This is another taste of how much the internet has changed things. We go back to 1986 and a movie called Band of the Hand, which I saw in theaters and happened to like (reviews are quite mixed but, you know, listen to reviews only when you can’t form your own opinion.) I’m not here to go into the film, but a particular song therein, which had a very brooding sound, enhanced by vocals that were throaty and almost-spoken; hearing the lyrics, “weave a circle ’round him three times,” sparked my curiosity, since I recognized it as a reference to Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan.
But this was the eighties, and we didn’t even have a VCR at the time. The movie played ever-so-briefly on cable, then about vanished, and I would catch it on rare occasions, eventually remembering to watch the end credits and determining that the song was “Faded Flowers” by the band Shriekback. But what could be done with this information was sparse. While in music stores, when I remembered, I’d check out the 45 RPM bins for any sign of the song or the band itself, and occasionally the albums, with no luck at all. And that was pretty much our only options then. I don’t think it was ever released as a single, and I can’t recall ever seeing any of the band’s albums.
Many years later, I had a VCR, but the film could not be found for sale anyplace that I looked, though I’d rented it twice, I think. But I stumbled across a cassette of the movie soundtrack in a bargain bin, sometime in the early nineties, and snatched it up. This was the only song on the soundtrack that I had the faintest interest in; the theme track was by Bob Dylan, perhaps the last of his appearances on the charts, and while I intensely dislike Bob Dylan, this was a particularly annoying song. But I kept the cassette cued up to “Faded Flowers” and copied the track over onto a couple of my mixtapes that usually stayed in the car.
Time moved on, and I moved a few times myself in there. Most of my cassettes, including the soundtrack, disappeared, and technology switched over to CDs anyway, though I never attempted to have a CD player in the car (the early versions, for sure, were terrible, because they hadn’t perfected the anti-skip technology yet and so it was impossible to listen to an entire song in the car without it stuttering or just plain giving up.) Very likely that the soundtrack was never released on CD anyway, but even so, finding it still required searching bins in music stores; purchasing things online was still a decade or so away. The song eventually slipped from my consciousness.
Finally, about ten years or so ago, I thought about it again and started searching, only this time, YouTube was an active thing and people were using it to showcase their favorite songs (not yet entire bands, because there were server limits then.) And I found it again, and downloaded it – illegally of course, because finding it for sale, even online, wasn’t yet happening. So now it’s in MP3 format and easy enough to transfer to a smutphone, MP3 player, or the jump drive in the car. which means I can present it to you quite easily.
Faded Flowers – Shriekback
What took even longer was finding out what that word at the start of the second stanza was: “Only the anacrusis…” – even online dictionaries for a long time didn’t have something that esoteric in their volumes, and I’ll let you look it up on your own if necessary. As you might imagine, the song plays within the movie as the ingénue discovers she’s made a few bad decisions in her life; the lead’s gravelly tone offset by a falsetto female’s voice in unison within the chorus is a nice aural bittersweet effect, while the sparse music does little more than establish the mood.
Anyway, there’s an obscure one for you, though yes indeed, still from the eighties – why break my pattern now?
[On a similar note, I had much the same rotten luck trying to find the soundtrack to Highlander in any form, even though I knew Queen did all of the music for the film. It was when picking through their albums, on CD at the time but still in a music store, that I saw the album title, “A Kind of Magic,” and recognized the reference. It’s never been identified as the soundtrack and bears no mention of the film at all, and includes one song from another movie: “One Vision,” which played in the film Iron Eagle and made an appearance on the pop charts for a while that year. But anyway, if you’re looking for the Highlander soundtrack, and you should be, that’s the album you’re after – it’s quite a strong one.]