Utterly bastard groovy. Sex. Drugs. Rock N Roll.

Its half past seven on a boring Saturday night in Birmingham and the church is open. All day the town has played host to black clad hordes, most of them halfasleep in Cathedral Park Watching a secondhand pub band murder old Doors songs. In Black Leather. In Boiling Sunshine. Some people will do anything for their heoes.

Half past seven inside a massive aircraft hanger with seats & the lights go down. Somewhere in the stalls high above me a distant voice shouts "Eldritch is God!" & everybody can hear him. The air becomes charged. Wherever they went to, the Goths reappear. Out of the woodwork, all across Europe, they come to see One Man. They all wear black, and all we can hear is the massive, earth swallowing Doctor Avalanche. All we can see if flashing coloured smoke and lasers piecing the NEC's black hole of an Arena. Everyone stands, shocked, immobile.

"Hello? is there anybody in there?" The Shadow booms like the voice of hell. Half the people are like "Oh My God! It's HIM!". The other half are "What The Hell Is This?". As entrances go, its almost perfect. the song, Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", once the boring wank of a dying old bank manager, becomes transformed into a crystal clear injection of common sense. Here, Eldritch clad in a long, dark overcoat, like some ancient God transformed from an age of chivalry, is a king amongst disciples.

The absurd self-pity of the song makes sense in the Sisters world. Halfway through & Tim Bricheno becomes visible through the smoke, clad in a glittersuit like Marc Bolan at his peak, shamelessly sporting a Sisters shirt underneath. Glamour & Squalor look beautiful together; one without the other is meaningless.

Andreas Bruhn esembles Billy Duffy in his new "Rock-Is-Dead-I Like-Nirvana-have-done-from-very-beginning-honestly" haircut. Halfway through and the songs swithes into "Some Kind Of Stranger." Most people are to dumbstruck to respond & simply stand there. Watching him scream, like a man possessed, I know that the old magic is back. That unearthly wail, not a person, but of some primal hurt animal, emerges from nowhere.

The moment Doktor Avalanche crashes into "First & Last & Always" everyone enters the familiar. Eldritch is in his element, no longer an outside, but a commandant of the dispossessed. The normal people are not here tonight, unless they are the Security, to save us from ourselves, to save us from the human pyramids being toppled. Everyone who has paid for a ticket has at least a passing thought to tell Security where to go. And at the front an inflatable Vampire Bat is waved at Eldritch like it's of monumental impotance. It is.

By "Ribons" someone has already fainted. "Alice" follows & even though it only sixteen drumbeats as an intro, it sounds collossal. Like the calm in the eye of the storm, you know, something big is about to happen. Somewhere in the middle of "Logic" the primal scream emerges again & somewhere, somehow he conveys he's been closer to dark things than most people care to imagine. There's only one thing left between sanity & insanity, and it sounds like its been taken away.

He mumbles in German a little before "This Corrision". Encores are only a matter of time - a solo version of "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" sounds like Elvis on Hell's Cabaret cicuit. As the rest of the band reappear, he narrates "Driven Like The Snow"

From nowhere, the muscular strains of "More" fill the air, guaranteeing the night's biggest cheer. A masterstroke, More is easily one of the more important things in the world of pop. Its sounds like when its over there's nothing left to say, the only song that ever been song, like a song alone in a void forever.

When he returns he's clad in black leather trousers, black leather jacket, shades & a bare chest. Next time you see Bono, try to remember where he got his obsession with shades, black humour, America & loud guitars. Eldritch recites "Fix" like God preaching the Ten Commandments, with a whisper more powerful than a scream. "Vision Thing" sounds like the moment of Truth; when everything is revealed. As he crouches down near the crowd, their arms reach out to him like people who know damn well they can never touch the moon, but you might as well try.

For the third & final encore, he appears to the strains of "1959" but tells us "we always were ten years too early". Suddenly, 1969 stands out & it sounds like the end of the world, the last song ever sung, the soundtrack to the coming Armageddon. Enless nights, meaningless lives, striving desperately to fill the emptiness at the heart of it all with Something Anything.

When its all over, the lights are up and everyone leave in ordered lines. Nothings really changed. Another Saturday night in Birmingham. Over the PA the soundtrack to "Apcoalypse Now" plays. A softly spoken man narrates over the sound of war madness. Explosions. Helicopters, America in excelsis. "Every time I wake up the walls move a little closer." Eldritch has left the building. "I'd wake up & there'd be nothing". And the black T-Shirts have sold out.

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