THE MISSION - A TASTE OF GODS OWN MEDICINE

Mat Smith takes his life in his hands and joins THEMISSION on the rampage in Germany. Is Wayne Hussey really Ian Astbury in disguise? What did happen at the death of Sisters of Mercy and why can't they talk about Andrew Eldritch? Rockism is alive and well and living in the new wild boys of rock. Mission impossible: Tom Sheehan

Wayne Hussey is distraught. Having managed, by hook or by crook (probably the latter), to secure not one but two ????? for his band, he's ???? at the Bonn Biskuithalle ????? and measly six cans of lager sitting shyly on the dressing room table.

"You drank all the rest at the sound-check yesterday," says Pete, the band's tour manager unsympathetically. The Mission state at each other with ?????? of horror and amusement - it's only ????? and they're not due onstage 'til two in the morning. "I wouldn't mind but I've been asleep most of the time I've been 'ere," Wayne moans.

Understandable really. Bonn is the liveliest city in Europe. The biggest laugh is watching "the New Avengers" dubbed in German. The ????? thank God, isolated pockets of resistance ?????? depressing norm, and tonight, lager and ??????. The Mission's dressing room will be ????? them.

A deal is struck. A couple ???????? almost audible sigh of relief ????????? and the room. Almost audible, that ???? the sound of Paul Rodger's voice belting ?????? Rock n' Roll Fantasy". It is. It really is. By 11 ????? has mysteriously vanished from the backstage toilet and at the witching hour the seal of approval is given and the immortal words are finally ????? above the din. "I think we're building up ????????? one. We're gonna be peaking just as we hit that stage."

"Yeah!" A thick Yorkshire accent echoes. "Its gonna be 'Allo, we're the Mission'...THUD! Forty minutes of applause."

The dole officer told Craig there was no future in music and would he please accept this nice job they'd found him as a park keeper - or else. Simon was busy fixing vacuum cleaners while Wayne was dipping elements in acid and cleaning kettles. And Mick? Well Mick had been sacked for crashing a fork lift truck into his site manager's office pinning the old bastard up against the wall along with his filing cabinets and beloved mahoghany desk. It couldn't go on like this, music was the only way to go.

The Mission were formed just 10 months ago yet in that time they've gotten galvanises and polarised opinions to such a degree that nary a week goes by without the Maker positie belting under a sackful of Mission missives declaring the band to be anything from the saviors of rock n' roll to a mindless bunch of Cults.

They're neither. From the outset the Mission made it clear that they were never going to trade on former glories however hard won they might have been. With two indie hits already under their big black hats the band signed to Polygram and now their current single "Stay With Me" is snaking up the charts and the spectre of Andrew Eldritch is at least beginning to fade away. The king is indeed dead - though not perhaps forgotten - but more of that later. What we want now is...

"Non-stop nobbing!" Mick Brown steps out of the toilet, stares at the Robert Palmer video flickering in the corner and repeats his favorite phrase. "Non-stop nobbing!" ???? are as wide as a hippos arse and twice ????? on his head he's wearing a green cap with ???? alerting the public to the fact that he has reached the level of "Space Cadet" - whatever that means. It's five o'clock. Again. And It was a good one. Again.

Like a gothic Faces, The Mission can be pissed as rats but they'll play like demons. They can be almost incapable of standing up yet they can still strut, sweat and sneer their way through a performance with an uncontrollable whiplash energy that is a pure joy to behold. They can juggle an initially uncertain crowd without any hammy tricks and they can, on their night, blow virtually anyone else away.

Back at the hotel Mick has calmed down and my room has been chosen as the target area for the bombing...... ???? interview.

"I don';t think ???? be any reverence with this band," Wayne ????, one eye on a wine bottle that's doing ???? and the other on the Palmer vid. "There was always that thing with the Sisters, but with the Mission I don't think there ever will be. Alright, we're precious about our songs but we don't mind trashing them - as everyone saw at Reading. That's not to say we don't care."

This is precisely why I like The Mission. They're cocky, self-assured and aware of the value of what they have. But precious? Never. A worthy asset when so many are becoming entrenched in the hollow romanticism of the indie ???? It's very easy to be indie - you just sit and ???? but poverty is boring and a betrayal of ???? instinct. The Mission are alternative but they're not isolationist.

"It annoys me that people think that just because you've signed to a major label you've lost your character," Wayne argues. "You haven't. You've just got the resources at your disposal to do things properly. Its like if you can sell out large gigs you might as well do them and present yourself properly. I hate playing in small places where people can spit at you, and.... touch you! I think we should be trying to educate the person who only buys one LP a year - the person that sees music as nothing more than something you can listen to in your car. If The Mission can create enough of an impression so that one LP that person buys is our LP then we will have provided a true alternative.

