It´s "The violet hour", the evening hour, that strives homeward. It´ s the spare time after the working part of the day.
"To the violent sound" -Bearing in mind that the sond was written around 1982/1983-ish, that was at least 5 years before anything technoish got on air and some 10 years before the techno/club -scene went mainstream (Lucky days, them.) Gothic then was Bauhaus, The Cure, all the classics, but no techno, and it probably wasn´t even called goff back then.
But there was something else: The cold war, the ever present threat of the nuclear holocaust. There was the ever present awareness that at all times, two parties that were deadly enemies, had the potential to blow up earth and all life on its face several dozen times over at the push of a button.
The dancers the song mentions, the pagans in the low damp ground, also are the dead to be after the bomb fell.
"I feel the light I feel the heat" -A thermonuclear explosion works by radiadtion heating large quantities of air. FIrst, there is that intense flash, that is strong enough to evaporate human bodies entirely if they are close enough to ground zero. You´ll feel the heat. And you´ll see the light. Very brightly, actually. Even if you close your eyes. Maybe even if you don´t look in the direction ofthe flash at the moment.
Then, after the radiation had time to heat up a couple of cubic kilometres of air substancially, the air expands like the gases in your car´s engine, causing a blast. You´ll feel that beat.
After that hellfire glowed in the sky, there will be faces (or what were such) glowing. As in burning, or being red hot. (As human tissue mainly consists of water, the actual faces will have evaporated by that time, and there will only be skulls glowing by that time, but that´s me being pedantic, the effect is the same: The audiences of this song are dead then.)
Oh, and a BOOM that takes out several square kilometres of city with concrete buildings at once is kinda violent a sound, isn´t it?
"The bodies on the naked on the low damp ground" are not just the club guests dancing in front of the stage, they obviously also are to be a pile of dead.
Only in the recent years, a few stories leaked out how incredibly close the world was to this catastrophy in the early eighties a couple of times. It was a very realistic and dreadfull threat to everybody in the world. Every person with some kind of realism about what their life´s situation was had to be a bit sceptical about having a good time next year.
…and sadly, it still is. With a substantial potential for nuclear destruction still being present and new tensions between what was the Soviet Union and the Nato countries being more intense now than at any time during the last 20 years, this topic gets contemporoary again…
I´m not quite sure who is called "the new elite" here. Did Andrew mean the yuppies, a group that just had been given that name back then, young buisness people that were nothing but buisness people, ocial climbers that wouldn´t dare to speak up or even contradict for not to risc their careers, or was it the political elite of the western/Nato world, Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand? Maybe all of them?
-Andrew made it clear often enough that he had no sympathies at all for the conservative block in politics, that were largely in power in the countries of the west during that time.
"The western dream", the ever more, more, more. The permantent expansion and growth. Even into territories that aren´t yours, which causes conflict.
Quote the homepage:
"The Sisters of Mercy are a left wing institution."
In some interview, Andrew described the band as a political animal. I can´t remember where exactly right now.
On a different note, violet and purple are pretty similar. Maybe there is some connection between theViolet in Floorshow and the Cobalt Red, Cobalt Blue, Purple Light in Ribbons?
@eo10478576 Well done and thank you. Of course we all understand people are free to interpret art in any way. However there is usually an intended meaning by the writer and I suspect your interpretations is far closer to the actual meaning than the others here.
I cannot believe someone as clever as Eldritch would bother to write something so puerile as a complaint about people enjoying a nightclub, his music was designed to be enjoyed at a nightclub. Whereas his obsession with politics and war seem a more likely topic for him to be writing about.
@eo10478576 Well done and thank you. Of course we all understand people are free to interpret art in any way. However there is usually an intended meaning by the writer and I suspect your interpretations is far closer to the actual meaning than the others here.
I cannot believe someone as clever as Eldritch would bother to write something so puerile as a complaint about people enjoying a nightclub, his music was designed to be enjoyed at a nightclub. Whereas his obsession with politics and war seem a more likely topic for him to be writing about.
