“None of This Should Have Happened”

• By Mark Cooper
• Q
• Apr 1987

Unlistenable early tapes. Refusals to appear on Top Of The Pops. Information-free record sleeves. A mistrust of people “who can play all the strings on a guitar at once”. Success, for the Cocteau Twins, came by accident not design.

Late in 1981, the three original Cocteau Twins — Liz Frazer, Robin Guthrie and Will Heggie — came down from Falkirk to London with two demo tapes. They’d recorded the songs for the tapes twice because they knew nothing of tape copying. One they delivered to John Peel and the other they handed to Simon Raymonde, then working in a record shop beneath Beggars Banquet’s office. That office gave desk space to the singly named Ivo, then sole representative of his record company 4AD. Ivo was selected because the Cocteaus were avid fans of the label’s Australian heroes, The Birthday Party Oddly enough, Ivo both received the tape and actually played it. He and Peel offered the novices immediate support despite the apparently appalling quality of those first demos.

The Cocteaus had little idea that a lot of other bands were trying exactly the same tack yet had gone straight to two of the few people in London who were likely to recognise their potential.

“I don’t know how long it would have taken them to make the kind of recordings that most people in the record industry would be prepared to listen to all the way through,” Ivo now wonders. “Probably at least another year. The tape really was rough — you can scarcely hear Elizabeth’s vocals. I remember playing it on the way back from Cambridge and a recording session that was going rather unhappily. I put the tape on and drove 50 miles playing it over and over, listening to these wonderfully distorting guitars…”

Peel gave the group a couple of radio sessions while Ivo offered them fairly constant floor space for their trips down from Scotland. Soon he installed them in London’s Blackwing Studios and helped them record their debut LP, Garlands, in a mere 9 days at the cost of £900. It remains the only Cocteau’s LP for which the material was written before entering the studio, a fact which helps explain the speed of the recording and the comparisons that were soon made between Liz Frazer’s voice and that of Siouxsie of the Banshees. Garlands eventually reached Number 2 in the Independent Chart as did its successor Lullabies, released a few months later.

Subsequently, the Cocteaus have maintained a fairly constant stream of 12-inch EPs and LPs, rarely more than months apart. The LPs, in particular, continue to sell steadily with worldwide sales at around the 175,000 mark. In the spring of 1984, the single ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ reached Number 29 on the National Pop Chart while the group’s last LP, Victorialand, released in April 1986, entered the National LP chart at Number 10. The Cocteau Twins quickly became financially independent of 4AD and remain so, still finding time to collaborate with the likes of the 4AD project This Mortal Coil and, most recently, Harold Budd. They have never had a manager. According to the unwritten rules of the record industry, none of this should have happened — least of all to as unlikely a pair as Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser, aged 23 and 22 respectively. The Cocteaus have never toured consistently, never put a picture of themselves on their distinctive “psychedelic” sleeves, rarely appeared on television or in the music press and remain largely disinterested in explaining their music or, indeed, themselves.

Meanwhile, their music has developed from record to record as an increasingly luxuriant beast. Rock critics have likened the Cocteaus to the “Voice of God” and suggested that their music is the perfect accompaniment for a variety of pursuits including the taking of morphine and sexual intercourse, not necessarily in that order. Some audiences have chosen to sit down crosslegged during a Cocteaus’ performance, some members of those audiences have explained to the group that their music is best enjoyed “when completely out of your head”.

Neither of these last two reactions particularly please either Robin, Liz, or the group’s new third member, Simon Raymonde, the man who accepted the charge of that first demo tape and joined the others towards the end of ‘83. The Cocteau Twins are now one of The Big Four of the Independent Charts — alongside Mute’s Depeche Mode, Factory’s New Order and, before their EMI signing, The Smiths. Like New Order, the Cocteaus are resolutely down-to-earth about their music while remaining bemused that journalists should want to know about their personalities. Indeed they remain indifferently hostile to the cult of the celebrity currently dominating British pop and politics. Perversely, the more they insist that it’s the music that counts, the more their mystery increases.

The Cocteaus’ is one of the few contemporary musics that hints that its makers might have access to profundities. Yet while all kinds of pop nonentities are busy telling their audience what to think, the trio insist on a language that is abstract and private. Despite the occasional lapses into tweeness or predictability, they are perhaps the only group in Britain who are selling their imagination and not themselves.

