COCTEAU TWINS QUOTES DIRECTORY
REFLECTIONS ON COCTEAU TWINS
"...I cannot speak for my EX-colleagues but I for one am, and alway's have been, intensly proud of the music I produced with the Cocteau Twins. You think I'd have done it for so long if I didn't believe in and live for that music? I have a feeling though that that's just not enough for some folks." -Robin Guthrie, January 17/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "orange appled was from love's easy tears those eyes that mouth sessions, in fact just after...we had to do a track for Melody Maker 7'' and that was what we wrote...one of my faves too." -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "It's [Peppermint Pig] shit.....A new, lighter, accessible sound from the Cocteau Twins, that's what it says in the biography...It's a bad mixture—bad song, bad producer...bad band. We'd never used a producer before, so we thought it might be good to have someone on the outside try to help, but it [didn't] work out, because he wasn't interested, he didn't like the music to start with. If he'd been into what we were doing, it would have been a lot better." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "If we're going to be light and accessible, it's going to be natural, over a long time y'know? That [Peppermint Pig] was unnatural, overnight accessibility. The next record's going to be fuck-all like that. It's going to be an LP, produced by ourselves." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "orange appled was NOT from the victorialand sessions! that is garbage. i remember writing the piano parts and the six string bass parts on it, and i was not playing on victoria land..it couldn't be more different!! about as ambient as my ass." -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "...we were generally quite good on that tour [1991]! at least you weren't at the one in ..norway(?) where liz left after about five minutes and r & i had to play the whole set without her...that was embarassing." -Simon Raymonde, August 8/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "i remember this song [Plain Tiger] well....as it happens robin pretty much did this one all by himself and i always found the bass line he wrote quite magical and it almost always foxed me when we played it live, i don't think i ever played it quite right! because of the way we shared the songwriting, it would be easy to forget who did what and when, but i think we'd all remember most of it, and that song even though like most it's credited to all three of us, it was one of those that really was far more robin's than mine, and certainly no hinigan or whoever was involved ...that is a total 100% error. believe me, and if you thought i was being disrespectful to you, i really was not, i think you misunderstood me,. i was laughing as i wrote it.....i love the way these things come out like this.. it's always intriguiing." -Simon Raymonde, March 8/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "...certainly there was a little black hole at the end of the cocteau twins where I really wasn't 'pleasing myself' at all...fyi the 'unfinished album' of which you talk was nowhere near an album, it was, at best, a few idea's put together quickly. I'm glad nothing came of it..It had little heart and no soul..." -Robin Guthrie, May 26/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I always kinda liked that bit in cico buff that goes into the guitar solo..." -Robin Guthrie, June 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "it seems strange to me to pick one album above others to recommend as I sort of have this linear idea about my music that starts back in 1981 and progresses (ok.. ever so slowly) to the present day. What I'm trying to say is that somehow they all connect, you can't jump from the last cocteau twins stuff to imperial without passing through several Violet Indiana records on the way." -Robin Guthrie, June 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...funny boy [Robin Guthrie] sometimes, makes us all laugh and v down to earth. re his simon doesn't talk to liz quote. yes i sounded quite like there was some issue the way it came out, but ( well maybe i am naive and don't know something robin knows ...?) there is nothing funny at all remotely between me and liz. we haven't talked in a while no, but then we don't share a daughter and we aren't in a band together but i love liz, always will, just guess our lives don't seem to cross paths these days....and having said that we are planning to have some dinner together very soon, but who knows...?" -Simon Raymonde, October 7/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I love that album [Head Over Heels] and I am very proud of it..'course it was 20 years ago.....just a thought : is it not possible that I may love these records way more than you know?" -Robin Guthrie, May 26/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...actually the only direction robin took on this record [Twinlights] was out of the studio...hardly the highlight of my career folks.. Well it was OK, I suppose, it just really wasn't what I thought the cocteau twins were all about..The songs from that which are on M&K's, for me, are the divinitive versions......FCC is just the only