100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s #95 Lamb – Górecki

Released : 1997

Most of the time when someone isn’t in love it’s hard for songs about it to resonate; unless they’re a dreamer always looking for what isn’t there, a natural response is to close anything that stimulates unrequited emotions off.

Singer Lou Rhodes and programmer Andy Barlow became Lamb when the former – child of folk singer Annie Burton – was working in Manchester as a photographer while Barlow was starting to establish himself as a producer. As the story goes their three song demo got them a six a six album deal with a major label, the sort of post-modern fairytale their first single Górecki appeared to have been taken straight from.

The song’s title was in tribute to Polish composer Henry Górecki, whose work in remembrance of Holocaust victims Symphony of Sorrowful Songs it sampled. But although it’s austere piano and Rhodes’ curiously ethereal vocals were somehow chilly and distant, the words were devotional, poetry of souls touching and new light appearing in a previously grey world. Górecki was a love song, perhaps one of the last great ones. It was let in.