The Mission
Considered beyond-the-pale by diehard Batcavers (who knew what
they were talking about when it came to the pale!), The Mission
nonetheless induce Proustian cider flashbacks in a later
black-clad generation.
Born in Bristol in 1958 to devout Mormon parents, Jerry Wayne
Lovelock hopped it to Liverpool just in time for the explosion of
punk at Eric's, playing with Pauline Murray & The Invisible
Girls, then Dead Or Alive with future Celebrity Big Brother diva,
Pete Burns.
Co-writing half the songs on their first album, Sophisticated
Boom Boom, Wayne Hussey (as he was now calling himself) left
before its 1984 release, having inadvertently done himself out of
a job by putting his guitar through a synth and creating a disco
sound that Burns fell in love with.
Hussey ended up in the Sisters Of Mercy for a year, eventually
leaving with bassist Craig Adams because kommandant Andrew
Eldritch wanted to tour less while Hussey and Adams wanted to tour
more. The result was hard-gigging band, The Mission, who trod the
boards from 1986 to 1996 - and again from 1999 to 2008.
During their initial success The Mission cultivated a uniquely
intimate relationship with their fans, sitting down to take phone
calls from the fan club once a week and offering "season
tickets" to tours. Hussey admitted later that this intimacy
became an albatross, destroying the music's mystique.
For some, this hard-drinking Leeds band were nothing more than
U2 with black sunglasses, but Gods Own Medicine -
notable for the wind-machine bluster of Wasteland and the
looming Severina - was vital in taking Goth out of the
crypt and into the student bedsit.
The band broke up in 96 but Hussey and Adams reformed in 1999
without drummer Mick Brown. Adams eventually claimed homesickness
after a 48-hour bender and Hussey told him to "fucking go
home". Hussey himself made his home in Brazil where he lives
with his Brazilian actress wife and her family near São
Paulo.
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