There’s a childhood memory of a fire-red TDK cassette tape, brand and product markings silkscreened in gold on plastic. Side A’s first track was the Sister’s Temple of Love. I remember the tape crackling on my cousin’s cheap radio deck in 1987, and then a synth guitar riff squaling from tinny speakers, tortured and wailing, the most menacing thing I had ever heard. I was immediately fascinated. This came from a brooding and dark place, a place that had existed in my fantasies, the realms of Skeletor in Eternia.
Hearing this song made me realize that the world of imagination is close to ours, and through art and will, things could creep into our world, riding the black wind, inhabiting this other reality. I was scared, and I could not stop listening to it. In my beating heart I had learned that we do not have to be content. We get to live in many worlds of our own making. Along with scary things crawling from their dirty sewers, this is where our freedom is created: We run for cover in the temple of love, shine like thunder, cry like rain.
- Sisters of Mercy – Temple of Love, Single, Merciful Release, 1983