Todashi wrote: ↑03 Dec 2023, 10:19
I have no special insight into why Dylan was let go. But let's do some reasonable guessing. On the night in question, I have only seen bad video recorded from the back of the room that show him acting up a bit in response to his monitors not working. It looked pretty mild to me. Like, what is a guitarist supposed to do if they're on stage in front of a relatively big audience and their gear isn't working? I know I'd be pretty stressed by that. (Also, has anybody seen any front row video of this? - I haven't seen anything clear at all and ususally there are multiple angles of all parts of a Sisters gig.)
From the video I've seen, Dylan appears to lose his s**t on stage and gets invited to take his frustration off stage as he's making a scene. He's not booted off stage, or anything like it - Von wanders over, puts his hand on his shoulder and says something to him, and he leaves the stage. Von has to worry about the viability of his band and its ability to put up on a show, so I don't judge him for this, and Dylan as a performer was probably having an absolute nightmare of a gig, so I don't blame him either.
So I don't think that incident can be solely responsible for him being let go. I think there has to have been other stuff going on. Either beforehand or possibly after the gig/next day when the post mortem happened. I don't know what that is, and it's really none of my business. The onstage stuff sort of is fair game for comment though, because it happened literally on-stage, in front of an audience.
I think Von is very lucky to have Ben at his side. And that extends to Ben being able to look up his contacts book and source a replacement guitarist at relatively short notice in Kai. But let's be clear, Dylan has been the single best thing to happen to the Sisters of Mercy in 20 years.
He brought something the spurred on a bout of creativity that was most unlikely, and in his departure, he created drama that resulted in the band finishing a tour better than it has in decades. Seriously - we had a string of shows that were regularly described as being excellent. A string.
This is the Sisters of Mercy we're talking about. Take your fan-glasses off and take a step back. Was this causation or correlation? Did he spark this, or was he just there when it happened, and it would have happened anyway? Only three or four people know that for sure.
If the band keeps going with this kind of momentum once the 'peril' of an endangered tour receeds, it'll also be remarkable.
All of that said, Kai has been amazing in stepping into a s**t show of a situation and getting it over the finish line. Major credit and he deserves kudos for that. But until he's involved in writing the first serious batch of new songs in nearly 25 years for the band, yeah he's not in the ball park with Dylan.