floodland

Who is Andrew Eldritch, you wonder, as you leaf through a pile of old interviews on the way to his current whereabouts in Bath. A character of the Old School, maybe, up to his eyes in Times crossword puzzles and Harvey's Bristol Cream, whose first question to you would be a haughty: "So...what does your father do?" Or some gauche, neurotic Leeds University dropout who formed a band to overcome shyness, lack of height and inability to click with girls? A dashing, caddish rogue in a smoking jacket with the voice of a Shakespearian actor, dozens of puckish epigrams at his fingertips and a pack of hounds to set on you should your line of interrogation verge on the impertinent? Or a shy little geezer with a high-pitched southern twang, fingers that fidget manically with his Silk Cut and nervous eyes that dart around and do anything but look into yours?

Who is Andrew Eldritch?

He'd greeted us wearing shades, and once you'd got used to his small stature he looked just like the guy you see onstage: slicked-back hair, black coat, black leather trousers, motorcycle boots, a filter tip in his paw and a cruel slash of a mouth bidding a confident hello. Once we sat down in the pub and the drinks arrived, however, he took his shades off to do the interview. And away went the legend of Andrew Eldritch.

This is not the leader of the Sisters Of Mercy, surely, you think to yourself. Not this guy with his painfully shy eyes and his shaky fingers and his chirpy voice. This can't be the guy who startled one interviewer by repeatedly swishing a fencing blade mere inches from his face while bemoaning falling attendances at county cricket matches. Bloody hell. This is the man who swaggers round Hamburg by night, smoke-screened in stealth as he moves from bar to bar. This is what Andrew Eldritch looks like with the shades off?

A Sisters Of Mercy compilation album comes out this month, entitled 'Some Girls Wander By Mistake'. That's a quote from the Leonard Cohen song 'Teachers', which was the first thing the Sisters ever played live, on February 16, 1981. The album is a collection of early singles and EPs from 1980 to 1983. Eldritch is the first to admit that, in a few cases, this material doesn't exactly constitute the absolute apex of Sororian wordplay, but press him on his reasons for dredging the old vinyl crypt thus, and he'll merely flash some car keys at you and smile pleasantly. Ah, a Merc. Your first?

"I've never been able to afford a car before," he nods, looking very proud. "I've never had that kind of money. No money at all for my personal enjoyment. So, er..." he rattles the keys, "this is why I'm putting it out."

A classis model?

"No, no, a very sensible family saloon."

Black, though, of course?

"No, white actually."

Well, that's no good, is it? Anyway, what's it like listening to all this ancient history?

"It's a tour de force of willpower," he says. "It's a tribute to persistence. It's a good lesson to everybody who listens to that record, that if you try hard enough, no matter how bad you are when you start out, sooner or later you might not have to sign on anymore. I was signing on until '84, you know. The musical climate when all this stuff came out was totally against us. We were hated. We felt completely alienated from London and alienated from people who had money. Then, it was like Kid Creole was the be-all and end-all of everything. He was completely hideous. That's what inspired us and a whole lot of people like us."

There's something odd about Eldritch's speech. You'd have to hear it. It's like something self-conscious. He doesn't sound very confident at all. Maybe he's still licking his wounds from last year's aborted, loss-making Sisters/Public Enemy US tour. He's trying too hard. When he makes a joke he goes "Erm!" at the end, just like Jimmy Tarbuck. His precise syntax evaporates if you press a point. He's a likeable man, certainly, friendly and honest. But when he talks of coming off the dole as being of huge importance in the Sisters' history, you can't help thinking, Well, hang on, where's the star-gazing in that? Where's the cynical playmaster of other people's emotions that you read about? Where's the ruthless puppeteer, the smirking Don Quixote?

When he makes a couple of charming quips about his height ("when I was small...well, smaller") it gets increasingly hard to square this Andrew Eldritch with the imperious Count Von Eldritch who bewitched 40,000 people at the Reading Festival last summer. He hasn't, you know, sent along a stunt double today or something, has he?

To best appreciate the embryonic Sisters Of Mercy, we have to Tardis our way back to the days of '80/'81, when sombre, commmitted bands like the Gang Of Four, Delta 5, the Mekons, and The Au Pairs sang of feminine armpit hair and Northern Ireland. Andrew Eldritch (or Andrew Taylor as he was then) was a shy Stooges freak studying Chinese at Leeds University. He and all his mates did loads of speed and not much else. On the first Sisters single, 'The Damage Done' (1,000 copies only, 1980), Eldritch plays the drums and a little guitar. He was so crap at drums you can actually hear him drop the sticks at one point.

