Istria Under the Deluge: The Sisters Of Mercy and The Godfathers in the Depths of a Roman Quarry (2025)
The Sisters Of Mercy / The Godfathers
Saturday, 26 July 2025
Vinkuran (Medulin, Pula) / Cave Romane / Croatia
July 2025! Our region is absolutely packed with concerts! There’s a ton of scheduling clashes and tough choices about who to prioritize. Festivals, as always, plus a whole string of standalone shows, mostly outdoors. Nothing new, really — and yet! When the final stretch of this July brought a drawn-out spell of weather misery, with relentless rain and storms that just wouldn’t quit, it started to wear you down — there was no end in sight! We’d barely made it back on the night of 25–26 July from the downpours in Austrian Carinthia, where we’d caught a reunion with rock legends Uriah Heep, Bonnie Tyler and Nazareth, only to be sentenced to another helping of sky water!
But the memory of that distant — hell, almost ancient — 11 March 1991 and the unforgettable show by cult gothic rock and post-punk legends The Sisters Of Mercy at Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli is just too powerful to let a bit of rain get in the way of heading south into Istria on Saturday 26 July — specifically to Vinkuran near Medulin, a place known as the site where Roman slaves once quarried stone blocks for building the Pula Arena. A vision of apocalypse, ringed by the high walls of the old quarry, the silent moaning and wailing of souls forever wandering, unbound through the centuries by no one — all that grim vibrational dread was amplified by yet another round of thunderous downpours we drove straight into, head-on, from the north. Straight to Cave Romane for a show by two outstanding — let’s just call them cult — alternative rock acts. And what a unique pairing it was. The Godfathers — rowdy, street-punk rock’n’roll — followed by one of the pioneering post-punk bands of the eighties, the unforgettable The Sisters Of Mercy, whose legacy and persona drastically shaped the later rise of gothic rock and industrial alike. Two completely different, yet legendary bands!
That things didn’t go sideways, we can thank the quick thinking of the concert organizer, who promptly set up a massive tent that a crowd of several hundred packed into — rough numbers somewhere between 600 and 700! The schedule held! At half past eight in the evening, The Godfathers hit the stage. The indestructible British punk rock fortress, fronted by the enormously charismatic vocalist Peter Coyne, who even at this stage of his career bellows with savage vocal contempt through a sermon laced with the sarcasm and cynicism of quintessential British humor. Peter Coyne and his three bandmates — drummer Billy Duncanson, guitarist Paul Humphreys and bassist Jon Prestley — wasted no time and rolled out track after track across roughly 50 minutes. The band shook the quarry and kept the crowd on edge through an avalanche of classics from their catalog, which included: This is War, OCD, If I Only Had Time, Cause I Said So, Walking Talking Johnny Cash Blues — then in the second half came I Can’t Sleep Tonight (Coyne dedicated it to the legendary Ramones), Hup 2 3 4 (where Coyne urged the crowd to sing along to the chorus as loud as they could), plus Love Is Dead and I Want Everything! Not missing from the mix was I Am Not Your Slave from their latest and still very current ninth studio album “Alfa, Beta, Gamma, Delta” (2022).
Right through to the finale, The Godfathers — who already played Croatia once this year back in March (that was Zagreb) — confirmed once again with this show that they are a brilliant live act, unstoppable on stage and always delivering a powerfully convincing performance. The true punk spirit of a rock’n’roll ride with the sonically roughed-up swagger of garage rawness crowned the fact that The Godfathers are a supremely seasoned and experienced band, driven by a wild-hearted engine of untamed charisma! The detonation was made complete in the closing stretch by Birth, School, Work, Death — a song everyone knows! Coyne couldn’t hide his delight at the crowd’s response: during the show they’d completely forgotten about the rain hammering down from above, given themselves fully over to the band’s energy and delivered back every bit as good as they got. The singer wrapped it up with: “Fuck the rain! We love you, you crazy Croatians!”
