“The Cocteau Twins”

• By Jim Irvin
• The Word
• April 2006

In the summer of 1981, a member of staff at the Earl’s Court branch of Beggars Banquet Records noticed an odd-looking couple loitering outside the shop, one morning before opening time.

When he spoke to them, the large young man with wild hair handed him a demo tape for Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD Records, whose offices were above the shop; the tiny girl with a necklace of chicken bones didn’t say much. The couple were 19 year old Robin Guthrie and 18 year old Elizabeth Fraser, visiting from Grangemouth, Scotland. The label on their cassette read ‘The Cocteau Twins’. The young man they gave it to was 19 year old Simon Raymonde. None of them realised during this fleeting encounter that they would soon be together making some of the most distinctive and beautiful music yet recorded.

Grangemouth is a “planned town” in Stirlingshire, Scotland, a port midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh on the mouth of the Firth Of Forth, bracketed by factories — a giant BP oil refinery and petrochemical plant and the ICI dye works. Grimy smoke regularly descends upon the town’s featureless housing estates, leaving smuts of soot on clean washing and only grey air to breathe. “It’s the most abominable place anyone could grow up in,” reckons Colin Wallace who was a year above Robin Guthrie at Grangemouth High School. Guthrie, he recalls “wasn’t the most popular or the most unpopular,” a slight outsider but fiercely bright, getting straight A’s in his O Levels and Highers. Guthrie had one keen ambition: to get out of Grangemouth.

Elizabeth Fraser was in the year below him. Wallace vividly recalls the first time he noticed her at school. “She was a little punk with a shaved head, leather miniskirt, fishnet tights and monkey boots. She looked incredible. She was maybe 14. Striking, but a bit of an outsider too.”

Wallace had football to take his mind off Grangemouth, Guthrie had music. His brother was famous locally for his huge record collection and musical knowledge. Guthrie followed suit. He taught himself guitar and would DJ at the town’s only punk club, based in the bar of the Hotel International. Elizabeth was a punter. “The ‘Nash’ was the only excitement for a 30 mile radius,” she told Sounds magazine in 1982. Robin noticed she was one of the few who knew how to dance to the records he played. Robin and another school mate, bass player Will Heggie had started a band, named after a Simple Minds song, ‘The Cocteau Twins’. For a couple of weeks there was a drummer and singer but they didn’t last. So Robin bought a drum machine and asked Elizabeth if she could sing. Elizabeth could sing. But she didn’t feel confident and didn’t like the songs, so she quit. A short while later, however, Elizabeth and Robin started going out together, and she gave the band another try, insisting on writing all the lyrics herself. The couple plucked up courage to talk to their heroes The Birthday Party after a gig, drummer Phil Calvert advised them to get a demo to their label, 4AD. A recording session in a small Ayrshire studio yielded three cassettes. Guthrie kept one, one was sent to John Peel and the other would be the copy handed to Simon Raymonde.

“We thought we were fucking great,” says Guthrie today, at home in Brittany. “We had absolutely no idea it might be difficult to get a record deal. Total naivety and youthful stupidity, we believed in what we did and assumed everybody else would too. We went to London with our little tapes and came back waiting for the phone to ring.”

Amazingly, it did. “I was round at Robin’s house smoking dope and listening to records when Ivo phoned and said ‘Do you want to do a single?’” recalls Wallace. “Robin was really excited. Then about an hour later Ivo called back and said ‘Fuck it, let’s do an album.’”

Garlands, recorded in nine days for —900, and released in the spring of 1982 seemed to align the new trio with the emerging Goth movement. “Garlands was an anomaly, it didn’t sound like us at all,” says Guthrie now. “Live, I used to do things like putting the drum machine through fuzz boxes, but the engineers we worked with then said, ‘Look that’s going into the red, you can’t do that’ and got us to change. It didn’t really turn out the way I wanted.”

Despite that, and lukewarm reviews, Garlands was soon topping the indie charts. The next time The Birthday Party played in Scotland, the Cocteau Twins were supporting. “Elizabeth apologised after every song,” remembers Wallace. “‘Oh fuck, I’m sorry, Oh fuck I’m really sorry’, and then Nick Cave came on and mimicked her.”

Though Ivo had produced Garlands and the excellent Lullabies EP, and exerted a strong mentoring influence, Guthrie nurtured an acute sonic sense of direction and was becoming frustrated by their recordings. A session with Alan Rankine of The Associates resulting in the brittle Peppermint Pig EP, was the last straw. Engineer John Turner helped Guthrie acquire the knowledge and confidence he required to take over production duties. After a massive, gruelling tour supporting OMD, Robin and Elizabeth seized a chance to move to London. Heggie, however, had become swiftly disillusioned by the music business. He opted to stay in Grangemouth and return to his old job at the refinery.