A year later the Sisters regrouped, and this time Eldritch was the singer. Now it was looking more like a band.

They were never quite like anyone else. They weren't as arty as Bauhaus, nor as boisterous as Southern Death Cult. They didn't have a drummer, just a cheap machine. They were pretty naff. One of their most famous songs, 'Temple Of Love', was never played live because nobody in the band couple play the guitar part. The press in London tended to scoff. Eldritch is convinced some singles were reviewed on the strength of their titles alone. But, as any Peel listener from the time will tell you, the Sisters never seemed to go away.

A staple of a Sisters Of Mercy set became the well-chosen cover version. Their first gig ended with a 20-odd minute version of the Velvets' 'Sister Ray', with Eldritch frantically inventing additional lyrics. 'Some Girls Wander By Mistake' has versions of the Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' and The Stooges' '1969'. What does Eldritch think the Sisters brought to these classic songs, apart from the tinny sound of a drum machine?

"A bit more energy," he says, and rattles on regardless of the loudly raised eyebrows. "You see, in those days we took a lot more drugs. I mean, we were really the bees' knees when it came to amphetamine consumption. I'm sure we set quite a lot of records."

Years of outrageous coyness on the subject of his drug intake have left Eldritch with a non-specific reputation of mysteriously derived illness the equivalent of, say, Dennis Hopper's. Everyone knows he's lived, but no one's really too sure what he's done. Just exactly how pharmaceutical are we talking about here?

"Well, I don't want to get arrested, do I?" he says testily.

It's eventually wheedled out of him that heroin was at no time on the shopping list; that cocaine changed his personality in all sorts of unsavoury ways and has been ditched with a vengeance; and that a few lines of cheapo whizz every so often are about his limits these days. And yet he insists that the Sisters "took up where the Stooges left off" and that the Detroit band's "gonzoid rush" became in time a fully-fledged Sisters trademark.

The 1992 Sisters Of Mercy have two 'proper' guitarists (Andreas Bruhn and Tim Bricheno), but still the same tacky drum machine they were using in 1980. They haven't had decent bass player since Craig Adams left with Wayne Hussey to form The Mission in 1986.

And Andrew Eldritch is still no nearer to facing an audience without his trademark security blanket of smoke, 40W lighting smoke, dry ice, monumental echo smoke.

"I'm too terrified," he says, looking like he means it. "I don't like the idea of that at all. I think one of the reasons people like to watch me is because it's obvious I don't really have any technical ability, but there's something about the way my terror manifests itself that seems to turn them on."

You're not cool at all, are you? You're really human and frightened.

"Oh, yeah...I mean...yeah..." His eyes dart around.

So why is all this Transylvanian bollocks written about you in interviews and stuff? All this heroic Flashman nonsense. He exhales steadily. His answer is pretty weird.

"Because I have no social skills, no communication skills outside of my songs. And people are always a bit lairy of what they don't understand. People don't understand me because... (long pause) ...because I don't explain a lot of what I do, I just do it. I frighten people with my intensity..." His voice trails off. "I don't like explaining. It's futile."

Did you kind of reinvent yourself as a rock start when you formed the Sisters?

"No," he says quickly. "I'd already cut myself off from everybody before that. Really, I ended up in a band by default. I'd never picked up a musical instrument. I'd been banned from music classes at school since I was ten cos I couldn't sing in key or play anything. I was completely incompetent. Tone deaf. I still am. Even today, if you listen, I've got a way of implying notes rather than singing them. And if it's not in A, I can't sing it anyway. The musicologists among you will notice how many of our songs are in A. It's quite a lot. It is remarkable how much one can make of one's limitations. That's all I've done."

As the Sisters records came out (all doing extremely well in the then-formative independent charts) Eldritch spent more and more time working on their lyrics. This became his domain. As soon as the conversation touches on his lyrics, all self-effacement and nervousness vanishes. Andrew Eldritch is adamant he's simply the best there is. That's better than Michael Stipe ("very good"), Lou Reed ("useless") and, well, everyone else really... with the surprising exception of Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs, whom Eldritch rates as a true genius.

Wayne Hussey of The Mission does not rate very highly.

"Yes, well, there's a difference between deliberately perverting language and not knowing what the fuck you're doing," says Eldritch briskly. "Wayne's illiterate. My writing owes more to collage editing in film. It's a richer use of language, that's all. Plus," he adds, quickly warming to his theme, "you need to be pretty clued up to get a lot of the humour in my writing. I write lines like : 'Stuck inside of Memphis in a mobile home', erm! Now if you don't know your Dylan (it's a pun on a 1966 Dylan song called 'Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again' -- Ed) you're not gonna know that's funny. There's a lot of stuff like that. It's like doing a particularly esoteric crossword. You not only have to know the Wordsworth quotes, but also who as the England cricket captain in 1965, or whatever. You have to have read a whole lot of Milton, Blake, Donne, Eliot."

