Devil Woman

The 1972 hit "Lady Eleanor" by Geordie folk-rockers Lindisfarne used to give me the willies when I was a kid. It wasn't the sinister mandolin (yes, a mandolin can sound sinister) or menacing atmosphere that did it, but the lyrics that spooked me because I hadn't a clue what it was all about and the imagery put all sorts of funny ideas into my innocent, 10-year-old head. Even reading the lyrics in a copy of Disco 45 was no help, what was I supposed make of this at that age?

Bashee playing magician sitting lotus on the floor
Belly dancing beauty with a power driven saw
Had my share of nightmares, didn't think there could be much more
Then in walked Roderick Usher with the Lady Eleanor

She tied my eyes with ribbon of a silken ghostly thread
I gazed with trouble vision on an old four poster bed
Where Eleanor had risen to kiss the neck below my head
And bid me come along with her to the land of the dancing dead

I knew that it was probably a bit naughty, but that was one the many unexplained and murky things about the adult world beyond my experience, something to do with what was on BBC2 late at night when my sister and I were in bed. Kids these days are so terribly worldly and sophisticated, what with their wireless computers and stereophonic telephones. They spend their evenings ripping out other people's spinal cords in video games and have a whole world of sexual perversion at their fingertips on the internet, so they'd find it highly amusing that my generation was so innocent something as cheesy as The Daleks could make us leap behind the couch in terror or that I'd be perturbed by the imagery in a pop song.

Over 30 years later I know that Roderick Usher is a character in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of The House of Usher." There are several, real life Lady Eleanor's, the best known being the 12th century Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of both King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and quite an interesting woman who went on Crusades and was a believer in Courtly Love. Then there's the half-gypsy aristocrat Lady Eleanor Smith, one of the so-called Bright Young Things who inspired Evelyn Waugh's 1930 novel "Vile Bodies" and led an eventful, bohemian life which involved running off to the circus and writing supernatural novels about gypsies and flamenco dancers. None of these people are connected in any way and the "secret" of the song I was looking for doesn't really exist. It's just surreal, all-a-dream nonsense, a Gothic-novel sex and horror fantasy. Basically, this is what you get when folk singers take drugs — it's all Bob Dylan's fault.

Download: Lady Eleanor - Lindisfarne (mp3)
Buy: "Nicely Out of Tune" (album)
Photo: "Mrs. Edward Mayer as Medusa" by Madame Yevonde