But to do so surely you'll have to use mainstream methods.

"Yes. But first and foremost we are entertainers anyway, " Mick interrupts. "We're not preachers on soapboxes. We all have our certain politics which we do by putting a little X in a certain box every now and then but we do not take that onstage with us."

"I think some of our fans will be worried when they see us on 'Wogan' or 'Razamatazz'," Wayne continues. "But I'm sure most of them will laugh at it like we laugh at it because it is highly amusing. It's like our video, we call it the hammer house of goth. There's a bit in it where a bat flies over me 'ead and you can see the string holding it as plain as daylight. There's another scene where Simon's sitting in a coffin playing a 12 string guitar. I mean think about it, it's fuckin' hilarious."

Its also laying yourself open to a lot of stink and misinterpretation.

"Yeah, but that doesn't bother us. Some of the reviews for our last European tour were terrible but we were still selling out the venues. It's the critics artistic license to give us a hammering, just as it's ours to release records that annoy them. Also I think that we can get away with it to a certain degree because we've got some much more character than most of the bands around today."

The fact that his statement contains so much more than a grain of truth will not stop The Mission being herded into the first available pen along with The Cult an dthe empty-headed plagiarism of Balaam. Won't stop them being seen as one third of a tripartite conspiracy intent on returning rock to the bad old days. They aren't, of course.

"The mere fact that Balaam and The Cult are friends of ours doesn't mean that we're part of any new movement - they're our friends, that's it. They share the same musical taste as us, that's all. In fact I get very hurt when I get letters saying we're like The Cult and that I should be in The Cult cos I wanna be Ian Astbury. I don't. I'd like to fuck Ian Astbury but I don't want to be him." Wayne grins.

"A lot of the bands around today, including the so-called alternative ones are really regressive. They try and emulate bands that have gone before. ????? we rip off, left and centre but ultimately ????? we do sounds like The Mission. ????? think we're a very clever band. We live ??? instincts. The thing that I liked about albums made in the seventies was that they were so much more complete. They contained a broad spectrum of ideas. These days with ands like the Banshees and the Bunnymen you get eight tracks fulfilling a very small criterea whereas if you look at an LP like "Led Zep 3 the spectrum it covers is vast."

Ah, Led Zep... there's a band the Mission are often compared with.

"Yeah we are. We don't like it or dislike it, we just say we like Zepplin. We know in our hearts we're not really like that. The fact that we like them is evident in our records, but there's no blatant element of plagiarism. I mean, they used to nick all the time anyway, didn't they?"

Why do people get embarrassed when they hear the word rock? Is it for what it was in the first place or what it has become? If it's the former then surely the bands themselves are to blame. If it's the latter there's still no reason to suggest that The Mission haven't learned from history and thus aren't, for want of a less damning term, doomed to repeat it. No reason to suggest they'll fall into the same traps that befell their heroes. And yet....

"I remember one hotel we stayed at we were all throwing up on the balcony, I think it was someone's birthday, and every time one of us spewed this woman would come out with a big broom and slosh it all over the side screaming 'You kanot be zik on my balcony!' Mick thought he'd finished do he went and had a shower, put on his clean clothes, stepped out of his hotel room and threw up all over himself again!"

There was a genuine surprise in some quarters when yours truly returned relatively intact, if a little frayed, from a Euro jaunt with The Mission. They have managed to build a reputation for walking on the wild side.

"I think I've slowed down a lot actually," says Wayne. "I don't drink as much as I used to and I don't stay up so many nights on the trot. I mean I couldn't do this every bight - if I did I'd never get anything done.

"Believe it or not I do feel a responsibility to my fans. You have to be very careful what you say or how you say it. Yes we all do speed, loads of it in fact, but I'd never advocate it to anybody else. It's fun for all of us but I think we're quite responsible. We've been at it a long time and we all know our limits."

Come Wayne... how many people have said that and then not woken up the next morning?

"Loads probably, but I'm sure none of us would ever end up as casualties. We don't do smack and I know for a fact that no-one in this band would ever touch it. I've seen what that drug does and it isn't nice.

Mick: "I think that what'll happen to us, if anything, is that we won't get fucked up by the drugs, we'll get fucked up by the pressure." That may be true but ol' Wayne is no strange to TTT these days and he does seem to be taking the words of his hero Oscar Wilde a little bit seriously: 'There's only one thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about."

