1984 Music: This Mortal Coil, It'll End in Tears

Release date: 1 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? I bought the seven-inch single of ‘Song to the Siren’, and I distinctly remember examining the album’s cassette case in HMV, trying to decide if it warranted a purchase, but I must have decided against it, because I didn’t hear the rest of it until much later. 

This album and Rainy Day, the subject of a previous post, both contain a cover of Big Star’s ‘Holocaust’, and both were recorded by indie ‘supergroups’, to use a term from 1960s stadium rock. In other words, they are credited to groups with no permanent membership, temporarily convened out of members of other groups. However, unlike their 60s forebears, in both cases under discussion here, the musicians were probably barely making a living in their day jobs, let alone their side projects. 

Rainy Day were an American – more specifically an LA – collective, but This Mortal Coil were the house band of the UK indie label 4AD, then best-known as the home of the Cocteau Twins, who feature here (and who recruited Simon Raymonde based on his contributions to this album). Like Rainy Day, It’ll End in Tears includes several totemic covers: ‘Song to the Siren’ was originally a Tim Buckley song, and ‘Kangaroo’ was, like ‘Holocaust’, off Big Star’s infamous abandoned third album. There’s also a cover of a Roy Harper song – an interesting choice, since Harper was not at all ‘cool’ in 1984 as the other historical reference points were. Plus there’s a more recent post-punk song from Colin Newman’s first solo album (‘Not Me’). 

Also like Rainy Day, the album as a whole is a little underwhelming: here the cover versions are complemented by several original songs, but these are wispy, seemingly improvised instrumentals, big on atmospherics but short on substance. Two compositions by Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance with her trademark keening vocals are better (especially ‘Dreams Made Flesh’). But the album is best known now as the setting for ‘Song to the Siren’, which, as performed by Fraser and Robin Guthrie, is really a Cocteau Twins track – except for the fact that its lyrics, though poetic and allusive, more or less make sense. 

It’s an inspired choice for a cover: Fraser’s voice is quite different to Buckley’s, but equally distinctive and acrobatic. So, whereas the covers on Rainy Day sometimes feel like degraded facsimiles of the originals (the closing version of Hendrix’s ‘Rainy Day, Dream Away’ is particularly bathetic), ‘Song to the Siren’ both adds to and transforms its progenitor.

It’ll End in Tears was reviewed in Melody Maker on 6 October 1984 by Steve Sutherland: 

When I first contacted Ivo, the instigator of Some Mortal Coil [sic: there are a lot of errors in this review], with the intention of maybe writing about it-them-whatever, I didn’t have a clue where to start. Tentatively suggesting a number of approaches, I ventured that perhaps talking to some of the participants might cast some light on this unintentional enigma. 

Ivo said he’d sound out his cohorts and rang the next day to say Howard Devote [sic] couldn’t see why I’d want to quiz him. “When you interview a guitarist,” he’d said, “you don’t interview the guitar.” 

This strikes me as the nearest I’m likely to get to explaining what This Mortal Coil is, how it works, what its aims are and, finally, its achievements. It is the dream of one man, Ivo, supremo of 4AD records. A non-musician and a novice producer, he hit upon the idea of recording the album he’d always wanted to live with using some of his favourite musicians for tools. That’s it. He’s succeeded admirably. 

“It’ll End in Tears” is an extraordinary record in that it pays no heed to what’s currently in vogue and resists the temptation to become another BEF public relations exercise while adhering single-mindedly to one vital premise: that this should be an album rather than a collection of songs, an atmospheric, even spiritual whole. A vision, not an indulgence. 

Its mood is melancholy, desperate at times, and yet, like Eno’s ambient things (the nearest comparison but still distant), it seeks to serve some purpose, to perhaps give some comfort, some companionship. 

Whatever the truth of this rapturous assessment, This Mortal Coil certainly achieved more than Rainy Day, if only by virtue of the fact that the collective issued two additional albums after this one. Here’s a recent discussion from The Quietus on their body of work.