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also a cover of a Roy Harper song – an interesting choice, since Harper was not at all ‘cool’ in 1984 as the other historical reference points were.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.

1984 Music: Big Country, Steeltown

Release date: 19 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Sort of. 

I liked Big Country’s first album, The Crossing, but didn’t own it. I didn’t pay much attention to the release of Steeltown but encountered it a couple of years later in someone else’s record collection. I was a bit sniffy. Even in the 80s, I found romantic elegies for industrial masculinity passé and regressive – they said nothing to me about my life – and explicit politics of any kind were inherently naff (I didn’t like Billy Bragg either). 

  

This is very definitely a rawk album, not a pop one, but it has in common with Rattlesnakes not only its Scottish connection but the fact that it’s ten bangers in a row without a duff track, and every one of them fizzing with energy. Of course Cath Carroll (again) in the NME hated it (I’m really beginning to enjoy her invective): 

So strong is the crusading tone of the recorded Big Country that a stubborn image has formed in the old mind’s eye: it concerns Stuart Adamson who, each and every time he undertakes a vocal track, cannot reach the emotional peak required unless he is standing in front of a wind machine and a blinding light. …  As usual Big Country here sound heroic, tempestuous, impossibly romantic. Every instrument and voice has been put through their unique ‘Cavalry Charge’ effect and still, every time Adamson opens his one mouth to sing, at least three other Stuarts are heard in varying stages of folksy harmony. Nothing has changed. The diddle-diddle solo is given plenty to do and must by now be ready to take its place in Celtic history alongside tartan-edged white parallel trousers and hung-over New Year’s Days at Balmoral. 

Once again, Carroll’s review is shadowed by Steve Sutherland’s in Melody Maker. But he was a full-fledged believer: 

“Steeltown” is, simply, superb, and everything Big Country ever said they were and everything we sort of hoped, with fingers crossed, they might be. There’s no ifs or buts about it – no “if only they weren’t so naïve”, no “if only we weren’t so cynical”, no “if only The Clash hadn’t cocked it up so badly for everyone else”, no “if only they didn’t wear those checked shirts”, no if anything. 

The sound that emanates from this album exhilarates – the power is internal, dynamic and emotional, not external cosmetic bluster. All the rockist arguments have been defeated, we never stop to consider this passion might be posturing. Thin Lizzy doesn’t come into it, nor do those nagging doubts that the bagpipe guitars might be a gimmick. This is sheer purpose made practise, adrenalised action. 

The debate whether Adamson is capable of reinvesting cliché with meaning is rendered redundant. The deed is done. 

What’s interesting about this gushing is how closely it replicates the emotional arc of a Big Country song – if you’re willing to give yourself over to it – staring off into the middle distance, avoiding paying attention to inconvenient particulars under your feet. 

In fact, only two of the group’s four members were Scottish (and both of them were born outside the country). In any case, the group’s fetishisation of ‘Scottishness’ might seem to contradict my generalisation that few of the albums I’m discussing here show any real commitment to place. But if one were to be unkind, one might say that Big Country’s songs are set in the same country as Braveheart: an idealised, fantasy landscape, as opposed to, say, Glasgow – or Dunfermline. Let’s call it ‘Wonderland’. Here’s a 1984 performance of a track from The Crossing: 

 

I should clarify that ‘The Storm’ is my favourite track on the The Crossing, and seeing it played live only underlines the group’s high level of technical skill. They have fantastic chemistry together onstage – no doubt the result of a lot of practice. So I’m being unfair: the film that Big Country actually soundtracked in 1985, Restless Natives – which I went to see at the cinema, surely because of their association with it (it was probably a deserted cinema, since no one in England followed my example) – is cleverer and funnier about Scottish identity than Carroll’s review is able to imagine. 

