Cathedral Song

One of the most under-recognised luminaries to emerge from the 1980s folk-music movement, the exotically monikered Tanita Tikaram made a brief but culturally signficant impact on European charts in 1988 and 1989, with her distinctive brand of melancholy, nostalgic brand of singer-songwriter pop. The most striking thing about Tikaram's singular artistry has to be her smoky, world-weary, bordering-on-baritone voice, which provided vivid, animated life to her story songs that detailed commonplace subjects like the travails of everyday life, the regrets of past romances, and classic existential angst. Check out 1988's 'Cathedral Song', a carefully constructed, folk-inflected gem that speaks volumes about Tikaram's musical sensibilities, and is bolstered by an appropriately idyllic, summer holiday-themed, but somewhat wistful video-clip treatment.