The Sisters Of Mercy

Seven days. One week. Then Andrew Eldritch and The Sisters of Mercy descend on Roig Arena. Valencia, you have exactly seven days to find the black clothes, resurrect the battered Sisters T-shirt, locate the eyeliner and prepare yourself for one seriously dark Sunday night.

On Sunday 27 September, the Leeds legends arrive at Roig Arena for a long-awaited encounter with Valencia, bringing more than four decades of gothic rock, post-punk attitude, industrial electronics and some of the biggest songs ever to crawl out of the darker corners of British alternative music. The show starts at 9pm, with doors opening at 7pm.

And yes, the big songs are coming. “Temple of Love”. “This Corrosion”. “Lucretia My Reflection”. Songs that have survived decades of musical fashion, survived the death of entire subcultures and somehow still sound like they belong in a smoke-filled club at 2am rather than in the polite surroundings of a modern arena.

But reducing The Sisters of Mercy to a greatest-hits exercise would be missing the point. Andrew Eldritch's peculiar musical machine has never been particularly interested in playing by the rules of the conventional rock band. The drum machine remains firmly in the driving seat, guitars come loaded with enough atmosphere to darken the Mediterranean and Eldritch remains the unmistakable figure at the centre of it all. The current lineup features Ben Christo and Kai on guitars, with Doktor Avalanche handling the machinery.

The result is something that still feels gloriously out of step with the times. While everyone else is busy trying to make music brighter, cleaner and more algorithmically friendly, The Sisters of Mercy continue operating somewhere down a badly lit corridor where the bass is enormous, the guitars are filthy and nobody appears remotely interested in smiling for the camera. And that's exactly why this Valencia date matters.

Roig Arena has already hosted everything from The Waterboys and Silvio Rodríguez to Hijos de la Ruina this month, but The Sisters bring an entirely different species of darkness to the building.

There will also be Real Farmer on support duties, bringing their frantic art-punk energy to the evening before Eldritch and company take control. So this is your seven-day warning.

Next Sunday, the lights go down, Doktor Avalanche starts doing whatever the hell Doktor Avalanche does, those guitars start grinding into the darkness and thousands of people suddenly discover that wearing black in Valencia in September was perhaps an act of questionable judgement. But nobody said gothic rock was supposed to be practical. Seven days to go. The Sisters of Mercy. Roig Arena. Valencia. Sunday 27 September. 9pm. Get your black shit ready.

For tickets and more information: Roig Arena