 

As for ‘Steeltown’, well, in the early 1990s, I did a few shifts as a security guard on the old Ravenscraig steelworks near Glasgow. That enormous site, itself as big as a village or small town, had closed, but was yet to be decommissioned or dismantled, and so it had to be patrolled – for years – to prevent thieves, and for insurance-liability reasons: that is, to stop any trespassers from injuring themselves and suing. Some of the men I worked with had once been steelworkers there, at far higher wages. Not so much the world of Steeltown then: more that of The Full Monty. I described this experience obliquely in my first novel, Five Wounds: 

Everything was preserved in a sticky grease coat, to which dust stuck and was fruitful and multiplied. The uneven concrete floor was encrusted with ridges of once-molten metals and alloys, with oil and with pigeon droppings, which fanned out in pale, luminous layers under the places where the pigeons squatted in the roof. … As he grew up in these massive enclosed spaces, Cur rose from the floor onto gantries that had once moved over mysterious pits. Long-dead jokes and insults were sprayed on walls and pinned to bits of paper in the rest quarters. Cur read them with curiosity, and began to feel nostalgia for a life he had never known. He spent much of his childhood enclosed in what had once been a control booth for one of the gantries. It had scratched plastic windows and cracked leather seats. Underneath the windows, every inch of wall space was covered in pictures of naked women with spread-eagled legs. 

I think the legacy of these places is more complex than clichés normally allow. So I prefer the Big Country songs that sing – very effectively – not from the point of view of the men working in these places, but the women who love them: ‘Chance’ on The Crossing, and ‘Come Back to Me’ on Steeltown: 

 

I have your child inside me 

But you will never know 

I never will forget you 

While I watch that child grow

1984 Music: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Rattlesnakes

Release date: 12 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. In my collection of home-taped C90 cassettes, number one had Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes on one side, and Rattlesnakes on the other. (I owned both albums on vinyl: I just didn’t have a record player.) 

This was the most commercially successful among the albums I’ve looked at so far, and given that its success was arguably based on taking the Postcard Records aesthetic and smoothing off its rough edges, I expected the music press to take a dim view of its hit-friendly gloss. But for the most part this doesn’t seem to have been the case. In the NME, the review by Cath Carroll (last encountered slagging off The Pale Fountains) fortuitously sits next to the review of Spring Hill Fair by The Go-Betweens in the 6 October issue: 

There have been many albums lovingly created under the working title of ‘I’ll Be Lou’s Mirror’, from the Dream Syndicate to the Blue Orchids – and that’s only in the last couple of years. Lloyd Cole’s marvellous all-purpose reptilian drawl can rescue a struggling melody, can turn re-translations of ‘O’ level French essays into testaments of suffering and the cool … Is there anyone who doesn’t like Cole and his cronies, who have made the Velvets do a part C&W album and part deep-south blues-funk – gentle, self-mocking, inoffensive and superbly balanced. Every song is instantly memorable. … The record plays like a film, heavy on limpid atmospherics and post-coital maudlinity shot through with illogical bouts of teenage exhilaration. 

Admittedly Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker was rather more critical, and along the exact lines I was expecting, but my impression is that he was the outlier, not Carroll: 

Like Orange Juice’s “Texas Fever” and ABC’s “Lexicon of Love”, “Rattlesnakes” is an album of cynicism masquerading as romance. It’s about past pop’s legacy to the present rather than love or hate or any of the emotions it feigns. It’s about how modes of expression haven’t moved on one iota from early Bob Dylan, how a generation bereft of its own voice falls back on playing with the language of its peers. It pretends to comment on this situation, boasts its own cleverness, preens its wit and says nothing. 

This sounds more like a review of Scritti Politti than Lloyd Cole, but it’s more targeted here: 

Of course, he’s really a cardboard Edwyn Collins and it’s as if he burst from nowhere to steal Edwyn’s thunder. He’s like a swot graduate from some pop school … Edwyn, an acutely sensitive and self-conscious youth, makes self-deluding records to pretend he’s wasted and reckless. … Cole, on the other hand, keeps a cool business head and seldom strays far from a settled, scholarly perspective. 

