It's weird how just one song can conjure up so many memories.
A chance encounter with the rather ungrammatical "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow" from The Moon And The Melodies took me right back to the house I rented in Lancaster for the autumn term 1986. After a long winded series of housing disasters three of us ended up in a lovely three storey Victorian terraced house in lofty Regents Street. A great house, with high ceilings, large rooms, a scarily dark basement and a bathroom that might well have been the original (I'm pretty sure the very clunky plumbing was).
The top storey of the house was locked up - the landlord lived there, or rather he did when he was in the country. I think he was a roadie or something like that, he certainly wasn't a responsible landlord as we were to find out. The bedrooms were all on the first floor and we drew lots for the rooms. I ended up with the biggest, across the whole of the front with two tall windows overlooking the leafy street. Kevin and Tim, both of whom I've entirely lost touch with, had rooms at the back, still decently sized though not as enormous as my room. It was about 25 feet across by perhaps 15 deep, furnished only by a ricketty wardrobe, a massive bed, a big, saggy armchair dragged upstairs from the lounge that we never bothered to use, and a tiny desk that I never found a satisfactory home for, moving it almost daily around the huge room so that it constantly faced a different direction.
Music came from my solid little Sony cassette deck and a constantly growing selection of tapes. That term I remember playing lots of Cocteau Twins, lots of Grace Jones, King Crimson and the two Cluster and Brian Eno albums which I must've just got hold of as I played them loads - I remember one night playing "Broken Head" over and over as I loved the weird wobbliness of the keyboards.
So far so good. We had friends just a few houses down the street in an identical house, though their cellar was clear and clean and perfect for some excellent parties. We settled in well, my £200 Vauxhall Viva worked just enough to get me to and from the campus and apart from reversing into a tree everything was great (I genuinely didn't see the magnificent oak behind me; I swear it must have leapt about three feet forwards).
Then the landlord vanished. He had never been around much, but he just disappeared completely. And the bills, which were all in his name (electricity and gas were all included in our rent), started to mount up. After a few weeks of increasingly red reminders dropping through the letterbox we decided to open one. Hundreds of pounds were owed, going back way before we'd moved in. A phone call to the Gas Board found them sympathetic, but not enough not to cut off the gas. The electricity company kindly let us keep the power, but they installed a meter (looking back, I'm not sure why the gas people didn't do that too, but they didn't). So with about 4 weeks of term left we had lights and power but no hot water or central heating. And it was then that having the biggest room became a problem. The lovely huge windows were very draughty, and a the wind would howl down the chimney into my impressive chunky fireplace. I froze.
I spent more time than ever in bed, keeping warm under the duvet. Tricky when it came to write essays though. I can remember working late into the night, which everyone knows is the best time to write history essays, and sometimes it was bitterly cold. One night I woke up at about 4am to watch the Australian Grand Prix, live. I dragged my little black and white portable over and perched it on the end of the bed and watched through a gap in the covers. Nigel Mansell simply had to finish in the points to win the Championship. Towards the end of a race that he'd led from the start he managed to blow a tyre along a dead straight bit of the track and put himself out of the race and the Championship. Poor Murray Walker was beside himself.
Anyway, that song, the strangely titled "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow". It's from an album recorded by the brilliant Californian pianist Harold Budd in conjunction with Scottish ethearalists Cocteau Twins (who aren't twins, and there's three of them). I was already a big fan of both Budd (especially his groundbreaking ambient records with Brian Eno) and the Twins so this collaboration was perfect for me. The eight tracks that comprise The Moon And The Melodies are divided cleanly into four songs and four instrumentals, with the songs beginning and ending each side of the record (remember them?). The album was released on 10 November 1986 so I must've had a good month in which I played that chilly echoey music to death, in my chilly echoey room. The songs are basically gentler Cocteau Twins songs, with the drum programmes turned down a bit. Budd's atmospheric keyboards are to the fore where they compete with Robin Guthrie's equally atmospheric guitar. The instrumentals are more Budd, but with added synths, swirly guitar effects and sometimes a saxophone so faint that you wonder if you've imagined it.
Despite the clear cut division of labour the whole album works extremely well as a whole album, and without exception every track is superb. Harold Budd reused "Memory Gongs" on his own album, the excellent Lovely Thunder (released around the same time as TMATM. For no obvious reason he retitled the piece "Flowered Knife Shadows" which is a rather silly title, though secretly I'm rather impressed by the sheer pretentiousness of it. Some of the other track titles derive from earlier Cocteau's songs - "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow" actually comes from a line in a song on Head Over Heels.
It's also the final song on TMATM and begins imperceptibly, building halfway through with the introduction of the drums. Elizabeth Fraser's vocals are magnificent; no idea what she's singing as usual, but it doesn't matter as the sound of her voice is far more important that the meaning. Every track gives off a glacial feel, every track is imbued with winter itself creating images of chilly fog and ice on branches... I played it over and over; the album was the soundtrack to those chilly nights as I tried to write essays at my itinerant little desk, or as I sat in the huge armchair drinking extremely cheap wine (hey, we were students) while candles lit the room and dribbled multicoloured rivulets of wax down the old wine bottles I used as candlesticks (really, how much more student-y can you get?).
At the end of that term the University took pity on us and found us all rooms back on campus after Christmas, so we were back in the warm, and with hot water once again!
Sometimes that all seems such a long time ago, but then I hear something like The Moon And The Melodies and it all comes back again. It's a record that is absolutely right for a house in which you could see your breath indoors.
