Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth

Roger Doyle, Elena López and Caroline Polachek on the lasting magic and surprising second life of an '80s pop paean to young love, yearning and possibility

“Cinders always remain where there once was a fire.”

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It only took Roger Doyle 10 minutes to compose his most enduring tune. Sitting at the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument in his Bray studio one day in early 1984, he quickly assembled the filigreed synth patterns and clanking bassline that would eventually become ‘Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth’. After spending the previous two years slowly mastering this complex bit of digital sampling technology – made famous by the likes of Kate Bush and Herbie Hancock – here was a perfect piece of theatrical pop, bursting out of him like the first flowers of the season. He knew straight away he was onto something special.

What the godfather of Irish electronic music did not predict was just how long it would take ‘Spring Is Coming’ to become the cult hit it was always destined to be. Four decades on from its 1986 release on U2’s Mother Records, this paean to young love, yearning and possibility – complete with lyrics and ornate vocals from Elena López, clattering drums from Sean Devitt, and backup singing from Olwen Fouéré – has taken on a life of its own. Over the past five years, it has amassed over a million streams across numerous platforms, become a regular fixture on NTS Radio, and been reissued on vinyl alongside an array of other works from Doyle's immense back catalogue, both as a soloist and as part of Operating Theatre, the group under whose name it was released. Ask around, and you'll find an increasing number of discerning listeners willing to go to bat for it as one of the best Irish pop tracks of all time. 

Most recently, on Valentine’s Day 2024, the avant-pop auteur Caroline Polachek released her own cover of the song as part of the expanded Everasking Edition of her 2023 LP, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, launching it into the pockets of a young, international audience for whom it has struck a resonant chord. Almost 40 years to the day since Doyle committed the original ‘Spring Is Coming’ backing track to cassette, this euphoric, hypermodern rendition has accompanied more solo walks, wistful main-character moments and social media posts than anyone could have anticipated. But how did we get here? How did this sleeper hit come to be? And what magic dust at its core has kept its cinders smouldering over all these years? I spoke with Doyle, López and Polachek to find out. 

Roger Doyle on the Fairlight CMI

Doyle is just finishing up a day in the studio when he picks up the phone one evening in March. The 74-year-old composer has remained incredibly prolific over the years; his Bandcamp is a veritable treasure trove of material old and new, from space opera soundtracks to contemporary classical experiments inspired by the works of James Joyce. When we speak, he’s gearing up for the 25th anniversary reissue of Babel, an enormous electronic project comprising over 100 tracks with almost 50 collaborators. “I'm always finishing off work,” he says. “Today, I’m listening back to 260 minutes of music; I have to check that there are no clicks.”

It’s a restless creativity that’s followed him since day one. By the time he’d upped sticks from Dublin to Bray in 1982, he already had a decade’s worth of electronic exploration behind him. Adrift after finishing school in the late ‘60s, and without the Leaving Cert points he needed to get into college, he wrote a four-page composition and showed it to his old piano teacher, who later handed it to a professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. They ended up taking him on for a three-year programme. 

In 1974, he was awarded a scholarship to study electronic music in the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, where he completed his first album, a collection of strange concrète manipulations and scratchy electro-acoustic assemblages called Oizzo No, arguably the first of its kind from an Irish artist. After completing another scholarship programme at the Finnish Radio Experimental Music Studio, Doyle released his second album, Thalia, in 1978, a work of dramatic avant-garde collagism that ended up on the fabled Nurse With Wound List. 

That same year, having returned to Ireland, Doyle was invited to play Thalia in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, a crucial hub for the city’s bustling creative community. “I thought it'd be great to find a dancer for that, rather than just playing a 30-minute electronic piece to speakers,” he told the Irish Examiner last year. The playwright Jim Sheridan – yes, that one –  introduced him to a young actress by the name of Olwen Foueré, who later performed an improvised dance piece in response to his music. Operating Theatre was born. Over the next few years, the experimental music and theatre troupe put on numerous performances around the city and further afield, accompanied by an eclectic cast of co-conspirators.

