Heartland

my brother came back from his second year at university in about '94 - i was 14 - and brought back FALAA and Floodland. i was into nirvana and terrorvision at the time (still am, kinda!).

i think i just loved the mystique about it. had no idea what was going on and i remember just staring at the photos trying to work stuff out, especially the twilight one in Floodland with Patricia doing that dance thing. it...just...seemed...so...cool.

then as i was studying politics and english a levels, i was recognising the political and literary stuff so it was great getting into another level of it.

only really recently "got" VT having thought it was some kind of USA sell-out thing. so thats another level of it...

this is a very self-indulgent thread, ain't it? guess thats what t'interweb is all about, really.

Let's see.

The origins of my Sisters kink lie in the bloody and wriggling birth of the new millennium. I was rapidly approaching my seventeenth birthday, and had started wearing sunglasses everywhere and only taking my overcoat off when the sweatiness finally got to be too much for me. I was also getting sick of just listening to whatever was on the radio and looking for new music.

Somebody called me a goth. Intrigued by this, I took a look around on the Interweb, Mystic Fount of All Knowledge, and found a lot of crap websites and one or two very, very good ones. All of them seemed to mention this band called the Sisters of Mercy. I was intrigued.

I bought Overbombing on the same day that I picked up Cradle of Filth's magnum opus Midian, on the recommendation of the then prospective Ms. Episkopos. The Cradle album was compelling awful; it was howling, atonal s**t, but the keyboard parts were quite nice, and it grew on me. Overbombing, though... whoa.

Under the Gun impressed me, Temple of Love blew my ears clean open and by the time Dominion rolled around I'd decided I had a favourite band.

Cool story.

My older sister brought home a copy of "Gift" around 86/87.I was about 12 years old .That got me started and I haven't finshed with them yet.

twas about 1994, a mate who had a van used lots of cash to fit a stupidly big stereo in it. i was asked to help, and i did. We then decided to take the sound machine on six wheels for a spin, i was expecting the dance music that was around at the time to be played, much to my surprise, and later enjoyment TOL (92) blasted out at about 2000 watts or summat, hell lets do loud music louder. That prompted me to but ASCOOB on cassette, but me being me, went to the states, bought Floodland on cd(electra-yipee) and built up my collection from then on. now i think back, 1st gig in 97 at manchester, had long fallen out with the guy, but bumped into him there, asked him what he thought, and he said summat like "Temple was way to short" I know very little about him now, but i know he his a tw*t for saying what he did.

A horn bucket in a teeshirt in about 81/82 *swoon*

1998.Traded a copy of Ok Comp. by Radiohead for ASCOB.It was only for TOL,but the whole song collection on the cd,let's say "Sisters" sound, got such an impact on me.

1988.. "Floodland"... I was leant a copy by the local goffs. They don't go to the gigs anymore. I do. Go figure.

I was trying to get into the panties of a young lady I went to high school with. She liked 'em, so I checkied them out. A victory on all fronts I'd say.

Stumpy Pete wrote:I was trying to get into the panties of a young lady I went to high school with. She liked 'em, so I checkied them out. A victory on all fronts I'd say.

Y?

Stumpy Pete wrote:I was trying to get into the panties of a young lady I went to high school with. She liked 'em, so I checkied them out. A victory on all fronts I'd say.

Er, snap

She wasn't called Suzanne, was she? That would be spooky. In an ironic Goth way

hellboy69 wrote:Circa 1986, Chico's goth night in Hanley, Staffordshire (what a s**t but wonderful club that was) ~ that got me a-groovin' to "Alice" ~ went out and bought the 7" ~ still got it and ne'er shall part with it!

Soon after, my girlfriend at the time got me the Temple 12" as a gift and FALAA soon followed as soon as i'd saved up for it. Won't be parting with them records either. Every now & then i whip 'em out and give 'em a quick sniff...

A few months later i got a job in a video shop & took WAKE home with me.

It's a familiar tale i know, but at least it has a killer soundtrack.

Stoke on Trent is also where it began for me. Was a student there in the late 90s, and the city library had a CD section that was better than most record shops. Picked up Slight Case, then SGWBM, then the rest. Had always been intrigued by the logo, and the scoffing by the music press only served to endear them to me before I'd even heard them.

Chicos was still going strong when I left (1999). A s**t but wonderful club sums it up perfectly. Had my 21st birthday there, taking along a fair few mates who'd experienced nothing similar before or since. I hear it burned down a few years ago. A shame, one of very few places in the city worth venturing to after dark (or by day for that matter).

I was working on the production line in a factory that made thermostatic controls (yes, PiB, Strix) during my gap year and someone I went to school who also worked there lent me a copy of Floodland. It was an almost epiphaneous experience. Must have worn out 3 copies of each album on tape, played them constantly. Probably a major reason for me choosing to go to Leeds Poly, too.

Freshers Week at Leeds Uni in October 1982... Psychedlic Furs gig in the Riley Smith Hall with this odd local support band... A combination of some rather good 'leb', cheap Tetley Bar beer and some good tunes caused me to open my ears.

Swinnow wrote:Freshers Week at Leeds Uni in October 1982... Psychedlic Furs gig in the Riley Smith Hall with this odd local support band... A combination of some rather good 'leb', cheap Tetley Bar beer and some good tunes caused me to open my ears.

you were lucky to know them from the start

sometime circa 89/90

the sisters were featured in an issue of melody maker's "bands that changed a generation" series

the booklet contained some very cool photos which, in conjunction with the band's biog, made me want to hear them

so i went out and borowed falaa and floodland from my local record library

i took them both home and put side 1 track 1 of falaa on...

i stopped it after a few seconds & checked the turntable's speed

then i realised his voice was SUPPOSED to sound like that

so i put it back on again & listened to it all the way through, up until 9 while 9, which i listened to repeatedly half a dozen times, before continuing with the rest of the album

then i put floodland on and became very confused - was this the same band??

that started a journey of discovery and i started to look for other bands that also had this "goth" tag (that way madness lies!)

sometime shortly after that "more" came out, followed by vision thing

16+ years later and here i am

I got into The Sisters of Mercy music from the back seat of a red Vauxhall Viva in the autumn of 1984.