As if the sky had heard Coyne, the intensity of the rain eased off a bit after The Godfathers’ set. It kept raining, sure, but at a more ‘bearable’ level! And so The Sisters Of Mercy took the stage. The Cave Romane atmosphere is genuinely tailor-made for this quartet. Given their stature, musical identity and persona, that’s beyond doubt. As always — a heavily fog-drenched stage with lighting strictly aimed at the backs of the performers! Both guitarists — Ben Christo (left) and Kai (right) — take up their positions at the front; at the back stands the eternal Doctor Avalanche, driving the entire rhythmic structure and the backdrop of programmed samples! Then a familiar figure appears in the centre. Everyone’s been waiting for him. The main man himself! Andrew Eldritch. In his characteristic pose — slightly stooped, trademark gestures, sunglasses non-negotiable. Wrapped in some kind of white tunic with a perforated pattern that could have been knitted for him long ago by his mum or gran, Andrew spent the concert moving slowly from left to right and back again. He stepped up to both guitarists several times — they were doing the heavy lifting covering the higher registers. Worth noting: Andrew’s voice has worn down considerably with age and he now sticks to the lower and middle ranges, and even there you can tell the man is sometimes a lung-compression kick short of breath. His inseparable companion through most of the concert is, of course, a cigarette. You never actually see him take a drag — but that smoldering cigarette between his fingers remains an obligatory prop in the stage inventory of every proper The Sisters Of Mercy concert.
The crowd really did do the heavy lifting. In what was — let’s say — ‘spectacularly’ awful weather, the kind that sends your mind wandering and has you catching yourself in your own spiral of pessimism, the audience genuinely shone. Like one of the spotlights — a blazing ball trained on the wall of the magnificent backdrop formed by the cliffs of the Roman quarry. The fans had come not just from Croatia; there were plenty of Slovenians (no surprise there, right?), plus the inevitable Italians and even some Austrians. Mostly the over-50s crowd, but none of them had forgotten a single song from their youth. The audience sang along loudly and responded with roaring enthusiasm to every cue from the stage. Adding their bit were a string of young women in the front rows decked out in full gothic-kitsch finery, relentlessly working every angle to catch attention from the stage! The chemistry was excellent. And that positive energy won out over everything — even over all the confusion of wandering souls caught in the whirlwind of what must have been a decidedly unusual concert chaos for them!
Sound: excellent! Band: razor-tight. And the drummer? Hard to miss when there isn’t one — if you’ll allow me a bit of sarcasm? Christo, who has been in Eldritch’s corner for nearly 20 years now, and Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kai were both brilliant in their precision on guitar (Kai grabbed a 12-string acoustic twice during the show), with both of them also dipping into bass guitar at points. Backed by a solid rhythmic spine and the sweep of swelling keyboards, the outfit built a kind of hypnotic atmosphere that sucks you down into the dark, bittersweet depths of this legendary band’s uniqueness and body of work. The Sisters of Mercy remain entirely their own thing — and they don’t need to prove it to anyone! The sermon of the charismatic Eldritch keeps stage theatre at its most compellingly alive — still convincing on every level, and still moving! A relic of a distant era, yet one that, from the commercial breakthroughs of their pioneering days all the way to now, hasn’t fired its last round yet.
What ultimately gave this unforgettable event its soul was the wild crowd that carried the quartet on their hands for over an hour and a half! With the deft handling by the concert organizers, it was a total success, and we will not forget it for the rest of our days. Not just because of being sentenced to a ‘soaked-to-the-bone enjoyment experience’ in the company of two cult bands, but also because of the whole confluence of circumstances that intensified the feeling of apocalypse hanging over this day. The storm and the lightning, though? They stuck around. Long into the night. They were still lighting our way long after the concert, as we were already heading back towards the Slovenian border.
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Author: Edita Klemen & Aleš Podbrežnik
The Sisters Of Mercy – setlist:
1. Doctor Jeep / Detonation Boulevard
2. Play Video Don’t Drive on Ice
3. Ribbons
4. Alice
5. Crash and Burn
6. Summer
7. Giving Ground (orig. The Sisterhood)
8. I Will Call You
9. Marian
10. Quantum Baby
11. Eyes of Caligula
12. More
13. But Genevieve
14. I Was Wrong
15. Here
16. When I’m on Fire
17. On the Beach
18. Temple of Love
—encore—
19. Never Land (A Fragment)
20. Lucretia My Reflection
21. This Corrosion