The brilliant Sunburst and Snowblind EP, featuring hit single “Sugar Hiccup” was their first release as a duo and Guthrie’s debut as producer. The format was retained for 1983’s Head Over Heels album. “Head Over Heels was about them being totally in love with each other,” says Wallace, who had been appointed their road manager. “I went to the studio in Edinburgh every day — mainly because I was taking the hash to Robin — a lot of it was recorded in a hashish haze. Elizabeth was at her most confident then, because she’d found a kindred spirit. At home she’d stay in the bedroom writing lyrics while Robin was downstairs doing the music.”

Live shows were just the two of them and a tape machine on a starkly lit stage, Elizabeth disconcertingly thumping her breast with her wrists and pulling at her fingers as she sang. She may have looked like a candidate for self-harm, but her voice was riveting: clear, perfectly pitched and unlike any other to have emerged from indie rock.

Since handling their demo, Simon Raymonde had remained close as a friend and fan. His own band, The Drowning Craze, had petered out but had no thought of joining the Twins. However, Guthrie figured they needed a replacement for Heggie and Raymonde, the son of celebrated pop arranger Ivor Raymonde (Dusty Springfield, Walker Brothers etc.) slipped into the role.

The sound immediately took on new colours for The Spangle Maker EP and a wider world became aware of Fraser’s voice when Ivo’s pet project This Mortal Coil issued a dream ticket, Elizabeth and Robin performing Tim Buckley’s languid, spectral “Song to the Siren.”

The full trio’s first album together, Treasure, was greeted ecstatically. For Robin, the high praise was fair enough, for Elizabeth it was more troublesome. She was uneasy about the elaborate compliments she was receiving and hated the idea that journalists, in particular, might be searching her lyrics for keys to her soul. She began pointedly making her words more obscure, writing in a kind of romantic Esperanto of her own devising. A certain amount of emotional concealment was practiced inside the band too.

“We didn’t articulate very well in those days” says Raymonde from his home in Twickenham. “We didn’t talk about our music at all between ourselves. We just went in and got on with it and then, I suppose, all the untold emotions would come out, and that’s what gave it its edge… Knowing more now about [the way other bands work], I look back and think it was quite strange what we did, we’d just go in and turn the tape recorder on — with nothing worked out — and see what happened. Sometimes we’d do it for ten minutes and if it sounded rubbish we went home.”

“We were always quite pragmatic,” says Guthrie. “The ideas would come together quickly but the execution of those ideas could take a long time. Sometimes it would be weeks before Liz came up with any words. And my drug-addled brain didn’t help.”

In 1985, the lustrous single “Aikea-Guinea” and the EPs Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In A Shallow Bay saw the Cocteau Twins moving into a musical subset in which they were the only element. Robin’s tremeloed, sunbeaming guitar was becoming a signature sound, the rhythm’s martial clout beginning its ebb into a gentle, protean drift which would evolve over the next 10 years.

A great many adjectives have been pressed into futile service in the cause of describing the abstract beauty of The Cocteau Twins’ music and Elizabeth Fraser’s ineffable voice. Newcomers to them today might find it hard to imagine how rootless and fathomless it sounded twentysomething years ago, when each new Cocteau Twins recording sailed into our consciousness bearing a fresh cargo of wonder. For some listeners Fraser’s voice must surely have seemed without precedent, hard to assimilate or believe, a rainbow of Swingle-cum-Sumac, Bulgarian dusk, Celtic dawn, folk myth, soul aria, nursery rhyme and lullaby. How, many wondered, did this sound emanate from “little Betty from Grangemeouth”? It was an unnecessary, patronising question. She’d been born with a great voice, but it wasn’t mere good fortune we were hearing, Fraser clearly had the intelligence and intellectual determination required to nurture such a gift, if not the ego or the required pop-cultural mindset.

As the music matured, the Cocteau Twins would attract high-profile fans like Madonna, R.E.M. Annie Lennox and, perhaps most surprising, Prince — who paid homage by sampling Robin’s guitar for one of his hits with Martika. They’d also inspire a wave of acolytes and imitators, Dead Can Dance, The Sundays, Curve and The Cranberries being just the most successful. All this time they more or less ignored the business’s promotional imperatives, being monosyllabic in interview and only occasionally making videos. “I wanted people to interact with the music, make their own mental picture,” says Guthrie. On the other hand, he didn’t appreciate their “truly ambiguous” music being misinterpreted. “We used to complain, ‘People just don’t get it’, but what could they get? I suppose, if I was doing my job properly then every listener was having their own experience.”