I got into a Sisters of Mercy gig via hurtling down th M1 in the back seat of a tail-gating yellow Mk III Cortina at the end of March 1985. Some short bloke in a cowby hat was standing outside watching people on their way into the Lyceum. I laughed at him for dressing a bit like Eldritch...

We waited an hour or so, and a bit after they came on as the smoke momentarily cleared I realised...

I went to the gothic-discoteque and heard the TEMPLE OF LOVE track...
That's how it started.... Then I began to buy the albums and still looking for the future one!

for me it was my clockradio which had been reset and it went off a sunday morning at 5... playing temple of love... that was about 16 years ago...
i kept listening to it to know who it was..

tried to find it.. and did.. :p

couple of years later if found out my neighbour knew them and said his older brother had some live cd's and stuff.. so copied those (so dark all over europe box, Amphetamine, out in the dark & echoes 4 + 1 demo tape (with tracklist i never ever saw again)... i'll have to copy it to my hdd once, because it contained:
good things
teachers
jolene
wide receiver
candle
driver
heartland demo
temple demo
garden of delight
dance on glass
fix (that satanic version)
and all the karaoke versions of FALAA on the b-side

a bit later someone gave me a copy of kama sutra.. which more stunning demo's.. and there i fell in love with the epic Afterhours (long extended)
and long train..

also bought my first bootleg vinyl than.. was the "enter the sisters" red version with white labels

was about 14 - 15 years than...

never stopped loving them ever since..

and now with all them new songs they play i love the even more...
some of the 2006 gigs have completely rusted onto my mp3 player

I heard This Corrosion on a local pirate radio station and was completely blown away. I still can't hear it without the hairs on my neck rising... It was so totally unlike anything I heard previously... Next day I went into town and bought the 12" and loved it silly! Knew nothing about their backstories so I went back in the next day and picked up a bootleg cassette from Stutgart 84... "I think he's trying to say you're a poof their Wayne..." because I thought Heartland may have had something to do with The The... ah, the nativity of it all...

I was about 12 years old and I just loved the Ramones. An older nephew had Enter the Sisters on a tape and one lovely night he played it to me and my bro. We both fell head over heels for the overwhelming pièce de résistance called Temple of Love...

16 years later, I'm still in love... although I did fell out of it circa 2001. It took 2 years to get back in the groove and I think it won't let me go ever again. That's the way I like it aha aha

Hold on for this is quite a story.

It must be around 97/98 when I got to know this guy who had a very strange musical taste, I didn’t know any of the bands he listened to but most of them I quite enjoyed. There was this one band he referred to as The Sisters where he seemed to be quite fond about. After I showed some interest he made me listen to a record so he brought me some girls wonder by mistake.
The first few tracks seemed okay and I seemed to know temple of love from somewhere but the general sound was so different from anything I listened to I didn’t know what to make of it. I returned the record and that was that.

13-10-2001
The same guy was become a good friend and he invited me to join him to a concert of this band, I was eager to try out festivals since I hadn’t been to many yet so I joined him. I also had started to recognise and enjoy temple of love the few times when a drunk DJ played it at a party, so I figured I had some idea what to expect, it soon turned out to be exactly the opposite to that.

To me the concert was one wall of sound, I couldn’t hear no guitar, drums or make out the lyrics. To this day this where the 3 things good music had to contain for me (But I liked it non the less)
Totally stunned and overwhelmed I soon bought 2 low priced records. First and Last and Always and Floodland. The second one was pish and I almost wanted to throw it away at the spot. F&L&A was different, I quite liked it but the first thing I noticed was he fact every song was different but just as good as the previous, I had never heard this on an album before.

Soon after I found Vision Thing and this was the catalyser because it was both harder and easier than the other records, this was just the kind of stuff I actually listened to at the time.
From here on I did some effort for some girls wander by mistake and soon I preferred it to VT, I gave Floodland another try and from here on I understood what this band was all about.

16-01-2004
My girlfriend and I had a talk about our relationship the previous week and I was driving to her when all of a sudden I heard a song on my car radio. I usually never listened to the car radio and I had never heard this song been played at a radio all together. The song was Temple of love. (original version)
I broke up with her and the next day I was a member of this site.

Must have been 1986 - had just left school took on a summer job in an office. First time I'd actually mixed, as with most school leavers I guess, with people who were 3-4 years older and didn't think they were weirdos.

Anyway, got friendly with a goth type and it was through her that I was loaned copies of FALAA and a few 12"'s (Body and Soul/No Time To Cry &
Walk Away).

Blown Away.

Gutted that it turned out they played in my home town (Edinburgh) about 8 months earlier...and that would be the last chance of seeing the WEA line up.

Managed Wembley in 1990...superb...but must admit to being a bit bemused by what they're up to these days though. I do make every effort to play stuff to my nippers though. My 8 year old loves FALAA.

And no, I didn't ever get to sh*g the goth bird.

halfjobbob wrote:And no, I didn't ever get to sh*g the goth bird.

Preach Brother, Preach!

Got bored of being a perpetual hippy, thought I'd discover other stuff and heard The Sister...more hippy stuff, better clothes (the band that is, not the fans)