One day, while standing in the dole queue on Werburgh Street in Dublin, Doyle bumped into the drummer Sean Devitt, who told him about a new studio that was opening up just down the coast in Co. Wicklow that had a Fairlight in its arsenal. This revolutionary bit of kit was hard to come by; Doyle raced to meet the owners as soon as he could, eager to get in on the action. Before long, he’d moved to Bray, and had the keys to the studio in his pocket. 

It took some time to get the hang of it; Doyle remembers spending a “painful” first two months in the studio flinging the Fairlight’s instruction manual against the wall, baffled by this new sampling tech. As he puts it now though, “the cathedral of learning turned into the matchbox of knowledge”, and he gradually learned to harness the machine’s creative possibilities. In October 1983, he demonstrated the instrument in a TV broadcast for RTÉ’s Live Arts show, which included a performance of the song ‘Part Of My Make-up’ with Foueré. A collection of recordings he made on the Fairlight between 1983 and 1988 can also be found on his Bandcamp. 

Around this time, an article appeared in the Evening Press paper with the headline: The man who can make a symphony orchestra out of a synthesiser. It caught the attention of Bono, who was still riding high on the success of U2’s third album, War. He also happened to live in Bray at the time, about 100 yards down the road from Doyle, who he called up one day out of the blue asking for piano lessons. 

It became a regular gig, and Doyle eventually mustered up the courage to play him ‘Spring Is Coming’, the pop jewel in his avant-garde catalogue. He knew that U2 were in the process of launching a new label for emerging Irish artists, so he took a punt. “I was a thirty something with a Fairlight,” he says. “But I had big thoughts.”

“He told me, ‘Jesus, that needs drums’,” Doyle remembers. “And did I know any singers?” 

As a matter of fact, he did.

Elena López was 18 when she moved from her native Lanzarote to Dublin to improve her English. A poet, she had her first piece published in a local literary magazine that same year. She quickly fell in with an artsy crowd, hanging out with future figureheads of the Irish theatre scene such as Philip Davison and Sebastian Barry. Bewley's café was regular haunt, and when one day in 1983 her friend Eoghan Nolan didn’t turn up due to sickness, Doyle sat down at her table and introduced himself.

They began collaborating almost straight away, she remembers; her words and improvised vocal melodies wove through his abstract compositions. “You could stick a mic in front of her and play back something on the Fairlight and she would just speak these beautiful, poetic lines," he remembers now.

They ended up recording about 15 songs together, including ‘These Are Loves’, ‘Nanda In The Bar’, ‘The Garden Room’ and ‘You Must Be In’, each of which appear in the expanded Babel reissue. Other collaborative works included ‘Belisa In The Garden’, ‘Ah Love, Ah Love’ and ‘Upon The Banks Of The River’, which were first performed as part of Operating Theatre’s musical interpretation of Federico García Lorca’s play, The Love Of Don Perlimplín And Belisa In The Garden, in which López and Doyle played the leads. You can listen to that whole suite here.

It was López who encouraged Doyle to embrace his under-utilised “poppy side” –  “If he’s working with the right person, it kind of gels,” she says now, speaking from her home in Dublin, where she still lives to this day, writing short prose and poetry, and working as a translator and scholar. The pair had already been working on ‘Spring Is Coming’ for a little while by the time Bono heard it. As she remembers it, the version Doyle initially showed the U2 frontman actually included her voice too, and she recalls later being sent a tape that featured him singing it back to her.

López sings its wordless refrain down the line, bursting into laughter as she recounts the youthful naivety and “tendency for dramatics” that birthed its lyrics, assembled from "little bits of letters I never sent.”

Dear Luz, 
There's so many things I want
But mainly, and like everybody
I want to be loved

“I was very young," she says. "I was uprooted, if you like. One of the letters was to my sister, Luz, expressing what I felt at the time… The images are maybe kind of cute; it's about first love, and expressing those desires. That’s pretty universal!”

Don't you think, dear Luz
That because, I sing
I have a light heart
It's been such a long time
Since I was in love

López drew influence from films and Spanish folk music in her lyrics: an earlier version of the above verse referenced an old song about a bird who would literally die if it couldn't sing; the titular strawberry was an image that had stuck with her from Roman Polanksi’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles adaptation – a symbol of seduction that comes loaded with multiple layers of genuine discomfort, but which López transforms into something altogether more innocent, sweet and universal.

