Curlycues in ‘Casablanca’ - a Mission Mystery

Here’s one strictly for music geeks of a certain stripe, so ready thyselves.

As discussed in this post from last year, when the First and Last and Always incarnation of the Sisters of Mercy fell apart circa 1986, departing conspirators Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams made more than a few deliberate attempts to stick it to Sisters’ Mother Superior Andrew Eldritch on their way out of the convent. For a start, their initial plan was to name their new project The Sisterhood, an uncomfortably comparable name to the former order, that is until Eldritch beat them to it with a hastily released EP (recently re-issued on CD). Unfazed, the new band re-christened itself The Mission, also a dig at Eldritch, being that plans for the follow-up album that never transpired were to call it Left on Mission and Revenge.

But the jabs didn’t end there. The Mission wholly made off with the tonsorial/sartorial aesthetic of the Sisters, with Wayne adopting Eldritch’s shades-on-absolutely-all-the-goddamn-time and big-fuckoff-black hat flourish. A sharper sting was naming their debut LP’s lead single “Wasteland,” blithely cribbed from the title of an epic modernist poem by Eldritch’s beloved T.S. Elliot. It seemed as if the new band was going well out of its way to mock and taunt their former taskmaster at every opportunity.

Of course, the mighty Mish went onto find a grand amount of success on their own accord and soon defined their own identity, largely shaking off the shackles of their former association and, I want to believe, burying the bitter baggage along the way, although a full-scale reunion with Eldritch has yet to happen, and I’m not holding my breath.

But there was one more thing from the Sisters that the Mission kind of adopted that always intrigued me - the curlycue cross.

A big part of the early Sisters of Mercy was their bold iconography. Even before they’d properly honed their chops as a functioning band, they’d established themselves with a stark design scheme, a proper logo and even a preferred font, not unlike the template-founders in hallowed Motorhead before them. As the band developed, Eldritch basically assigned the now iconic head/star motif to the band’s label, Merciful Release, and soon adopted the so-called "Chinese Chop,” another cryptic design that graced the sleeves of the singles and the eventual release of the first LP, First and Last and Always, although when that line-up dissolved from attrition, Eldritch retired the “Chinese Chop” for good.

Doubtlessly recognizing the value of that type of readily identifiable insignia, the Mission, too, sought to similarly brand themselves, and settled upon the curlycue cross you can see at the top of this post, a sort of suitably baroque rune that hints at arcane lore. It was just vague enough to conjure any number of gothy connotations, and looked fuckin’ great on the back of a black leather jacket. One friend of mine always thought it looked like four condoms, ... a decidedly more pruriently priapic suggestion than I'd believe the band would prefer to espouse. 

Personally speaking, I’d always been curious about the curlycue cross — what was its origin? What did it actually mean? Where did the band first find it? What was its true provenance?

I’d always assumed it was appropriated from some Celtic, pre-Christian art or swiped from some esoteric medieval source, and figured that, short of directly asking Wayne (which I actually had the opportunity to do, at a couple of points, in the early `90s as a fledgling "rock journalist"), I’d never actually solve the riddle.

And then came yesterday.

My wife and I had a dinner plan with one of her siblings on the Upper East Side later in the evening, but decided to go uptown early for a mild mid-winter stroll and maybe a quick museum trip. We settled on the Neue Gallery, a poshly teutonic little institution on the corner of East 86th and Fifth Avenue that, despite my having grown up in the same neighborhood, I’d never actually visited. The Neue is a comparatively tiny museum next to its stately neighbors like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to its south and the Guggenheim to its north. Its humble succession of rooms features treasures like several iconic paintings by Gustav Klimt, an impressive-if-random array of medieval arms and armor, some Austrian illustrations from two centuries ago and — quite incongruously — a tiny alcove filled with trivial ephemera from the classic film, “Casablanca.” The private collection of one wealthy German art-collector and rampant cinephile Ronald Lauder (of the Estee-Lauder gang), this trove of memorabilia featured a wide selection of movie posters, stills and promotional materials from the film, as well as the prop passports used by protagonists Rick, Ilsa and Victor Lazlo. It’s pretty impressive, if completely out of nowhere, even if you’re only a passive fan of the film.

So, I’m standing there, admiring Lauder’s collection and listening to Louis Armstrong’s throaty rendition of “As Time Goes By,” when I suddenly spot something that just about blows me out of the alcove. In a promo shot from the film, there’s a scene of the great Claude Rains, portraying French officer Captain Louis Renault, conversing with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. Claude is attired as the jaunty policeman, and has his head cocked at an angle, revealing the top of his fetching chapeau — adorned with, mais, oui — qu’est-ce que cest?? Why, it’s the Mission’s curlycue cross!!! Here’s that shot now….

Further scrutiny reveals that the curlycue cross was something of an ongoing motif in the French military. Here it is on the the top of a cap from World War I.

Now, as far as I’m aware, the great Wayne Hussey doesn’t have a solitary drop of French blood in his person. He was born in Bristol, moved to Liverpool and cut his musical teeth in the local punk scene in bands like The Walkie Talkies, Pauline Murray’s Invisible Girls and then Dead or Alive before decamping to Leeds to join the Sisters. So, why the curlycue cross, and where did he first see it? Was he covertly a student of the sartorial finery of the French military or did he indeed swipe it from Claude Rains in “Casablanca”?

As has always been the case, probably only Wayne has the answer.