant people who painted their faces white, like Alien Sex Fiend, or who claimed to sleep in coffins, like Goethes Erben in Germany. In the late 80s, Eldritch wore leather jacket and jeans and dyed his hair, and that was exactly what everyone did who was "alternative" and left-wing. You would hear him say on interviews that he had nothing to do with Goth then, and we were all like "of course not" (obviously. Because he doesn't paint his face, and doesn't claim to mutilate cats at night on graveyards. That was what defined "goth" late 80s/early 90s in Germany.) And in 91, he even put out a rock album.
If the term means something different nowadays to you, it's another story. But don't confuse it and blame Eldritch.

Amen

[James Blast]

we're talking early 80s and the UK

dickless

[Prescott]

I don't really understand
If the three albums that the Sisters have released are broadly speaking "Goth" then the band is Goth
The only way you change your image is to release an album that is totally different and have an image to go with it
i.e. Bowie with Young Amercans, suit and tie and appearing on Soul Train
You can't just say I am something different and churn out the same stuff with same stage act from the time of Thatcher and expect to be taken seriously.

And what exactly is this "goth" thing?

Germanic tribes? Who were considered barbarians by the Romans?
Or maybe middle ages era architecture because some pompous fools used "gothic" in the context of "barbarous" to describe it?
Oh, I know, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe because they included such architecture in their literature?
Wait! Even better! A bunch of bands that have little to do with one another that wear funny hats and lots of black! That must be "goth" right?

Why? Because Peter Murphy sang about Bela Lugosi once?
Because another band had "Banshees" in it's name?

What's "goth" about a banshee? I was under the impression that "goth" has the same root as "gott" and has more to do with "god" than werewolves, vampires, black velvet and spooky things.

But I guess people would rather cling to their own preconceived notions that they borrowed from some moron who couldn't write a music review without referring to labels that are meaningless.

Explain to me what reminds you of germanic tribes in any of the lyrics?
All those other contexts of "gothic" are also false usages, the architecture, the so-called "gothic" literature, all of it.

When the British forces crossed the Gothic Line in WWII is as close as you'll get to a Sisters lyric having anything to do with "Gothic" anything.

The music? Does the Dr. Avalanche in any incarnation conjure up images of Ostrogoths and Visigoths battling the Romans? Of their villages? Of their way of life before being decimated?

Does Marx's guitar? Or Hussey's?

Give it a rest. There might be some guy in Germany who tries to recreate Gothic music from long ago, yet besides some form of Germanic tribal world music, there is NO SUCH thing as "Gothic" music at all.

The scene that has become associated with that word has barely stood for anything other than dabbling in black magic, looking depressed on a dance floor and wearing lots of black.

If that's the lense you see Andrew Eldritch through, your perspective is not only shallow, but it seems rather uneducated and skewed.

[James Blast]

Oh you give it a fuckin' rest!

it's a label dreamed up by some music journo that has stuck, and that's that

handle it

[Big Si]

Look guys:
the term "Goth" wasn't even widely used back then - at least not in Germany where Eldritch was living. When someone used it, they meant people who painted their faces white, like Alien Sex Fiend, or who claimed to sleep in coffins, like Goethes Erben in Germany. In the late 80s, Eldritch wore leather jacket and jeans and dyed his hair, and that was exactly what everyone did who was "alternative" and left-wing. You would hear him say on interviews that he had nothing to do with Goth then, and we were all like "of course not" (obviously. Because he doesn't paint his face, and doesn't claim to mutilate cats at night on graveyards. That was what defined "goth" late 80s/early 90s in Germany.) And in 91, he even put out a rock album.
If the term means something different nowadays to you, it's another story. But don't confuse it and blame Eldritch.

Amen

It was used very widely in the UK where he was living until 1985, after FALAA was released and the band imploded!

[James Blast]

aye, and it's bigger than him or what he reckons he is, he can't just deny it


<----no steampunk Whitby type BTW

[million voices]

I can't do that copying down thingy.
But referring to Prescotts observations, labels are there as generalisations, I do not expect them to be realities. When I play Heavy Metal I do not expect it to fall through the stereo. If I put on some New Romantic it does not mean that I get to f*ck somebody different and if I play some New Wave I don't expect to drown.
These are just titles of convenience

[_emma_]

So how do you explain the fact that his last recorded efforts were merely re-recorded songs he originally wrote and released in 1982-1983!

