“Divine Rapture: Simon Raymonde revisits Cocteau Twins’ purple patch”
- By Colm McAuliffe
- The Skinny
- 1-Jul 2014
As 4AD re-release Cocteau Twins’ seminal albums Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas, Simon Raymonde tells us what life in the fold was like during the band’s commercial peak
Ever since Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie ascended to another world from their Scottish home of Grangemouth in the early 1980s, a certain fear of interpretation defined and honed the Cocteau Twins’ sound. This fear came entirely from the band themselves; while journalists had a descriptive field day in attempting to pin down their sound in semantic terms, the band themselves gruffly refuted lofty terms and pointedly refused to speak about what they were doing. Nevertheless, the Cocteau Twins appeared to arrive and thrive in their splendidly hermetically sealed isolation. The chiming splendour of Guthrie and bass player Simon Raymonde’s instrumentation provided an immaculate foil for the glacial purity of Fraser’s remarkable voice. And during a period when bands were increasingly looking to deconstruct the traditional rock idiom, Cocteau Twins did the same, albeit entirely on their own terms.
By 1988, they hadn’t recorded a full album as a complete trio in four years. Side projects with Harold Budd and This Mortal Coil had seen the trio veer off into more overtly ambient territory but the arrival of Blue Bell Knoll in September of that year heralded not only a defining album of the era but also a spectacular work on its own terms, soaring amid a stately production with xylophones, glockenspiels and marimbas trilling through the sumptuous sound. Some twenty six years on, Simon Raymonde admits it was an unusually happy time to be in the Cocteau Twins.
“That whole period was incredibly fertile,” he says. “Even just before Blue Bell Knoll, with This Mortal Coil projects that I was deeply involved with, the Victorialand album [which Fraser and Guthrie recorded as a duo] and the Harold Budd collaboration, we were all super busy and—seemingly—fairly happy. Things seemed to be pretty good. We were at our most creative during that period, 1985 through 1990. And all the drug stuff hadn’t really come to the fore yet. The catalyst for it all was the studio we built in North Acton in an industrial estate with all these other small businesses, Dif Juz helped us build the studio inside this little unit. It was there that everything came together, and Blue Bell Knoll was probably the first record we made start to finish in our own place. We’d do bits and pieces elsewhere—we did some work at William Orbit’s house, the Tiny Dynamine and Echoes in a Shallow Bay EPs were done there and mixed somewhere else—but Blue Bell Knoll was the first time we had a studio with our own key and a front door we could shut and just get on with it. And that made a massive difference as the three of us were getting on and understanding what we were trying to do; it all gelled pretty well in that period.”
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