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The way we make love

I wrote the song after reading books on criminology – my father had a good collection, being a detective and all. Hindley and Brady were inescapable at the time, all over the news, something you couldn’t ignore, even as a 15-year-old, and being in the family of a cop, this was discussed over the dinner table.
— Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson: “Across a Crowded Room” (1985) (cover: Phil Smee & Donato Cinicolo)

The Moors Murders inspired another song by a British musician youthfully affected by the crimes – this one a Londoner and son of a policeman. “Love in a Faithless Country” by folk-rock pioneer Richard Thompson isn’t “about” the murders – unlike “Suffer Little Children,” the song (from Thompson’s 1985 album Across a Crowded Room) contains no outright references. But it does trade on a related theme: that of the homicidal couple on the run, unrepentant and bonded by their crimes, a subversive whiff of erotic charge in the air. Had Thompson not acknowledged the murders’ inspiration on the song, no listener could be expected to explicitly make the connection. Yet it’s there. And once the link is made, the already ominous track gains chilling intensity.

Always move in pairs and travel light
A loose friend is an enemy, keep it tight
Always leave a job the way you found it
Look for trouble coming and move around it

Richard Thompson: “Love in a Faithless Country” (1985)

Brady and Hindley weren’t unique. Difficult as it is to assimilate, romantically linked couples sometimes kill for fun, and their victims have included children, whom they sometimes sexually abuse. Such behavior violates all social codes and, though several exist, no theories seem sufficient to explain it. Often the power dynamic in such relationships is tilted towards an older, dominant male – an obvious psychopath seeking a sexual partner-in-crime with whom to share his perverse proclivities. The more passive partner is typically driven by some elusive combination of lust and fear, and after capture leans heavily on the latter to explain their actions.

In America this motif first emerged in 1958, when drifter Charles Starkweather (20) and his underage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate (15), went on a killing spree that left 11 people dead, including Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and baby half-sister. Their nihilistic crimes inspired both music (Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 song, “Nebraska”) and films (Terrence Malick’s restrained 1973 Badlands, Oliver Stone’s hysterical 1994 Natural Born Killers). Starkweather and Fugate didn’t sexually assault their victims, but later murderous pairs upped the transgressive ante with sex crimes sufficiently horrendous to steal one’s sleep. In the 1970s and ’80s, Gloucester couple Fred and Rosemary West raped, tortured, and murdered numerous women and girls, including their own children. In the ‘90s, Canadians Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka committed similar sex-murders; among their victims was Homolka’s teenage sister.

Murderous couples (left to right): Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, Fred and Rosemary West, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo (unsourced news photos; Wikipedia)

Always make your best moves late at night
Always keep your tools well out of sight
It never pays to work the same town twice
It never hurts to be a little nice

Thompson’s song is driven less by words than music. Where “Suffer” lulls the listener with steady, tonal accompaniment – the only musical clue to its dire theme a minor-key modulation towards the end of its repeated chord progression – “Faithless” jars with dramatic pauses, dynamics changes, and outright dissonance. Like other sprawling Thompson songs that often close LP sides (“Sloth,” “Night Comes In,” “Pharaoh”), it uses contrasting elements and flexible space to create a moody soundscape – here redolent of the vast, lonely moors. Interestingly, a woman’s voice is used to haunting effect in both songs: as “Suffer” fades, female laughter is heard in the background (evoking Hindley, carefree and predatory), while “Faithless” is punctuated with shrill, startling vocal interjections from background singer Christine Collister (as if Hindley’s facade has fallen, revealing her shattered interior).

Richard Thompson (2007) (Anthony Pepitone; Wikipedia)

Learn the way to melt into a crowd
Never catch an eye or dress too loud



Three full verses consist of such elliptical advice – blandly expressed vocational directives for … whom, exactly? These mildly sinister pronouncements – ostensibly shared between lovers – could apply equally to thieves, spies, mercenaries, or cutthroats, and perhaps that’s the point: to conjure all of the above and by doing so reveal kinships between activity that involves furtively sneaking around in order to violate innate rights of privacy, property, and personhood. In places it’s possible to ascribe a specific line to the Moors Murders (“Always keep your tools well out of sight” might refer to Brady, the gravedigger; “It never hurts to be a little nice” could be Hindley, coaxing her trusting prey), but overall the lyrics and associations remain oblique. The true textual clue to the horror at the heart of the song is one of juxtaposition: the repeated refrain that falls between each banal, cloak-and-dagger verse:

That’s the way we make love
That’s the way we make love
That’s the way we make love

Thompson makes the point explicit in the final lines of the last verse: “You’ve got to be invisible my friend / to find the joy on which we must depend.” Because … that’s the way we make love. The unfathomable link between sexual arousal and child murder is the song’s hellish center, and Thompson twists the knife again, as it were, by using the euphemism traditionally reserved for romantic love to describe the couple’s aberrant bond. Another striking choice of words, in the song’s final line, implies some awareness on the part of Thompson’s shadowy protagonists that they exist in a hell of their own device. For while joy is indeed something in life we “find,” to “depend” on it … to “must” have it … suggests not joy but addiction – a Faustian bargain that, left unaltered, will lead to one’s doom.

The concept of hell and endless torment is popular with those who believe they aren’t headed there.
–Ian Brady

You couldn’t hate me more than I hate myself.
–Myra Hindley

Police and dogs search Saddleworth Moor (1965)
(unsourced news photo; thesun.co.uk)