I don't know, but my guess is that maybe he just wanted to put these great old songs on one record, and earn some money by doing that? And then other things happened, other things didn't happen, time moved on and things changed?

[Being645]

These are just titles of convenience.

... ... convenient is the last thing The Sisters ever were ... ...

[legion]

ISBN-10: 190092448X :

Starkly lit and draped in fog, blatantly minimalist in an age when ‘bigger’ was generally regarded as ‘better,’ there was little to actually look at, but a great deal to watch, three figures choked in cloaking smoke, the now omnipresent hats and ponchos conjuring images that would not be out of place in a Peckinpah movie. And that was before the band kicked into either ‘Phantom,’ with the ghosts of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly floating around its skeletal melody, or Dylan’s ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door,’ lifted straight from Peckinpah’s own Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. Other bands have toyed with the taut, tense expectation that was lay at the soul of the Sisters experience. But none before had ever captured it with such chilling calculation.

[black smurf]

whats this obsession with labels? only two types of music, that vary with each person. like and dont like. simples!

[Swinnow]

Oh come on, back in the very early 80's when Ben used to come around to my mate Sue's house in the LS6 student ghetto and play us the latest demo casettes we used to laugh at the Led Zep rip-off's.

They're a rock'n'roll band, and a rather good one on their day too, same as The m*****n, live with it, love it, g*th my arse!

[paul]

Its romanticism....

Amen to that, it sais it all. It's a feeling you can't explain and heavily contradicts with any form of logic.

[lachert]

ISBN-10: 190092448X :

Starkly lit and draped in fog, blatantly minimalist in an age when ‘bigger’ was generally regarded as ‘better,’ there was little to actually look at, but a great deal to watch, three figures choked in cloaking smoke, the now omnipresent hats and ponchos conjuring images that would not be out of place in a Peckinpah movie. And that was before the band kicked into either ‘Phantom,’ with the ghosts of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly floating around its skeletal melody, or Dylan’s ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door,’ lifted straight from Peckinpah’s own Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. Other bands have toyed with the taut, tense expectation that was lay at the soul of the Sisters experience. But none before had ever captured it with such chilling calculation.

black hats, black clothes, black hearts, another goth band:

[n'Emolicia]

[shivarising]

the problem is that most of you here know the sisters from floodland era, the same era that i stopped to follow them

And yet... you continue to follow them and post almost 1000 times on this very site. Hmmm... at least you're not confused.

[James Blast]

what does that make me?

[Quiff Boy]

what does that make me?

über-fanboi

[Silver_Owl]

...g*th my arse!

[centurionofprix]

I suppose you could argue that the Eighties line-ups were "goth" in some very vague sense of the word -mostly on the basis of the humorous black clothes and the imitation of the Sisters by actual goth bands- but even during that period I don't think the actual content of the music under the ironic rock and roll excess was very "gothic" at all. Not (much) more than T.S. Eliot, and if you include him, then anything is goth and the term means nothing at all. There were no vampires or supernatural castles in the Sisters world.

81-90 was less than a third of the band's lifespan, and calling the Sisters of Vision Thing and later "goth" is ridiculous, as is labeling the entirety of the band by FALAA. If they are goth, then so is anyone from any walk of life whose view of the world is not all rainbows and angels.

@Being: TSOM is (was) important band on (some phase of) our life. But consider this: stop act like hard-core, only-on-earth-who-understand, lunatic psycho-fan(atic), and don't say so big words because it's only Rock 'n' Roll, Baby. or as Red Forman would say it: "Now stop acting wierd and go mow the lawn dumbass!"

Not to speak for someone else, but I don't think that was the point at all. It was that the Sisters sing about different aspects of real life and the reality of the human condition as they see them, not from a particularly "goth" point of view, not of any particularly "goth" themes.

If a person who calls himself "goth" identifies with the Sisters message, that's alright but it doesn't mean the band itself or the all the other people who identify with the band are goth as well.