album that we could make at that time, as was BBK and all the others.. I'd be a liar if I said that we we're 'artistically free' towards the mid 90's .. There were often 'too many cooks' and this, to me, shows big time....... I can't remember - ever - anyone remotely involved with the cocteau twins, ..except me saying 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' - which probably explains why the sounds of my records and Violet Indiana's have a certain.. familiarity about them. My creative experience with the cocteau twins taught me this much... you can't please all the people all the time.... so fuck it..." -Robin Guthrie, May 26/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post "...with the bass it's hard to generalise...naturally had i been at the controls it may have been more prominent, yes i love the sound of bass, sure, and maybe with all the guitar odubs and pianos and whatnot with vocals, the bass needed a specific space to sit in, and far be it from me to criticise how those records sound now. If i had felt that the bass wasn't high enough or fat enough or whatever, i only needed to chime in and say, but i don't recall too many sulks or arguments about balance...i think only one person can truly mix a record like CT and Robin mixed them. As for the RECORDING of Bass on BBK, hmm i would imagine it would have been something quaint like a rockman box or such...i recall they may have been the thing around that time? or perhaps a rackmounted rocktron ? i really have hazy memory, perhaps robin will see this soon and throw his oar in..." -Simon Raymonde, July 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "actually the 'original' piano version [of Twinlights] was not. the oompa version came first, from robin's france trip, and when we decided to do the duel ep idea of acoustic vs dub ambient, that was when i worked it out on the piano and we tried it out , but yes i prefer it, kind of. though liz's delivery on original makes me cry more." -Simon Raymonde, October 10/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "[When told all releases add up to just over 8 hours of music]god how depressing! all that fuckin work for what...8 bleedin' hours..?? good grief, put it like that, no wonder we did so many drugs" -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "there is actually only one song that is unreleased, it did have a working title, oh yeah that's it 'my head is full of magic', but we didn't think it was up to it...probably was from either HOLV session of BBK but my memory is v bad. There are a few, and i mean few as in less than several, bits and pieces, but nothing of note. 99% of our songs started as instrumentals and if Liz didn't like them , they didn't become songs, and we'd usually get her in quite soon after starting something, so if she wasn't keen, we'd just leave it and move on...hmm, weird isn't it? Seemed perfectly normal at the time!" -Simon Raymonde, September 30/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "Garlands is like a big stone hanging round our necks. Everybody's expecting us to be like that all the time, and we're not." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "Everything we do gets compared with Garlands now, and there's no way we can get a sound like that again, because it was created through total naivety, we just didn't have a clue what was happening." -Will Heggie, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine]
INSTRUMENTS, EQUIPMENT & EFFECTS
"Let me see, well I had to buy strings recently and, hey, you can't just buy one, you have to buy six, otherwise the guitar sounds all weird like somethings missing...OK, that wasn't fair.. So, well I bought a new pedal, a Boss RC50 a while back but it's been sitting in it's box waiting for me to RTFM.. I haven't really the income to justify buying many new toys, really what I need to do is concentrate on replacing so many of the things I use which have become somewhat unreliable, obsolete or just plain beat up from lugging them around everywhere. A nice new mic amp would be nice, I had to swap the last one I had for food." -Robin Guthrie, October 14/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "No the better question would be, which guitars that you own have strings on them? OK, I once had a considerable number of guitars, now that I think about it I think I was convinced if I bought more I'd eventually be able to play them better. For the same reason I invested in lots of books about learning french. Needless to say they all said the same thing, some stuff about verbs and other tricky things, so I had to rely on my ability to look utterly stupid and lost so that the unsuspecting french public would take pity on me and show me how to get home or which aisle the toilet paper was in and other such necessities. As for the guitar thing, well I take the same approach and when I stand on stage and seem to get away with it." -Robin Guthrie, October 14/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I use an Electrix repeater [for live looping]. It works...it's unstable and the MIDI implementation was written by a sped. I think it's Canadian but that may be a coincidence. I've been through all sorts, the original jam man was great but clicked on