Before the advent of Luminous Groove, this was an unreleased demo recording (recorded in Yarmouth in 1992) originally entitled "Ivy" per a radio performance.

From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
My father died while I was on tour in the USA in early 1992, and I returned to my empty house on the Isle of Wight. My life at the time was a collage of frenetic activity in the USA and complete solitude back on the island. There was nobody around. Seaside towns out of season have a compelling melancholy: just how alone can you get? As a child I liked to spook myself, and that pleasure lingered into my adult life.

Away from other people, who is there to define you? I might be my alter ego, an eccentric old lady wandering the corridors in purple, muttering to the portraits of her dead ancestors on the walls.

My house on the Isle had several corridors, that led to rooms full of dead toys. Time was, families had filled them, but who’s to say if they lived happily ever after? There were presences in two of the rooms that meant I could never sleep in them. I had a gramophone set up in one - vinyl was ebbing at the time - that played Roxy Music slightly slow through one speaker. I would go up there for tea with the ghosts.

Two old sisters sometimes appeared late in the afternoon; they’d both been engaged to the same man, before World War I, unbeknownst to each other. He jilted them. The shock of running into each other at the altar was so great that each one fled from the world and mulched down on the West Wight. They finally faded from this life in the 1980s. I used to see their younger sister shopping for them in Freshwater - I can’t remember what her name was. The old ghosts were called Patience and Ivy. They loved Bryan Ferry’s voice, and would occasionally impersonate his vocal mannerisms: “Eeeuuuoooohhhh”, cackling to each other over their tea. Oddly, they had an aversion to cups and saucers (yet they were genteel ghosts, I thought?) and insisted on drinking their tea from large, chipped mugs. I still have one of those mugs, that commemorates the wedding of Princess Anne & Mark Phillips. It’s lived in America twice with me - but that’s another story.

I recorded a demo of this song with the Egyptians in that same house, later in the year, which lay like a piece of old furniture in the dust for years. Recently, several people have requested it for our streaming show so - voilà! Here it is, dusted down and slightly polished…