Melody Maker (April 16), 1988
Jonh Wilde

When you leave, he wailts until you reach the foot of the long road and waits for you to turn, before waving frantically. He's thorough like that.

When you arrive, he performs a number of elaborate ceremonies to avoid the touch. He recoils from the hand-shake, shuffling objects around in his hands, as if this explains everything.

If you forget your manners and drowsily refer to Cindytalk as a pop concern, he winces before throwing a look bewildered as Stan Laurel's, as innocent as you wish.

Gordon Sharp is Cindytalk. One fierce spasm. Or two. "In This World" is his latest work. Two LPs, released simultaneously, with one name. It's going to confuse people but that doesn't matter. Maybe people need to be confused. When you get past small matters like which is which and which comes first, there's much more to moither over.

Get beyond the pale ghosts decorating the two sleeves, and you come up against a music difficult and dense. Unsolved and ambiguous, hot and cold, light and dark, naked and disorientated. You find an intensity rare in modern music. Whatever you feel about "In This World", it's difficult not to go back, to discover how you feel the next time. It sounds necessary, like it should not belong on the streets.

The record has already elicited a peculiar array of responses. It seems to have put people on the defence. Our own Chris Roberts was sufficiently moved to compare the gentleman in front of me to a skunk. He also concluded "In This World" was "weirdly unhealthy". Sharp quite likes the skunk bit. He doesn't own a bath at the moment. Or a shower. He has to wash himself bit by bit. "A different bit each day." Prophetic, almost.

Roberts was, however, sufficiently thrown by "In This World" to completely overlook the fact that there are two records. This is going to happen. The one he missed is meant to be the second one, "the quieter one". After being thoroughly knuckle-dusted by the first, you might need the second breath.

"In This World" has taken four years to fall together. A long time in pop music. But this isn't pop music. It's one man's world. Not, as Gordon Sharp keenly points out, a version of the world or a little bit of someone's world. One man's world. A big thing to say, you must think. Something, "exhaustive, emptying, disgusting". Sharp insists the making of these records was a disgusting experience. It sounds like this.

"What can we deduce from the collision of two bodies without an accident," the record rails, at one point. "Oh thing of love...memories. And just to touch something alive. A body, not any-body. Just to taste that same body without spitting out. Without throwing up, without asking question after question and sinking further into dissolution...an end."

The record punishes itself like this. Then, before you know it, there is beauty. The Voice. You might be familiar with Gordon Sharp's voice. It's the pure, pristine instrument that towers and totters on the first This Mortal Coil LP, "It'll End In Tears", sending shivers through Alex Chilton's haunting "Kangaroo" and the self-penned "A Single Wish". A dagger of a voice. You might have heard it before, joining The Cocteau Twins on radio sessions and occasional live performances. Or, before that, fronting a forgotten Scottish pop group called The Freeze who released two semi-spectacular singles before falling out and apart.

Between The Freeze and Cindytalk, Sharp was invited to join Duran Duran. This is actually true. Later, he was asked to "join" The Cocteau Twins. Both prospects made him shake his head very firmly. He just wasn't interested. Cindytalk was interesting to him. More than that. Cindytalk had to be. "Camouflage Heart" sounds like a record that had to be. Every last tortuous stab of it. It left Sharp, again, emptied.

"I felt like it was the end. I was at the point where I hated my voice. I felt I couldn't turn in any direction because I'd exhausted myself with 'Camouflage Heart'. Then I did two songs for This Mortal Coil, and, to me, that was a lie. I'd gone in and used by voice purely technically. I'd never done that before. I'd always been instinctive about it.

"This Mortal Coil was an interesting experiment, but I could live without "Kangaroo" quite easily. It doesn't mean anything to me. As a vocal performance, it astonished me, but it also disgusted me. As soon as I sang it, I knew it was a lie. I knew it was a hell of a lot less soulful than anything I did with Cindytalk.

"After 'Camouflage Heart' though, I knew there was a definite need to find another way of communicating. I really thought I'd taken my voice to the end. But I still had the urge to touch. I couldn't just stop doing that. Some of the time, I tried to use the piano like a voice. I thought it would be interesting trying to communicate through something I had no knowledge of. Tapping out those little messages. By the time I was halfway through thinking about this LP, I was desperate to sing. I couldn't wait to get back in. Now, I want to sing even more and I actually like the idea of singing. I've about-turned."

Those who turn to Cindytalk after warming to Sharp's This Mortal Coil performances might face a shock. The vocal intensity is still there but it's a very different kind. When Sharp does come round to using the voice on "In This World", it sounds like a scream ricocheting around walls. Untamed, inflamed, and far removed from the sensuous swell of "Kangeroo". It's awkward and overwrought.

You can hear the fear in this place. It is not pop music. Any and every instrument is there. A large part of "In This World (Part Two)" is merely the ripple of piano. Merely doesn't come into it though. Elsewhere you hear saxophone, clarinet, harmonica and accordion as well as the typical rock tool-box. It could be anything at times.

"We took hold of instruments to see what we could do with them," says Sharp. "We were like children sometimes. I wanted something close up, a record that reacted against all the complexity on records these days. Something raw, naked, exposed. 'Camouflage Heart' was like a mask in many ways. I was interested in something pure. What you hear is all that is there. I see a parallel with Haiku poetry. The words and the must are not symbolic of anything. They are everything." Besides Sharp, there was John Byrne, Alex Wright, Kathy Acker, and others. And Shaman, Sharp's pet Alsation. While Cindytalk were retching four sides of "In This World" out of their failing systems, Shaman was constantly on hand, prowling the studio floor with wolfish virulence. His presence often sent everything off the edge, into nervous hysteria, nervous exhaustion.

Occasionally, he snapped (good-naturedly) at a nearby limb. Occasionally, he pounded. His contribution Sharp insists, was integral. Shamenn sits in on the interview. Gordon insists. I would feel slightly more comfortable sharing a small leather sofa with a grinning brontosaurus. This is show-business. On with the show.

"People tell me I'm perverse. Or difficult. That I should sing properly. Like with This Mortal Coil. I can't see it like that. It's not even a matter of compromise. I just can't think that way."

On the other hand, his next move, which won't take four years to initiate this time, is a pop record. I'm astonished. So is he. Sharp cannot believe he has said this. Maybe it's a joke. When he goes on to confess that, on my recommendation of four years ago, he is wheeling in Phil Spector to produce, I know it's a joke. How pop will it be then? Really.

It might be Patti Smith's "Elegy". Nothing by Perry Como. It will be as it has to be.

"I do throw myself into situations where I know I'm going to be uncomfortable. Just to watch myself wriggle. It keeps me alive."

He phones me later to say that the interview made him physically ill. He could barely stand afterwards. It's all nerves. And strange magnificence. That too.

Reprinted without permission.