BonjourLaFille,
you almost got there. As anyone interested in The Sisters of Mercy, you should have a look at what the "1959 and all that"-site has to offer.
http://1959.tsom.org/prefla_notes.html#song7
It´s "The violet hour", the evening hour, that strives homeward. It´ s the spare time after the working part of the day.
"To the violent sound" -Bearing in mind that the sond was written around 1982/1983-ish, that was at least 5 years before anything technoish got on air and some 10 years before the techno/club -scene went mainstream (Lucky days, them.) Gothic then was Bauhaus, The Cure, all the classics, but no techno, and it probably wasn´t even called goff back then. But there was something else: The cold war, the ever present threat of the nuclear holocaust. There was the ever present awareness that at all times, two parties that were deadly enemies, had the potential to blow up earth and all life on its face several dozen times over at the push of a button. The dancers the song mentions, the pagans in the low damp ground, also are the dead to be after the bomb fell. "I feel the light I feel the heat" -A thermonuclear explosion works by radiadtion heating large quantities of air. FIrst, there is that intense flash, that is strong enough to evaporate human bodies entirely if they are close enough to ground zero. You´ll feel the heat. And you´ll see the light. Very brightly, actually. Even if you close your eyes. Maybe even if you don´t look in the direction ofthe flash at the moment. Then, after the radiation had time to heat up a couple of cubic kilometres of air substancially, the air expands like the gases in your car´s engine, causing a blast. You´ll feel that beat. After that hellfire glowed in the sky, there will be faces (or what were such) glowing. As in burning, or being red hot. (As human tissue mainly consists of water, the actual faces will have evaporated by that time, and there will only be skulls glowing by that time, but that´s me being pedantic, the effect is the same: The audiences of this song are dead then.)
Oh, and a BOOM that takes out several square kilometres of city with concrete buildings at once is kinda violent a sound, isn´t it?
"The bodies on the naked on the low damp ground" are not just the club guests dancing in front of the stage, they obviously also are to be a pile of dead.
Only in the recent years, a few stories leaked out how incredibly close the world was to this catastrophy in the early eighties a couple of times. It was a very realistic and dreadfull threat to everybody in the world. Every person with some kind of realism about what their life´s situation was had to be a bit sceptical about having a good time next year.
…and sadly, it still is. With a substantial potential for nuclear destruction still being present and new tensions between what was the Soviet Union and the Nato countries being more intense now than at any time during the last 20 years, this topic gets contemporoary again…
I´m not quite sure who is called "the new elite" here. Did Andrew mean the yuppies, a group that just had been given that name back then, young buisness people that were nothing but buisness people, ocial climbers that wouldn´t dare to speak up or even contradict for not to risc their careers, or was it the political elite of the western/Nato world, Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand? Maybe all of them? -Andrew made it clear often enough that he had no sympathies at all for the conservative block in politics, that were largely in power in the countries of the west during that time.
"The western dream", the ever more, more, more. The permantent expansion and growth. Even into territories that aren´t yours, which causes conflict. Quote the homepage: "The Sisters of Mercy are a left wing institution." In some interview, Andrew described the band as a political animal. I can´t remember where exactly right now.
On a different note, violet and purple are pretty similar. Maybe there is some connection between theViolet in Floorshow and the Cobalt Red, Cobalt Blue, Purple Light in Ribbons?
@eo10478576 Well done and thank you. Of course we all understand people are free to interpret art in any way. However there is usually an intended meaning by the writer and I suspect your interpretations is far closer to the actual meaning than the others here. I cannot believe someone as clever as Eldritch would bother to write something so puerile as a complaint about people enjoying a nightclub, his music was designed to be enjoyed at a nightclub. Whereas his obsession with politics and war seem a more likely topic for him to be writing about.
@eo10478576 Well done and thank you. Of course we all understand people are free to interpret art in any way. However there is usually an intended meaning by the writer and I suspect your interpretations is far closer to the actual meaning than the others here. I cannot believe someone as clever as Eldritch would bother to write something so puerile as a complaint about people enjoying a nightclub, his music was designed to be enjoyed at a nightclub. Whereas his obsession with politics and war seem a more likely topic for him to be writing about.