the loop if you didn't get it just right, something I am familiar with. As I said in another answer I have an RC50 but haven't fired it up yet. On paper it looks great." -Robin Guthrie, October 14/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I've been sitting here trying to work it what these [guitar] tabs mean and I just can't seem to get it... Either I'm really useless at reading tabs or it's not what I played. I suspect I'm useless at tabs, I've never been able to write things down for the guitar. Having said that, though, it seems like a nice tune, maybe I'll use it for something else... If it's any help, the guitar part for wax and wane is, er, very simple.. simple enough to play without moving your fingers too much so that you could concentrate on keeping your hair sticking up....oh, and no wah wah, I'm afraid." -Robin Guthrie, February 27/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[With Victorialand] I used an acoustic guitar, which I still have which was made for me by the Kinkade brothers in Bristol, England, where Russell Fong was learning his craft at the time. It's quite simply the most beautiful acoustic guitar I've ever played. True, of course, is the fact that it is processed to shit, using, mostly, a unit I liked at the time called and Eventide SP2016. There is as well Richard Thomas who plays soprano sax, like an angel would, tablas, played by Richard also, some beatbox, a Roland Compurhythm CR8000 and lots of other processing." -Robin Guthrie, February 4/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[...a bass player with a jetglo 4001...he would run his guitar into two 300watt Carlsbro Stingrays via digital delay/reverb and boss chorus + overdrive.] Curiously similar to one Mr William Heggie - Ibanez effects though.......and we couldn't afford two." -Robin Guthrie, August 28/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I take it [recording equipment] to the local market each week and barter it for sheep (or at least sheep parts) and medicine for the children....I believe the masters for the albums that I remastered had been stored in a sub basement in venice or perhaps the front lobby of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in oklahoma...nowadays I put my faith in a loving higher power who has knowledge of 24 bit file formats.... and I use what's left of my equipment to entertain y'all." -Robin Guthrie, September 6/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...the reason for having a go at drum machines, especially in the 80's when the whole idea was pretty young, well as far as programmed beats and sampled sounds were concerned there wasn't much choice, the beloved 808 was a stepping stone to 'better things' as digital was the key word at that point...better an really crunchy horrible 8bit Fairlight sample than a fat analogue 808 kick in 1982/1983 trust me. The sounds which the 808 became famous for were dirty, malprocessed sounds by dj's who inadvertently overloaded their desks and people who used to put the drum machines through fx as I did but as I've mentioned before, perhaps in another thread, when we used this box for 'garlands' it was way more wimpy than it should have been....many reasons for this, the people we worked with were very 'knowledgeable' and I had just turned 19 and didn't have the confidence in myself at all to, as I've stated before, play our drum machines, a DR-55 Dr.Rhythm and 2 Soundmaster Sr88's through guitar amps, fuzz(on/off) and reverb (spring) from the amp. Most of the time it was HH amplification but I also used some white and pink noise generators that I'd built myself to thicken out the sound....(or make it unlistenable depending on if you were a 'knowledgeable person' So for me, always a shrinking feeling, even after 22 years that ' Garlands wasn't quite what it could have been.....But it has to be said that during the later period of the CT, when drum machines (god bless 'em) per se, we being phased out by samplers and the programming of such samplers was by MIDI keyboard, I really wasn't interested in the computer alternatives of the day (as far as music was concerned) (fairlights then cost about $33000...The awkward combination of computer and hardware I found quite distracting and tried to stick to more 'musical' composition tools, such as the Akai MPC60 and the EMU SP1200, where I could, sample at will, but of course, not save any for posterity....... still better 12 bit than no bits, eh? The long and the short of it is that most of CT's drums, I programmed were on the 'not quite' best of equipment of the day and are burned to tape. Having said that however I must point out, if even for my own sanity, the beats and rhythms I put on Cocteau Twins records remain , to me, someting very vital." -Robin Guthrie, July 28/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...that seems to change everytime I play as I haven't really found the ideal [looper] unit - I use a jam-man, an electrix repeater or a boomerang depending what works......[reverb] eventirde, [delay] echo-pro, and [piano] steinberg grand [while recording Imperial].....[and for Violet Indiana performances] flextoneII amp and blue and green line 6 stomp boxes.....