New book featuring Cocteau Twins: “Still in a Dream,” by Simon Reynolds
- Cocteau Twins News
- 18-Jun 2026
Veteran music journalist brings to life the decade from 1984-1994, featuring a chapter on Cocteau Twins
Simon Reynolds, who began his career in the 80s as a writer for Melody Maker, has gone on to publish numerous book-length retrospectives, including Rip it Up and Start Again, Shock and Awe, and Retromania, among others. His latest book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, slackers and the reinvention of rock, 1984-1994 (White Rabbit, 2026), recounts the post-post-punk era, as rock and pop music underwent yet another important metamorphosis. Reynolds characterises the era as one of explosive creativity and an exploration of novel new directions. He devotes quite a bit of the first chapter to Cocteau Twins, whose presence is felt throughout the book as he explores the work of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, A.R. Kane, Spacemen 3, Lush, Galaxie 500, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and many others.
Writer Owen Hatherley (Militant Modernism, The Alienation Effect) praised Still in a Dream, writing, “Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music — it’s a great book full stop, Reynolds’ best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It’s warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that ‘withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.”
In the book, Reynolds writes of Cocteau Twins:
Cocteau Twins are where postpunk ends and something new starts. The obsession with sonic texture. The envisioning of music as dreamworld. The dissolving of vocal and verbal clarity, and how this introduces the idea — verging on heresy in a punk-and-after world — that music is more than the carrier of words, that it may in fact be something higher or radically other than a form of communication or an instrument of meaning. These things make Cocteau Twins a herald, a touchstone for an emerging era.
The book is currently available in bookshops and online. ▣
