Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust in an EP released by This Mortal Coil, a supergroup on the 4AD label, headed up by label founder and president Ivo Watts-Russell. It was released in 1983, after Ivo had tried to convince Modern English to record a medley of "Sixteen Days" and "Gathering Dust," two of the band's early songs with which they closed out their live sets. The band declined, but Ivo decided to assemble a group of musicians to record the medley. Members of Cocteau Twins, Colourbox and Modern English itself, along with vocalist Gordon Sharp of Cindytalk made up the band that recorded the title track of the EP.
Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins recorded the intended b-side, a cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren." Ivo was pleased enough with the results that "Siren" was made the A-side of the 7" release.
Ivo has expressed displeasure with how the "Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust" medley turned out, and it has become somewhat of a rarity. A 4AD compilation EP, only available through the iTunes Music Store in 2006, was the only re-release of the song until it was included in a box set of all This Mortal Coil recordings, entitled Dust And Guitars, that 4AD released in 2011.
Famous quotes containing the words sixteen days, sixteen, days, gathering and/or dust:
“Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph.... “Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?””
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
““I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
When fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.”
—John Wilmot, 2d Earl Of Rochester (1647–1680)
“This was once
a city among men, a gathering together of spirit.
It was measured by the Lord and found wanting.”
—Robert Duncan (b. 1919)
“Many a miner has gone
into the deep pit
to receive the dust of a kiss,
an ore-cell.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)