[during the intro to I Wear Your Ring] well, it's a mixture of my guitar and a roland JD-800, sort of..." -Robin Guthrie, May 26/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...A kissed out red floatboat...ok.. no synths, it's all guitars and smoke and mirrors...the sort of synthy percussive sound that runs all the way through and is all on its own in the intro is a bunch of filtered delays triggered from the drums. I used a lexicon PCM70 for this..(same with the 'synth' rhythm thing on blue bell knoll)....the filtery pulsating wah sound which appears from the choruses to the end, well the exact guitar I can't remember but the jist of the sound is a triggered gate, triggering 16th notes from the metronome output of the sequencer, an emu sp1200, then wahed....the four guys in anoraks who always used to stand in front of my pedalboard and take notes and photos during the set (and nudge each other and look smug when I made a fuck-up) will know that I replicated this sound live using the same gate (a drawmer ds201) and an akai mpc60. The wah was a roger mayer customised crybaby....the acoustic guitar in all probability is my kinkade as mentioned in another answer, probably treble or quadruple tracked, compressed, delayed....The little riffs at the end of the verses were played on a fender electric 12...the sweep sound which crops up now and again is my broken (and I will never get it fixed) boss bf2 flanger...(broken as it goes into a very destructive oscillation if you wind the feedback up all the way - I have a couple of others which don't)...." -Robin Guthrie, December 5/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com] "[List of drum machines used per release] garlands : roland tr808, lullabies : linn lm1, peppermint pig : linndrum, head over heels : emu drumulator, sunburst and snowblind : emu drumulator, treasure : : emu drumulator modded with the rock chips set (samples of john bonham), aikea guinea : roland tr707, victorialand : just a roland cr78 on one song, echoes in a shallow bay/tiny dynamine : roland tr707 and tr727, blue bell knoll : emu SP12, Yamaha RX5, heaven or las vegas : Akai MPC 60 MK1 (this is the one designed by roger linn) , Emu SP1200, four calendar cafe : Akai MPC60 MK1, Roland CR1000, milk and kisses : Akai MPC60 MK2....Of course there were usually other sounds triggered, but for the most part these are the machines used. For all of the later records, the machines used were sampling drum machines (ie the Akai's and the emu sp series) therfore the machines didn't actually contain the sounds used. The sounds came from 'a variety of sources'..." -Robin Guthrie, December 1/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...it should be noted that the 808 was only used on garlands with a few samples of one on blue bell knoll" -Robin Guthrie, December 1/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "OK The recording of Blind Dumb Deaf was a little different to most of the later Cocteau Twins songs as it was our first album, we were studio newbies and didn't have the time or experience to experiment at all during the recording process. I wasn't really the producer (I didn't even know what a producer was at that point...) so all the work on guitar sounds as such was done before the band entered the studio from playing gigs and gathering what equipment we could.. Garlands, the album, was essentially recorded live in the studio with myself and Will playing together and Elizabeth overdubbing a few vocals later, very much the way most bands record..my guitar setup was this : a Kawai KS-11-XL electric guitar followed by an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi, a Watkins Copicat tape echo (3 button model), an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory and then into another Watkins Copicat tape echo (4 button model) - this went into my amp, a Maine combo (60w 2x10 never seen one since..) . The bass was a Rickenbacker 4001 played through a Ibanez UE-400 Multi-Effects unit into a carlsbro stingray bass combo....There was one disappointment at the time which was the drum machines that we used at that time, a Boss Dr Rhythm and a Soundmaster SR88 played through the distortion channel of a HH IC100 combo were deemed unsuitable by the engineers and ivo (the grown-ups) and were replaced with the "more proffessional' (at the time as it had just been invented) Roland TR808... This made the drums sound very clean but weak, lacking the power that we were used to in concert.. I mean the stuff we used sounded way more like (what became) hiphop than electronic. But in spite of the lack of distortion on the drums the Garlands sessions were a pretty accurate recording of how we sounded at the time when we played live...." -Robin Guthrie, November 20/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "heaven or las vegas: As said before, for that whole album I mainly used the Paul Reed Smith and my 1959 Fender Jazzmaster although for that song I played a customised Levinson (a blue jazzmaster shaped one with a chandler maple neck) for the slide solo...The clean guitar parts were the Paul Reed Smith played through a Marshall 9000 series tube preamp directly into the board with my fave Lexicon pitch shift +10/-10 cents to spread the sound to stereo, followed with a little Roland Dimension