But even Sutherland concludes: 

I’ve been too hard here on purpose because this record’s good enough to stand it. Compared to most else around, it’s a gem ...

It’s hard to deny how polished Rattlesnakes sounds, especially for a debut – by that I mean that every song is laden with lyrical and musical hooks: there’s not a dud among them. Whereas Ian Pye damns with faint praise by describing Pacific Street as ‘very much an album’, by contrast this sounds like a greatest hits compilation (and in fact nothing Cole has done subsequently has had anything like its impact: I can only imagine how frustrating that must be). Moreover, everything is in service of the song: the only instrumental solo on the entire album is the guitar one in ‘Forest Fire’. 

 

And whereas you have to work hard to figure out the relevance of whatever obscure allusion Paddy McAloon is making on Swoon, here the references are all wrapped up in pointed one-liners (or couplets). While this can certainly be shallow – quotations instead of emotions, or an appeal to the snobbery of those who ‘get’ the references – it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously (‘She’s sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan’). And there’s more specificity and deft characterisation in this quatrain than in the entirety of Pacific Street: 

Jody wears a hat 

Although it hasn’t rained for six days 

She says a girl need a gun these days 

On account of all the rattlesnakes

  

Many of these songs were written in a basement room at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole’s father worked, and while Cole was as an undergraduate at Glasgow University. But the songs seemingly owe very little to that Glasgow connection. As I noted when discussing Julian Cope, this free-floating quality is shared by most of the albums I discuss. The Pale Fountains came from Liverpool and Prefab Sprout from Newcastle, as was very obvious when they spoke in interviews – but you wouldn’t know it from any of the songs on their first albums. The NME review of Rattlesnakes notes that ‘The contradiction of an English laddie groaning away in high Trans-Atlantic has become our firmest, unquestioned alternative tradition’. And most of Cole’s songs on this album also seem to be set in a fairly generic version of America (one with freeways and forest fires and the New York Times crossword). Only ‘2CV’ is explicitly set in London – and maybe ‘Charlotte Street’ since the road of that name in Fitzrovia is well-known, though that is also the song with the New York Times crossword, and a ‘union card’ (not necessarily American, but probably intended as such on an album that references On the Waterfront).* 

This kind of thing is often aspirational. It not only represents a desire to speak to American audiences and therefore be successful internationally, but more symbolically, it’s a rejection of provincialism: America is the great beyond, the place you escape to – the same place represented by the Western frontier, or by LA and Hollywood, in the American imagination. And in fact Cole later married and settled in America. 

The best thing I can say about this album is that it hasn’t dated at all: perhaps the fact that the allusions are all to 60s music, books and films helps in that respect. 

*There is also a Charlotte Street in Glasgow, though nothing in the song suggests it’s set there.

1984 Music: Julian Cope, World Shut Your Mouth and Fried

 

Release dates: early March and 9 November 

Was I listening to these in the 1980s? Yes. 

I begin my survey of 1984 music with Julian Cope’s two album releases from that year: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried. If one were to believe the critical wisdom of the time, Cope’s career peaked with the early singles by the Teardrop Explodes – the ones released on Zoo Records. These singles, ‘Sleeping Gas’ and ‘Bouncing Babies’, were, supposedly, better than the re-recorded versions on the band’s first LP Kilimanjaro, which was in turn better than the group’s second and final LP, Wilder, which was in turn better than Cope’s first solo LP, World Shut Your Mouth. All these successive releases were compared unfavourably in reviews to their immediate predecessors, so that Wilder, dismissed on release, nonetheless became a stick to beat World Shut Your Mouth with. 

With Fried the critical trend changed slightly: although for the NME, it marked no improvement on World Shut Your Mouth (and indeed David Quantick’s review contains the expected unfavourable comparison to the previous record, even if he remained dismissive of both), the Melody Maker review by Steve Sutherland was far more positive. That wasn’t enough to help sales though: Cope was dropped by Polygram soon after. He seems to have taken it all to heart, to the extent that World Shut Your Mouth is currently unavailable officially, and for many people Cope’s solo career begins with Fried. 

