This Mortal Coil’s ‘Filigree & Shadow’ turns 40 on 22 September
4AD released This Mortal Coil’s “Filigree & Shadow” on 22 September 1986, the project’s second album led by Ivo Watts-Russell. It turns 40 this year.
This Mortal Coil, the rotating collective of musicians and vocalists assembled by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, released its second studio album, “Filigree & Shadow,” on 22 September 1986 through 4AD. The double LP turns 40 this year.
The album gathered 25 tracks, about half of them instrumental, credited to This Mortal Coil but built around a different set of contributors than the project’s 1984 debut. Ivo Watts-Russell and producer John Fryer recorded and mixed “Filigree & Shadow” at Blackwing and Palladium Studios, with arrangements from Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins, cellist Martin McCarrick and engineer John Turner, plus violin and viola from Gini Ball. Dead Can Dance percussionist Peter Ulrich and members of Dif Juz, The Wolfgang Press and Colourbox also appeared on the record. Vocalists including Dominic Appleton of Breathless and Alison Limerick sang cover interpretations of songs by Tim Buckley, Gene Clark, Van Morrison, Colin Newman and Talking Heads. “Filigree & Shadow” reached number 53 on the UK Albums Chart and number 2 on the UK Indie Chart, and it streams on Spotify.
About This Mortal Coil
Ivo Watts-Russell founded 4AD in London in 1980 and built This Mortal Coil a few years later to record music outside the constraints of a fixed band. In 1983 he brought together Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie, Cindytalk’s Gordon Sharp and members of Modern English to re-record two Modern English songs as the medley “Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust.” Its B-side, a cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” sung by Fraser and Guthrie alone, entered the UK Singles Chart at number 66 and led Watts-Russell to build a full album around the same idea. That album, “It’ll End in Tears,” followed in 1984 on 4AD.
This Mortal Coil never had a fixed lineup. Watts-Russell and engineer John Fryer were its only constant members, and each record drew on a different group of musicians and singers, most pulled from 4AD’s own roster. “Filigree & Shadow” followed in 1986 as the project’s second album, again produced by Watts-Russell and Fryer, with Simon Raymonde, Martin McCarrick and Gini Ball forming its core backing group and Peter Ulrich among the guest musicians. This Mortal Coil closed its studio run with “Blood” in 1991, on which vocalist Caroline Crawley – whose death Side-Line reported in 2016 – was among the featured singers. After the group’s run ended, Watts-Russell continued the same collaborative approach under the name The Hope Blister from 1998, while Fryer went on to produce and engineer widely across the 4AD roster and beyond. “Filigree & Shadow” turns 40 this year, four decades into a project that treated an album as a collaboration rather than the work of a fixed band.
Support Side-Line
More people read Side-Line than ever, and there is still no paywall and no advertising. Readers pay for it instead - from $5 a month.
Why we ask
Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations we have not put up a paywall, and we refuse to add annoying advertising, so we need to ask for your help. Side-Line’s independent journalism takes time, money and hard work to produce, and we do it to push the artists we like, who are equally fighting to survive.
Handled by PayPal.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
