Paint My Name in Black and Gold

Leeds, 1980. From the chaos of the city's vibrant post-punk scene emerges an unlikely band of young men who will, over the next five years, go on to invent goth as we know it and change the course of rock music forever, before blowing apart spectacularly on the verge of stardom. This is the story of the rise of the Sisters of Mercy.It focuses on the Sisters' two classic line-ups: Andrew Eldritch on vocals, Craig Adams on bass, Gary Marx and Ben Gunn - and later Wayne Hussey - on guitars, and a drum machine called Doktor Avalanche. Hussey and Adams were hard-living road dogs with fascinating musical back-stories; neither Gunn nor Marx were natural rock 'n' roll animals, but the latter performed with such abandon that it was hard to believe he also wrote the Sisters' most delicate and beautiful songs. Lead singer Eldritch was the most peculiar and compelling of them all, a singular and mesmerising amalgam of T. S. Eliot and David Bowie: in the period covered by this book, he staked a powerful claim to be the greatest rock star of his generation.Drawing on dozens of interviews with band members and key figures in the Sisters' journey, Paint My Name in Black and Gold is the definitive account of how - against the odds and all reasonable expectation - these men came to make transcendent and life-altering music. It is also about the glorious stupidity of being in a Leeds rock band in the early eighties, with tales involving a milk float, a hibernating snake, a wardrobe in a tree, an amyl nitrate-soaked effects pedal and the inopportune consumption of Dutch hash cake.