Totally Shuffled-This Mortal Coil

extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"



This Mortal Coil-Song To The Siren-4AD single 

If, from the perspective of 2012, and if you believe everything in the mass-media, then the 1980’s were shit. There’s a plethora of cheaply commissioned television programmes, usually shown when there’s something much better on one of the other channels, about how naff the whole decade was. They’ll all have, ironic this, non-entity talking heads who were non-entities in the 80s and who have only been dragged in front of the camera to resurrect their long-flagging careers. There’ll be mocking references to shell-suits, chicken kievs, TV programmes like Blind Date, Royal Weddings, the birth of Breakfast television in the U.K., mullets, bad fashion and bad music. The list is endless. There may be slight references to the miners’ strike, Thatcher, Greenham Common and wider political issues.However, these will only be slight and probably only in the context of the birth of alternative comedy. Whereupon they’ll wheel out some addled coke-head who had a bit-part in The Young Ones and once shared a dressing room at The Comedy Store with someone who is now vastly more famous they are now, to laugh about the “scruffy lesbians at Greenham”. The general tenor is one of, at best, how much more naive everyone was back then, and at worst, how naff it all was and how much more sophisticated we are all now. Alongside all this, there’s a revisionist tendency at the moment to re-write history and to burnish the 1970’s with the same patina of cool that’s been laid  on top of the 1960’s. Well, maybe time is a great healer, but the 1970’s were shit.

For anyone who wasn’t young or around in the 1980’s then it was infinitely better than 1970’s and a thousand times better than a bunch of knobheads on Channel 4 lead you to think. The end of punk had opened a whole new vista of possibilities-not just in music but in film, art, politics, design. Here are some of the better things about the 1980’s that you never really hear about –The The’s “Soul Mining”, Prefab Sprout, the films “Paris, Texas”, “Heathers” and “Sans Soleil”, New Order and Peter Saville’s artwork, John Peel interviewing The Fall on the Tube, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the realisation of the majority of the country that Thatcher was beyond evil and because of that we never had to suffer the Tories again for nearly 20 years, the birth of hip-hop, Spike Lee, Cheers, The  Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, Detroit and House Music, ZTT, “Frankie Says..”, despite a general air of cynicism even now (especially now) Live Aid and the fact that ordinary people in the West actually did give a fuck as opposed the politicians who clearly didn’t, Harry Cross, the imminent release of Nelson Mandela, the ability to wear cardigans and still be cool, The End fanzine, Hill Street Blues.

And this song, the b-side of a 4 AD single, featuring the voice of Liz Fraser from The Cocteau Twins. It’s probably been played to death in the intervening quarter of a century and appropriated for awful TV ads by the very people above who slag off the 1980’s.Never mind all that, it’s still a thing of immense beauty. Even if the whole of the decade was rubbish, then these few minutes of shimmering splendour make up for it all.

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