D and echo from the TC2290, synched to the bpm, the chorus, more distorted guitar part was played through my Gallien Kruger preamp (channel 2) then the same sort of treatment, tweaked differently..I should have said before but I normally would compress the guitars to tape either with a Urei1178 or a pair of dbx 160x's...oh, and usually lots of double tracking...Simon played bass on that one, I can't remember which bass exactly (probably one of his precisions) but I think he played it through a rocktron bass preamp which was a favourite at the time. squeeze wax: strummy acoustic guitars, not fun to record at all but I was playing at that time one of a handful of acoustics none of which are particularly sexy, a black yamaha, a washburn 12 string and a red charvel flattop - my fave acoustic is a custom made kinkade brothers (made for me in 1995 for victorialand by the kinkade brothers in Bristol - where russell fong learned his craft) though I'm pretty sure it wasn't that one. I do know, however, that all the acoustics would be doubled or trebled then compressed to thicken the sound. The sort of funky guitar is a 1959 Fender Stratocaster played through a Tom Sholtz Sustainor and then into the board with a touch of all the same stuff I wrote in the last paragraph.. the fast tremelo guitar sound was created in the mix with a noise gate...S'funny I remember all the pre-rehab recording as if it were yesterday and the later stuff is a little more vague. I blame the sobriety.... Most of that equipment is still in my studio just waiting for an opportunity to get used but, to be honest, when I play through those things it sound so.. cocteau twins that I tend to avoid it...save it for a rainy day, I suppose...." -Robin Guthrie, November 14/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Pitch The Baby]ok.. the pulsating stuff : was my green paul reed smith guitar (cause I did most of holv with it and my '59 jazzmaster) played through a gallien kruger preamp straight into the board. this was then treated with a lexicon 480L (pitch shifted +10 cents and -10 cents to make it stereo) and delayed with a yamaha d1500 in sync with the bpm of the track.. next the fun bit .. I inserted a drawmer ds201 dual noise gate over the stereo guitar and triggered it externally from click track playing 16th notes... then I rerecorded the track back from tape through a cry baby wah-wah which I moved manually (Ie with my hands) ..next: the clean guitars - same guitar through a tom sholtz rockmodule preamp into the board, a little roland dimension d and same yamaha delay....and the bass was a '57 precision played through a nomad bass box....sorry not to be more specific...oh, and there are no synths...." -Robin Guthrie, November 13/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post "...the violaine gtr- was doubled by....me..at the time, cutting and pasting was something I couldn't afford at that time..(Well who knows what a recoed with Liz would have been like? Having said that , I managed lots of the (so called) modern prodiuction techniques....! (not my editing)" -Robin Guthrie, September 24/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Piano sounds in Twinlights]..it was a grand piano actually. we went specially to a studio that had one cos i said i weren't gonna play some lame digital electric shit....so it sounds that bad huh? oh well.....must have been the microphones." -Simon Raymonde, October 7/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "we did use som roland ones on and off but the treasure sound was from Emu-Drumulator's SP12. it had those little pads on with each drum sound assigned to pad. it was quite basic compared to the shit you can get now but it had charm! it was designed by roger linn, who also had a hand in the next one we used..on BBK , it was made by Akai and it was called an MPC60 ( i still use this now!)...robin did all the drum programming for the band. That was his thing, and....well nothing." -Simon Raymonde, January 31/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "well well! time to educate and elucidate. after all these years you're finally gonna find out....you asked for this....and btw Will was an outstandingly good bass player, much much more of bass player than i ever was...very intricate and very rythmical. robin and i swapped around yes. not constantly, but when it felt like it was needed. my potential as a bass player? not for me to say, but i never thought of myself as solely that anyhow so i was never bothered to be any good. I never practised, and never had an instrument at home. I always figured that i wanted to be excited to play the bass when it was important ...ie at the studio...and it's not an instrument you can have much fun on by yourself. I always just wanted to play something on the tune that i enjoyed to play, to record, that contributed something to the overall sound. calfskin smack actually as you'd mentioned it, was one that i wrote on the keyboard first, then recorded it with robin playing along on guitar then I put the bass on after. This was often the way, in the older times, we would sit with me on bass and robin on guitar and write that way, and only occasionally would we swap, like on Eggs And Their Shells was one i wrote on gtr