Dear Daniel
I can't think of anything worth writing
I just write to you
So that you know that I am alive
And that cinders always remain 
Where there was once a fire

“That letter was to this guy in Switzerland that I had a major crush on,” López remembers with a smirk. “I misunderstood a letter that he had sent me, where he said ciao, which I thought meant ‘goodbye’, but it actually means ‘hello’ as well. I thought he was saying goodbye to me! I thought, okay, that’s it, I can't keep this platonic thing going on anymore! I never sent that one either…”

It’s the stuff of Big Feelings – of all-consuming infatuation and that borderline combustible longing more usually reserved for journals, internal dialogues and, of course, unsent messages. In the song, López recites them with a dizzying conviction familiar to anyone who's been swept up in the throes of desire, before letting rip with a keening soprano's cadence in the chorus. 

At the song’s heart is a sense of unbridled optimism; an embrace of all these chaotic, overwhelming emotions, and a readiness to surf them straight into the next phase. “It’s about [saying] there's a world of possibilities out there, and that this possibility will happen again," López says. "It doesn't matter that maybe I'm a little bit sad today, because the seasons succeed one another, and spring is coming. This too shall pass; spring will come again.”

Operating Theatre L - R: Olwen Fouéré, Sean Devitt, Roger Doyle, Elena López

It was summer 1985 when López, Doyle, Devitt and Fouéré were invited to Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios to record the single ‘Queen Of No Heart’ with Bono at the helm as executive producer. ‘Spring Is Coming’ was the B-Side. Doyle has fond memories of the recording process. “It was all very good natured; there was a lot of laughter,” he says, recounting Devitt’s ability to mimic the sound of a tape recorder rewinding with his mouth, and the “very cool” Bono’s persistence with them when it came to getting the perfect take.  

López, who also wrote the lyrics and sang on the A-Side, remembers things a little differently. She was back in Spain at the time, so Bono had her flown to Ireland on a first class ticket so that she could record her vocals. It was he who fought her corner when some tension arose within the group around who should actually sing the lead on ‘Spring Is Coming’, she recalls. She couldn’t help but feel sidelined. Though she had previously performed in an Operating Theatre play, she maintains that these songs really had “nothing to do” with that project, and that the decision to release the single under that guise was a misappropriation of her work; an attempt at publicising something she didn’t really feel all that connected to.

Regardless, it was released in 1986, with a 7" single comprising 'Queen Of No Heart' and 'Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth' and a 12" EP adding a few of Doyle's solo works as well as 'Part Of My Make-up'. As other artists who went on to release on Mother Records would also learn though, promotion from the label’s side was scarce, and the whole thing fizzled away without much fanfare. Doyle remembers the crushing disappointment he felt at the time, having been so sure that this was going to be their big break. “They didn't even get it on the radio,” he says. “Imagine U2 not getting something on the radio, when all they’d have to do is click their fingers.” He received a 60p royalty statement three years later.

Part of López wishes they'd made more of a go of being a proper band once the single was released, having “left [her] studies to try and become a pop star". They threw a launch party for the record in Dublin’s trendy new Sides venue, but she didn’t sense much drive within the group to actually get out there and play gigs.

They made a music video for ‘Queen Of No Heart’ – produced with money López had borrowed from her dad – and they were even invited by to perform on the Late Late Show by Gay Byrne at one point, after he’d seen them play ‘Nanda In The Bar’ on the Nighthawks show. But López was already back in Spain, and couldn’t afford to fly back for it. Things slowly fell apart, life moved on, and Operating Theatre went their separate ways in 1988. 

Caroline Polachek had already been a fan of Operating Theatre for a while by the time All City's Allchival imprint reissued Doyle and Fouéré’s 1983 album Miss Mauger in late 2019, generating renewed interest in the extended outfit’s work. Speaking over a video call from Los Angeles, she recalls being shown ‘Part Of My Make-up’ and ‘Rampwalk’ by her ex, the musician Ian Drennan, in winter 2012, and subsequently going down a “rabbit hole” in search of whatever further traces of their music were available on the internet at that time. When she found ‘Spring Is Coming’ and ‘Queen Of No Heart’, she was struck by how different these “big pop songs” were to anything else of theirs she’d heard. 

