In November 1987 — thirty-nine years ago this month — the Sisters of Mercy released Floodland, their second studio album. It debuted at number nine on the UK Albums Chart. It was later certified gold for selling 100,000 copies. Its first single, “This Corrosion”, reached number seven. And it was made by a band that did not exist.
That is not an exaggeration. By the time Floodland was recorded, the Sisters of Mercy had broken up. Two of the band’s members had left to form another group. The singer, Andrew Eldritch, had tried to carry on under a different name, and that had failed. He had lost his publishing deal. He was living in Hamburg, in Germany, writing songs on a cheap synthesiser and an acoustic guitar, looking for a drum machine with a tighter snare. And from that wreckage — from a break-up, a failed side project, a lost deal and a city full of water — he made one of the great albums of the 1980s: a record about a world slowly falling apart, sung by a man who had watched his own world fall apart, and who had decided to rebuild it alone.
Floodland is a gothic rock album, and a dark wave album, and it is also something stranger: a solo record disguised as a band record, a record about water made in a city of water, a record about the end of the world that became the beginning of its maker’s second life. This is the story of how it was made.
The break-up
The Sisters of Mercy’s debut studio album, First and Last and Always, was released in March 1985. After its release, the frontman Andrew Eldritch intended for the band to record an ABBA cover as a single, and he tried to hire Jim Steinman as a producer. Eldritch had originally contacted Steinman when the ABBA song “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”, from 1979, was part of the band’s setlist. Steinman was interested in producing the cover version, but he was too busy at that time. It is one of the great what-ifs of 1980s music: the Sisters of Mercy, the darkest band in Britain, recording an ABBA song with the producer of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. It did not happen then. But the contact mattered. Two years later, Steinman would produce the two biggest songs on Floodland.
Shortly afterward, the Sisters of Mercy disbanded. The break-up occurred while the band were preparing their second studio album in October 1985, an album that was going to be titled Left on Mission and Revenge. The guitarist Wayne Hussey and the bassist Craig Adams left to form the Mission. The music press reported the break-up on 2 November 1985, announcing that “the Sisters of Mercy were down to singer Andrew Eldritch and his faithful drum machine [Doktor Avalanche] this week after guitarist Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams left the band. Although this has scuppered recording plans for a new album this month, Andrew now intends to record the same album in the New Year and could well be using Wayne as a session guitarist. […] Andrew has also approached former Gun Club bassist Patricia Morrison — now in Fur Bible — to play on the album, but it’s not yet known whether Andrew will continue with the name Sisters of Mercy.”
Eldritch had no intention of carrying on under the band’s name. The members who left to form the Mission had an agreement with him that the name the Sisters of Mercy would be used by no one after the break-up. It was a clean break, or it was supposed to be: the band was over, the name was retired, and everyone would go their separate ways. Eldritch, who had still intended to record the album but as a solo artist, called the bassist Patricia Morrison that same month — she was on a tour of the United Kingdom with her band Fur Bible, in support of Siouxsie and the Banshees — and asked her to collaborate. The album would be made. The only question was what it would be called, and whose name would be on it.
The Sisterhood fiasco
Eldritch’s answer was the Sisterhood. He released the single “Giving Ground” on 20 January 1986 as part of a project under that name, featuring vocals by his musician friend James Ray. At the end of February 1986, the record label Merciful Release announced the “forthcoming Andrew Eldritch album which for some months has had the working title Left on Mission and Revenge”. The album was eventually titled Gift, and it was released in July 1986, again by the Sisterhood. It was recorded at Fairview Studios in Willerby, Hull. Eldritch did not sing on the album, for contractual reasons, though Morrison collaborated with him for the first time, contributing a spoken passage on the track “Jihad”.
Gift was negatively received overall, and Eldritch lost his publishing deal with RCA Music Limited as a result. A twelve-inch EP by the Sisterhood entitled This Corrosion was planned for release, set to feature an American vocalist whose identity was meant to be kept secret until release. The EP had been recorded at Fairview Studios with Alan Vega, of the New York duo Suicide, but it remained unreleased — and Eldritch kept the idea, and the title, for when he would reboot the Sisters of Mercy.
The music paper Sounds dubbed the whole episode the “Sisterhood fiasco”, and it was. A side project that was supposed to free Eldritch from the wreckage of his band had instead become a second wreckage: a record he did not sing on, a deal he had lost, a name that meant nothing to anyone. He had tried to walk away from the Sisters of Mercy, and the walk had led him nowhere. So he did the one thing he had said he would not do. He went back.
Hamburg, and the water
After what Sounds called the “Sisterhood fiasco”, Eldritch decided to continue under the name the Sisters of Mercy, feeling as though doing so would improve the name’s reputation after the previous fallout. He also thought that it would have been nonsensical to change the name, as he still wrote songs the same way as before. The name was not the problem. The songs were the same songs. The man writing them was the same man. Only the band had changed — and, as Floodland would prove, the band had never really been the point.