Robin and Simon are doggedly perplexed by what the pop industry expects from musicians. Liz, as so often, is simply uncomprehending. Sitting in a 4AD office, Robin talks in a quiet Scottish sing-song that tends to the sardonic while Simon’s hair stands up on end like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, as if bemused by the perversity of my questions. As for Liz, she rarely completes a sentence without one of the boys saving her tongue from complete entanglement.

“Most things I can’t do,” she explains towards the end of the interview. Dressed like a 17th-century apothecary complete with plucked brows and eyes that constantly blink, Liz concentrates intently on the questions and, for the most part, shrugs her shoulders in incomprehension. According to Robin, Liz once cooked him some strawberries in an attempt to cheer him on his sick bed. Incapacity is Liz’s watchword.

“Before she even tries something, she knows she can’t do it,” crows Robin. “That’s absolutely inbuilt into her character so it’ll stop her from trying. So she gets me to do it…”

“And then I can stop wasting time,” riposted Liz, “and go ahead and do something important…”

According to Simon, Liz has improved since coming to London. For the first 18 months, she never went out alone, not least because she had yet to master the tube map. “I just can’t think in those terms,” bemoans Liz, “I just can’t, can’t. I was never any good at exams or anything like that. I can’t do these practical things.” As her singing suggested, Liz Frazer is simply on another plane.

She and Robin plainly detest the notion that their audience could be remotely interested in them as personalities.

“I’d like to think that people don’t want to know about us,” he says. “I’d like them to accept the records for what they are. It’s like when people do interviews, they ask what our politics are. What the fuck does it matter what our politics are? What makes my opinion on something like that more important than their own just because I play music… I’m not a benefit person. The only thing we’ve put our name to is Artists Against Apartheid and anybody who’s human would do that. There’s so many worthwhile causes; if you do one, you’ve got to do them all. How can you choose one and not the others? Music with a concrete message has got its place. So many other people do it and they probably do it better than we ever could. Somebody like Morrissey is a very eloquent person, he can answer anything because he’s got a big vocabulary…”

“He hasn’t really…” laughs Liz.

“But he can talk,” says Robin. “He’s a better talker than he is a singer. That’s what people who buy Smiths’ records buy them for. Why should all music have a concrete message?”

There’s little that’s concrete in the Cocteaus’ music or their extraordinary array of song and record titles. Tiny Dynamine, “When Mama Was Moth,” “Sugar Hiccup,” “Sultitan Itan,” “Oomingmak” or “Aikea-Guinea” are rather more evocative than instructive. Some of these efforts embarrass Liz and clearly her selection process causes her some grief. Yet, ultimately, she doesn’t place too much importance on a mere title.

“I’m sure people do see the titles as a way into the songs,” she agrees. “But when you get to the record sleeve, you’ve got to call them something. If a song doesn’t have a title, it’s impossible to collect publishing on it. It’s also a convenience for the records so that you don’t get journalists going the one that goes, Hum, hum, hum. ‘Treasure”s an embarrassment but, you know, you’ve got to call it something and rather than Fred, John and Bert… You say, well, fuck it, it doesn’t matter, just write that…”

Like the titles, Cocteau Twins songs are simply collections of words. Liz has long since abandoned writing lyrics as such. “They’re all words that I sing. There’s none of it that’s just nonsense. You can’t just go out there and sing noises all day because you’d end up making the same noises all the time.”

Similarly, while the group and 4AD’s designers take great care in constructing the “right” sleeve, often remarkably information-free. Robin will assert that “the sleeves are for putting records in. I wouldn’t want people to buy our records because they saw a picture of us. I mean, they wouldn’t anyway!”

Unsurprisingly, conventional promotional methods are not warmly embraced by the Cocteau Twins. The medium of TV, they feel, is a compromise that eats the soul. They refused to appear on “Top Of The Pops” when ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ reached Number 29 because they dislike the sound and appearance of the show. For their music.

“Everybody that goes on ‘Top Of The Pops’ has the flashing lights and the dancing girls and the balloons and the party atmosphere,” is Robin’s caustic observation. “I’d feel a fucking prick standing onstage, miming, with all those people behind me doing that sort of thing. Everybody says, You should go on, you’ll appeal to so many more people. So what if you’re going to sell more records if you have to do it that way? It’s not my duty because I’m in a band to go on ‘Top Of The Pops’ and dance about like a fucking idiot, miming. As people we get embarrassed in embarrassing situations. I don’t want to be a freak show. It’s not an anti-‘Top Of The Pops’ thing. I’ll sit and watch it and laugh at what everyone else does. Why try and be a part of something that so obviously has nothing to do with you? It’s like a big disco and I don’t ever go to discos. Why go to a disco for the first time and be seen by 12 million people doing it?”