"I can't help it. I'm a sociable person. I go to parties. I get drunk and I fall down, but now its got to the point where people expect me to be like that all of the time. I get terribly lonely. I know it sounds pathetic but on the bus coming over I was almost in tears. All it seems is that there are people grabbing and taking bits of you all the time and no-one giving. I tend to wallow in self pity which is a very destructive thing to do. It's something that's only started to happen in the last couple of months.

"When I was in the Sisters I was under a different kind of pressure. Me and Craig were feeling the same pressure and we could talk to each other about it. Now we seem to have grown apart because he feels the same pressure that he always felt, but I'm feeling more. When we started The Mission I thought - "yeah, I can handle it'., now sometimes I'm not so sure. I know the realities and practicalities of the situation - I'm not running away from anything, but it doesn't make it any easier - it does your fucking 'ead in.

"I went through a funny time when we were doing the album" - "Gods Own Medicine", released by Polygram next month - "and for one reason and another I alienated myself from the rest of the group. I started going a bit nutty. I hadn't been home for months, the only person I'd spoken to outside of the group or its circle of friends or the people who work for it was me mum. In that sort of situation it gets really hard to keep any sort of perspective but you have to, otherwise you're finished.

"The only thing I worry about, and this is the God honest truth, is what me mother thinks. She's me favorite person in the world. She doesn't think much of what I've done but I know that I can phone her from anywhere in the world and we can talk about me aunts and uncles which, when your caught up in a world like this, is something you really need.

"There's a line in "Bloodbrother" that says 'Mother I wish I could tell you I love you.' I sent her a tape of that song along with some money so that she could go on holiday with a PS - 'I love you too.' It was heartbreaking. All this to me is temporary. It wasn't here a couple of years ago and it might not be here in a couple more but I know, God willing she'll always be there."

Do you object to the term 'rockist"?

"Do you object to the term 'wanker'?

I mean, what is 'rockist' apart from being a Paul Morley word? Loud guitars, long hair and a certain code of behavior I suspect, but by the same token where it begins and where it ends will be different in everybody's mind."

"Stop being serious," Wayne shouts from the toilet. "This isn't the bad news tour this is Spinal Tap."

"Oh, by the way I've just thrown up in your toilet bag."

The Mission don't deny their heroes for the sake of instant cred. Don't care about washing in public what some would deem decidedly dirty linen. But hang up the offending items for everyone's enjoyment or embarrassment.

"Robert Plant was gonna be on the LP, but he missed his bus," Mick laughs. "We like to jam with the people we like and it adds a different edge to the show. We got Speedy Keene up onstage at Reading without knowing about his past - we got letters from people thinking he was a guitar roadie - poor Speedie! To us he was just a great bloke who was full of hilarious stories from the Sixties about people like The Who and Hendrix and how he got lost in the corridors of the Albert Hall one day, walked through a door and found himself onstage with Led Zepplin."

"We're not ashamed of our heroes," Wayne continues. "Music is the greatest thing in our lives and if it wasn't for these people we wouldn't be here. As far as cover versions go they're not premeditated either. We just do 'em at rehearsals and if we fall into hysterics we do them onstage. The latest one we're doing is 'Tomorrow Never Knows'. In the song book it's only got one chord, but we added two more to it. That's how talented we are. We can fuck about with Beatles songs."

Fading, but not quite gone. What did you think of the Sisterhood album Wayne?

"I really thought it was an appalling record. I reviewed it for Sounds (apparently a music paper) and it dawned on me a couple of weeks later what he did it for. It was a business move more than anything else."

And explanation follows into the whys and wherefores of the Eldritch way of doing things. One day the truth about the Sisters split will come out and a lot of people who previously thought of Andy as some kind of latter day God may begin to realize why The Mission put him more on a par with the child catcher in the "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" movie. And if you think this feature has been short on the old Sisters anecdotes its because Wayne and Craig were recently forced to sign a contract forbidding them to talk about the old days. But scars still run deep.

"It's strange," Mick offers by way of explanation, "cos it still permeates the whole of the band. It's so hard to gain Craig's trust in anything for the simple fact that he was viciously fucked at the end of the Sisters - he's never gonna let that happen again. You can understand why he can't trust people anymore - even us. It must be impossible trying to live with what Eldritch has left him."

"What I find heartening thought," Wayne adds, raising the spirits a notch or two, "is the number of letters we get which end up by saying, by the way, who were the Sisters? I think The Mission are maybe less well known than the Sisters were but we're certainly more popular."

Quite so. And that has everything to do with what The Mission are rather than what they may try to be. The Mission are never so serious to pretend they have all or even any of the answers but at the same time they're not so empty-headed to believe that the music is all that matters.

At the start of this year I said that they were a good rock n' roll band. I take that back. They are of of the great rock n' roll bands.