On this date in 1988, THE SISTERS OF MERCY released the single LUCRETIA, MY REFLECTION (Jun 10, 1988)
Lucretia My Reflection was the third and final commercial single from The Sisters of Mercy's second studio album, Floodland. Where the album's first two singles had traded in grandeur -- This Corrosion, produced by Jim Steinman with the New York Choral Society, had reached number 7; Dominion / Mother Russia had made number 13 -- this one took a different route. There was no Steinman, no massed choir. Produced by Andrew Eldritch and Larry Alexander, Lucretia My Reflection was leaner, harder and colder, built on a pounding, mechanical bassline and the relentless pulse of Doktor Avalanche, the band's long-serving drum machine. It peaked at number 20 on the UK singles chart, spending five weeks in the Top 100, and also reached number 22 in Ireland and number 30 on the US Billboard Dance Club Songs chart.
The context for Floodland, and by extension for this single, was a band that had been pulled apart and put back together in an entirely different form. After the release of the debut album First and Last and Always in 1985, Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams had left to form The Mission, taking a large part of the previous line-up's sound and momentum with them. Gary Marx had already departed earlier. What followed was a naming dispute, the deliberately confrontational Sisterhood project, and Eldritch's retreat to Hamburg, where the city's abundance of water fed both the album's title and its recurring lyrical preoccupation with flood, drowning and dissolution. He wrote the Floodland songs there using a Casio CZ-101 synthesiser, acoustic guitars and a new drum machine, before taking the material to studios in New York, Stockport and Bath. Eldritch performed vocals, played most of the instruments and programmed Doktor Avalanche himself. Patricia Morrison, formerly of The Gun Club, had joined as the new Sisters of Mercy bassist and was a visible part of the band's presentation and live work, though the extent of her playing on the finished album has remained a matter of longstanding dispute. Later accounts, including remarks attributed to Eldritch, have suggested her musical contribution was limited; the question remains contested.
Eldritch later said that he wrote Lucretia My Reflection as a "welcome" to Morrison, who "always strikes me as a Lucrezia [Borgia]-type person" -- referencing the infamous daughter of Pope Alexander VI, a name synonymous with political ruthlessness and alleged poisonings since the Italian Renaissance. The lyric opens in a landscape of industrial collapse and violence, with imagery of roaring machinery, methedrine, dum-dum bullets and dive bombers circling the repeated, hammered phrase "empire down." The middle section shifts into something closer to numbness and resignation before the song folds in a passage that seems to echo Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, the 1932 Yip Harburg standard about the Great Depression's destruction of the American promise. Given the song's connection with Morrison, listeners have often noticed the prominence of the bassline, which drives the track with a cold, sequenced insistence throughout.
The single was issued on Merciful Release, distributed through WEA, in three formats. The 7-inch (MR 45) paired a single edit running to 4 minutes 20 seconds with Long Train (1984) at around 7 minutes 27 seconds. The 12-inch (MR 45T) carried an extended version of the a-side stretching to nearly ten minutes, during which the mechanical elements -- the sequenced bassline, the drum programming, the layered electronic textures -- are given room to grind and build with a patience the album version does not permit. Long Train appeared at a similar length on this format. The CD single (MR 45 CD) carried the same extended a-side but paired it with a considerably shorter edit of Long Train, cut down to around 4 minutes 26 seconds.
Long Train itself was a track from the earlier Sisters era, first issued in 1984 as a bonus flexi disc included with the initial 5,000 copies of the Walk Away single. Its copyright notice on the b-side label -- 1984 WEA Records Ltd -- sits alongside the a-side's 1988 credit, and the contrast between the two recordings speaks plainly about how far the band had moved in the intervening years. The lyric deals in imagery of victims, railway tracks, tunnel vision and one-way tickets, its tone bleaker and more direct than Lucretia's layered Cold War panorama. For devoted fans the pairing was a useful bridge, connecting the rebuilt Sisters to the band's earlier period.
The music video for Lucretia My Reflection was directed by Peter Sinclair and filmed in India, including footage shot in a cotton mill in Bombay. The grainy, industrial imagery -- pounding machinery, abstracted visuals -- suited both the lyric's tone and the record's mechanical feel. The song's repeating structure and sequenced production sit close to the late-1980s meeting point of goth, programmed rock and industrial dance, and the track has often been heard as occupying ground between the Sisters' post-punk roots and the harder electronic territory that was opening up across alternative music at the time. On Floodland itself, Lucretia My Reflection follows the brooding instrumental passage of Flood I and precedes the spare, piano-led 1959, occupying a space distinct from the Steinman-produced tracks -- stripped of their orchestral scale, relying instead on repetition, tension and the cold authority of Eldritch's baritone. Floodland had debuted at number 9 in the UK and was certified Gold by the BPI, making Lucretia My Reflection the closing commercial chapter of an album that had established the second incarnation of The Sisters of Mercy as a going concern.
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