The Siren: the Great Archetypal Love Story of Our Time.

 

I was going to post this on Garlands Day, but with the death of yet another GenX luminary - Foo Fighters' drummer Taylor Hawkins - today felt more appropriate. 

I'm not aware of any substantial connections between Our Lady, Queen Dowager of Sibyls and the Foo Fighters, but I won't be surprised if the Shimmer gets to rewriting the timeline and serves some up in the coming days. That's how it works.

This is a fact-corrected revision of the first series of Siren posts on The Secret Sun, all the way back in early 2008. If you're new to this story, this makes for a solid primer.

And so it began. 

With a band name taken from Hamlet - the Shakespeare Company's most portentious drama - and a song written by a doomed, modern day Celtic bard in honor of the great destroyer of men, the Eternal Drama found a new, real-world expression in the voice of Elizabeth Fraser, the not-quite-human Scottish thrush who would enchant not only David Lynch, but also the son of the song's composer. 

The album title was simply the icing on the cake: It Will End In Tears. Which it most certainly did.

This performance by "Siren" composer Tim Buckley was taken from the March 25, 1968 episode of The Monkees TV show, whose plotline is like something out of James Shelby Downard.

"Mijacogeo" (1968) Micky, Mike and Peter find that Peter and all their neighbors have been hypnotized by their Television sets. The Evil Wizard Glick is using an alien Frodis to control people's minds through his machines (such as the Freeble Energizer) and plans to take over the world.

Buckley would never find the fame many thought he deserved, and after a series of commercial failures he died of a heroin overdose in 1975.

The year after Elizabeth Fraser recorded "Song to the Siren" with This Mortal Coil, she also sang a song called "Lorelei" on the Cocteau Twins' album, Treasure. The name Lorelei referred to a German version of the Siren, who lived in the Rhine River and would lure fisherman to their death with the sound of her singing. The chorus of the song had the Siren beckon her eternal lovers with the breathless promise, "We're covered by the sacred fire/When you come to me/You come to me broke."

The Cocteau Twins were much too weird and psychedelic for the masses, but Fraser's magic would enter the meme-stream through the side door. Hearing her version of "Siren," David Lynch was hellbent on using it in Blue Velvet:

I heard the song in the 80's and I'm not sure whether it was '85, but I really pretty desperately wanted to use it in Blue Velvet and it was tied up in some sort of legal thing, or it was either that or something involving a lot of money and we couldn't get it. 

And it broke my heart, but on the other hand not having This Mortal Coil "Song to the Siren" led me to Angelo Badalamenti and Angelo, you know, I've worked with ever since.

Undaunted, Lynch later used Fraser's rendition in Lost Highway.

Part 2: Sea, Swallow Me

Smitten by her luminescent interpretation of his father's song, Jeff Buckley sought out Elizabeth Fraser while he was working on his debut LP for Columbia Records, Grace. Sometime around mid-1993, he and Fraser began a passionate, whirlwind affair.

There was something tragic about Buckley from the very start. An uncanny mirror image of his father, the prodigiously talented singer also exuded a delicate androgyny, often interpreting songs by divas like Billie Holliday, Judy Garland, Nina Simone and Fraser herself in his legendary sets at New York's landmark Irish cafe, Sin-e.

The equally-androgynous Fraser referred to this in one of her many songs about Buckley, 'Seekers Who Are Lovers,' singing "You are a woman just as you are a man."

Buckley also worshiped Led Zeppelin and seemed at times to be the embodiment of both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Both men returned the compliment and became ardent admirers of the young singer. Later, their music would play a chilling role in Buckley's exit from this mortal coil.

Fraser and Buckley were obsessed to the point of mania with one another, but both were also very busy professional musicians. And at some point in 1995 they broke up. Fraser, an adult survivor of longterm childhood sexual abuse, spoke obliquely of the relationship in 1995 when the Cocteau Twins released their EP Twinlights.

"...when the Twins went on tour.... Fraser fell in love. "My love addiction was worse than ever. I was maniacal," she confesses.

"The EP is about that man," she says of Twinlights. "My last goodbye, as it were. I was too needy and he was too much of an avoidance person. Naturally."

 Twinlights finds Fraser voicing words of self-reliance and comfort. When she panics, she says she feels about five years old. "You kind of go back to the age when you were being abused," she explains. Singing helps her soothe her younger self

"Last Goodbye," of course, was Buckley's first single. 

