Head Over Heels / Cocteau Twins // Official website

“We had to give up the flat because we couldn’t afford to travel and pay the rent. So we did that, did the tour, and then of course we had no home. So we thought, ‘Where the fuck are we gonna go?’ Foolishly, John Wilde and Scott Roger, who’d come to a lot of the dates on the tour, had said, well, if you really need somewhere to stay, just come along at any old time and we’ll put you up and all that stuff. But I think they meant a weekend, and it turned out to be about a year. We made Head Over Heels while we lived there—we went back to Grangemouth to record it, made it up as we went along in the studio—but we stayed there while it was going on. There was a lot going on in that house. It was a really good atmosphere, really productive.” Elizabeth Fraser

Head Over Heels

October 1983
4AD
CAD 313
37 min, 1 sec

Track listing

When Mama Was Moth
Five Ten Fiftyfold
Sugar Hiccup
In Our Angelhood
Glass Candle Grenades
In the Gold Dust Rush
The Tinderbox (of a heart)
Multifoiled
My Love Paramour
Musette and Drums

Formats

Vinyl
Cassette
CD
Digital

Performers

Release notes

Produced by Cocteau Twins and John Fryer at Palladium Studios, Edinburgh.
Engineered by Jon Turner.
Special thanks to Ally Gibb for saxophone on “Five Ten Fiftyfold.”
Art direction and design by 23 Envelope.

CADC313 (cassette) and CAD313CD (CD) included tracks from the EP Sunburst and Snowblind.
Head Over Heels peaked at #51 on the UK album chart, and was 4AD’s first #1 record on the UK independent chart.
The sleeve design was inspired by a scene from the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker.
Lyrics from “When Mama Was Moth,” “Glass Candle Grenades,” “The Tinderbox (of a heart),” and “My Love Paramour” are printed on the inner sleeve of the vinyl release.
The album title takes its name from a lyric in the song “It’s All But An Ark Lark” from the EP Lullabies, released the previous year.
The track “Musette and Drums” appears on the 1985 compilation The Pink Opaque.
Remastered versions of “Sugar Hiccup” and “My Love Paramour” appear on the 2000 compilation Stars and Topsoil.
“Sugar Hiccup,” “My Love Paramour,” and “Musette and Drums” have appeared in live performances.
An instrumental track, “My Hue and Cry,” was recorded during this period but never released until a Radio Sessions version appeared in 1999 on the BBC Sessions, though a version of it was performed live during the mid-1980s.
Head Over Heels was digitally remastered and re-released, with original artwork, by 4AD in 2003.
“Musette and Drums” was included on the two-disc compilation that accompanied the 2013 book, Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, by Martin Aston.