— Fred Dellar
A little girl is growing up in a small town. Everything about her life is normal: she goes to school, plays with her friends, argues with her brothers and sisters and refuses to eat anything with onions in it. She spends her pocket money on sweets and is disappointed that her parents still won't relent and get her a puppy. Then she learns about the abduction of a girl close to her age and her world is turned upside down.
"Child Come Away" is a song about two girls: the one who gets snatched and left for dead and the one who is privy to the unraveling of everything around her. Innocence ends up being yanked away from both. Obviously the former is put through so much more but the lingering affects are left as a burden on the former: not knowing quite what happened (much less how or why), learning little snippets of detail but being denied the full story by parents and a town that doesn't want to discuss it, living in fear that she could be next. Fred Dellar mentions a "town filled with terror" but I suspect there's more to it than that. The community is in denial, perhaps even complicit, as to what's been going on.
That the Wilde family was able to come up with this gripping four-minute thriller is absolutely remarkable. Having already trotted out a pair of sorrowful yet superb singles with "Cambodia" and "View from a Bridge", they were well positioned to deliver yet another tragic piece and "Child Come Away" is their zenith. Kim seems to have toned down the vocal frostiness that worked such a treat on her early records, leaving room for a sweetness that captures the childlike wonder and confusion going on. I don't know if I agree with Dellar that the "piccolo-headed arrangement" moves the song into the realms of folk-rock but it is effective. I have to wonder if it's intended as a Pied Piper-esque tool to symbolise a child being lured away, while other children are being shuffled off to the side and told to go and play and stop asking so many bloody questions.
It's as a piece of writing, however, that "Child Come Away" truly shines. The lack of clarity in the story may seem strange at first but that's precisely the point. What exactly happened to this girl in the sand? What kind of appalling state was she left in that everyone in town — including the judge at the trial — turns away from her now? Has she been cast aside by the community as much as her captor/torturer ("I saw her face in the back of the car / As they were speeding out of this town")? We aren't to know, just as the other young girl in this song isn't to know. And we can look at this situation and gasp the heartlessness of the townsfolk but that's how close-knit communities often deal with these situations. How was this not used in the TV series Broadchurch?
So, all that said, how did it fail to catch on, falling short of the Top 40? Being her third single on the trot dealing with dark subject matter may have turned people off, especially deejays who were content around this time to spin sunny reggae-pop by the likes of Musical Youth, Culture Club and Eddy Grant instead. (Hopefully it did indeed manage to grip audiences during Wilde's tour; I like to think that she still occasionally floors her fans with it at shows to this day) In retrospect, it's a shame it wasn't released as a double A-side with its jauntier — though still appropriately angsty — flip "Just Another Guy": come for the whiplash pop-rock, stay for the searing devastation.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
ABBA: "The Day Before You Came"
And while we're on the topic of great melancholic pop that punters and radio conspired to spurn, all hail ABBA's swansong "The Day Before You Came". Variously interpreted as recalling the last days of mundane loneliness before finding love, some sort of murder/suicide plot or the tale of a stalker, the very ambiguity of just what motivates this song's protagonist is precisely what makes it so intriguing. (I tend to lean towards the stalker theory although I'm beginning to warm to the concept that the whole thing is a delusion with 'You' never coming) Dellar mentions the amusing line about watching every episode of Dallas but I also like the fact that this lonely, aimless soul reads both the morning and evening papers, a throwback to the omnipresence of print media. Just imagine how much more miserable she would be if she spent her commutes playing nothing but Candy Crush on her mobile?
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