Radio review #1: 'Song to the Siren'
A long-running BBC series pays tribute to a cult classic. Rock and the Beat Generation tunes in
ONE OF THE things I most enjoy about the UK radio series called Soul Music is the sound world which enwraps the production and enraptures the listener. Whichever tune or song or oratorio becomes the focus of the half-hour broadcast, the special sonic ether to which you are transported is quite entrancing.
This was no different for the latest episode in a 20 year long sequence. The British Broadcasting Corporation – which has nine, publicly-financed, national networks under its widely-spread wings – does not fall short in its efforts, whether it is giving showcase or airtime to orchestral music, urban R&B, prog rock, sport or indeed speech.
The prestigious Radio 4 is the platform which most focuses on talk and spoken word, on voice-led documentaries and discussions. It is there where Soul Music has made its home for those two decades and it was a pleasure to hear this important BBC outlet enrol a cultish rock classic into its eclectic hall of fame.
In the mid-1960s, an emerging singer-guitarist by the name of Tim Buckley collaborated with a young drummer-lyricist called Larry Beckett on a song they would entitle ‘Song to the Siren’. Even in their hands it would enjoy various lives but it would also become the object of a number of cover versions.
LA-based Buckley would deliver a simple folk-like singer-songwriter reading of the song on the Monkees TV show before that swinging decade was out. In 1970, a more fleshed out, richly produced, take of the piece would end up on an acclaimed album called Starsailor.
In between and somewhat surprisingly, middle-of-the-road chart performer Pat Boone would have his own attempt. Later Elizabeth Fraser, the angelic vocalist of the Cocteau Twins, would hook-up with the band This Mortal Coil to produce a highly memorable twist on a haunting anthem.
But what was genuinely touching about this particular radio broadcast was that Larry Beckett was still very much around to talk us through, and give a highly personal reflection on, this deeply affecting mini-epic. These days, Beckett is very much a poet, not a musician. His latest and massive collection American Cycle has been making waves in serious US verse circles this year.
His contribution to the show was all the more poignant because his lyric, his poem as song, was the product of a young man in love. Beckett is now a much older man and plenty of water – a pertinent metaphor here – has flowed in the half-century since. A troubled vocal titan, Buckley died of a drug overdose aged 28 in 1975. Doubly disturbing, Jeff, the son he barely knew, who went on to rock stardom of his own, was accidentally drowned in 1997. Quite a whirlpool of emotional turbulence.
‘Song to the Siren’ is no conventional love song: dark, mysterious, mythical, it is not grounded in a typical present. It floats from past to future on its undulating waves. It is inspired by Homer and the Odyssey and references the taunting cries of indistinct female forms that drew ancient Greek sailors onto dangerous rocks. The central symbol of love as dangerous temptation, of such deep emotion transcending even death, forms a potent core to this unusually serious popular song.
The double dose of fatality which now spikes this sharp musical cocktail lures the listener to think of strange and disturbing matters of prescience, though Beckett makes no claim to mystic powers. Perhaps in ‘Song to the Siren’, the product of ‘an apprentice poet’, the writer now says, tragedy is merely a part of life which continues on much as the ageless patterns of the sea reform infinitely.
One of the great skills of Soul Music is to draw on ordinary voices, non-experts if you like, for some its most insightful and heart-touching commentary and former American Olympic runner Anthony Famiglietti plays a key role in this conversation as he discusses the highly touching background to his love of the John Frusciante version of the piece.
As he comments: ‘When I hear this song, I hear it written for Jeff Buckley from Tim. When I listen to Jeff Buckley songs, I hear him calling to his father through his music and there is this dialogue across time. Even the circumstances of Jeff Buckley’s death, to swim out into the water like he did, tells me there is more than what we see and feel.
‘Our senses are very limited. I think music is a way of trying to open that up, rising to a higher frequency to hear another station you would not have known was there. It’s like, don’t just look at the surface layer of things in life: look deeper, much much deeper.’