Robin and Liz recorded Victorialand alone while Simon worked with This Mortal Coil so the trio didn’t fully consolidate its potential until Blue Bell Knoll, their first album from their own studio; a beautiful record, which sort of passed by uncelebrated. “Around that time we finally got a manager,” says Raymonde. “We’d got into problems with the tax man and found things were becoming difficult between us and 4AD. We were all members of the dead dad club and none of us enjoyed the business side of things so here was an older guy in his early 50s and we let him be our dad and go off and do business for us. It was probably a mistake.”

Ivo didn’t care for the new man, and the relationship started to sour between the band and their original mentor. There was a two year hiatus — during which time Robin and Elizabeth’s daughter Lucy Belle was born — before the release of their greatest work 1990’s Heaven or Las Vegas. Perhaps buoyed by motherhood, Liz created her most joyful and unusual melodies. It’s a record full of light and life. It broke the band in the US and sold extremely well, but its optimism and success masked the fact that the Cocteau Twins’ painful demise had already begun.

The chief problem lay in Robin and Elizabeth being unable to create a life together away from the band. “It was two concentric circles,” says Guthrie of the way they combined their work and their relationship. “It was very unhealthy. We didn’t do anything else. And me being a junkie didn’t help. I’d love to say it was the pressure of having to make music, but I think it was simply my inability to stop taking fucking drugs. I can’t blame anyone else. Basically, I was a train wreck waiting to happen.”

“I guess as Robin and Liz’s relationship began to have some problems, my involvement in the recording process became a bit deeper,” says Raymonde. “I might be recording Liz’s vocals on my own for a few days and that’s when I first fully appreciated how amazing she was. I’m an emotional chap and I would get very affected by these songs. There were tracks on Heaven And Las Vegas where her voice would literally move me tears. She’d come into the control room and say, ‘What was that like?’ and I’d scrape the tears away and say, ‘That was alright, Liz’. She didn’t get off on praise. If I said. ‘That was fucking amazing’, she’d say ‘I thought it was shit.’ I learnt not to be too effusive, which was difficult because I was so blown away with what I was hearing.”

Meanwhile, Robin, scarfing up all coke he could score, began to believe that the label he’d helped put on the map wasn’t treating him right. “One becomes a little fed up when everyone in the company is on their second Mercedes and Liz and I are still on the fucking bus — you tend to notice that after a while. We sold half a million copies of Heaven or Las Vegas and we’re still financially crippled.”

“Nobody was looking at the situation in an adult way,” says Wallace, who by this time was working for the company. “Everybody was taking way too much coke and just got paranoid about each other, I mean in the band and at 4AD.”

A showdown was inevitable. The unthinkable happened and the Cocteau Twins left the mothership.

Simon Raymonde now runs his own label, Bella Union. I ask if he could handle a band like the Cocteau Twins were back then. “I don’t think I could,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about that recently, because I’ve been back in touch with Ivo and it got me thinking that it must have been incredibly difficult dealing with us.”

“To this day I’m embittered about 4AD because I don’t think they took care of us,” says Guthrie, “the contract was awful, we don’t really make any money from the catalogue. But, on the other hand, I’m totally indebted to Ivo for picking us up, persevering with us and being a mentor and guide.”

Feeling unwanted in their former spiritual home, they signed to Fontana/Mercury, once a regular haunt of Simon’s father, Ivor. “Frying pan to fire,” says Robin today. “Collective Irresponsibility would be my name for the Cocteau Twins book. We became over-managed, all those mangers, accountants. lawyers. The Cocteau Twins might still exist now if they’d seen that we were completely burnt out and just left us alone. We could have gone away for a few years, come back refreshed, but we were worked like ponies. We’d come off a huge tour and be sent straight into the studio to do B-sides.”

The first album for Mercury, 1993’s Four Calendar Café, is the Cocteau Twins’ secret masterpiece, a seriously undervalued work of great beauty. It proved bittersweet for Robin, however, when Liz chose to sing clearly discernable lyrics about the dissolution of their love. “These days, I try to communicate as well as I can through singing,” Liz told Melody Maker when the album was released. “Even when I am not using words, people can understand what lies beneath. Making lyrics more audible on this album was more for my benefit. To bring me closer to myself. I have to summon up a lot of courage to make records. That’s why we don’t release albums very often. I lack the courage to be more prolific. I am a perfectionist, too. That doesn’t help.”