Eldritch, who in 1985 had first moved to Bramfeld and then to St. Pauli, began to compose a new album while in Hamburg, under the Warner Elektra Atlantic label, WEA. Hamburg is a city built on water: a port on the Elbe, full of canals and harbours and rain, and the city’s large amount of water influenced the album’s title as well as its recurring lyrical theme of water. Floodland is a record about water — about floods, about drowning, about the sea coming in — and it was written in a city where the water is never far away. The demos for the album were mainly recorded with a Casio CZ-101 synthesiser, acoustic guitars and a new drum machine. At the time, Eldritch was attempting to find a MIDI drum machine of a modest price that featured a “tighter snare drum” sound. It is a small, practical detail, and it tells you a great deal about how the album was made: not in a grand studio with a grand budget, but in a flat in Hamburg, with a cheap keyboard, a guitar, and a search for the right snare sound.
New York: Steinman and the choir
The starting point for the album was the song “This Corrosion”, which was set to be produced by Steinman. Eldritch had immediately thought of him when he came up with the idea for the song. He stated that “when we were trying to sell ‘Corrosion’ to Steinman, we told him it was like the high-point of a Borgia’s disco evening and he went for it.” The Borgias were the Renaissance family famous for poison, murder and corruption; a Borgia’s disco evening is a party at the end of the world, with beautiful people dancing while the poison works. It is a perfect description of “This Corrosion”: a huge, Wagnerian pop song about decay, with a choir singing over the top of it as if the world were ending in harmony.
Eldritch also used Steinman to get his record label to concede an appropriate recording budget. He figured that the label would not grant money to use on choirs, but that they would immediately do so if Steinman were to ask for it. According to Boyd Steemson, the office manager of Merciful Release, Max Hole, the head of WEA’s A&R, managed to get the band a budget of fifty thousand pounds for “This Corrosion”. Fifty thousand pounds, in 1987, for one song. It was an extraordinary sum for a band that had broken up two years earlier, and it was spent on something extraordinary: a choir.
The recording of “This Corrosion” and “Dominion” / “Mother Russia” started during January 1987 in New York City. Steinman and Eldritch used the Power Station Studios in Manhattan, where they worked with the engineer Larry Alexander. On both songs, Steinman used six background singers and forty members of the New York Choral Society. Eldritch recalled that he was unsure as to why so many vocalists sang all at once, but noted that this “seemed like a good idea at the time” and worked out well in the end. Forty singers and six backing vocalists, in a Manhattan studio, singing on a record by a man from Leeds who had written the songs in Hamburg on a Casio keyboard. It is the kind of excess that only Steinman could have justified, and only Eldritch could have wanted. Steinman mainly focused on the production of the choral singing and did not contribute much to the actual composition and arrangements, which is why he received only partial production credit on “Dominion / Mother Russia”. But on “This Corrosion”, his fingerprints are everywhere: the scale, the drama, the sense that the song is too big for the room it was recorded in.
England: building the album alone
The remainder of Floodland was recorded in England. Initially, Eldritch worked with an unknown producer, whom he eventually fired. He called Alexander while in New York City and hired him as a co-producer, and the two travelled to England, where they recorded at multiple studios, including Strawberry Studios in Stockport and The Wool Hall in Bath. The sessions carried on throughout the first half of 1987.
What they made was, in almost every sense, a solo record. Eldritch served as the vocalist, performed all the instruments, and programmed the band’s drum machine, “Doktor Avalanche”. The drum machine acted as the drum player. Other than backing vocals, Patricia Morrison did not contribute to the album, despite being a member of the Sisters of Mercy. In contrast to the conventional group-based recording sessions for First and Last and Always, Floodland was pieced together on computers using sequencers — built up track by track, in studios in Stockport and Bath, by two men and a machine.
Eldritch was frank about it afterwards. Despite hiring Morrison to play bass guitar on the album, he later claimed that she did not contribute to the songwriting for it, saying that it was practically a solo record. He insinuated that she suffered from writer’s block and was unable to come up with many musical ideas, adding that he “couldn’t even get her to pick up the bass in the first place”. He reaffirmed this in a 2012 interview with Classic Rock, stating that she “didn’t make the cut” and therefore did not appear on Floodland. Steemson, the Merciful Release office manager, also confirmed that Morrison’s contributions were minimal. It is a harsh judgement, and it is Eldritch’s judgement, not a neutral one — but the record itself supports the broad shape of it. Floodland sounds like one man’s work: one voice, one vision, one set of obsessions, played by one pair of hands and programmed into one drum machine.
Eldritch denied that his approach to songwriting had changed since the band split, saying: “‘This Corrosion’ sounds like ‘Temple of Love’ II, ‘1959’ sounds like ‘Afterhours’ part 2. I don’t see any difference or any real change. I think I just carry on where I stopped.” It is a revealing sentence. “Temple of Love” and “Afterhours” were songs from the first Sisters of Mercy, from the band that had broken up. Eldritch was saying that Floodland was not a new beginning but a continuation — that the break-up had changed nothing about the music, only about who was in the room when it was made. And in a sense he was right. The songs are the same kind of songs. What changed was the scale: the choirs, the sequencers, the drum machine, the fifty thousand pounds, the man alone in Hamburg with a Casio and a tighter snare.
