Gloomy Sundays

 

Three versions of the song made famous by Billie Holiday - all three covers released within three years of each other

Lydia Lunch was first

Then Billy Mackenzie (personally I always found it a rather lumpy obtrusion in Sulk)

Then Marc Almond

Actually there was a fourth cover within that timespan: Elvis Costello recorded a version in 1981 (but twas only released much later as part of a Trust reissue)

EC also did this Standard

The original was composed by Rezső Seress in 1933 as "Vége a Világnak" which translates as "The World Is Ending". 

Which made me think of this pop classic of teen heartbreak

Which in turn made me of a song about the world really ending 

"Gloomy Sunday' was widely known as the "Hungarian Suicide Song" and in its initial incarnation was apparently inspired by political doom more than amorous apocalypse (the Depression, rather than depression... Fascism ascendant also)

Later lyrics by poet László Jávor shifted it to heartbreak.

 Rezső Seress did actually kill himself, in 1968

During WW2 the BBC banned the song as potentiality detrimental to public morale

There are other well-known coverers of "Gloomy Sunday" where the tune fits well with their overall image / aura - Marianne Faithfull, Serge Gainsbourg, Diamanda Galas, Sinead O'Connor 

But back to 1980-83 and the cluster of covers, kicked off by Lydia 

Around that time there was critical chatter about the Torch Song - along with a general interest in things like cabaret, the bygone craft of jobbing songwriters knocking a standard out before lunch, etc etc

the idea being that this strict division of labour lead to better results than the rock-band-as-collective-auteur or the navel-contemplating singer-songwriter.... 

with the Brill Building / Nashville / Motown / Broadway / Las Vegas approach,  one professional does the tune, another professional does the lyric, yet another professional arranges and produces (although often those roles are separated too), others professionals play the instruments... 

the singer's job is reduced simply to doing a good job of interpretation.. the singer functions only within a narrow strip of professional expertise of their own, without creativity as such drawn upon... their role, vis-a-vis the song, is much more like an actor than a torn-from-your-own-guts-your-own experience artist.  

Related ideas at this time would be:

the idea of a classically structured Song with a capital 'S' as the elegant container for immense pain, or wild desire - passion controlled, expressivity stylized.  

the (once provocative, now a bit well-worn) thought that the softest songs can hit harder than the supposed hardness of rock. 

Concomitant with all of this was things like Julie London being rediscovered.  Scott Walker getting compiled and reissued. Nina Simone (although it would be the un-torchy "Baby Just Cares For Me" that eventually clawed its way back into the charts as a reissued single). 

Then there were the contemporary exponents... 

The critical apotheosis of August Darnell as an out-of-time / against-the-times figure, with his "Kid Creole and the Coconuts" taking us back to the days of Cole Porter and Cab Calloway.... 

Rickie Lee Jones's mostly-covers mini-LP Girl At Her Volcano (inc. "Lush Life", "My Funny Valentine"...)

Blue Rondo A La Turk 

Everything But The Girl doing "Night and Day"

And much else besides....

This was not so much the opening up into a post-rock world, as a wishful reversion to a pre-rock age 

The afterbirth of this current of thought resulting in the likes of Carmel, Swans Way....

Rubbish byproducts aside, I don't think the fond esteem for the original era of standards, the Great American Songbook, et al  was misplaced (I've been listening to Sinatra this very morning in fact). 

But there is a dialectic in music... and there is the supersession of earlier stages

Which is why later attempts to go back nearly always founder, if not commercially (Harry Connick Jnr.... Any Winehouse... Duffy) then aesthetically. 

Or even philosophically. For there is is something like bad faith or one of those concepts at work in any drive to "bring back" or restore.  

(It's one reason why the resurgence of the Musical in recent decades is such a zombie business, even as it does good business...  even the grandest musical theater success of today, at the cinema or on Broadway, cannot possibly have the same culturally central function as its precursor equivalents did in the original heyday of the form. Which started to sputter from about the mid-Sixties onwards precisely as rock came forward as the new Intelligent Music) 

But back, again, for the second time, to those three-years of "Gloomy Sunday"'s...

Confession: I have never really clicked with Billie Holiday. Despite repeated attempts over the years -  heeding the advocacy of esteemed ancestors - I have never felt pulled back to relisten. 

Oh it sounds fine in the moment of listening. 

But it does come to seem like it all sounds the same. Much of muchness. 

I suppose that is precisely what might be compelling for some about her as a vocalist (her extremely narrow vocal range..... narrower than many civilian singers in fact) and the fixation on a certain mood (even a certain tempo and gait of song - listening now, again, there's a jolt when you get a rare faster number. Woozy blue langour seems to be her true domain)

But I can't quite make the breakthrough to where you start hearing the myriad subtle differences within the sameyness.

Or don't want to....  something about the Mythos is just not alluring enough to pull me over into that necessary deep immersion. 

Perhaps related to this non-attraction is how vastly I prefer the sunny, upbeat Songs for Swingin' Lovers to the proto-ambient torch moodscape near-concept * album that is In the Wee Small Hours 

Keep wanting to say "snap out of it, man... plenty more fish in the sea"

* I feel there is a pun here itching to be made out of Ava Gardner and avant-garde but for the life of me can't get there

bonus: a Lydia Lunch cover I much prefer

Another bonus: great piece by Barney Hoskyns on the torturous double-LP (Mark Almond's debut solo album) on which his cover of "Gloomy Sunday" appeared - Shock+Awe regulars will note the theatrical / anti-theatrical tropes running through the piece