Contemptuous of all forms of TV promotion, flatly refusing to fabricate stories about their love lives for ravenous tabloids, the Cocteaus idle along contentedly in their own little world of late-night radio, concerts and the occasional forays into the music press. The band refute any charge of complacency or preciousness, however. “It gets worrying if your audience remains the same,” Robin admits. “We want as many people to hear our music as possible. But it’s not our fault if we’re on the circuit you describe. It’s not as if we want to be on night-time radio only and we aren’t that much anyway. I’d be quite happy if Radio One played about five or six hours of our music every day — but they won’t. We won’t change to fit in with what they want. What’s the point of changing for anybody except yourself? All of our records sound different to one another but that’s not something we set out to achieve.”

Despite their concern with the “music itself”, they maintain a contempt for “musos”, studio wizardry and the professionalism of mid-’70s progressive rock culture. As Robin so succinctly puts it: “I’ve got a real dislike for the kind of person who can play all the strings on the guitar at once.”

Their live performances use specially recorded backing tapes that approximate their vinyl versions and still often terrify the group. “If you’re still at the stage where you get violently nervous and have to concentrate all the way through in terms of the playing, that’s not slick is it? If we start off a song and it fucks up, we’ll stop the tape and say. Right, let’s try that again. The bigger we get, we get more people coming along to see us for the first time who’ve just heard a few of the records; their expectations must be mega. And what they see is three people just standing there playing crude versions of the songs. And they aren’t even our greatest hits. I get a lot of abuse when I stop to tune my guitar sometimes. I’m sure they probably just think you’re not doing a very slick show. But it’s not a show…”

“It’d be nice not to be so nervous,” mutters Liz. “The last time that we played, I started the first song and nothing came out. I’m sure people must have thought the microphone wasn’t switched on…”

Liz always looks like she’s on trial for her life onstage. She stands as if rooted to one spot and pummels herself around the chest while singing, as if beating the notes out of herself. “It’s a tremendous responsibility,” she says. “It’s so easy to get distracted. You spend the whole of the gig trying to forget that there’s anybody there which I know sounds absolutely ridiculous…” “She only hits herself to wake up,” scoffs Simon.

Robin and Liz have been lovers since they left Falkirk. He and the other original Cocteau, Will Heggie, enlisted Liz after observing her extraordinary dancing at a DJ spot they had in town. Robin finds it hard to associate their music with grim industrial Falkirk. “If you’d ever been there, it’s not somewhere you go back to. Whenever I hear about people I knew, they’re either dead or still going down the pub.” Nor will they acknowledge that their relationship affects the music. “We don’t sit and fucking french-kiss in the rehearsal room,” complains Liz. “I don’t think we’re an obvious couple…”

They moved down to London in 1984 and now live in Chiswick “where there’s nothing to do. We don’t know anybody, we never go out,” mumbles Liz. She acknowledges it’d be nice to know more people outside their music-making circle. “It’s not really very nice being distraught so much of the time…”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” says Robin. “We started off in a very small world. I didn’t know a lot of people in Scotland either. We’ve probably made hundreds of acquaintances in the music business but that’s acquaintances. What can you do about it? Stand on a street corner and say, Be my friend? It’s like when we’re making up the guest list, it’s, Got any guests tonight then? And the answer’s, No.”

This voluntary isolation extends even to the recording process. Liz claims she can only sing “in complete solitude.” Her startling range of ascending voices are backed by little more than the usual guitars, bass and electronic drums, later treated during mixing.

Swathed in echo and reverb, the Cocteaus’ songs sound like an ambient choir, pursued by an otherworldly train or gorgeous melody. They have gradually shorn themselves of the spikier traces of their punk beginnings and their latest LP Victorialand is their most tranquil of all. They use sound with the skill of the best ambient or New Age musicians while offering an emotional substance quite lacking from those styles. One day, in the fullness of time, this strange trio will probably make their own Dark Side Of The Moon.

“That’d be fucking boring,” says Robin.

Liz just mutters to herself. She is probably talking about something else altogether. ▣

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