Cocteau Twins Big hair, big voice, big sound – “There was a certain chemistry there”
“F
OR most of the time of the band, Liz [Fraser] and I were completely in our little bubble,” says Robin Guthrie. “We lived small, we didn’t do much without each other, we didn’t live in big apartments.” That hermetic atmosphere in part helped create the unique feel of the Cocteaus’ records, with Guthrie and Fraser, joined by Will Heggie and then Simon Raymonde, mostly recording in their own studios, improvising songs out of thin air as they battled to keep industry tentacles out of the control room. “There wasn’t much career planning, we were just kids that listened to John Peel and wanted to be part of that,” says Guthrie, explaining why they signed to 4AD, currently celebrating its 40th birthday. “We wanted to be on the same label as The Birthday Party!” Here, the guitarist and Raymonde recall the highs and lows of their 15-year journey, from the cavernous noise of debut, Garlands, and the ecstatic, lifeaffirming Heaven Or Las Vegas to their time on a major label that led to the end of the band. “I’ve always tried to do my best at everything,” explains Guthrie, lamenting the demands placed upon him in the ’90s. “I’m not able very easily to make a crap song, badly recorded. In my head, it had always been so fucking special…” TOMPINNOCK
GARLANDS
CHRIS GARNHAM
4AD,1982
Thenoisy,post-punkdebut, recordedatLondon’s BlackwingStudios ROBIN GUTHRIE: It was a very exciting time – here’s me, my girlfriend and my mate coming down to London on the bus from Scotland, young and naïve and innocent in many ways, to make a record. We were teenagers, I was 19 and Liz was 17, and our aim was to make a record – never a second or third record or anything. This album took six days to record and mix. It was pretty much all live. These were songs we’d already played live; we’d written them in my mum’s living room and in various abandoned lockups in Scotland. There were some absolutely gorgeous moments in the studio; when we were able to hear what Liz was singing through studio monitors without it being drowned out by the guitar, that was quite a moment. There were a few disputes along the way as well – I understood the technical reasons for not wanting to make the little needle go into the red, but I also understood that that’s how I wanted it to sound! On all the demos we’d done we used to put a beatbox through a distortion unit and they wouldn’t let us do that. 96 • UNCUT • FEBRUARY 2020
We used a different drum machine that we borrowed from Depeche Mode, because it was an expensive one, but it didn’t really sound the way we wanted it to – but who cares, you know? We had a record, and that was fucking brilliant. That’s the bucket list over, at 19.
HEAD OVER HEELS 1983,4AD
Aboldturningpointforthegroup, writteninanEdinburghstudio GUTHRIE: After Garlands we did a lot of touring, then Will decided to depart. I remember when the idea for Head Over Heels came – we were in a chip shop and I said to Liz, “So we’ve gotta tell 4AD we’ve got some new songs, and we’ll just wing it. We won’t let them hear the demos, because we haven’t done them, because we haven’t written anything… Come on, we can do this…” So that’s what we did. Palladium was our home ground, we’d recorded demos there before. We weren’t as intimidated because we weren’t in the big city, there weren’t red buses and all this shit. It was joyous – I was getting into the pilot seat, Liz would spend her afternoons upstairs in the studio reading books and writing lyrics and then come down and start singing
The Cocteau Twins in 1982: (l-r) Liz Fraser, Will Heggie and Robin Guthrie
along and we’d just go with it. It was so exciting to have that freedom that we’d worked towards, to be able to express ourselves without having to channel our ideas through somebody else, an engineer wearing a white coat with pencils in the pocket… It liberated us and set the tone for the way I did all the other records, essentially starting with nothing – the songwriting process started to become integrated into the recording process. This is one of the most important records we ever made, in terms of releasing our creativity. SIMONRAYMONDE: I got to see them live a lot before I joined. Liz was just like this beautiful angel on the stage beating her chest, so into the music. It was wonderful to watch, and to listen to this big swirl of spacey guitars and these huge bass drums on the tape machine.
TREASURE 1984,4AD
JoinedbynewbassistSimon Raymonde,thegroupmaketheir ‘unfinished’thirdwhiletheirlabel triesforahit GUTHRIE: We released “The Spangle Maker” EP before this, with “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” as a single. I think it was a bit of a
disappointment, because 4AD had put a lot of money into it, but it only got to 29. We met up with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois before Treasure [there was talk of them producing it] – I asked Eno, “How would you produce our records differently?” And he kindly said, “Well, we don’t want to produce them differently, they’re beautiful as they are.” So I went, “Oh, well, we should just carry on doing them ourselves.” RAYMONDE: I think Robin was like, “Yes!” Because he heard the band’s sound in his head – even though the records all say ‘produced by Cocteau Twins’, he was very much the producer. We had three weeks in the studio to come up with an album, and it was really exciting – I loved being in Scotland, the snow was halfway up the door and we got cooked breakfasts! I really enjoyed the process even though we felt the record wasn’t really 100 per cent finished. GUTHRIE: I apparently said that Treasure was an “abortion”, which is a really Scottish way of saying it wasn’t quite right. It was the first time that Simon had contributed some things and we were still finding our feet with each other. Some decisions I made are pretty poor – I got sucked into some of the technology of the time – and it’s not what it could have been. I’m not gonna say it’s a bad record, because I really consider that the body of
