Loverboy loves a tribute band. The classic, the cheesy, and the subversive: they bring a very particular kitsch joy to music. When we heard that there was an upcoming London gig featuring The Misters Of Circe – in tribute to The Sisters Of Mercy – on a bill along with the gloriously named Kenickers, Loverboy’s Fallon Gold just had to speak to the Kitty Fedorec, Charley Fucking Stone and Patriarchia Morrison of The Misters about goth/not goth, genderfuckery and the glory of a good name pun.

 For the uninitiated (ie all non-goths or those born in the last couple of decades) who were The Sisters Of Mercy?
PM: The Sisters started out in Leeds in 1981 playing urgent and riffy post-punk numbers with T S Eliot-meets-Hunter S Thompson lyrics over a tinny drum machine.

KF: The thing to understand about The Sisters of Mercy is that they are musically driven by a goth who secretly wants to be in Fleetwood Mac. As opposed to a band like All About Eve, who were basically Fleetwood Mac wishing they were goths.

Oh except that apparently Andrew Eldritch is not a goth. Got that? Not a goth.

CFS: When I was at sixth form college I put up posters in the Student Union common room saying “We’re So Sick of this Pseudo-Gothic Nonsense”. I can’t remember who that was directed at but it wasn’t All About Eve. Personally I believed The Sisters of Mercy to be the only true goth band, although I wasn’t a fan at the time. I’ve grown into them, somewhat perversely, like socialism.

PM: They morphed through a number of different line-ups and their output varied between chirpily apocalyptic folk-rock at one extreme to relentless chugging political metal at the other.  Between the two there was the pop-industrial high camp of the “Floodland” era for which they are most famous.

 

 

And so, who are The Misters Of Circe? Why The Sisters Of Mercy over other goth bands?
CFS: We are The Misters of Circe. We’re the ones in the photo. We’re not goths.

KF: The Sisters of Mercy are the archetype. And there’s so much pomposity and posturing, and you know Eldrich is just doing it to amuse himself, so it’s all already a character you can completely step into.

PM: Like Kitty says, The Sisters of Mercy are not a goth band.  This is extremely important.  They are intellectual love gods and an industrial groove machine.  And so are we.

KF: In the UK at least it has never really been cool to be into the Sisters. There was a goth revival a few years ago and across East London you could walk into venues and hear Specimen and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, but not The Sisters of Mercy. However I was given a copy of their greatest hits collection, A Slight Case of Overbombing, when I was 15 and that’s all I wanted to listen to for about a year. Over time I got to hear their earlier stuff, which just blew me away. The Sisters of Mercy are lodged under my skin in a way perhaps only David Bowie shares.

Why is it important to you that this is a gender non-conforming band?
PM: It is gender non-conforming in the sense that we do not conform to the genders of the people whom we represent.  I am a non-binary person playing the role of sometime Sisters bassist and goth icon Patricia Morrison, Kitty is doing Andrew Eldritch, and Charley is a woman representing really any of the of the guitar-men who have been in the Sisters but most likely Andreas Bruhn, who was a hot blonde.  Kitty and Charley have both got a queer femme thing going on, too, which adds to the picture.

KF: I think there’s something specific in being a gender non-conforming tribute band. Something about claiming a stake in a music history that is predominantly made up of cis het males. When you grow up female and into music you rarely see anyone like you. When I was young and only had dial-up internet on the shared family computer, I would rely on recommendations from friends, and those would be predominantly male friends recommending almost entirely male bands. I didn’t buy any music mags because that took money that I could be spending on black things from the charity shops, or in pubs that pretended to believe we were over 18. I sometimes wonder how we ever found good music before the internet.

CFS: When I was young we had Smash Hits and Melody Maker, actually.

KF: So there’s a lot here for me about taking ownership and making space. It’s also about being part of a wonderful queer scene, full of really exciting people and music. I identify most of the time as female for political reasons, but one’s relationship with gender is of course far more complicated and fluid than simple binaries. And it’s important to me to position what I do in terms of queerness and gender non-conformity because by doing so we add to the voices and enlarge the safe spaces for that.

CFS: That’s interesting what Kitty says about identifying as female for political reasons. Similarly, I think feminism gave me a cause and a reason to embrace my femme-ness, although I always felt more like a-Charley-thing than a woman.

PM: The gender non-conforming aspect is great because (after the pioneering work of all-woman Duran Duran tribute Joanne Joanne in this regard) [pictured below] it means we get to think of ourselves as a concept, and get to play scuzzy gigs in actual music venues for no money, rather than just being one of those boring old conventional tribute bands that earn pots of cash playing at functions.

CFS: We’re here, we’re queer and we’re not going to play your wedding.

PM: Um … I would definitely play a wedding if you guys were up for it.

