40. This Mortal Coil - Song To The Siren (4AD)

 

One week at number one on w/e 5th November 1983

For a song as tasteful, respected and covered by all and sundry, “Song To The Siren” had an unbelievably ignoble and shaky start. Tim Buckley made several failed attempts to record the track before finally committing it to vinyl, meaning its debut release was a tossed off version by Pat Boone (complete with Pat doing an impromptu pirate impersonation at the start). Less objectionable, but no less unlikely than that, the first broadcast version by Buckley saw him singing it (beautifully) on an episode of “The Monkees”.




Buckley’s version on “Starsailor”, however, complete with the heat haze of reverb-heavy guitar and his sonorous voice, finally saw the track becoming the kind of cult classic eventually taped on to endless cream coloured TDK cassettes and swapped between friends in the know.

Its visibility was starting to wane by the early eighties, at which point 4AD entered the fray. This Mortal Coil were a label project rather than a proper band, an excuse for 4AD’s owner Ivo Watts-Russell to build his own troupe using a talent pool of all the different voices on the label. A world apart from Pat Boone’s version, “Song To The Siren” is, in the hands of Watts-Russell, Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie, suddenly something arctic, unhurried, debagged of Buckley’s weighty, elaborate vocal bulk. It breathes slowly, embraces absolute silence where emptiness has the greatest impact, and is unafraid of the cold and dark – Fraser’s performance is exquisite, broken but confident, always leaving the impression that she could push harder and go further, without her being tempted to actually do that. Just when you then think you’re close to reaching her, the song stops abruptly, messing with the fabric of time as it does so; you think you’ve been listening for a mere minute-and-a-half, but it’s clearly been playing for over twice as long.

The phrase “effortless sounding” is bandied around a lot by critics to describe all manner of tracks, from catchy two minute punk-pop wonders to improv jazz, and is usually pulled out when they can’t quite do their job and define what it is about the damn thing that works. The fact that I’ve apologised for reaching for that phrase doesn’t make the use of it any more excusable; but explaining why I find this version to be more effective than any of the many that have followed it since (from people as varied as George Michael, Bryan Ferry, Robert Plant, The The, Sinead O’Connor, Garbage and even Half Man Half Biscuit) almost feels like an act of science, like trying to dissect the emotional impact of one voice and its accompanying half-asleep guitar with a stopwatch and notebook.

The best conclusion I’ve ever managed to draw is that in this instance, “Song To The Siren” succeeds because of what it doesn’t do. In the same manner that a performer in a jazz or folk club taking the stage to do an impromptu open-mic performance can sometimes be the best live performance you’ve heard all year, it realises that laying the track bare, giving it an unfussy space and letting Liz Fraser gently embody its essence is the best bet – she knows exactly where to take it, precisely when less is more (which is interesting, given that some of her performances can be as showy and dazzling in their own eccentric way as Buckley’s) and her instinct aligns with the listener’s emotions. In her hands, this song sounds as ancient as the Greek myths Buckley was embracing, as if you first heard it forty lifetimes ago. The subtle, cold 4AD production just adds to the impression of a song trapped and frozen between two worlds, the ancient and the modern; no wonder David Lynch became so obsessed with it.

While it only entered into the lower reaches of the national Top 75 – which you may rightly deem to be unjust, but it was hardly likely to ever be played on Steve Wright In The Afternoon – “Song To The Siren” hovered around the NME Indie Charts for 54 weeks, keeping “Blue Monday” endless company.

By the time I had grown up and gone to university ten years later, it was still in the foreground as one of the first songs a fellow student played as part of an arts project. She wasn’t any kind of 4AD collector or music buff – it had just floated her way one day by chance and stayed inside her head. As slowly as the track unfolded on everyone’s stereos, it also seeped, drip by drip, into more people’s lives, continuing the journey it had begun in the sixties.