Struggling to keep her composure (and barely succeeding), Fraser finally broke the silence of her and Buckley's relationship in a landmark BBC documentary on the late singer:

"I mean he idolized me before he met me. It's kind of creepy and I, I was like that with him. This is embarrassing but it's the truth. I just couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable. Lovely.

"I read his diaries, he read mine, you know we'd just swap, we'd literally just hand over this very personal stuff and I've never done that with anybody else. I don't know if he has.  

So in some ways it was very, there was a great deal of intimacy but then there'd be times when I'd just think 'oh no, I'm just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all.' "

Already struggling with dealing with her childhood abuse and its then-looming consequences, Fraser was crushed by the split. In conjunction with Twinlights, the Cocteau Twins also released a long-form video called Rilkean Dreams in 1995.

In reality a nakedly-confessional video love-letter to Jeff Buckley, Fraser apologizes to him in Rilkean Dreams for her self-confessed "love addiction." The songs are significant because Fraser is singing in plain English and the lyrics are flashed on screen.

Knowing the backstory as we do now, the video is almost heart-wrenchingly tragic. The love Elizabeth Fraser felt for Jeff Buckley is excruciatingly powerful - legendary, even - you can feel it still after all these years.

And if you already know the end of this story, the very first shot of Rilkean Dreams will put ice in your veins.

Part 3: Theft, And Wandering Around Lost

Sometime in 1995, Fraser and Buckley had co-written and recorded the passionate love song "All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun" at the Cocteau Twins' studios in Twickenham, located in the Eel Pie building owned by The Who's Pete Townsend. It had been a very long time since Fraser's fans had heard that kind of ecstasy in her voice. This was a woman deeply in love, in a way you usually only saw in myths and fairy tales.

But that love would end, in what may have been a misunderstanding over what might have been a joke Buckley told to a journalist that spring:

 Talking of orgasms, did you and Liz Cocteau Twin "do" "it"? Everyone thought you were An Item some months back. 

"Oh no. Oh no," Jeff looks shocked. "We were just friends – very, very close friends. She's such a good person, so sweet. F***ing her would be like f***ing a sister – no, Liz and I were never bed buddies. That was all lies. "I am f***ing Courtney, though," he adds. "All those rumours are true, obviously." 

Jeff is lying so much, his pants are on fire.

Fraser, who had naturally assumed they were a lot more than "close friends," was heartbroken. She probably wasn't thrilled by all the pictures of Buckley with a series of hot young things on his arm in the papers either. Buckley tried to reconcile - probably unaware of what he'd done to hurt his love paramour - but Fraser had apparently had enough.

Even so, the brief but burning passion these two preternaturally artists shared would be immortalized when the Cocteau Twins reconvened for recording sessions that summer. 

In contrast to the heartbroken Twinlights, the Twins' 1996 release, Milk and Kisses, was full of raw, orgasmic enthusiasm.

The album literally climaxes with the nakedly-erotic"Seekers Who Are Lovers," in which Fraser breathlessly sings of "saliva" and "sweet sex" and a "magic love" that "fills you up and you get reborn."

This love would even "send Lucifer to Hell," after Fraser promised to her lover that she would "slide you in."

In the same song she boasted of "the breath of God in my mouth," a reference to the legendary exclamation from the Melody Maker that Fraser had "the Voice of God." Even the mopey Twinlights tracks got luscious revamps.

On Milk, Fraser dedicated "love and a thousandfold rose" to Buckley, a frankly erotic turn of phrase if ever there was one. But she'd already put her lover in the past, having begun a relationship with Spiritualized (and later Massive Attack) drummer Damon Reese. A relationship she would celebrate in the delirious dream-pop gem, "Smile."


In response, Buckley wrote a song called "Thousandfold," and another called "Morning Theft," about what may have been he and Fraser's short-lived reconciliation for his in-progress sophomore album, My Sweetheart the Drunk.

Sprinkled throughout the lyrics are apparent references to Cocteau Twins songs ("Theft, And Wondering Around Lost" was a song on the then-most recent Cocteau Twins album). Buckley also mentions Fraser's daughter in the lyrics, lamenting that...

 

There's no relief in this

I miss my beautiful friend

I had to send it away

To bring her back again

The intensely private nature of the relationship makes all of this very hard to sort out. But it seems the legendary lovers may have drifted apart for good.