and robin played bass on...but then on BBK things developed more as piano and vibes crept in, so i began to start more things on piano, and bass would be added later after the skeleton track was done. The actual track Blue Bell Knoll was one we swapped on, him on bass, me on guitar, but nearly all the time without exception Robin would do all the fuzzy gtr tracks and I would just noodley melody stuff that you can't hear much anyhow!! We wrote over 100 songs i think so there are a ton of different ways we did this stuff, cos otherwise we'd have got so bored. Also when we were in a mess drug and drink wise, we'd often find ourselves at studio at totally different times, and it'd be like, ' ok i've done a piano bit, but i can really hear some guitar on this, can i be bothered waiting for robin to come in? no not really, i'll put something down as i feel inspired...kind of thing' and for him, exactly the same. He went to france once with a tape machine and did a whole bunch of tunes on his own, like Half Gifts, Rilkean Heart, while I was back in London in our studio doing things like Primitive Heart and Calfskin Smack myself....so it was for the most part evenly distributed, and that's why we always just say 'written by cocteau twins' or else we figured we'd just spend too long submitting seperate forms for each bloody song to the publishers etc...other things i can remember while i'm here and you're in inquisitive mood....'Ups' was something i loved recording for example, cos i get to have this thick fluid bass playing all over, about 2 tracks of lo and chord-y shit i think, which actually drives the track along...take it away and the song don't really exist, whereas sometimes for the track you're just kind of helping it along.. what else...gosh i'm on a roll now.....like going down memory lane this....Eperdu, now that was one RG did the guitars in France with the ocean lapping outside, and then when he played it to me back at september sound,i just found it very inspiring to play basses on, and in one afternoon we had it finished, very magical, and then of course Liz can get inspired hearing these little pieces go from just little pieces to full complete movements. What else...Alice was all written by me on piano first. ( god i love that tune)...Robin wrote Bluebeard music 100% all himself...Quisqose we wrote together standing up with a Bass VI each duelling. Rococo we wrote live, him on gtr, me on bass, took about 10 minutes. Which ones did RG play bass on....? other than the ones we already mentioned, well the whole of HOH of course! On HOLV he wrote the bass line on Pitch The Baby ( i loved playing that live i have to say!), in fact he did all the music on that one, I did the guitars (they sound like keyboards) on 50-50 Clown, he did the pulse bass and the slightly buzzy guitars in the middle 8, and i did the hi real bass....and on M&K he did all the music on Half-Gifts, (not sure if it has a bass line at all?) mostly all of Rilkean Heart, and bass on Violaine, and with a few exceptions i am sure due to bad memory, that was about it. Liz wrote the music on beatrix i remember that! Oh yeah Robin did Cherry Coloured Funk, yeah i am sure he did. Most else was shared duties, but oh yeah remember that Robin did ALL the drum programming which took alot of time and effort and this was often the starter for us to begin a track....'what kind of thing shall we do today, fast or slow, heavy etc etce' and then he'd come up with something beatwise and we'd kind of pick it up from there. I am getting all nostalgic now.......we figured if it was difficult then it wasn't any good anyway and we'd go to the movies. we HATED to TRY too hard. maybe we was lazy or something, but if we had to sit and scratch our heads as to how it could happen, we thought, fuck it let's go get chocolate. we did spend a long time pissing around with the Sound of things. And from the inspiring sound would come a good tune. Mostly. that sounds very arrogant, but i don't mean it to. What I mean is that musical creation does not have to be this furrowed brow and pained existence. The crap that was going on outside of the studio walls was painful enough, here was our refuge. OUr place to be ourselves for five minutes. Outside was a struggle, why would we want to make the studio a mirror of that? Does that make any sense? I have had a couple of vodkas so maybe im full of shit i dunno." -Simon Raymonde, October 3/02 cocteautwinsforums.com] "Violaine was a song where we swapped, and I played the note-y melody guitar parts and robin played the bass, so just goes to show...nothing for granted." -Simon Raymonde, October 1/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "in the old days of 8 and 16 track i used to play mostly chords, three note mostly, like strumming a guitar really, Pearly Dewdrops for eg, is kind of a chord with a melody at the same time. Then I got a 5 string bass which made life easier, and with Iceblink Luck, Carolyns Fingers etc, i think I did both chords and a hi note melody too, though when i did it live i managed to incorporate the two, a challenge but kept my fingers slender! then when i felt it was becoming a bit cliched to do it and every one else in the world seemed to be playing chords I went the other way and used very minimal dub-by kind of bass lines, occasionally enhanced by a counter melody with a hi bass. That was quite boring wasn't it?" -Simon Raymonde, September 30/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "...no gold hardware on my jazzmaster-so I'll keep that, don't have a country gentleman, do have a nashville-so I'll keep that, er, sparkle jet, it's old, you wouldn't like it-so I'll keep that as well.." -Robin Guthrie, May 22/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