In the same article, a piece about her vocal heroes (Nina Simone, Kate Bush, Edith Piaf, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holliday, Van Morrison, David Bowie, John Lydon, Sinatra, Tim Buckley, Bryan Ferry), Fraser said something unusual about a singer few had yet heard.

“I’d love to sing with Jeff Buckley — Tim Buckley’s son. He is currently making his first album, and it should be amazing. He’s written this song called ‘Grace’, which literally makes the hair on my neck stand on end. I was sweating like a fucking June bride when I first heard him. Music has never done that to me before.”

The band had been introduced to Buckley while on tour in the US in 1991. In 1994, on the Four Calendar Café tour, Liz and Simon went to see him perform at a bar in Atlanta. They spent some time with him over the next few days and were delighted by his energy and almost uncanny relationship with music. He could mimic so many of his favourite voices, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Dylan, Aretha…and Liz.

When Robin and Elizabeth’s marriage finally collapsed, a relationship began to develop between the two extraordinary singers. At first, Elizabeth was wary, thinking Buckley a “stalker,” but slowly she succumbed to his irresistible charm, and they were close for 18 months — though according to Buckley in interview, the relationship was never sexual. Mind you, he also denied that they’d sung together. A demo for a duet called “All Flowers In Time” is easily traceable on the net.

The words to one Four Calendar Café song “Bluebeard,” seem curiously apt for this period: “Are you the right man for me… or are you toxic for me, will you mistreat me and betray my confidence?” Whether aimed at Guthrie or a premonition of Buckley, such sentiments were hard for Robin to hear night after night on the subsequent tours.

At least he was beginning to address his drug problem. But now the band was operating under all the pressures surrounding a divorce. There was one person still to buckle under the strain: Simon.

“As the problems became more complex — the relationship, the drugs, dealings with the labels, it finally got to me,” he says. “I started to detach myself more than I’d ever done, I used to be Robin and Liz’s friend and be a bit of a buffer between them, which took its toll on me. By the end I was like, ‘This isn’t helping. Nothing’s getting any better here.’”

On the final album, 1996’s Milk & Kisses, a pretty but pale collection, it was clear that a light had gone out. Work on yet another album was underway when Liz went to speak to the band’s old friend, Colin Wallace, who lived near her in Twickenham. They had hardly been in touch since the split with 4AD. “She came to me and said, ‘I don’t like this any more. I feel like we’re going round in circles. How do I get out of it?’ And I told her how and I don’t think Robin likes me for that. But a friend asked me to help her and I did.”

Liz walked away from the Cocteau Twins and began the work she has done ever since, appearing as a guest vocalist with Peter Gabriel, Massive Attack, Yann Tierson and others and on film soundtracks like Lord Of The Rings. She is also recording her own music, much of it with current partner, Damon Reece, whom she met on the final Twins tour as her relationship with Buckley was fading. When Reece moved to Bristol, Elizabeth joined him, hoping she might bump into Massive Attack, who’d once asked her to sing with them, though they’d never met. One afternoon, standing in Sainsbury’s car park, holding a mop and a bag of groceries she spotted Daddy G and 3D. She ran up to them. “Are youse Massive Attack?” she panted. “Yeah, do you want an autograph?”

In late May 1997, Elizabeth was finally booked to record with them. A day or so prior to the session, she found herself inexplicably drawn to re-read Jeff Buckley’s many letters to her. The following day she received a call from Buckley’s road-manager to say that the singer was missing in Memphis’s Wolf River. The song she recorded shortly afterwards was “Teardrop,” to many her finest performance yet.

Meanwhile, Robin was suffering from withdrawal from the band. “When it stopped, I found myself aged 34 suddenly facing real life. How did I get this house anyway? — I just moved in, there was a cup of coffee waiting for me. There was all this debris of a life I’d never taken responsibility for. It was very sobering. You went from relative comfort and everybody wanting to be your friend to nobody wanting to know you, all these people who’d always be there for you suddenly were not. Doors were being slammed in my face.”

