I. Labi Siffre and the end of the world
Claudius Afolabi Siffre was 27 years old when his third studio album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, was released.
In a televised interview with the BBC, Labi Siffre says he is not poetic. There is confidence in his sweet voice, eyes flickering towards the unseen interviewer. He sweats in his collared shirt, forehead damp from nerves and beaming studio lights.
“Good heavens,” he says, almost a singsong-imitation of the white English audience members who have gathered to watch him perform. Tongue in cheek. It makes him all the more endearing.
Labi sits on a wooden stool, guitar in his lap. He is on stage; no band or backup singers. His posture is fluid—he’s in his element now. He sings and his voice is a cool rag against your temples, Mom blowing on your swollen & fevered eyelids. The sounds from his guitar and lips a clear & rapid spring, a palm holding your face. A bird in a tree singing a song, just for me. Just for you.
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The first track on Labi Siffre’s 1972 album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, is an a cappella. More of a spoken word poem or prayer, “Saved” is told from the perspective of a free man, whose own father was a slave. A man like Labi Siffre’s father or grandfather perhaps. Or even from his own I—a black and openly homosexual man, from an immigrant family, living through the tail end of the historical Civil Rights Era in the 1960s.
Well, I don't need religion to tell me what to do
I know that I should love you
And if there is a heaven, and I get there
How could I be happy with my children down here?
In an interview with The Guardian (2022), Labi Siffre reminisces on his Nigerian father warning him about homosexuality throughout his adolescence. Despite this upbringing, Labi’s father was the quickest to accept his son’s longterm partner, Peter John Carver Lloyd. Labi met Peter when he was nineteen years old and they had been together ever since.
Labi’s ease with his own sexuality, during a time when LGBTQIA+ rights were just beginning to come into the mainstream, is reflected in the lyricism throughout Crying Laughing Loving Lying. His songs are ambiguous with most pronouns, a notable exception being the sixth track, “Blue Lady.” Labi allows the listener to fill in the gaps for themselves, the presence of an amorphous lover haunting nearly every song. The lover that Labi holds an immense amount of feeling and tenderness towards—even if that lover has other lovers, even if Siffre pretends not to love them. He sings his song for them.
“And it was my father who just accepted it without a blink. There’s this rubbish about homosexuality being un-African. Bullshit!”
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1972 was not the easiest time to stand out as a musician, let alone a queer folk-pop musician, in the same year as Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted, and Black, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, Neil Young’s Harvest, The Rolling Stones’ Exit on Main Street, Lou Reed’s Transformer…
Like the music industry now, there is always someone more connected, more talented, and more popular, singing louder than you to much bigger crowds than you may ever get the chance to reach. And yet, Labi Siffre’s Crying Laughing Loving Lying remains a distinct weaving of songs created by someone with no real interest in fame nor limelight; a musician and poet more concerned with the intricacies of love, solitude, emotion, devotion, grief, nature, and that silent space between notes where the Ineffable and the Inexpressible live.
On my favorite track from the album, “Cannock Chase,” Labi Siffre describes a solitary moment at the Cannock Chase forest located in Staffordshire, England. He is alone and surrounded by nature, emerging from a time when his soul seemed “dead and gone.” Although he knows his old friend the blues will inevitably return, “Cannock Chase” is hopeful. In his music, depression is an entity that ebbs and flows— a rainstorm ending, leaves falling and growing back again. A hopelessness that shifts and dies, and returns too.
As someone who is emerging from their own depression, I wish I could say re-emergence felt as beautiful as this song does. It does not. Some depressions harden you, make you sharper than before. More closed off. There is a loss, internal or otherwise, that leaves a mark on the spirit. Some depressions go in for the kill. But if you manage to survive it, you are reborn.
I look in the mirror and there is a scar on my lip not yet faded. As long as it remains, it will remind me of my most recent dance with the blues. I’d like to believe I am a bit wiser and more humble for it. More willing to live for myself and no one else. More grateful I survived the last seven months, that I can forgive and not forgive and remember and forget again. That I can inhale, and exhale, and inhale, and exhale. I can do it all over again. We can pick up our guitar and do it all over again, even at the end of the world.
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Mostly, as I come back to this album every couple of weeks, I am attempting to understand and hopefully embody the kind of relationship Labi had to his music, particularly his relationship with the guitar and songwriting.
Tracks like the aforementioned “Cannock Chase,” “Crying Laughing Loving Lying,” “Blue Lady,” and “Come On Michael,” showcase Siffre’s playing skills. He sites Wes Montgomery (another favorite guitarist of mine) as an early musical influence and says he prefers the acoustic guitar to the electric since he likes the lack of separation between himself and the sound emitting from the instrument.
This closeness he feels with his guitar is intimate, a word that encapsulates the overall message of CLLL—intimacy. By using the guitar as a melodic stream to lift his voice up, with an intricate pattern of fingerplucking, he creates an auditory environment of softness and vulnerability that is given permission to stretch out and guide listeners through the entire album, from beginning to end.
Sure he has his jangly pop-folk songs that are more surface level, and maybe it is crazy to say it, but I think Labi sings and composes the songs on Crying Laughing with a certain clarity and authority—he is saying something strong and almost forceful, almost pleading, beneath the delicate guitar melodies and voice. I like to believe he is asking us to listen very closely, because he might not repeat himself again.
To me, my favorite songs on this album feel like the remnants of a sweet and sad dream, like laying down under a tree and waking up, not meaning to fall asleep. You see it is dusk and your eyes still heavy, your tongue in your throat. Were you crying? You whimper a little and feel a dampness on your cheeks. The wind is cool on your face. It is dark blue everywhere.
And then you look up to see the white moon, fistfuls of grass between your fingers.