About Me
Where and why the Sisters started in the first place
They may have gone their own way since, but originally the Sisters were a product of their times. That doesn’t mean that they typified the times.
Punk had mocked traditional rock bands, which is why the Sisters had so much fun referring to them, and the fashion victims had turned to bad funk. Before Happy Mondays and "baggy" made it fashionable to like everything from Manchester (with a comedy-funk version of that 808-and-a-riff thing for which the Sisters had been sneered at five years earlier), it was necessary for a northern band to turn twee before it got any attention from the fashion police in London. Look at The Smiths or New Order. Even now, Oasis are as cute as the Beatles. Hold on, they are the Beatles.
When the Sisters started, the times - then as now - were typified by bad disco music. The Sisters were fans of Gary Glitter, T Rex, Motörhead, The Stooges, Suicide, The Velvet Underground, Père Ubu and The Fall. The Sisters liked good disco music, and their first communal kitchen was painted to the sound of the first Imagination album, but they couldn’t understand why even the NME was assigning the future of popular music to the likes of Kid Creole And The Coconuts ... to the exclusion of intelligently savage fun.
They still can’t. Click here
for the Sisters’ views on postmodernism.
The Sisters were to form part of an anomalous rebellion along the M62, a motorway which crosses northern England and joins Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. Nearby Sheffield can be considered a part of this enclave. Hull never bothered; it finally produced ...the Housemartins. Apart from New Model Army, Bradford could only ever boast fundamentalist traces of the few youth movements which had landed and promptly left. In each city, the rebellion had a different dominant flavour. Leeds, as the Sisters knew it, was a speed town, charged with a broadly political kind of gang warfare.
The subculture in Leeds was clearly divided at the time. The punks were almost exclusively left-wing (to varying degrees, but united in their contempt of the right-wing) and vaguely allied to the dub factions of Chapeltown and Harehills. On the other hand was a right-wing alliance of general Aryan types, skinheads, would-be mods and a few confused teds. There were regular skirmishes between the two sides. The right-wing would sally forth from the Whip and the Adelphi, adding to the routine violence of Tetley Bittermen at closing time. The F Club offered a relatively safe base for the punk contingent, and every visiting band would play there which was not big or mainstream enough for the university. It’s where the first Sisters (and many of their lifelong friends) met each other.
The Sisters were not part of the art-school scene which threw up excellent bands like Gang Of Four, Mekons, Delta 5, and (indirectly) Scritti Politti. The Sisters belonged firmly to the non-student, city end of things. Their immediate forbears were the Expelaires, Music For Pleasure and Dance Chapter. The counterparts in Liverpool were The Teardrop Explodes, Pink Military and Echo And The Bunnymen; Manchester was primarily represented by Joy Division and The Chameleons. Sheffield had the mighty Comsat Angels, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League in their initial, fabulously Gerry Anderson phase. Indeed, Andrew says the best double-bill he ever saw was that incarnation of the Human League, with Père Ubu, on the F Club’s tiny stage.