Robin and Simon decided to set up a label, Bella Union, initially to release their own music but eventually to develop other acts. Simon took to it well and the label is now thriving, with such acts as The Czars, The Dears, Laura Viers, Explosions In The Sky and Midlake on the roster. After recording two albums with singer Siobhan De Mare as a duo, Violet Indiana, Robin — less comfortable with the business of developing other artists — withdrew from the label to concentrate on making his own music through different outlets. He makes a good living touring various solo shows, including one based around a 45-minute animation. He spends three months each year in the US playing to decent houses. He has hardly appeared in Britain because, frankly, the gigs he’s offered aren’t worth doing. “I feel quite sad that I can’t get any recognition for what I do in the UK but, actually, in the scheme of things, it’s quick small.”

Last year, out of the blue, it was announced that the Cocteau Twins were to reform, for one night only, at the Coachella Valley Festival in California.

“I was quite up for it,” says Robin. “I wasn’t at first, I thought the idea sucked, but then I rationalised that I’m kinda proud of that work, if I’m going to be playing it to a bunch of people who want to hear it and someone’s going to give us a load of cash, what’s the fucking problem? We all met up and got on really well, first time we’d all been together for ten years. I got really excited about it and then, two weeks later, I’m told it’s not happening.”

Elizabeth?

“Well, it wasn’t me or Simon, that’s for sure.”

Colin Wallace now manages Elizabeth Fraser. “We felt last year that so much water had passed under the bridge that Elizabeth could probably do a few dates, but in the end she decided she couldn’t. It was hard for me to get to the bottom of it, really. Elizabeth has her reasons. Robin’s my oldest friend and Elizabeth is one of my dearest friends too, so I got caught in the middle. It did culminate in me and Robin having a proper Scottish argument with me using the word ‘fuck’ more times in a minute than anyone in our office had ever heard. We have been fine since.

“Elizabeth has changed her vocal style. She went on a holistic singing course. In a place where they believe that you don’t breathe from the diaphragm but start at your toenails and take it right through your body. She absolutely loved it — a year long course with opera singers, all sorts. Part of it involved arranging and promoting your own gig, you had to sing with no PA and no microphone, and she did it. Somewhere outside Brighton. She wouldn’t let me or Geoff [Travis, of Rough Trade, the label to which Elizabeth is currently signed] go to it, though.

“She hasn’t really performed live since the Massive Attack tour in 1998 — and I wonder if part of [her decision not to do Coachella] was because she’s renowned for her vocal gymnastics, and she doesn’t really sing like that any more. I wonder if that was at the root of it. I’ve not spoken to her about it.”

Not speaking to each other about things seems to be a bit of a Cocteaus theme. “Where we come from nobody ever talks to anybody about how they are feeling,” Wallace admits.

“We talk because we’ve got a child but we don’t talk about work.” says Robin.

Elizabeth has built a vocal booth in her house in Bristol which, according to Colin Wallace, is used every day as she edges towards the solo album she has reportedly been working on for ten years. Much like a great heroine of hers, Kate Bush, Fraser is a perfectionist in no particularly hurry to re-enter the fray. She will deliver some new music when she’s good and ready. Also like Bush, she seldom feels the need to talk to the press. It’s a shame, because the interviews she has given are fascinating and make a refreshing change from reading media-savvy line-towing. She comes over as wise and funny, with a strong take on the approach of a female musician and the spiritual and emotional aspects of being moved to sing. “She feels like she’s moved on a lot. I don’t think she wanted to talk about the Cocteau Twins any more,” says Wallace. She is about to embark on a tour with Massive Attack, singing two of her contributions to Mezzanine. They will headline at Coachella.

Simon keeps busy running Bella Union from its Twickenham base and producing music for bands like Clearlake and The Open. He also manages The Archie Bronson Outfit. His copies of the new two-volume Cocteau Twins’ EP collection, Lullabies To Violaine are still in their shrink wrap, unheard.

Robin’s new life is based in France. His daughter Lucy Belle, now 16 — a fan of Green Day, Foo Fighters, Good Charlotte and Tim Burton movies — currently lives with him. In the course of his many gigs he still runs into Cocteau Twins obsessives, and is amazed by how young some of them are. One recent superfan was sporting a tattoo of Liz’s face. Robin writes a witty blog at www.robinguthrie.net.

I ask if he still listens to the Cocteau Twins music. He points out in his soft, chuckly voice that he spent a month remastering it for Lullabies To Violaine.

“It was really quite emotional,” he says. “It took me back to places and situations with real clarity — like Sunburst and Snowblind, the first time I’d produced a record. I remember sitting in the chair and putting my hands on the mixing desk, touching things and getting really unpredictable results. It was lovely… But I don’t need to hear it again.” ▣