Mission: Improbable

 I'm sometimes loathe to admit it, but I used to be a somewhat massive fan of The Mission (or The Mission U.K. as they were marketed here). Forged after the great goth schism that ripped apart the sophomore line-up of the Sisters of Mercy, The Mission were a slightly less serious bunch than the Sisters, but circa 1986 through, say, 1990, they were an entertaining little concern that made a clutch of great singles and performed some beerily memorable shows. The rot set in around 1991, however, and I slowly lost interest. The band went through a number of lesser incarnations before mastermind & perma-sunglassed Wayne Hussey (an exceptionally nice guy, I should point out) finally pulled the plug.

So why am I bothering to bring them up now? Well, because YouTube "recommended" a video of theirs to me this evening. "Shine Like The Stars'' was a single by the band that came out in 2002 (long after I'd stopped religiously following them). Simply out of curiosity, I decided to give it a spin and -- what's this? -- the entire clip takes place here in NYC. The Mish themselves do not appear in the video (which is arguably a good thing). The plot line involves a troubled young couple who appear to be arranging a star-crossed rendez-vous. Sullen skater boi agrees to meet plucky goth girl in Coney Island but, improbably, he can't seem to figure out how to get there and ends up wandering around Brooklyn like a tourist. Worse still, he can't seem to accost anyone else who knows where Coney Island is either. To make matters worse yet, goth girl unhelpfully refuses to stay at their assigned meeting place and takes a cab into Manhattan for a bit. Kids today, I tell ya.

If you manage to sit through the whole thing, you'll doubtlessly be relieved to learn that they find each other in the end, however anticlimactically. In any case, being that I'm a slavish devotee of clips that capture our vanishing city, I think "Shine Like the Stars" is at least worth a cursory viewing for its depiction of an eroding Coney Island. It also has some shots of Times Square, but who hasn't had enough of that by this point?

Personally speaking, I much preferred the Mish when they looked and sounded like this.