I hate this record. I was disappointed with it when I got it 25+ years ago, and it's probably 24 years since I played it. Now I'm older, not much wiser, and not in the mood to equivovate: I hate it. File under alternative eighties.
But let's wind back a minute, or a few minutes, to before I dropped the needle on Side 1. Cindytalk dropped completely off my radar in about 1985. I was wondering why The Wire hadn't done a retrospective on the act, championing them as groundbreaking forefathers of something-or-other equally unlistenable. I thought I'd better do some checking, as the spotlight of my attention is a narrow beam that misses much. Sure enough, this page confirms that both the August and September issues of The Wire have mentioned Cindytalk. (As usual, I'm way behind on my magazines, and those issues aren't out of their plastic wrappers yet.) Not only that, but Cindytalk are a going concern, and have been for most of the intervening period. Next playing in Hull in two days' time.
Actually I listened to a recent Cindytalk album on Spotify, and it sounded OK (no vocal histrionics). But let's not muddy the waters of a simple-minded diatribe. Tucked inside the sleeve of my Camouflage Heart is an interview feature from Sounds, dated 22 December 1984, where Robin Gibson talks to Cindytalk's Gordon Sharp, pictured with a spectacularly bouffant mullet.
"On the surface," he suggests, "Cindytalk is possibly pretty much the unlistenable rubbish that people might say it is. Because I think it demands that you move towards it, and maybe go inside it. It seems, also, superficially claustrophobic… it's maybe dense at times, and even at the points where the density is taken away, and there's a space, it's still very intense. There's a mood of harshness throughout… a mood of abrasion.
"And all those things alienate people, and the attitude in that context is that we're willing to take that on, and not make it too easy for people — and hope that they will maybe sense something from it."
And search further. Perhaps Camouflage Heart is demanding, but it should not be alienating. It's a brave album, alone and weaving its own thick web of love, pain, hope and horror offering emotion. It is uncompromising, but it's definitely human, laced throughout with feeling.
"There are words — just single words can point in the direction of attitude. 'Desire' is a word that would work. 'Communication'. 'Emotion'. Ummm… 'Commitment'. Things like that."*
Just to explain how all of this came to pass, winter 1984 was the season of This Mortal Coil's first album, and I followed a couple of paths from there. One was to Dead Can Dance; the other to Camouflage Heart. My disappointment was that it didn't sound anything like the songs Gordon Sharp sang for This Mortal Coil.
Somewhere along the line it became apparent that Sharp had a fixation with Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins, so the line on the insert, "Elizabeth, is there room in the rosary for three?" seemed like a slightly impertinent dedication at the time, given her "relationship status" at the time. I was not the only one to cock an eyebrow at this.
* Whisper it: I had a mullet in December 1984, and I'm confident I talked more crap than there is in this interview excerpt.
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