The Sisters Of Mercy

London, Roundhouse

Kings of darkness take back the night.

“Simmer down,” commands Andrew Eldritch, in a voice lower than Atlantis. Some of us have been over-bombing with our enthusiasm: there is a certain beauty about several thousand goths in full black regalia shouting, “Do Emma! Play Hot Chocolate’s Emma!” Eldritch remains both enigmatically above it all and slightly nervous: he shifts position constantly, never quite satisfied that where he’s standing is the right place. Between the main set and the encores, the self-proclaimed Elvis-meetsKierkegaard simply states, “I’m going for a cigarette.”

But we’re not here for jolly anecdotes. We’re here to revel in the murky, muddy, mesmeric bowels of the Sisters sound, which his current band pump out gloriously. That rumble-tumble of half-heard words, relentlessly direct rhythms and lightning-flashes of serrated guitars has aged well: if this is nostalgia, it still sounds like no-one else, striding in the twilit spaces between generic goth ennui and hard rock. It’s still “a disco run by the Borgias”; existentialism with a backbeat. From the opening More through No Time To Cry, Alice and Marian to the adrenalized headlong finale of Lucretia My Reflection, Vision Thing, Temple Of Love and This Corrosion, this is driven, disbeliefsuspending drama. Our overlord, now resembling a cross between Harry Hill and Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu, still holds dominion over us. We dance the ghost with him.