Archive find: 'The Key', Kristin Hersh

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, one of the ways you could convince yourself that, despite every indicator to the contrary, you had some remaining spark of 'cool', was to read - and better to be seen and known to read - now-defunct music magazine Select. (Look at that list of attitudinising contributors!)

And every self-respecting teen motorist had the chance to double down on my - I mean 'their' - Selectiveness by playing on their car stereo the cover cassette of the moment. They didn't always feel it at the time, but in hindsight these were seriously various. 

The cassette that most regularly did this work in my own personal highly integrated automobile sound system was Secret Tracks 2, the cover cassette from Select May 1994. And what a tour it was - introducing us at the same time to Saint Etienne, Oasis and Echobelly. But most of all for me, most lastingly of all, was 'The Key', from Kristin Hersh's Strings. 

Hersh had happened to the UK rather abruptly in 1994, popping into the charts with Michael Stipe and a cello on 'Your Ghost', whose ancient wooden corridors lit by dusty slanting sun showed up at Number 45 in the UK chart a week after my birthday, its blank and uncompromising sparseness not so much competing with New Labour anthem 'Things (Can Only Get Better)', Tori Amos's 'Cornflake Girl' and the Inspirals' 'Saturn 5' as it was arriving from a completely different planet in no identifiable pop-pickable tradition.

A semi-reluctant and deeply incompetent violist, I loved (and still do) those dry rich voices that the lower strings produce. (I'm in good company - Akhnaten uses 12 violas and, praise be, not a single violin.) I'm sure I remember an interview with Hersh at the time in which she expressed how stunned she was by the timbre and richness of the cello bassline that she'd imagined as accompaniment rather than the main character that it became in the recording. 

So when I heard 'The Key' - which YouTube's algorithm decided, wonderfully, gloriously, to show me this afternoon - I was bowled over, obssessed, addicted; this music wasn't a luxury, it was a necessity, and everything I had ever heard or thought or sensed (with my ancient mid-teen soul) was the real instrument being played here. A string quartet sonnet-cum-round with a lyric that was intriguing, evasive, elliptical, built from folk archetypes and snatches of memory. Imagine a whole album of this!

But I couldn't find it.

Pre-internet, stuck in a region far from urban sophistication, reliant on the whims of WHSmiths and Woolworths for tape and CD stock, I couldn't get a copy anywhere. And I never quite forgot. Echobelly came and went: Tori can still count on me in every UK tour, I never did quite convert to Saint Etienne fandom as I vaguely thought I should have done if my Select-reading creds really meant anything; I bought Hunkpapa and University and shouted my lungs out to Bright Yellow Gun and read Seeing Sideways and Rat Girl and still I couldn't ever manage to match up the moment of looking and the moment of finding.

A much more intelligent man than me has recently been thinking and writing about strategies for increasing the probability of serendipitous events. (I think it was the News Quiz and I think it was Barry Cryer but then when isn't it? who in the 'Uxbridge English Dictionary' round defined serendipity as 'Looking for a needle in a haystack, and finding a farmer's daughter'.) 

This is where I get to: this unexpected exsurgence of serendipity has left me not only with a long-lost earworm returning in full force, but also handed me a theoretical account of the serendipitous event itself at just the moment that I could best appreciate the virtue and power of serendipity itself. 

I promise it's usually less meta around here. I blame the 90s. Random!