Elizabeth Fraser - What Song The Sirens Sang?

I'm not always paying attention. Or at least, I'm telling myself that I'll do something later, and then forgetting about it completely. For example, last summer I found myself asking 'who did the voice belong to that gatecrashed the third song on Sam Lee's latest album Old Wow?' - familiar yet strange; an eerie unchecked soprano; and above all, otherworldly. I forgot to pursue the thought and didn't return to Sam Lee until last week, following a tweet about the song 'The Moon Shines Bright' by the music journalist Pete Paphides: 'Treat yourself to the sight of Sam and Liz Fraser singing together in the same room!' The adjective 'otherworldly' should have provided me with the answer. Who else sounds like Elizabeth Fraser? No one on earth.     

Elizabeth Fraser - 'Long afloat on shipless oceans'

That said, it's not quite a typical Fraser cameo. That soprano delivery - as always - resides high up in the ether, but the folky words of 'Wild Mountain Thyme' ground your sensibility. Perhaps it was this which caused me not to recognise one of my favourite voices?  

It's a fantastic piece of music. Listen to Sam Lee's delivery, rich and urgent and authentic. I love the way he enunciates the word 'mothering'. But it's the arrival of Fraser that takes the song elsewhere, lifting it up into something unique and extraordinary. Perhaps inviting her on to your record is to strike up a kind of Faustian pact? Her appearance will make sure you get noticed like never before, but every time that it gets played it will become an act of anticipation. That said, if I had any kind of musical genius, I'd make that bargain.     

There is - or at least there used to be - a contention amongst fans of The Cocteau Twins, that as the band's lyrics became clearer and started to make more sense, the quality of the output declined. I never bought into that. And it's not that I don't love albums like Treasure and Victorialand and Blue Bell Knoll; rather I thought that when you could make out the words that Fraser was singing, the band were even better. Imagine if the words to 'Heaven or Las Vegas' were supplanted by gibberish - albeit rarified, delicious gibberish - and that song would lose something vital. Or indeed, 'Half-Gifts' (the acoustic EP version)? Poignant, personal and extraordinary, it has that rare ability, even after countless plays, to catch you out. You could even argue that it catches Fraser out, the slight choke in her voice as she reaches towards self-validation and sings the song's closing lines: 'I have myself - I still have me'. Furthermore, that she can take an ugly abstract noun like 'process', replete with ghastly TV talent show connotations, and make it shimmer anew, is testament to her genius.   

Elizabeth Fraser and Sam Lee

But back to Sam Lee and Liz Fraser's scene-stealing cameo. As much as I adore The Cocteau Twins, it is these cameos, fleeting and often surprising appearances with other musicians, that I return to over and over again. And her performance on 'The Moon Shines Bright' is right up there with my other two favourite vignettes. What of them? 

Sir Thomas Browne, an English polymath, once invited us to ponder on 'what song the syrens sang'. And each time I read that quote - it is the epigraph to Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', the first ever detective story - I immediately hear the opening lines to This Mortal Coil's 'Song to the Siren'. 'Sail to me, sail to me,' sings Fraser and, like Odysseus, we are nailed to the ship's mast, rapt and stilled by that extraordinary voice. 

'Broken lovelorn on your rocks'

As the years have passed, the song has found extra elements of poignancy. 'Song to the Siren' was the work of Tim Buckley, Jeff Buckley's erstwhile father. That Fraser went on to have a relationship with Jeff adds a romantic, almost uncanny circularity, to the proceedings. 

What of my favourite Elizabeth Fraser cameo then? I have a feeling that I'm about to wrong-foot a few fans here. No doubt Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' is what some of you are expecting. It is, after all, very special. But no! My choice is her work with the magnificent, but relatively little know, Scottish band The Bathers and the song 'Angel on Ruskin'. Lead singer, Chris Thomson is the one bargaining with Mephistopheles this time, before employing a four-in-the-morning growl to summon his muse down from the Glasgow rooftops. And what an arrival: 'I hardly knew if I was still breathing' she sings, and the song launches into the most sublime and feverish of duets. Chris's bargain even extends to Fraser appearing on another track 'Danger in Love'. We have to fear for his soul! 

'Believe it or not, there's an angel on Ruskin'

It quickly becomes apparent when writing about Fraser's voice that there are clichés that are difficult to avoid. Odd, when you consider it an instrument sui generis. When setting out on this piece I took to Twitter to ask for alternatives to 'otherworldly' or 'ethereal' (you may have noticed that I failed to avoid those words). Other than 'haunting', the replies avoided single adjectives in favour of more conceptual descriptions. One in particular, from writer, poet and photographer Clare Archibald struck a chord: 'she just exists within her own parameters when she's singing, properly inhabiting herself?' Which, when you think about it, is the opposite of ethereal, and indicative that her genius might be better described as something internal rather than otherworldly. That it strikes us as the latter is just our reception of it.

The pursuit of the conceptual rather than than the singular, all-encompassing word, took me towards other forms. Listening now, as I write, I'm thinking of the Russian painter Kandinsky and his theory that particular colours have corresponding sounds. 

Vassily Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913)

I'm no synesthete, but when I listen to Fraser's voice I come as close to that state as is possible. I hear a multitude of colours, a kind of aural kaleidoscope that bursts across my consciousness. Well, that's two words rather than one. But still, I think I'm ready to switch off analysing and return to listening. Or as Kandinsky himself would have it:      

'Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?'