I think most people would agree that music is more emotionally significant to humans than visual art.
I’m not underplaying the strength of the team that I play for but can you as readily associate a significant moment in your life with a piece of visual art as you can with a piece of music? Personally, I can remember three incidents of seeing visual art that stopped me in my tracks: Franz Kline’s ‘Meryon’ and Mark Rothko’s ‘Seagram Murals’, both in the Tate, and Käthe Kollwitz’s ‘Woman with dead child’ in the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Köln. But in each case the only memory associated is that of being bowled over by witnessing the art and the emotional memory stops there; seeing the same works again never seems to have quite that same emotional punch.
Music however… it can act as if it’s recalling punctuation points in your life’s story. A song not heard for perhaps decades can evoke not just memories but also the emotions felt of that specific time. It pulls the then into now with such force and authenticity it almost feels as if you are reliving that initial moment.
In the 80s, when my initial musical tastes were being formed, a song turned up from a band called This Mortal Coil when I was an 18 year old goth/punk. It was a scene I was new to in a city that was not strictly my home town and was listened to in a house with friends who were reeling with the shock of just hearing about another friend’s recent death to a heroin overdose. Personally, that emotional setting is inevitably tied to this song.
A decade or so later, the significant chorus lyric of the song was revived by techno/rave duo Messiah. And this is locked into my memory as being the first song where me and my wife danced together, laughing face to face and with joyous hands in the air, at an outdoor party.
With the advent of the internet it became easy to research the song and its history and I now have four versions that I love, but all for different reasons. So here’s the inspiration for these drawings ‘Song to the Siren’. And the versions that turn up on my studio mix list that’ll make me stop work and sit down to take some time to just listen: Tim Buckley’s live performance on The Monkees television show, This Mortal Coil’s 1983 studio recording and Sinead O’Connor’s recording from 2010. And if the Messiah version turns up you could catch me dancing…
But the key version for me is still the first heard – that of This Mortal Coil with the beautiful vocals of Elizabeth Fraser. They can lower me down to this one when I’m done.
Did I dream you dreamed about me…

The initial set of the drawings are being exhibited at BSMT gallery in London

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