“‘Spring Is Coming’ stayed a dear song to me,” she says. “But then something else happened. I listened to it a lot during the deep depths of the pandemic, and something about it really hit, not just as a very literal gesture of optimism, but it also felt so visceral. The vocal stylings of both of the singers feel so thrown, without concern, so free and so open and so cathartic. I listened to that song on repeat, hundreds and hundreds of times: walking to the studio, to get groceries, in the park, on the train. It really just gave me so much life and vitality… It really got me through the pandemic.”

“I started to think to myself, I wonder if I'd ever work up the guts to cover it,” she continues. “I think perfectly written songs are one thing to cover, but perfectly produced songs are very scary to cover. And the production of that song has something so special about it, with these harpsichord-style synths cutting through this drum kit that sounds like it was recorded in a rehearsal space. It’s all so perfect and so beautiful and so wild that I was intimidated to think about ever touching it.”

The decision to finally go through with it came at the end of her Spiralling tour, a near 12-month global run during which she and her band had become very close. They wanted something to commemorate it with. “Being on tour is kind of like being on a pirate ship,” she says. “You're with your crew, you go through all sorts of things, and you dock on many foreign lands together, and spend many solitary sad days out at sea together. We all felt a bit sentimental to be saying goodbye after a full year on the road.

“So I thought, wait a minute, my drummer [Russell Holzman] is kind of the master of playing breakbeats live, and my bassist [Maya Laner] has this incredible tone to her voice that almost reminds me of Wendy from Prefab Sprout – this iciness at the high-end which I love getting to hear live but has never made it onto the records. And then my guitarist [Matthew Horton] is just a total chameleon when it comes to the kinds of other instrumental tones he can slip into. Why don’t we all do ‘Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth’ together?”

To top it all off, Polachek tapped pop luminary A.G. Cook to produce it. Not exactly known for his work with live bands, she was curious to see what he’d do with the song. The recording process ended up being one of the fastest she’d ever been a part of. “I think this came together in like four sessions, which for me is unheard of,” she says. “There was a total synergy.”

The cover is quite loyal to the original; López even briefly mistook Polachek’s operatic vocals as her own on a first listen. The synths are a little more sleek, the bass a little smoother round the edges, but the song’s essential balance of untethered emotion and celestial tenderness feels perfectly judged, rejuvenated for its new life in the digital era. “Every single decision made it in,” says Polachek. “But, you know, the song was so good. And after having sat with it for so long, I think I really knew what I wanted out of it.”

There are some minor structural tweaks. Polachek cut the number of repetitions of the song’s title in the pre-chorus from four to three. “Three is quite an odd number in pop music,” she says. “You don't really hear it very often. I just felt like shortening it a bit would add to that feeling of surprise. I thought, that’s the spirit of the song a bit; the edge of the cliff is right there.”

She also inserted a spoken verse of her own into the song’s mid-section: a reprised portion of Desire’s ‘Blood And Butter’, whose lyrics chime with the same sense of longing that permeates López’s.

And what I want is, to walk beside you
Needing nothing, but the sun that's in our eyes
Paint the picture in blood and butter
Holy water, fire in the sky

It’s the most overt connection between ‘Spring Is Coming’ and the rest of Polachek’s album, but what she slowly came to realise was just how subconsciously influential this lockdown-era salve may have been on her own writing process. This song really lives “right smack dab at the centre” of the Desire universe, she says. “It was kind of a beautiful thing to discover, because that album was such a widely flung constellation of sounds that, even as I was making it, I was kind of concerned that it wasn't gonna gel into one thing… It felt like such a coup to realise that ‘Spring Is Coming’ sits squarely in between every song.”

“It sits right at the seat of what this album is about and what it's meant to feel like,” she says. You can sense it in the “cathartic approach to breakbeats” in ‘Smoke’, the spoken passage in ‘Pretty In Possible’, and in the “wild vocals” and non-lyrical singing in tracks like ‘Sunset’ and ‘Welcome To My Island’. Even the song’s references to cinders and fire feel entwined with Desire’s volcanic imagery. 