This is a pity. My own personal ranking would be: Kilimanjaro is better than the early singles, Wilder is better than Kilimanjaro, World Shut Your Mouth is as good as Wilder, and Fried is a (small) step down from both. Both of the first two solo albums traditionally suffer, not only by comparison with Cope’s earlier work, but also with Ocean Rain from the same year by his perennial Liverpool rivals, Echo & the Bunnymen. But they are very different records. Ocean Rain is a self-conscious attempt to create ‘THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE’ (as the adverts described it), and if it doesn’t reach those heights, it achieved enough to intimidate its own creators out of attempting to replicate its success for another three years. By contrast, both Cope’s 1984 albums have a dashed-off, spontaneous feel – attempts to shake off the doldrums of the collapse of the Teardrops – but this gives them a real energy. Ocean Rain is stately and self-important, swaddled in strings: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, recorded much more quickly and for a fraction of the cost, blow a raspberry in its direction. 

 

Consider the following lyrics from ‘An Elegant Chaos’, the first few lines of which are singled out for particular scorn in Barney Hoskyn’s NME review of World Shut Your Mouth: 

People I see 

Just remind me mooing 

Like a cow on the grass 

And that’s not to say 

That there’s anything wrong 

With being a cow anyway 

But people are people 

With the added advantage 

Of the spoken word 

We’re getting on fine 

But I feel more of a man 

When I get with the herd 

Sure, it’s no ‘Fate, up against your will’, but it is … well, it’s quite funny. Its silliness makes me laugh – as it's intended to. It also has some clever wordplay. 

The lyrics have this kind of loose inventiveness and lack of concern with the singer’s dignity throughout, and the music and production are enlivened with all kinds of playful grace notes: Kate St John’s oboe, a sitar, samples of revving engines and children playing, backwards guitar riffs, and invented historical references in the lyrics (‘Metranil Vavin’, which pretends to be about a Russian poet and reads like a treatise on Gnostic theology). But, in contrast to the lush orchestration of Ocean Rain, the sound throughout World Shut Your Mouth has a kind of fundamental cheapness, which for me is part of its charm. The keyboards and organ are particularly unmajestic, as is the drum machine on ‘Kolly Kibber’s Birthday’.

  

Hoskyns was not impressed by any of this. From the NME review published on 29 February: 

The problem with Cope is that he writes everything in major chords, so that there’s never the cancer-in-the-sugar sensation he demands of music. All is delivered with the same orotund enthusiasm, be it the soft Blondiesque pop of ‘Elegant Chaos’, the forced Matt Johnson-style funkiness of ‘Pussyface’, or the wistful Kevin Ayers of ‘Lunatic and Fire Pistol’. To this day, Cope is singing ‘Baa-Baa-Baa’ and meaning it. 

I’m not qualified to say whether everything on the first solo album actually is in major chords, although it surely can’t be true of the mournful ballads on Fried. But I think the obvious rejoinder would be that World Shut Your Mouth is supposed to be an upbeat album – and its success in this regard was the result of some psychic effort on Cope’s part ('I hold on to beauty / If I lose my grip I might fall'). It’s certainly not the product of complacency. 

Fried is more of the same from World Shut Your Mouth – except it's gloomier, with less melodic variety and fewer musical or lyrical jokes. Despite the deliberately ridiculous cover image of Cope crawling naked under a giant tortoise shell, it takes itself more seriously: the queasy antics of ‘Reynard the Fox’, which describes a character cutting his stomach open, are diagnostic here – there’s no hint of a wink to soften the horror of this image. 