Fraser embarked on a world tour for Milk and Kisses, and she seemed quite animated and happy throughout. Her voice was in breathtaking form, and the bizarre, Yoko-like "dolphin in distress" vocals that ruined the Four Calendar Cafe tour for most fans - a tour bookended by psychiatric hospitalizations for the labile diva - were a thing in the past. Buckley also had an on-again, off-again relationship with a singer named Joan Wasser, and apparently they were on again in 1997.

The stress of touring and promoting his debut album had given Buckley a case of writer's block and he moved down to Memphis, Tennessee to work on songs for Sweetheart, which were slow in coming. He locked himself in a room in a boarding house with his guitar and a four-track recorder. After an arduous process of reconnecting with his muse, Buckley excitedly called his band down to Memphis to begin rehearsals on his new songs.

Buckley may not have thought twice that the longford video love letter Fraser made for him opened with a rushing river, but did he think that in the opening track on the album she dedicated to him she seems to be singing, "Be careful, Love/Be careful, Love" beneath all the ecstatic glossolalia?


Part 4: Death, My Bride 

On May 29, 1997 Jeff Buckley said his last goodbye to this mortal coil in Wolf River Harbor, near the roiling waters of the Mississippi. That river, which has given birth to so many classic American songs, boasts a vicious undertow beneath its placid surface.

Buzzing on the triumph of his new music and the impending arrival of his compatriots, Buckley sought to baptize himself in those legendary waters. He didn't realize he was actually swimming towards the Siren that took his father down to her two decades before.

This BBC documentary brilliantly tells the story of that horrible night:

Indeed, there's nowhere else this story could have ended but in Memphis, Tennessee. 

There's no street but Beale from which Jeff Buckley would heed the Siren's call.

There's no band but Led Zeppelin that could have been the musical accompaniment to their deathly summons, no other song than their demonic hijacking of "Whole Lotta Love."

And the ominous looming pyramid was just the cherry on top.

The skies over Memphis became pitch black that night as rescuers searched for Buckley, and a violent electrical storm soon tore that blackness into shreds. Columbia executive Steve Berkowitz looked up at the violent sky and the enormous pyramid and felt he had been transported to the River Styx. He was half-right. Hell is a movable feast, and that night it descended on Memphis.

On that fateful night, Fraser's Rilkean Dreams would be transformed from a love letter into nothing less than a dire prophecy of Buckley's fate.

Three thousand miles away, Fraser was in the studio with Massive Attack, record vocals for their landmark album, Mezzanine. 

In hindsight, there is no other song Elizabeth Fraser could have been singing while her onetime lover was pulled beneath the River Styx than the legendary, surreal lament, 'Teardrop.' This story began in tears and had to end in them.

Water, water, everywhere.

The imagery of the 'Teardrop' video is mesmerizing - a fetus singing in Fraser's voice while swimming in the waters of amniotic creation - a symbolic new life from tragic death. Full circle. The song would go on to become a modern classic, and would be used in numerous commercials and in the opening credits to Fox TV's House MD.

There's something else at play, some poetic - or mythic - ending, beneath the exoteric narrative. Something floating around the Symbolic Realm. You can just see it in Euripides and Aeschylus.

It goes like this: A beautiful and talented young troubador gets drunk on his own charisma and thoughtlessly toys with a delicate soul who is playing host to something that crossed over from the Other Side.

Two thousand years ago, the omens and portents would have been recognized by everyone, from old women to schoolchildren. They would have warned him: Don't break the Siren's heart.

As of this writing, Elizabeth Fraser has released only one solo record - a limited-edition single - since walking out on the Cocteau Twins while they were recording their followup to Milk and Kisses in 1997.

It's called "Underwater." She has since withdrawn the single and has fought against its online dissemination.

Bearing in mind that Elizabeth Fraser sang in Russian for her most recently released recording - "My Sorrow is Luminous," performed during Massive Attack's set for the 2020 Minecraft Festival - let's hope the title of this collaboration doesn't turn out to be prophetic.

POSTSCRIPT: The story has grown beyond all imagination since this was originally written, as many of you realize. In fact, the Siren Saga is barely even a footnote compared to the revelations that keep unfolding with Our Lady. And it so happens the Siren may indeed have incarnated in a different host while the entire saga was unfolding. You can - and should - read about that here.

There's also an expanded piece on the Siren from 2014 you can check out.

And since we are in the shadow of the Sibyl's coming portents - first announced just hours before Russia declared war on Ukraine - take note that "Underwater" will finally be released on the upcoming Sun's Signature EP, along with a number of tracks that had been premiered during the 2012 London Olympics.