Diana
The opening track of First Utterance and its 1971 single, credited to the violinist Colin Pearson.
Comus, from First Utterance (1971)
"Diana" opens the album and was issued as a Dawn maxi-single in 1971 with "In the Lost Queen's Eyes" and "Winter Is a Coloured Bird". It is credited to Pearson alone. He told the Vinyl Press that he had the basic idea, some chords and most of the lyrics, that Wootton wrote the rest including the chorus, and that he is not sure why he alone was credited, though the band had agreed to share the credit. FACT described the sound as twanging fiddles and eldritch voices.
Setlist.fm records six plays. Current 93 covered it to open Horsey (1997), with David Tibet singing over a loop of the original violin arrangement. Nero's Day at Disneyland sampled it in "Sprawling Idiot Effigy", and Opeth took a line from it for "The Baying of the Hounds" on Ghost Reveries (2005) and reused a phrase in "Moonlapse Vertigo". No chart history or video was found, and our upload is presumably the album version.
Covers and versions
- (1997) Opens Horsey, with David Tibet's vocal over a loop of the original violin.
More songs by Comus
Sources
- First Utterance, Wikipedia
- Comus: First Utterance, part II, Vinyl Press (2018-08-08)
- Comus (band), Wikipedia