TOTAL RECALL... STILL

i found this while surfing thru the net. for those who didn't live thru the 80's or missed this song then, read on. you'll understand why i love the song so much. and even if you don't know the tune, you'd still fall in love with the lyrics.


"Total Recall" (live) (1986)

By Michael Sutton


The Sound's "Total Recall" has the most famous opening bass line that hardly anyone has heard; it thumps like a heartbeat, the ominous tone that plays in your head when you're about to reveal to someone that you're in love with them. And then the guitars float into the mix, ringing like a distress call. "It's all such a blur when times goes so quickly," Adrian Borland sings, his voice dripping with tears. "Trying to hang on to/The way that you'd like things to stay," he continues, and suddenly we've reached the point in the book where we can't put it down. We want to hear his story, and from the sadness in his vocals and the lonely shimmer of the music behind him, we have a feeling that it won't have a happy ending. "Trace back the seconds/Recall the detail," he tells his lover, and the windmills of our mind paint their own images of the past, affectionately called "the good ol' days" - warm kisses in the sunlight; the soft embrace of flesh upon flesh; dreamy laughter in the rain. The listener is given a moment to fill in the blanks - "recall the detail" - before the drums snap and abruptly crash the reverie. The tempo rises, capturing the heightened agony in Borland's voice as he cries out, "Oh, there must be a hole in your memory." The band shifts speed, briefly slowing down, as Borland makes a whispered confession: "You cut me off just as I was starting to speak." With the chilly, mournful synthesizers of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" mourning behind him, he explains that his love for her was not only rejected but it was never given the freedom to be spoken. He is trying to remind her of the good times they once shared - "Trace back the seconds/Recall the detail" - but she refuses to. Brimming with frustration and loneliness, the group unleashes his bottled-up emotions; in the live version, Borland sounds like he's nearly out of breath in the track's dizzying climax. "I can see a distant victory/A time when you will be with me," he bellows.

If Joy Division's Ian Curtis was a depressed man trying to sound like Lou Reed, then Borland was a depressed man aiming for Bono's righteous passion on U2's "I Will Follow." In the end, everything collapses; the band has spent its energy, and Borland, gasping for air, weakly summarizes, "Yes, I can see/That there's got to be another time/There's got to be." Sadly, there wasn't. On April 26, 1999, Borland committed suicide by throwing himself at a moving train.

In the Philippines, the Sound's "Total Recall" is considered an '80s classic, and it's still often played on Manila's alternative rock station NU-107 (http://www.nu107.com). In the rest of the world, however, it unfortunately lingers in obscurity, a heartbreaking tale from another time.