Creativity Quote by Andrew Eldritch

Weaponized deadpan is Eldritch's native tongue, and here he uses it to turn a business dispute into a miniature manifesto. The first line sounds like an update, the kind labels and fans demand: has the feud thawed, are the old albums coming back, is there a reunion of interests? Then he snaps the premise in half. "Nothing has changed" because there was never anything to change: "We have no relationship". It's a musician's version of bureaucratic annihilation, the corporate equivalent of being unfriended so completely the profile disappears.

The phrase "withholding our labour" is the tell. Most artists describe this as a contract issue, a legal mess, a creative pause. Eldritch frames it as labor politics, borrowing the language of strikes and collective bargaining to reclassify the band not as temperamental rock romantics but as workers refusing to produce value for a company they regard as predatory or irrelevant. The "almost seven years" detail turns the pose into proof: this isn't a tantrum, it's endurance, a willingness to sit on potential music as leverage.

Context matters: Eldritch and The Sisters of Mercy have long been defined as much by absence as output, with decades of touring, minimal new recorded releases, and a famously adversarial stance toward industry machinery. The subtext is control. If the label's power is distribution and ownership, his counterpower is refusal. It's punk ethics expressed through corporate dryness: if you can't own the masters, at least you can deny them the future.