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.

36. Tom Robinson - War Baby (Panic)

Three weeks at number one from w/e 9th July 1983

At some point in the early eighties I caught a glimpse of Tom Robinson singing “Glad To Be Gay” on the television and sat dumbfounded. I was shocked not because he was gay, but because he wasn’t homosexual in a way I’d been lead to expect. I was a naive child, not even a teen, and my limited awareness came from the music press and national newspapers, who generally put either very camp and effeminate or exaggeratedly butch gay men front and centre of their coverage.

If your childhood is lived in an eighties suburban bubble without much other experience to draw from, that becomes what you think “gay” means (besides a bog-standard playground insult). Yet here was Tom Robinson, a confident but regular looking performer, singing about how proud he was to be gay without make-up or any of the other cliched stylings apparent on his person. How could he be proud if he presented himself as such? Why wasn’t he dragging up like Boy George as he must obviously want to do? So many contradictions here to which there appeared so few answers in deepest South East Essex. I chalked Mr Robinson up as yet another one of those Elvis Costello type performers who was too much of a studious riddler for me to make sense of, and went back to reading my copy of Whizzer and Chips.

Of course, in retrospect I find all this hilarious because – at the risk of heavily signposting the obvious childish errors and ironies – Tom Robinson was an absolute trailblazer for gay rights way before any of the new crop of performers had even left school. Originally discovered by Ray Davies, who briefly signed him to his Konk label in 1973, “Glad To Be Gay” was issued by the charity Campaign for Homosexual Equality (or CHE) in 1975 while Robinson was out of contract. He decided to declare his pride before punk had even emerged, never mind the more open and out aspects of New Romanticism, performing the song defiantly in front of rock audiences. To put this into context, homosexuality had only been decriminalised in the UK for eight years at that point, and seventies rock audiences (and indeed even allegedly right-on rock critics) were not always renowned for their tolerance.

"Glad To Be Gay" remains a superb anthem and portrait of an intolerant, "non-woke" period so many of my moping, sad-arsed fellow heterosexual middle-aged men and ladies would like to return to. Every line is precise and jagged, highlighting hypocrisies and societal inconsistencies so obvious they should never have existed - "Pictures of naked young women are fun/ In Titbits and Playboy, page three of The Sun/ There's no nudes in Gay News, our one magazine/ But they still find excuses to call it obscene". Those were the days, eh chaps? Still, at least we were free to drink water from hosepipes and trepan our skulls or some shit. 

There were other trailblazers besides Robinson, but few actually politicised their sexuality. For his troubles, “Glad To Be Gay” was banned from BBC radio despite containing absolutely nothing that could be deemed controversial a mere 6 or 7 years later. Other tracks of his slipped gay references under the radar and picked up radio play, and for a few years in the late seventies he scored hit singles on EMI, not least the deathless “2. 4. 6. 8. Motorway” which remains an oldies radio staple and heavily compiled anthem.

Later releases struggled, however, with even a songwriting collaboration with Elton John “Never Going To Fall In Love… (Again)” failing to chart. He was dropped by EMI, formed the rock band Sector 27 who signed to a reactivated Fontana records, scored no hit singles with them and promptly found himself completely broke, without a record contract or group and bereft of direction. He moved to Hamburg for a while acting as a musician for hire and gigging around the circuit in Germany, before having an unpleasant, alienating evening in a gay sauna which would at least partially inspire this song.

Frustrated, he spewed various stream-of-consciousness lines into a notepad, including the opening lines here “Only the very young and the very beautiful can be so aloof/ Hanging out with the boys, all swagger and poise”. Having emptied his pen of his thoughts, they sat in his notebook for an undefined period before eventually being used to fill “War Baby”, each line a complaint, a charge, or a recently excavated nugget from his anxious belly, each one not necessarily connected to the one before - “Corresponding disasters every night on the TV/ Sickening reality keeps gripping me in its guts” sits alongside “I don't wanna batter you to your feet and knees and elbows/ When I'm kneeling by the candle at the foot of my own bed” as personal angst jars and rattles against the universal.

You can speculate all you want about what “War Baby” is actually about – Tom Robinson has never helped us in this respect, and the safest conclusion to draw is that the chaotic state of life in the early eighties and his own personal life coalesced to create a frustrated outburst on 45. While the song itself is almost as anthemic as “Motorway”, the lyrical scansion is almost as loose as a Crass record, some lines stumbling hither and tither, stretching to try and fit the melody; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that many of the lines weren’t radically adapted from his notes. Misgivings topple into panic then into grievance and fear before Robinson sings the chorus’s final hook of “I’m scared, so scared, whatever it is you keep putting me through”.

So far, so unbelievably uncommercial, but “War Baby” has major features on its side. The first is the gentle, rocking melody and seductive sax – two things much beloved in the early eighties – but the aforementioned anthemic chorus acts as a glorious, luminous lighthouse beam, spinning around and hitting the listener amidst the choppy scramble of the lyrics. There, in the middle of it all, is the message we could all cling on to.