The music incorporates the genres of gothic rock and dark wave, and the lyrical content sees Eldritch cast as the observer of a slowly deteriorating world. Some of the events that inspired certain songs include the Chernobyl disaster, the Cold War, and the band’s previous break-up. Chernobyl had happened in April 1986, a year before the recording began: a nuclear reactor in Ukraine exploding, a cloud of radiation drifting across Europe, a disaster that no one had predicted and no one could undo. The Cold War was in its final years, but no one knew it yet; the world still lived under the threat of nuclear war, and the Berlin Wall still stood. And the band’s break-up was its own small apocalypse, a world ending in a rehearsal room in October 1985. Floodland is about all three, and about the feeling they share: of watching something fall apart, slowly, from a distance, and being unable to stop it.
The songs: eight tracks, one flood
The album, in its original form, contains eight tracks, and they play like chapters of a single story. It opens with “Dominion” / “Mother Russia”, seven minutes and one second of drums and declamation, the song Steinman helped to build with forty singers behind it. Then comes “Flood I”, six minutes and twenty-two seconds of water rising, followed by “Lucretia My Reflection”, four minutes and fifty-seven seconds, the album’s most driving single. “1959” — four minutes and nine seconds — is the quiet centre of the record, the song Eldritch himself described as “Afterhours” part two. Then “This Corrosion”, the full-length version running ten minutes and fifty-five seconds, the Borgia’s disco at its high point, with the choir and the drums and the whole weight of the record behind it. “Flood II” follows at six minutes and forty-seven seconds, and then “Driven Like the Snow” at six minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and finally “Never Land (A Fragment)”, two minutes and fifty-five seconds, a short closing piece that sounds like the water going out again. The CD edition adds two further tracks, “Torch” and “Colours”, bringing its total length to just over an hour. On vinyl, “This Corrosion” fades out earlier, at nine minutes and sixteen seconds, and “Driven Like the Snow” appears in a different, shorter mix.
The cover matches the music. It is a black-and-white photograph: a man in sunglasses on the left, a woman’s face half in shadow on the right, and below them a full moon reflected on water. It is the whole album in one image — the darkness, the glamour, the water, the moon. The singles followed the album out into the world one by one: “This Corrosion” in September 1987, “Dominion” in February 1988, and “Lucretia My Reflection” in June 1988, each of them climbing the chart a little further from the flood, each of them carrying a piece of the album’s water with it.
Release, and the long afterlife
Floodland was released in November 1987, through Merciful Release, a subsidiary of WEA, internationally, and through Elektra Records in the United States. The singles “This Corrosion”, “Dominion” and “Lucretia My Reflection” were released in promotion. “This Corrosion” peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart, while “Dominion” and “Lucretia My Reflection” peaked at number thirteen and twenty, respectively. Floodland debuted on the UK Albums Chart at number nine, and was later certified gold in the UK by the BPI for selling 100,000 copies. It also reached the top forty in other European countries, including Switzerland. It was, by every commercial measure, a success — a bigger success, in fact, than the debut album by the band that had made it, the band that no longer existed.
The critics were slower to catch up. Despite initially receiving mixed reviews from music critics, Floodland has retrospectively received praise and been considered a seminal gothic rock album by several critics. It is easy to see why the first reviews were mixed: the record is grandiose, overwrought, unashamedly theatrical, and it was made by a man who had, by his own account, practically made it alone. It is not a modest record. It does not ask to be liked. It demands to be heard, at volume, with the choir and the drum machine and the water and the end of the world all at once. And time has been kind to that demand. What sounded excessive in 1987 sounds, now, like a blueprint: for gothic rock, for dark wave, for every band since that has tried to make a small song sound enormous, and an enormous song sound personal.
What remains
Thirty-nine years after its release, Floodland remains the Sisters of Mercy’s defining album — and the strangest fact about it is that it was made by a band that had already broken up, by a singer who had already lost his publishing deal, in a city he had moved to because there was nowhere else to go, on a cheap synthesiser, with a drum machine he had programmed himself. It is a record about a world falling apart, made by a man whose world had fallen apart, and it is also a record about rebuilding: about taking the name back, about keeping the song, about deciding that the break-up had changed nothing that mattered.
The water is still there, in the title and in the lyrics, in the songs written in Hamburg and recorded in New York and Stockport and Bath. The choir is still there, forty voices from New York, singing over a drum machine. The Borgia’s disco is still going, the high point of the evening, with the poison working quietly in the background. And the flood — the slow, rising water that Eldritch saw in Hamburg, in Chernobyl, in the Cold War, in the end of his band — is still rising. That is why the album endures. It was written about a world that was falling apart in 1987, and the world has been falling apart, slowly, ever since. Floodland saw it coming. It is still, thirty-nine years later, the sound of the water coming in.
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