LYRICS, SINGING & TITLES
"A lot of the stuff I was singing about then was all metaphorical. I wasn't talking like I am now. I guess it's back to how much personal power you feel that you have. Like, if I'm 17 and I don't even know when I'm hungry, am I tired, have I had any sleep—if you don't even know that, then how can you talk about lyrics that come from such an unconscious place? I always said 'I dont' know', and I didn't." -Liz Fraser, 1995 [SOURCE: Alternative Press] "I've discovered she's [Liz] worse when it comes to singing live. Three days prior to a gig that's when the moods start—slamming doors, breaking things." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Rorschach Testing] "...re: the FCC tour and the yelpin'!! crumbs that was a tough one. at the time, the band found it tough, cos as you say, we actually sounded fairly awesome, probably for the first time ok ok i know you're all gonna go...'no, the holv was bezt, the garlands tour was best'...whatever, in my opinion, the fcc tour was going to be really good but the M&K one was superb cos mark clifford was involved, we did the otherness thing with him we did the twinlights thing with acoustic gtr and piano, and we did singalongacocteau as well!! personally i supported liz on the 4cc thing cos i sorta had to cos everyone else was on her case. i don't 100% know exactly why she sang like that but i can hazard a guess and it was mostly a huge release to the relationship with RG going tits up, the new relationship she was having, and wanting to not be so rigid to the way we'd always done things. It made me cringe sometimes on stage, sure but at that time, i was more bothered with keeping the whole ship steady and i just got through the shows easy enough. it was a relief actually. But on M&K tour her voice was stunning, but she was not terribly happy you know so...it didn't last so long.....there you go...she was pretty amazing most of the bloody time. we all get to go bananas once in a while don't we?" -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "It's impossible. It's impossible in as much as...No. You'd be disappointed if you found out...I might make it sound as if I think it's unimportant, but the words are important, important to me I mean, but...I think you're just supposed to get out of them what you can. And they DO make sense." -Liz Fraser, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "[The actual Wax & Wane lyrics are:]the devil bites dirty we wax and wane." -Robin Guthrie, October 3/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Instrumentals, hmm, I'd have to have a think about that one. What I do know is that there were two which we only played live but didn't record...and then..."Sky to Speak" (became or was actually "Orange Appled"); "Double Doubt," from what I understand, was "Kookaburra," but I could be wrong; "Void of Voice," is actually an incorrect name given to the live version of "My Hue and Cry."....sky to speak, Double Doubt, Void of Voice: for the record these were never our titles (working or otherwise) for any of our songs..I guess someone just made them up." -Robin Guthrie, January 20/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[When jokingly asked if he'd like to join the (ficticious) 'Anti-Screeching Dolphin Club' (ASDC), a fanbase whose members disliked Liz's change in vocal style during the FCC era, Robin responded:]been members since '94" -Robin Guthrie, November 13/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Providing phonetics for song titles] tiny dynamine (die-nah-mine), cico buff (keycoh-buff), cicely (sigh-se-lee), violaine (vi-o-lane), beatrix (bee-trix), pandora (pan-do-ra), oomingmak (oom-ming-mak), quisquose (quiz-quose)." -Robin Guthrie, September 24/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post "[When asked why no back-up vocalists were used during live Cocteau Twins concerts, he replied:] difficult question : I don't really think anyone would have been up to the job : I mean, all those other vocals, these were not just 'oohs,ahhs and doowops' type backing vocals but liz kinda vocals 'cept in the background - if that makes sense.. and how would they know what to sing? eh?" -Robin Guthrie, May 28/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Why sing something that no-one can understand? Why not just sing some old bollocks that all of us can lalalala along to and we'd all be happier right? You'd be more popular cos the radio folk would play it, the fans would be happier cos they wouln't have to guess them all, right? Not for me. Liz sang plenty of decipherable lyrics, like poetry it is. She has the most unusual phrasing of any singer , and this is what can cause this theory that she's singing gibberish. MOre oftern than