Robin Guthrie

As a child, Robin’s family had musical instruments in the house, but he’d never had any proper musical training. “I came at the guitar from a very different perspective,” Robin explained to Penny Black Music in 2006. “Will, Liz, and I fell into being a band together. I have still got our very first demo, and you can hear the very early musings of the Cocteau Twins there… We never from the outset did any other people’s songs. You know when you are a teenager you’re trying to grasp some sort of identity, aren’t you? You want to make some sort of statement.”

Robin’s facility with electronics—he was trained as an electrician—had an enormous influence. “I was really into electronics and so was Will. We were both geeks like that. I was into fuzz boxes and pedals and things like that and I ended up putting them into my guitar. I also had this idea that I really couldn’t play for shit. All my mates would pick up the guitar and would all copy Jimi Hendrix, and I couldn’t do that. I also just wanted to sound like something else. Some of the earlier noisy things I was influenced by were bands like the Birthday Party and the Pop Group and groups like that, people who were using the guitar like a thoroughly different sort of instrument.”

This practice of altering or enhancing traditional sounds eventually included programming, sampling, and more sophisticated forms of audio processing and manipulation as technology evolved and the band could afford to invest in new tools and better studios. In fact, many listeners (and critics) assumed Cocteau Twins were purely a “synth band,” whose sound was entirely artificial, when in fact their primary instruments were always guitar, bass, voice, piano, and drum machine (the only truly synthetic band member). It was Robin’s tinkerer’s fascination and natural aptitude with technology—both analog and digital—that transformed those instruments in the studio and helped to create the Cocteaus’ signature sound.

The 1990s saw Robin become a sort of elder statesman figure among the rising “shoegaze” scene centred in London—a sound many consider the musical progeny of that pioneered by Cocteau Twins—and it was not uncommon to see Guthrie’s name attached to singles, EPs, and whole albums, as bands at the time, such as A.R. Kane, Chapterhouse, Lush, and others sought his mentorship and expertise in the studio.

In addition to his ongoing work as a producer and engineer, Robin’s prolific post-Cocteau Twins musical career has included seven records as Violet Indiana (with singer Siobhan de Maré), more than eleven solo releases, and three film scores, including multiple collaborations with the late Harold Budd. He has toured extensively, performing on his own, with a band, and with other artists, as he did with Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance in 2011.

Although Robin co-founded Bella Union with Simon and Liz in 1996, he eventually divested his share of the business. He has since established his own label, Soleil Après Minuit, through which he has released a number of his own albums along with those of a handful of other artists.

A perfectionist who can sometimes be his own worst critic, Robin fought a well-documented battle with drugs and alcohol in the 1980s and 1990s, and considers himself in recovery. His long-term relationship with former bandmate Elizabeth Fraser, which ended in 1993, was another key organic ingredient in Cocteau Twins’ chemistry and music. They have a daughter, Lucy Belle, who was born in 1989. He now makes his home in France with his wife Florence and their daughter Violette.