The 1983 debut single from 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell’s collaborative project This Mortal Coil, Song To The Siren was, for many listeners, the first introduction to the spellbinding vocals of Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser. A cover of Tim Buckley’s 1970 track, the song would feature in the UK indie singles chart for an astonishing 101 weeks, and remains one of the most bewitching pieces of music to have emerged from the 1980s. Speaking to MOJO in her first in-person interview in 13 years, Fraser discusses how the song came to be, and how it led her to first meet Buckley’s son, Jeff, with whom she would go on to have an 18-month relationship before his death in 1997...
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Fraser tells MOJO’s Martin Aston of the first time she heard Buckley’s version, “but it was also not completely unfamiliar from my upbringing. I could feel a connection with Scottish folk music. It spoke so deeply to me. And I would never have met Jeff Buckley if it wasn’t for Song To The Siren.”
The song was originally selected by Ivo Watts-Russell as a B-side to Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust, a Modern English song performed by a 4AD all-stars band intended as the first single attributed to his This Mortal Coil project.
Fraser agreed to record Tim Buckley’s ballad a cappella. Fortuitously, her partner and Cocteau Twins bandmate Robin Guthrie had accompanied her to Blackwing Studios in south-east London, since Watts-Russell couldn’t think of what to do between the verses. “So, Robin, very reluctantly, put on his guitar, found a sound, lent against the studio wall looking decidedly bored, and played it once to Buckley’s version in his headphones.”
Fraser’s exquisite ache allied to Guthrie’s luminous ambient drifts, pierced to the heart of the lyric’s doomed images and aquatic metaphors. Switched to the single’s A-side. Song To The Siren was so successful that it hung around the UK Independent Singles chart for 101 weeks, ranking an all-time fourth in the 1980s behind Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi's Dead, New Order’s Blue Monday and Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Fraser initially distanced herself from This Mortal Coil’s version because of her embarrassment at getting a few of the words wrong (the publisher’s lyric sheet never turned up, and there was no internet source back then). But she has a closer kinship with it now. It was Fraser’s final encore at her second Meltdown show in 2012, and she sung it on Massive Attack’s tours of 2024 and 2025.
“That song is such a moment in my life,” she says today. “I had to think about what it was like to sing it again, to reinterpret it, now I’m older, I have a different voice and I’m coming from a different place… It sounds less like the ‘siren’ now.”
Meanwhile, Buckley’s original speaks to her as deeply as ever.
“The lyrics are so beautiful, and Tim’s voice had such a positive effect on all levels. It makes you think how much you can use your imagination. It makes you think the sky’s the limit.”
“We were all very emotional people…”
In her first in-person interview in 13 years, Fraser speaks exclusively to MOJO about the strange magic of the Cocteau Twins, while she and former bandmates Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde ponder the prospect of a Cocteau Twins reunion. “I would record with Liz again in a heartbeat…” reports Guthrie. Read the interview in the new issue of MOJO, ON SALE NOW!
The newly updated edition of Martin Aston’s definitive history of 4AD, Facing The Other Way: The Story Of 4AD is out now via William Collins.
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