to do between the verses,’ he recalls, ‘so Robin had, very reluctantly, put on his guitar, found a sound, lent against the studio wall looking decidedly bored, and played it once to Tim Buckley’s version in his headphones.’ He, Guthrie and John Fryer sat in the garden as Fraser – who hated being watched, worked out what to sing.
Ivo: ‘I couldn’t bear the suspense so I crept back inside and listened to what she was doing! I probably only heard her sing it once before I let her know I was there and thought what she was singing was brilliant. But because I couldn’t make the whole thing work without any instrumentation, and because what Robin had spontaneously done was so gorgeous, it was easy to forget my original a cappella idea. Three hours later, the track was finished. I tried to think of ways of taking away the guitar, but I just couldn’t get away from that swimming atmosphere, which is a tribute to Robin’s genius.’
John Fryer: ‘A-sides of singles can involve tension and stress but B-sides like “Song To The Siren” have less pressure on them. This was one of those times, and the B-side totally outshone the A-side.’
Bucking the trend of cover versions paling in comparison to the original, this new ‘Song To The Siren’ was exceptional, casting its own and equally haunted spell. ‘Buckley got so close to the edge of a loneliness and yearning that’s almost uncomfortable and stops you in your tracks, whereas Fraser’s version floats in your ears and washes over you, like the sea that’s constantly represented,’ reckons singer-songwriter David Gray (who covered ‘Song To The Siren’ in 2007). ‘Each time I hear either version, I’m transported somewhere else, outside of myself.’
‘Jesus Christ, I made that happen!’ was Ivo’s reaction. ‘And I wanted to do more.’
On the same September day in 1983 as Modern English’s ‘Someone’s Calling’ and Xmal Deutschland’s re-recorded version of ‘Incubus Succubus’ – prosaically called ‘Incubus Succubus II’ – 4AD released a twelve-inch of ‘Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust’. An edited version on the seven-inch became the B-side to the lead track ‘Song To The Siren’. The name that Ivo gave to this collective adventure was This Mortal Coil, a phrase that had originated in William Shakespeare’s most famous play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, whose themes centred on treachery, family and moral corruption. The play’s most famous speech, beginning with ‘To be or not to be’, contained the lines, ‘… what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’
The word ‘coil’, derived from sixteenth-century English, was a metaphor for trouble, or in the Oxford English Dictionary’s view, ‘the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life’. Not being academically minded, Ivo hadn’t known the provenance of the phrase; his source had been Spirit’s 1968 track ‘Dream Within A Dream’, specifically the line ‘Stepping off this mortal coil will be my pleasure.’
‘This Mortal Coil somehow suited the music,’ Ivo explains. ‘I didn’t take long to decide. I can’t say I still love the name, but I became comfortable with it.’
Less comfortable with the affair was Fraser, who was mortified to discover after the recording that she’d got a lyric of ‘Song To The Siren’ wrong. The promised sheet music from the publishers had never arrived, so she’d tried to decipher the words from Buckley’s version. ‘A few mind-bending substances were involved along the way,’ recalls Sounds journalist Jon Wilde, whose flat Fraser and Guthrie stayed in for several months. ‘By the time they had to go to the studio, one line continued to elude us.’
Fraser eventually sang, ‘Were you here when I was flotsam?’ instead of the correct line, ‘Were you hare when I was fox?’ which was an understandable error given the context for Beckett’s lyrics was water and not earth. The mistake compounded Fraser’s already self-conscious view of her performance; she’d felt rushed into the recording and was unhappy with what she’d achieved. But this was just for a B-side so it she let it pass.
The NME, while featuring Depeche Mode on the cover, buried its review low down on the Singles page, citing, ‘a respectable job on “Song To The Siren” and that’s about it – no revelation’. But if the leading UK music paper was still being sniffy about 4AD (The Burden Of Mules had been reviewed six weeks after release), ‘Song To The Siren’ entered the independent chart, and Fraser and Guthrie were asked to perform it live on BBC TV’s late night show Loose Talk. ‘I’ve never been more nervous in my life for anyone as I was for Liz that day,’ says Ivo. Fraser was visibly shaky but still cut a mesmerising figure.
The duo also agreed to make a video, and by the end of its run on the UK independent singles chart, ‘Song To The Siren’ was to rack up 101 weeks, the fourth longest ever in indie singles chart history, behind Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (131 weeks), New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ (186 weeks) and Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (195 weeks). ‘Song To The Siren’ also reached number 66 in the UK national charts, selling in excess of half a million copies, without the film soundtrack or major label marketing that had launched ‘I Melt With You’.
Only a reissue of Bauhaus singles on the 4AD EP separated the release of ‘Song To The Siren’ and new Cocteau Twins records, which had been recorded before the This Mortal Coil sessions. Having had one-off contracts for Garlands, Lullabies and Peppermint Pig, the band had signed a contract for five albums, or to run five years, whichever condition was fulfilled first. Colourbox signed the same kind of deal. ‘Both bands wanted a wage and I thought they deserved a certain standard of living,’ says Ivo. ‘I also wanted to carry on working with them. We all recognised we were part of something that was becoming quite special.’
Cocteau Twins’ second album Head Over Heels was released at the end of October, followed just one week later by the EP Sunburst And Snowblind, a collective hit of newfound freedom, expressed in a lush, panoramic drama that far exceeded Garlands’ stark origins. The album cut ‘Sugar Hiccup’ also fronted the EP with an equally new-found commerciality, while the album’s serene opener ‘When Mama Was Moth’ further extinguished all convenient Banshees and goth comparisons. Equally, ‘Glass Candle Grenades’ fed in a graceful, rhythmic imagery and ‘Musette And Drums’ was a magnificent finale.
Ivo: ‘Robin and Liz’s relationship and their music had just blossomed. Head Over Heels showed an extraordinary growth, especially Elizabeth’s singing. The Peel session recorded shortly after includes my favourite ever Liz vocal, in the version of [Sunburst And Snowblind cut] “Hitherto”. It’s the track I play people if they’ve never heard Cocteau Twins. She sounds completely unfettered and it still gives me shivers.’
If Cocteau Twins could magic this up on the spot, what could they do with a little planning? Part of the music’s magic was down to the euphoria between the duo, bound up in the album title’s expression of love and Fraser’s new engagement ring. ‘We were young and in love,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘We’d just moved to London, people were saying how great we were, which fuelled us. As did loads of speed!’
23 Envelope mirrored Cocteau Twins’ huge pools of reverb with a silver-metal pool of ripples (inspired by a key scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker) and a fish disappearing, stage right, from the photo. ‘That was a mackerel,’ Nigel Grierson explains, ‘in coloured ink, in a bath of water, into which we’d thrown flower petals. Everyone at 4AD went nuts over the image, and from there, we were directing operations more, trying to create a connection between the music and the visuals, without narrowing the interpretation, but to let the imagination work.’
Yet Guthrie again didn’t find 23 Envelope’s choices suited his own image of the band. ‘Some of Nigel’s other photos were joyous and beautiful but the one they chose was dark, dull and ugly. We’d say
