But this new cover version of Song To The Siren, by a studio-based collective named This Mortal Coil, had sprung up in a very different climate. Punk had given way to its more experimental, artful offspring, post-punk, alongside the new electronic sound, and the synthesised pop called New Romantic. Song To The Siren had spent more than a hundred weeks in the British independent music charts during 1983 and 1984, and its fame had reached America, as David Lynchs interest illustrated. He regards TMCs version as his all-time favourite piece of music: That song does something to me, for sure, he told the Guardian newspaper in 2010.
In either version, Song To The Siren was an easy track to be infatuated with, given its sorrowful, elegiac mood, and its lyrics haunted by images of the sea and of death. The singer of This Mortal Coils version was Elizabeth Fraser, whose performance supported in spirit by the guitar of her musical and romantic partner Robin Guthrie suggested that she was the siren of The Odyssey personified, luring sailors/lovers to a watery grave.
In their daily lives, Fraser and Guthrie were known as Cocteau Twins, recording artists for the independent music label 4AD. It was 4ADs co-founder, and singular leader, Ivo Watts-Russell, that had taken Lynchs call that afternoon. As happens, Ivo recalls, when the film went into production, my friend Patty worked as an assistant to the producer on Blue Velvet. Shed call me, whispering, David and Isabella [Rossellini, the female lead] are in the corner again, listening to Song To The Siren, before shooting a scene.
The cover version, recorded in 1983, had been Ivos idea. The late Tim Buckley is his all-time favourite singer, and Song To The Siren is still his all-time favourite song. Not since Billie Holiday had recorded Strange Fruit was a song and lyric so suited to a voice as Tim Buckleys was to Song To The Siren, he reckons.
By 1985, the inimitable Elizabeth Fraser had become his favourite living singer. And here was Lynch, requesting not just the music for Blue Velvet but Fraser and Guthrie to mime on stage in the prom scene. However, the lawyers for Buckleys estate demanded $20,000 for the rights, scuppering Lynchs plans (the films total budget was only $3 million). The director quickly turned to composer Angelo Badalamenti, who attempted to mirror the tracks displaced, eerie mood with a new song, Mysteries Of Love, sung by the American singer Julee Cruise with her own take on haunting, ethereal projection. Starting with Blue Velvet, and most famously on his TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch fashioned a world that appeared seamless, unruffled and presentable on the surface, but scarred and disturbed underneath, foaming with a barely controllable darkness. As Twin Peaks FBI Special Agent Cooper declared, Im seeing something that was always hidden.
In 2006, Ivo pointed to
a similarity between label and director. I feel that 4AD is like David Lynch, he told the Santa Fe Reporter. If you say to somebody, Its kind of like a David Lynch movie, you kind of know what youre getting. It was like that in the same way for a certain period at 4AD: Its kind of like a 4AD record. Actually, that probably meant it had loads of reverb.
By this, Ivo wasnt referring to something hidden more that it was a brand that could be identified, where the term 4AD had become an adjective of sound. Yet in the music that the label was producing, there was the same sense of beauty as a mask for the true emotions coursing beneath. By 1985, the so-called classic 4AD sound was all about dark dreams and hidden depths, performed by supposed fragile characters on the verge of anguish and breakdown. Take Elizabeth Fraser. After the drooling reception for her performance in Song To The Siren, she didnt grow in confidence, but began to sing in what resembled a made-up language, or simply by enunciation, making it impossible to be understood. With a voice like hers, she didnt need words; it was all there in her delivery, a shiver of emotion from agony to ecstasy.
March 2012. Its been thirteen years since Ivo stood down from running 4AD and sold his 50 per cent share of the label back to his business partner Martin Mills, the head of the Beggars Banquet group of companies. But his legacy clearly lives on. The weekend edition of the Guardian has just published a feature on 4AD. What is it about a record label that makes it the sort of place you want to spend time in? asks writer Richard Vine. When it first emerged in the 1980s, 4AD felt like one of the most enigmatic worlds, the sort of label that you wanted to collect, that brought a sense of brand loyalty way before it occurred to anyone to talk about music in such crass terms.
Vine cites Ivo as the reason, adding, But arguably just as important to the labels cohesion was designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Nigel Grierson whose covers gave 4AD its distinct, haunted, painterly quality. It felt like you were peeking into a carnival full of beautiful freaks who didnt want to be seen.