And here we are in another grey area. Eldritch refers several times to his "education". He's not from Leeds originally; he was born in the Fens in East Anglia ("so, of course, I hate the French, erm!"). A nomadic childhood peaked with an invitation to go to Oxford University to study German Literature, but the young Andrew Taylor couldn't get a foothold in the class-conscious, punt-happy Oxford milieu and abandoned his course at the end of the first year. He went north, to Leeds University, to learn Chinese. Unnerved to learn that the plan was to dispatch him to Peking for a year of some intensive, closer-to-the-action tutelage, he dropped out and went on the dole. His Chinese is now, he admits, pretty shaky. He's still to meet a Chinese person he can speak it to - the restaurants round his way are all run by Cantonese people who speak a different dialect.

But he considers himself "a linguist, a specialist", and it's this fascination with words and sentence construction that he brings to his lyric writing. He explains how he'll omit the definite article here and there to get the listeners attention, or twist the grammar round so you get lines like "Acid on the floor so she walks on the ceiling" ('Body Electric').

"I thought the 'Vision Thing' album was unassailably brilliant," he says. "I just love the language. I'm a linguist. Those little twists." He inhales.

When most rock stars want a few hours of incognito relaxation away from the depredations of clammy hands of the superfans, they tend to whack the shades on. Andrew Eldritch takes his off.

"No one looks twice at me when I've got them off," he says confidently. "Plus with this short haircut I look like a puny Marine. Ain't nobody gonna recognize me now. When we do gigs I spend most of the time beforehand in the crowd, soaking it all up with the shadesoff."

He goes into quite a passionate little speech about "being picked on" by strangers in public when he's just trying to "live in my own space". The Eldritch of cartoon legend, of course, would send these scurvy rapscallions on their way with a cuff round the ear and a piercing aphorism or two. The real Eldritch just says: "Nah, mate. Sorry. You've got the wrong bloke."

How do you feel about your fans? Are you protective of them?

"Oh yeah. I hate it when they get slagged off. The worst kind of reviews are when they say, Well, it's a pretty good record but who wants to be associated with the other people who are going to buy it? As if they're obviously morons. That really upsets me."

Do you get the feeling your music helps them through something?

"Yeah, I do. I get letters along those lines. I do know there are a lot of people who find sustenance there. We're just trying to provide a soundtrack for people with the same worldview as we have, whatever that might be. I think our music has values, and I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of at all."

Would your fans be disappointed if they met you off-duty?

"No, I think they'd be pleasantly surprised, because I do give people the benefit of the doubt. People keep having a go at me, you know. People take advantage of me quite a lot. It's because I'm actually quite easy-going."

His eye contact's all over the place now. What's this all about?

"No, I think the only reason they'd be disappointed is because I'm obviously shorter than they think I am. I'm five foot nine, and I'm not pretty. I know I'm not pretty because before I was in a band I was completely unattractive." He looks down at the carpet. "I like...I like those little twists of language, you know, I...I don't like people to be paying attention to what the hips are doing. I just want them to...get the most out of the songs..."

A sudden, almost sympathetic thought occurs. Would you be happier with your shades on?

"Yeah, I would," he exhales. "I mean...it's occurred to me, yeah. I just thought it might make things difficult for you."

Don't you think the Sisters fans would respect you even more if they knew you were this human? He finally snaps. He's had enough.

"Look, it's not up to me to tell them, is it? Why should they believe anything I say? One of the things I've always said to them is, Look, I know I'm telling the truth, but what I do is akin to being a rock 'n' roll star, so you'd want to be very careful before you believe anything I say. Now why should they believe me? Eh? If anyone's gonna tell 'em, you tell 'em. I write songs..."

With little twists. Sure. Next time you're at a Sisters Of Mercy gig, take a good look around the crowd beforehand. Look for a little guy in a leather jacket with a cruel mouth but incredibly nervous eyes. Ask him if he's Andrew. The chances are he'll say no and scuttle off through the crowd, head down.

And when the lights go down and all that bloody smoke billows up and that imperious looking figure with the matchstick legs and the voice of doom salutes the first delerious cheers of recognition, ask yourself this: who is Andrew Eldritch?

Omg. So I have no idea what to say in response to this, other than to take a look at this picture and decide for yourself.