Andrew Eldritch (born Andrew William Harvey Taylor, May 15, 1959) is the frontman, singer, songwriter and the only remaining original member of The Sisters of Mercy, a band that emerged from the British post punk scene and, in later years, also flirted with pop and hard rock. He also programs The Sisters of Mercy's drum-machine tracks and plays guitars and keyboards in its studio recordings. He has also established the record label Merciful Release.
Read more on Last.fm …read full bio
Andrew Eldritch (born Andrew William Harvey Taylor, May 15, 1959) is the frontman, singer, songwriter and the only remaining original member of The Sisters of Mercy, a band that emerged from the British post punk scene and, in later years, also flirted with pop and hard rock. He also programs The Sisters of Mercy's drum-machine tracks and plays guitars and keyboards in its studio recordings. He has also established the record label Merciful Release. In addition to The Sisters of Mercy, in 1986 Andrew Eldritch established a side-project The Sisterhood (in order to keep former band members from using the name) which was shortly abandoned in favor of continuing working under The Sisters of Mercy banner.
Now in semi-retirement from his musical career — The Sisters of Mercy tour every so often, with six scheduled concerts across continental Europe in August 2005, ending with the M'era Luna Festival in Germany, but no new recorded material has been released for sale since 1993. Despite this, the band continues to debut new material on stage on a semi-annual basis, infrequently playing secret gigs under a pseudonym in their spiritual home of Leeds.
The devices in Andrew Eldritch's lyrics include literary allusions (most prominently to the works of T S Eliot and Shakespeare), erotic imagery, metaphors of drug culture, and an acrimonious criticism of the Republican Party of the United States, with which Eldritch flippantly claims to have a "hate-hate" relationship, in view of the Bush dynasty, Christian fundamentalists, and the military-industrial complex. Politically, he has claimed to be "traditionally a Labour supporter" despite his "anarcho-syndicalist tendencies".
Though Andrew Eldritch is often called the "Godfather of Goth", The Sisters of Mercy, despite being formed in 1980, were originally not very popular in the post punk sub-genre that the British press, in the early 1980s, had labeled, both the artists and their audience, Goth. The Sisters of Mercy were, however, accused by the press of plagiarizing Joy Division, who were marketed by their management as "gothic" in the late '70s.
The Sisters of Mercy would have a big impact on the second wave of Goth that came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the reasons Gitane Demone of the first wave commented that the scene had turned "stale". The use of drum machines and the atonal, deep vocal style used by many second generation Goth bands were inspired by the Sisters of Mercy and were not that common among the first generation.
Since the early 90s, Eldritch has publicly rejected associations with the Goth subculture. He describes The Sisters of Mercy as humanist, modernist, and implies he wants nothing to do with Goth, stating "it's disappointing that so many people have in all seriousness adopted just one of our many one-week-of-stupid-clothes benders". He also notices that "I'm constantly confronted by representatives of popular culture who are far more g*** than we, yet I have only to wear black socks to be stigmatized as the demon overlord".
Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.
…shrink me down again
Update this bio | Artist Bio + Tag FAQs