Gig Review: The Sisters of Mercy @ Hunter Lounge, Wellington, 26 October 2022

They say you should never meet your heroes. The idea being that they seldom live up to expectation and it often only ever results in disappointment. Sometimes, a variation on that old adage can be applied to seeing your favourite bands perform live. More so, if you’re seeing the band for the first time, some 35 years after their feted heyday.

Such was the case when The Sisters of Mercy played at the Hunter Lounge in Wellington on Wednesday night. Maybe I just expected too much. Perhaps it was because I was a little too sober. I’d read and heard mostly positive reviews of the band’s Auckland set the night prior, and felt confident that Sisters v.22 would match my own not unreasonable expectations.

All I wanted was the “hits”, some atmosphere, the requisite quota of melodramatic darkness, and a decent light show. Not too much to ask.

What we got was somewhat less than all of the above. Sure, we got the biggest hits (hits, in context of the 1980s indie charts), but we also got a lot of new-ish, unreleased material - around 50 percent of the set list - which ultimately failed to stir the loins, and virtually all of the hits felt a lot less than the sum of their original parts.

When the set opened with ‘Don’t Drive on Ice’, a relative newbie which wouldn’t have been out of place on the band’s faux-metal Vision Thing album, it felt a little bit like hearing a very good karaoke replica. The sound was thin, a little tinny even, and I felt certain the volume inside the packed venue was somehow muted, if not a little muddy. Surely they’ll amp things up and sort out the mix?

But no, nothing changed as we weaved our way through a 20-something strong set list. Newer tunes were dispersed at regular intervals, easily the best of which was ‘But Genevieve’, alongside a run of better known work which included a lightweight ‘Alice’, ‘Marian’, ‘More’, ‘Detonation Boulevard’ and The Sisterhood epic, ‘Giving Ground’, which briefly had me upping my inner goth to feet shuffling and head-nod mode. Nothing really pulsated my chest or buckled my knees.

I was pleased Vision Thing’s slower-paced sleeper gem ‘I Was Wrong’ was included, but by this time I was despairing a little too much for main man Andrew Eldritch, his once majestically deep baritone now a mere shadow, replaced in 2022 with a sort of unhappy-go-lucky growl.

When the time for an obligatory encore arrived, the band did appear to up the ante a bit, perhaps in anticipation that their night’s work was almost done, and versions of ‘Lucretia, My Reflection’, ‘Temple of Love’, and ‘This Corrosion’ were as good as could be expected, given the rest of the night.

I get that sometimes a band can become tour-worn and jaded. I get that a band can fall prone to merely phoning-in a performance on occasion. And I get that a band wants to introduce new work to an audience ostensibly there to celebrate the stuff they already know.

But the gig just lacked “soul”. There was no real sense of authenticity. Both guitarists could well have been cutouts from a Sisters tribute act, and Eldritch himself was fairly underwhelming as a posturing frontman just going through the motions. Almost like he was trying to resist the urge to take the piss out of himself and failing badly. And yes, I appreciate that you can’t ever take this genre too seriously … and sometimes you should never meet your heroes.

PS. The support act was Brisbane duo Elko Fields, a curious mix of the White Stripes and The Kills’ aesthetic, and they played about half a dozen raucous songs to an enthusiastic reception.

Photos: @nothingelseon, thanks bro.