“Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde on drugs, reunions and his brain tumour”
- By Will Hodgkinson
- The Times
- 26-Aug 2024
The bassist turned record label founder talks about why the Scottish dream-pop trio fell apart and how he discovered Fleet Foxes, as well as living with a tumour for more than 20 years
Simon Raymonde is a baseball cap-clad 62-year-old with a history as the bassist for the Cocteau Twins, a legacy as the son of the arranger and composer Ivor Raymonde, who worked with Dusty Springfield, and a thriving business as the founder of the record label Bella Union, which discovered the folk rock revivalists Fleet Foxes.
You would never guess, as he chats away about his life in his publishers’ Holborn offices, that he has also been living with an egg-sized tumour on the right side of his brain for more than 20 years. “It’s still there,” Raymonde says with quiet acceptance. “Thankfully it hasn’t grown so much that I need to do anything about it.”
The tumour was diagnosed in 2001, after Raymonde suffered a sudden loss of hearing in one ear. One of the country’s top neurosurgeons told him it should be removed immediately, he had a 94 per cent chance of survival and he might also lose the use of the right side of his body. After speaking to a forward-thinking oncologist, who suggested he just live with the tumour, Raymonde took the latter option.
“It shows that you need to find more about a subject than the first thing somebody eminent tells you about it, which is a lesson for us all in politics, education, whatever,” Raymonde says. “To be honest, it was out of fear that I didn’t get the tumour removed. I was 40, I had young kids, I had never thought about mortality. It showed me how life can change in an instant.”
In his new memoir In One Ear, Raymonde comes across less as someone who forged his own destiny and more as an amiable enthusiast who wandered into the most influential dream-pop band. In 1983 he was working at a record shop called Beggars Banquet in Wandsworth, London, when a former technician of the BP oil refinery at Falkirk called Robin Guthrie came in with his girlfriend, a shy 20-year-old called Elizabeth Fraser. They wanted to deliver a cassette to Ivo Watts-Russell, founder of the Beggars-affiliated label 4AD.
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