One of Cope’s weaknesses in this early phase of his career was his fondness for minimalism and repetition. In his first volume of memoirs, Head-On, he tells of being mesmerized by a Subway Sect performance in Liverpool in 1977:

Drums and bass started together, a slow mid-tempo beat: Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum … 

Then a single tiny guitar note: Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow …

For at least a minute, the riff held steady, then the lead singer carelessly turned half round, the mike in his left hand. ... There was no chorus. Just the same riff throughout. I guessed the chorus must be the bit where everyone sung the same word over and over. The song finished and there was polite applause.

The next song was the same. A kind of three-note Stooges thing. But still at 15 mph. This time the guitarist played a chord for most of the song, but when the singer muttered, ‘Solo’ into the mike, the guitarist returned to the steady Bow-bow-bow of the first song. 

‘Sleeping Gas’ is an early example of a song written according to this model: the reason I find the Kilimanjaro version superior is that it mitigates the monotonous chant of the lyrics with inventive production that layers sounds to create texture (horns, a double-tracked vocal, etc.). Cope was only a co-author for this particular track, but it seems to serve as a model for too many of the compositions on Fried. I’m incapable of musicological analysis: I just know that as a listener to World Shut Your Mouth, the movement in the vocal line recalls someone excited about what they have to tell you (pace Hoskyns) – and some songs are so bursting with ideas that they change musical gears several times, e.g. ‘Sunshine Playroom’. Conversely, Fried has several songs that not only do nothing to disguise their monotony, but actually emphasise it with a none-more-basic musical arrangement, especially ‘Search Party’ and ‘Torpedo’ on the second side – but also ‘Laughing Boy’ and ‘Me Singing’ on the first: and that’s 40% of the album. ‘Sunspots’ does the same thing, but here, as in the Kilimanjaro version of ‘Sleeping Gas’, we have the clever arrangements and different layers (e.g. tuba, a recorder) that provide the variety missing from the melody. 

 

Finally, despite the caveats above, there is something quite remarkable about ‘Reynard the Fox’ beyond its grotesque imagery (though that imagery is also part of it). Consider the passage where Cope sing-speaks: 

Reynard left and went to Warwickshire, to a mound near a railway line, With canals and a freezing swamp. He climbs high up above the countryside And breathes freely. To the south he could see Polesworth, and to the North he could just make out the ruins of the priory where Joss and I Played cricket as children. … 

When pop albums evoke place, they usually do so implicitly, by atmosphere or indirect allusion: think the post-industrial landscape of Manchester as mediated by the music of Joy Division. By contrast, this passage from ‘Reynard the Fox’ seems a very modest, literal account, eschewing the kind of poetic detail prized by many critics, but this level of topographical specificity is virtually unprecedented in mid-80s pop (including on the rest of Fried and World Shut Your Mouth). The obvious precedent is The Beatles, in ‘Penny Lane’ (its twin ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is actually far less specific in this regard), but I suspect many musicians deliberately avoid this kind of detail in the mistaken belief that being less specific makes their songs more ‘universal’ and thus easier for listeners to identify with. But a favourite writing maxim of mine applies to songs as much as to stories: it’s always better for a story to be set somewhere rather than nowhere. Hence The Angels of L19 is set mainly within that postcode (and, even more specifically, mainly on South Mossley Hill Road).

It’s perhaps symptomatic that Cope reverts to a speaking voice to deliver this quasi-voiceover narration in 'Reynard the Fox', which offers details from his own childhood (Joss is his brother). It also seems important that this passage immediately precedes the description of Reynard cutting his guts open: it’s establishing the setting for what might now, in the context of this precise invocation of place, be interpreted as a shamanic ritual. This interpretation is partly based on Cope’s notorious stage antics, where he cut his own stomach while singing this song, perched on a custom mic stand named after Yggdrasil, the World Tree on which Odin’s body hung after he sacrificed himself to himself (Odin is hymned directly on Fried’s ‘O King of Chaos’). So perhaps ‘Reynard the Fox’ is the foundational text for Cope’s later interest in both prehistoric archaeology and magic ritual.