Sail Away
Writers - Noël Coward
First released - 1998
Original album - Twentieth-Century Blues (various artists)
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - Nightlife 2017 reissue Further Listening 1996-2000 bonus disc
Other releases - bonus track with the single "You
Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk"
Neil is very much a fan of Noël Coward (the Boys having previously covered his "If Love Were All"), so it's not surprising that he should become the guiding force and producer of a charity album project consisting of various artists' interpretations of Coward songs. The resulting 1998 album, Twentieth-Century Blues, benefited AIDS research and relief. The Pet Shop Boys provided a recording of "Sail Away," a mellow rumination on middle age in which the narrator ponders the notion of "sailing away." This can be read both literally and metaphorically: a literal desire to retire to a pleasanter place as well as a metaphorical anticipation of decline and death as part of the natural process. Somber stuff, to be sure, but appropriate in its context.
Annotations
- The voice heard at the beginning of the song saying "This is the story of a ship" is Noël Coward himself, sampled from the opening narration of his classic 1942 patriotic film In Which We Serve, based on the World War II naval actions of Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten and the sinking of the HMS Kelly during the Battle of Crete. In the film, Coward portrays the ship's captain, although in this fictionalized rendering of the story he's not Mountbatten—instead his name is Kinross—and the ship is renamed the Torrin.
- Quite a few music websites (such as Spotify, Shazam, and Soundcloud, among others) assign to the Pet Shop Boys' rendition of "Sail Away" the subtitle "Ace of Clubs." That stems from the fact that "Sail Away" first appeared in Noël Coward's 1950 musical Ace of Clubs. Precisely why it so often appears as a subtitle to the song, however, is otherwise a mystery.
List cross-references
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