 

A lot of queer kids get attracted to goth. There’s something about being outsiders but wanting to belong to something, the chance to wear makeup and queer gender.
KF: Yes! I think this was very true for me as a teenager in the late 90s/early naughties. My gateway band was Placebo (goth being more a look than a music genre at that point). There was a deep thrill in seeing that androgyny and recognizing something in yourself. We would sing Nancy Boy loudly in the school corridors and get excited by these hints at another way of being. I owned a black feather boa, with little electric blue feathers. Great times.

CFS: Hmm, well for me I liked the black clothes, the echoing reverb and the sense of desolation, but I didn’t identify as a goth as I didn’t want to belong to anything. I just wanted to stand alone on a rock in a remote landscape and be buffeted by the rain, thank you very much. Anyway, what Kitty doesn’t know is that there was a brief period in the mid-90s when the “fans” in Germany said I was the female Brian Molko. Something for her to think about there.

KF: Phwoar!

Tell me about the other stuff you all do when you’re not The Misters Of Circe
KF: I go to see Charley in other bands.

CFS: I go to see Kitty making art.

KF: I’m a dance artist, so I do other performance related stuff. I make work that is very heavily informed by the fact that I’m a queer aspie goth with mental health problems. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

CFS: I’m actually in all the bands as well as having a glamorous career in television, playing a local busybody in the UK’s most popular online soap based in #londonsThamesmeerd.

PM: I am a lawyer taking a possibly terminal career break to do some activist work and a PhD.

Tell us about the gig.
PM: It is going to be great! There is going to be us, there is going to be a coldwave duo doing covers of 90s funk metal, there is going to be a Kenickie covers band, and it is going to be headlined by The Indelicates, who I understand are going to do note-perfect renditions of their own songs, but in the style of The Indelicates.

CFS: The Indelicates are actually one of my favourite bands ever. They’re not goths. They are intense and a bit weird though.

There will be an EP, at least, right?
PM: At the beginning I didn’t imagine we would bother with recordings, but Kitty’s vocal is so good that maybe we should.  She has the Eldritch paranoid squawk going on, but with a Patti Smith undercurrent.  I love it.

CFS: The “We’re So Sick Of This Pseudo-Gothic Nonsense” EP, perhaps?

The great MacCauley Culkin is in a pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band. Can you make any food puns out of The Sisters Of Mercy (or any other goth) songs?

KF: Home of the Ramen? Body and Sole? Under the Bun? No time to Fry? You could put out the songs on the atrociously titled collection Some Girls Chunder by Mistake.

PM: What about places to get food?  Temple of Lunch?  Bodega Electric?  Lucretia my Refectory?

CFS: What a lot of pseudo-gothic nonsense!

Tell of some of your dream tribute acts and can you think up any good punnish names?

KF: I created Wrong Mael while idling an evening away in a Premier Inn on a roundabout outside St Helens. I’m thinking of developing him into a drag act based on the guy from Sparks that just stands behind the keyboards giving really fierce looks. There’s so much great material to work with there.

CFS: I’m in a fictitious all-female tribute to Devo called Are We Not Men.

KF: Oh, and Generation Terrortits. That would be a queered early Manics. We all need that in our lives.

CFS I’m really looking forward to seeing The Mangles.

Do you have any favourite tributes bands or band names?
KF: Joanne Joanne comes top of my list! And I’m so excited to see Kenickers, who are playing with us at the Fiddlers Elbow. Plus I’ve heard rumors of a Twink 182.

CFS: Joanne Joanne is the best, let’s be honest. Also Ye Nuns, which is an all-female tribute to avant-garde garage rock band The Monks.

KF: One of the last gigs I went to at the much-missed Power Lunches included The Ethical Debating Society doing a set with loads of covers and they did Motown Junk which blew me away. I think they are leaving London which is sad for us.

PM: I love Joanne Joanne so much it hurts, but that is because some of my favourite people are or were in it i.e. Charley, and Jo who does backing vocals on our version of Temple of Love.

You’re part of a really thriving queercore DIY London band scene. Why do you think it’s smoking hot right now?
KF: I think the way we are connected by social media now makes finding and participating in scenes made up of typically othered people and outsider groups much easier than it used to be. We’re able to give visibility to each other through Facebook, Twitter, Bandcamp etc, rather than being reliant on a music press and radio dominated by people who don’t share our interests. And that is particularly important now that costs of rent impact people and venues, making scenes much less about a particular geography (Shoreditch, Camden, Soho etc). Also I think we talk much more and much more openly about what we need to make spaces accessible. That’s so exciting because it means bands and audiences can involve people that might experience barriers in attending more traditional nights, and the best way to have a wonderful scene is to fill it with wonderful people.

What’s next for The Misters Of Circe?
KF: We figure out how the Sisters of Mercy would cover Fleetwood Mac.

The Misters Of Circe, Kenickers, The Indelicates and “Travolta” play The Fiddlers Elbow in Camden on 30th June. Fightmilk, Hasslich, Meatraffle and The Misters Of Circe play Fighting Cocks,  Kingston-upon-Thames on 5th August. 

Top image of The Misters Of Circe by Matt Farrow

Image of Joanne Joanne by The Chaos Engineers