A few months later, a review copy of Jeff Buckley’s “Live at Sin E” plopped into my Hall of Residence pigeon-hole, and I stuffed it at the bottom of my listening pile muttering something about the talentless offspring of respected musicians. When I finally put it on the stereo at one in the morning, headphones on and totally alone, I was stunned and pinned to the spot all over again, but I recognised as much of Liz Fraser as Tim Buckley in the controlled but instinctive, “effortless” nature of the work. That her and Jeff ended up in a romantic relationship is really the stuff of gossip columns rather than relevant to this blog entry, were it not for the fact that something felt oddly inevitable about that step on its journey. Pat Boone could never know what he tried to start.

New Entries Elsewhere In The Chart

15. Death Cult – God’s Zoo (Situation Two)

Peak Position: 5

I’ve often wondered where the “inappropriate gothic handclap” device stemmed from – those moments where sounds and rhythms which encourage dancefloor clapping work their way on to anguished records performed by ghoulish men and ladies. For a while I thought Death Cult started it with this track, then I listened to Joy Division’s “Glass” again and realised that was probably patient zero.

Sure enough though, “God’s Zoo” seems to be one part stomping celebration, one part rumination. “Like flies!” Astbury hollers while the rhythm stomps. “Flies!” he warns, followed by another stomp, followed by “Flies!”/ stomp/ “Flies!”/ stomp/ “Flies!”/ stomp. Like a hell of a lot of goth rock, this could actually be hilariously funny if you were five pints or five spliffs deep into the evening.

“God’s Zoo” also has fat, burping basslines and seems suspiciously as if deep down, it really wants to be a soaring rock and roll track; interesting given the direction Ian Astbury and his chosen cohorts eventually took.




20. Divine - Love Reaction (Design Communications)

Peak position: 20

More gay disco, this time by way of “Blue Monday”. Divine would later find himself scoring minor hits and being categorised as a “gender bender” in Smash Hits, but initially he was a cult figure known mainly to regulars at Heaven nightclub and keen watchers of John Waters films.

The songwriting credit for “Love Reaction” is given to Neil Tennant’s hero Bobby Orlando, and it’s possible a more together and organised record label than Factory Records would have sued; this is such an obvious lift of Blue Monday’s key riffs and motifs that it’s hard to understand how it passed unchecked. Sumner’s detachment is replaced with Divine’s celebratory theatrics, though, which makes the track feel less multi-faceted and more ecstatic.

In common with all his records, Divine sounds like an anguished goose doing an impersonation of a soul diva, meaning that vocally speaking we’re replacing Sumner’s non-committal amateurism with unashamed and equally off-centre karaoke booth theatrics. You pay your money, you take your choice.




21. Icons Of Filth - Used Abused Unamused EP (Corpus Christi)

Peak position: 12

As we slowly travel through these charts, I’m noticing a Motorhead influence increasingly creeping into the anarcho-punk tracks. There’s no question the group were always a background influence on punk rock anyway, but it’s almost as if they were a bacteria that grew as the years progressed.

“Used Abused Unamused” sees Cardiff’s premier anarchos rush towards shit-encrusted hills with anger and determination, never really stopping for breath.




24. The Blood - Stark Raving Normal (Noise)

Peak position: 19

Some late period Oi for anyone who was wondering why we haven’t seen so many of Gary Bushell’s chums in the indie chart of late. “Stark Raving Normal” was The Blood’s final single of the eighties, and for all the chaotic churning and thrashing in the verses, they lean heavily into an anthemic howl of a chorus which is almost Tenpole Tudor styled (mock-Tenpole Tudor, perhaps?)

They later rebadged themselves as Legalise Rape for a 1984 Oi compilation, proving that edgelords have been around for almost as long as human beings have been alive. There again, they also released the track “Kill The Pimps” in protest about human trafficking on International Human Rights Day in 2006. If they’d reached number one I’d be duty-bound to write a pontificating blog entry considering their contradictions, intentions and methods, but as they only got to number 19, the bare facts are all you’re getting, and you can do with them whatever you will.

For the full charts, please go to the UK Mix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Billy Joel: Uptown Girl (CBS)