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Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Morrissey & Siouxsie - "Interlude" CD single, 1994, (Parlophone)


When I heard this recording back in 1994, I didn't know the song.  I usually know all of Morrissey's cover songs, because I feel we have a common taste in music.  His obscurity is my front yard.  Nevertheless, "Interlude" was a total mystery.   Not only the source of the song, but the haunting melody and lyrics were dreamlike and didn't seem possible to exist in the waking world.  It was a decade later that I found the original recording by Timi Yuro, and once heard, I couldn't stop playing her recording.  It was the theme song to a film that I never saw, and tough for me to locate.  Yuro has numerous best of albums, but "Interlude" never seemed to be in these collections.  

I'm not a fan of Siouxsie Sioux's voice.  I just never warmed to her goth aesthetic or her band's music.  When I read in the music papers that Morrissey did a recording with her, I thought it was an odd choice for him to do such a recording.  "Interlude" is very goth in its sense of romantic misery and doom.  I immediately loved the record and Morrissey's right-handed musician (to this day) Boz Boorer did the arrangements and production. This was also the first record where I thought of Morrissey as a singer rather than a cultivated pop star.   Now, I think of him as an underrated singer.  Over the years he has gotten better and better as a vocalist.  As he aged, his voice became an instrument that can only be him.  

The original "Interlude" is a much better record, but it's also a  classic piece of song craft written by Georges Delerue.   Timi Yuro's interpretation cannot be made better, yet, Morrissey and Siouxsie do add their magic touch to the song. 

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