“Pearly Years: Dream Pop Godparents”

• By Martin Aston
• MOJO
• Oct 2015

Anyone debating the impact of the environment on musicians can have a field day with Cocteau Twins.

Equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh, their hometown of Grangemouth was once dubbed “a village around an oil rig,” suggesting the uncanny fantasia of the trio’s densely woven sound was less a mirror than an escape route, bathed in iridescent hues mixing post-punk and dream-pop—Des Punks Célestes, as 2013’s French language biography of the band put it.