The Sisterhood

For more than twenty years I have been thinking about projects to celebrate women and our contribution to the history of song - This, at last, is it: these are my ten singers, my essential lodestars. If your favourite is missing, I apologise, but with these stories I tell my own, acknowledge my musical tutelage and identify the women who mean so much to me. This album is dedicated to all my musical sisters, to those who went before and to those still making music. Thank you for blazing the trail, for fighting for us all with your irresistible talent and your passionate resolve.

This recording has been cleaned up and mastered by Wayne which shows the raw intensity of the build up to that very first show.

The Sisters of Mercy are an English rock band, formed in 1980 in Leeds. After achieving early underground fame there, the band had their commercial breakthrough in the mid-1980s and sustained it until the early 1990s, when they stopped releasing new recorded output in protest against their record company WEA. Currently, the band are a touring outfit only. The group has released three original studio albums, the last of which was released in 1990. Each album was recorded by a different line-up; singer-songwriter Andrew Eldritch and the drum machine called Doktor Avalanche are the only points of continuity throughout. Eldritch and Avalanche were also involved in The Sisterhood, a side-project connected with Eldritch's dispute with former members.

The Anthology - the Phonogram Years is a 2 CD set including all 11 of the Mission's Top 40 hits, with big hits such as 'Wasteland', 'Deliverance' and 'Butterfly on a Wheel' alongside rare mixes, long lost b-sides, BBC sessions and previously unreleased material. The package has personally been put together by Wayne Hussey and he has written extensive sleeve notes, with stories and anecdotes on each track included on this set. Almost 20 years to the day since Wayne Hussey announced that his band would be known as the Mission (rather than the Sisterhood), this anthology, curated by Wayne himself, celebrates one of the UK's most successful rock bands of the post punk years. Universal. 2006.