‘Sisters’ Were Doin’ It in Motor City

By Vlad T, Rock At Night Detroit

Live Review: Sisters of Mercy w/Blaqk Audio – The Fillmore, Detroit, MI – September 14, 2024

Sisters of Mercy frontman Andrew Eldritch has had an offbeat way of expressing his fondness for the city of Detroit. He once quipped, “Detroit is 40 square miles of urban wasteland….I find that to be quite an achievement.”

Moreover, the back of the band’s debut LP “First and Last and Always” shows Eldritch and the erstwhile band members archly posing in front of a theater marquee proudly touting “Detroit’s Finest Adult Movies.” (Trivia question for my fellow post-punk street urchins: What’s the name of the theater where this was snapped? Look for the answer later in this piece.)

That said, the band has consistently found a way to make a stop in the city during its infrequent tours of America through the years. The city’s dark image—wh

With that in mind, it should be no surprise that the Sisters’ 2024 North American tour made its beachhead in Detroit. The configuration of the band on this jaunt includes Eldritch plus mainstay lead guitarist Ben Christo. It also sees the recent addition of Kai (also in modern metal outfit Esprit D’Air) taking on guitar duties. Returning to the ranks and manning “Doktor Avalanche” (the band’s curiously anthropomorphized drum machine) is Chris Catalyst.

The set performed by the Sisters at the Fillmore on September 14th was similar to what they performed at the same venue last year, albeit with a few new wrinkles. Eldritch has been on strike against the release of any new recordings since 1992–yes, 32 years ago. He has long maintained that there is no reasonable income to be made from producing and releasing new recordings and thus isn’t worth the bother; however, the band and he do write material and choose to exclusively present it to the world in live shows. Eldritch’s tactic has proven prescient, with the rest of the music industry that’s not Taylor Swift having realized the same grim reality and capitulated to making its income from live performance and merch.

Saturday night’s thunderous set encompassed Sisters live mainstays such as “Alice,” “Dominion,” “Temple of Love,” and the delicious “Ribbons” plus recent titles “Don’t Drive On Ice,” “Eyes of Caligula,” and “On the Beach.”

This tour’s stage set reflected Eldritch’s longstanding fascination with “Apocalypse Now,” evident in the lighting columns draped in camouflage netting. The total effect of this and expressionist lighting carving the stagescape made for scenes befitting, say, the hallucinatory Do Lung bridge scene in “Apocalypse.” Eldritch and his bandmates deftly exploited the stripes of darkness and light, manifesting themselves in bright shards as if to punctuate key moments of lyric or song.

Colonel Kurtz would have approved.

Yet, amidst the sturm und drang, there is a sense of comedy and levity that’s evident in Eldritch’s occasionally exaggerated body expressions and subtle smirks visible to those close to the stage. He’s an eternal iconoclast, never afraid to challenge, but also eminently capable of charming.

Reciprocating the band’s loyalty to Detroit is a fervent following for the Sisters by Detroit, with those followers out in force in Saturday’s show. The group has several generations of rabid followers, all of whom made their presence felt.

At one point, during the hard-driving anthem “Marian,” a coven of a dozen ladies near the stage spontaneously clasped hands and deliriously danced in a circle. This reviewer couldn’t shake the sense that the witches of MacBeth had been conjured downtown for a evening of frivolity and mischief with their Sisters.

Throughout Eldritch and both guitarists could be seen clearly relishing the affections of the Motor City audience. They know—and we know—they shall return.

(For those who made it this far, here’s the answer to the trivia question: The aforementioned photo of the Sisters was taken in 1984/85 in front of the Sassy Cat Cinema on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Amidst a neighborhood rehab 20 years ago, the theater was rehabbed to its original stylish state and reverted to its original “Garden Theater” moniker. Rock At Night even covered a show here, the swinging Caravan Palace, in 2019. Perhaps the Sisters could play there next time?)