As recently mentioned, I don’t know that I’ve ever been busier both at home and at work. I am struggling to keep my head above water both on a litany of demanding projects at the office and on host of pressing needs at home. As such, the blog may be taking a bit of hit, but I was struck by something this evening, and this post just wrote itself. It won’t mean much to many, but for those who know and care, enjoy.
In retrospect, there was always something a bit crass and vindictive about “Wasteland,” the breakout single from God’s Own Medicine, the debut LP by The Mission. Having been a die-hard fan of the First And Last And Always-iteration of the Sisters of Mercy, I was enthralled, of course, by the “Great Goth Schism” that ripped that band apart, finding founding guitarist Gary Marx jumping ship first, shortly to be followed by bassist Craig Adams and relatively recent recruit, guitarist Wayne Hussey. While Marx was happy to split from the program entirely, Adams and Hussey seemed wholly intent in sticking it to the Sisters’ Mother Superior, Andrew Eldritch, on their way out the door by initially appropriating an uncomfortably comparable moniker — The Sisterhood — before Eldritch beat them to the punch by releasing a deliberately difficult ep, — Gift (German, don’t you know, for “Poison”) — before they could make good on the name.
Unfazed, Hussey and Adams re-dubbed their new combo The Mission, also a swipe at Eldritch’s vision, it being an arguable allusion to that version of the Sisters’ never-to-be follow-up album, Left on Mission and Revenge. Adding insult to injury, Hussey wholly adopted his former taskmaster’s tonsorial and sartorial aesthetic (shades at all times and a big, black fuckoff gaucho hat), arguably blurring the already vague lines, for those who weren’t really paying attention, between who did what and who was who in the notoriously enigmatic Sisters of Mercy.
But while Hussey wrote about half the music on the Sisters’ debut LP, there was kind of a crucial difference — the lyrics. Where Eldritch reportedly agonized over lyrical nuance and veiled symbolism, Hussey basically just “got on with it” and strung bits of portentous prose together. While the early work of The Mission certainly bears the sonic hallmarks of the Sisters, the lyrics, by and large (and by all accounts, even Hussey’s in later years) don’t really mean anything. Like, at all. They are simply words that fit the bill and sound nice together.
But taking it a step further, Hussey continued to mine from Eldritch’s sandbox. The very title “Wasteland,” of course, comes from the classic romantic poem of the same name by T.S. Elliot, a frequent source of inspiration for the inarguably erudite Eldritch. Now, was Hussey himself as versed in the storied works of said Modernist poet? Or was he just brazenly swiping yet another aspect of Eldritch’s aesthetic? Even a casual perusal of Hussey’s lyrics don’t suggest a familiarity with Elliot’s complex wordplay, if that was indeed was he was trying to emulate. It sounds more like a stylishly funereal way of taunting his former bandmate.
Were that not enough, the core of “Wasteland” is essentially Craig Adams’ brooding bass line, itself basically lifted wholesale from 1981’s “Over the Wall” by Hussey’s fellow Liverpudlians in Echo & The Bunnymen.
So, yeah, add it all up, and “Wasteland” was basically an emphatic middle finger (with stylish black nail polish) from The Mission to Andrew Eldritch in the form of an essentially empty vessel that cribbed all the fixin's — but none of the actual meat — from the turkey that was the First and Last-era Sisters of Mercy. It did not go unnoticed. When the time was right, Eldritch shot back directly at Hussey & Co. with “This Corrosion,” a withering rejoinder rife with over-the-top, Hussey-ian fluff that took his former bandmates to task for the pilferage. It didn’t hurt that it became the reconstituted Sisters of Mercy’s biggest hit to date.
So, yeah, I know all that, and huge swathes of these suspicions were confirmed by Trevor Ristow’s magisterial tome, “Waiting for Another War” last year (see posts about same here, here and here), but I still have a confession.
I still fucking love “Wasteland.”
I can still remember spying the video for “Wasteland” on MTV”s “120 Minutes” one evening and being immediately smitten, going out the next fucking morning to prize the LP from a long-shuttered and short-lived record store on First Avenue. “Wasteland” went onto rub shoulders with “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult, “51st State” by New Model Army, “All That I Wanted” by Belfegore and — yes, do wait for it — “Eighties” by Killing Joke as one of my favorite songs of all time. Despite its inherent lyrical vacuity and liberally pastiched sonic elements, I still swoon every time I hear Wayne’s hoarily ominous intro (“I still believe in God … but God no longer believes in me!”) and air-strum accordingly along with Wayne’s shimmering twelve-string and lead guitarist Simon Hinkler’s florid e-bowing. It’s silly, but I will always love it. In a world where people champion laughable fucking piffle by Drake, Cardi B. and Justin Bieber as the crowning achievements of the species, I feel not a jot of shame.
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