The cover feels tailor-made for the festival stage; it begs to have a crowd sing it back in joyful, full-throated unison. It seems almost cruel that Polachek and company only recorded it together once they’d wrapped their tour, but she’s already excited to play it live when the time comes: “Next album, next tour.”

Caroline Polachek live at Wide Awake Festival, May 2023. Credit: Garry Jones

Polachek has a history with Irish music. She previously covered The Corrs’ ‘Breathless’, for instance, transforming it into a soaring electronic pop gem. And then there’s Enya, an artist whose music she sought comfort and safety in as a child amidst her parents’ divorce. “Enya was the only record that I would hear both played at my mom and my dad's house during that time,” she says. “As a little kid who was quite disoriented and scared by the whole experience, Enya sort of archetypally became like a third parent for me: this soothing, calming voice that I would hear in every environment that made things feel like home, but it wasn't home that I that I was familiar with, it was like a spiritual home. It was a home that sort of encapsulated the fantasy worlds of the Disney films, or fairy tales, or paintings that I'd seen that felt so compelling and magical. And suddenly, here was Enya, singing about these places and spaces and situations that made it all real. 

“Listening to her was maybe one of the first genuinely psychedelic and mind-opening experiences I ever had with music,” she continues. “Around that age, like eight years old, seven years old, I realised that music – this little CD that would go in the car or go in the boombox – had these really really big powers, that it could encapsulate these worlds that were so vivid. I also didn't understand how any of this music was made... I would secretly learn to play her songs on the piano. I think that secretly began my love for electronic music. It sort of set the blueprint for me, for my relationship with electronic textures, that they don't need to reference instruments, they don't need to reference technology, they just need to reference energy and emotion and feelings in the service of telling a story… Enya is the master of that.”

It’s a sense of enchantment that ‘Spring Is Coming’ emits in spades too – a vitality that has kept it alive over all these years. “It's like that feeling of when you're riding your bike down a hill and the bike’s just going a little faster than you want it to,” says Polachek. “It's like that moment just before it becomes scary. And we don't get to hang on to that moment for long. But the song lets us sort of hang on to that… I would love for it to find its way into people's lives as they experienced that first warm, sunny day of spring, where everyone goes a bit mental for a day. That's all I could ask for really.”

Doyle and López have been heartened by their song’s surprising second life, and thanks to their shared ownership of the copyright, royalties get split right down the middle. “I feel a great joy that it lives,” says Doyle. “I’ve watched it grow now for maybe two years. It looked like a little bump at first, then it looked like a rolling hilltop, but then it kept coming. It didn’t fade! Luckily we had it registered properly.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by López. “I am so thankful I got to work with Roger in the ‘80s; I love his music. He's a genius, particularly on the more melodic side. I’m particularly delighted, after all that, that our collaborative work has gotten some recognition, and that it still stands… I am so very chuffed that Miss Polachek decided to make a cover of that song, which so much represents me, and to have been Roger’s collaborator and muse.”

If the TikTok era has taught us anything, it’s that you can never really know how long a song will take to find its audience. Now, it seems as though every week a newly unearthed classic catches an unexpected wave of virality years after its release. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shared ingredient amongst them all is often in their dealings with intense matters of the heart and mind, from Life Without Buildings’ ‘The Leanover’ and Yves Tumor’s ‘Limerance’ to the entirety of The Caretaker’s 'Everywhere At The End Of Time’.

But the slow-burn revival of ‘Spring Is Coming’ feels more organic still: less an algorithmic miracle than a natural, inevitable denouement of fate. You’d like to imagine that in any universe, in any timeline, this song would always arrive at this same point some day. And really, the hint was always there in Lopez’s lyrics, glowing softly like an ember in her timeless promise of warmer days, love and light. “Spring always comes,” she says with a smile. “Spring is always coming.”

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Thanks for reading! Come back in a couple of week’s for this month’s round-up of new Irish music. In the meantime, be well!