not, she's .....um ....not. Yes there were times when she did not want to be understood, quoted, analysed, studied etc and her way of dealing with that was to use words as play, as new language, to create with sound, to start from scratch, new slate etc...funnily enough it had the reverse effect and more people than ever wanted to know what she was singing! That was only a brief period, and it irks me somewhat that CT will mostly be remembered as a band with a singer who just made noises. Garlands, all words, Head Over Heels, all words, Treasure, some sound experiments here. Harold Budd, bits of both. Victorialand, bits of both, Blue Bell Knoll, alot of foreign words, alot of cut and paste, Heaven or Las Vegas, mostly all songs with words, FCC, all words, and Milk and Kisses, half and half again." -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
SOLO & COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
"I'd been a fan of mark clifford since the seefeel days so naturally we wanted to work with him at BU. He found sophie and made pseudo nouveau and while it was a lovely record, in my head I heard more. So I asked them if I could mess around a little with their work and, voila, 5050..This was a litle different for me because although I'd been remixing people (pretty anonymously) for years, I cant remember any other record where I was credied with my name like that....For me, and I shy before Mark and Sophie, it's my favourite Sneakster record." -Robin Guthrie, December 12/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "The music from the movie [Mysterious Skin] trailer is all in the film... it's a trailer for the, er...film. ... I'll say it again for the less attentive. The music from the movie trailer is in the movie.. Now, how does this fit in with your false advertising statement. It doesn't . You're wrong... next. The 'track', as you put it, is actually an amalgam of many of the pieces of the original score, most of which are on the album. So if we are talking about a few seconds of a tune that didn't make the album, then, hey, I've just ripped you off....deal with it... (because of course I'll be getting 19 bucks in my pocket for every cd sold....yeah, right) If you had simply pm'd me and asked me for whatever music you wanted I'd have sent you it happily.. But after stating that I'm ripping you off, first by cancelling coachella (er..check the facts), then making a record that doesn't please you, I think I'll not bother." -Robin Guthrie, May 26/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...I was of course talking about the [Mysterious Skin] score... although it's not just the original film cues, as they range from 15 secs to 2 minutes a piece and don't make an album that's very easy to listen to. They have been fully re-worked for an album and they sound just gorgeous.. But... and this is really important..You really should see the movie.. It's very powerful." -Robin Guthrie, March 18/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...the whole process is a little upside down here. The 19 crescent show in LA was the demo, the future recordings of that work will be the...mmm .. cream.. please indulge me and don't give me any of that, 'well I saw the 19 crescent show and it was better' kind of elitist bullshit. It was a work in progress, no more.. Hey some of it was really good, but please give me a chance to improve, this whole, publicdemo thing is fucked up." -Robin Guthrie, May 17/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...[Lush's thoughts on Robin's production of Spooky] nah they loved it.. and they played all the stuff themselves..." -Robin Guthrie, January 23/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I mixed a track or two on the album [Dead Can Dance], I honestly couldn't tell you which one(s) as it's years since I heard it.. I can't remember playing guitar on it but that doesn't mean I didn't. I do remember that it was music that they had recorded in Australia before they came to the UK..." -Robin Guthrie, January 10/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com] "i don't want to sound like a real pussy, but no. i just cannot do it at the moment [more solo material]. i have a total lack of confidence in the singing thing. to be brutally honest, it is cos a) it really aint that good, and b) when the record came out, the press were kind enough and said the voice was soft and sweet and really quite lovely and all that nonsense, but being vain and self-concious about it, i did delve a bit deeper and found some rather uncomplimentary comments on these kind of boards, and to be fair, i think most of them were about right. And well even if they weren't it shattered my confidence somewhat to the point where i just decided to stick behind the desk or the piano or whatever. I do admit to singing backing vocals at a gig in nov last year with TRam, but that was a one-off, and also cos Paul's voice is even more soft and quiet than mine. I want to sound like Scott Walker but i end up sounding like Paul MacCartney and that really is not what i want!!! and please do not reply to this with a ton of 'oh but simon..'s !! i made my mind up long ago. but hey ..thanks for asking, and when i do finally record an lp, it will be better than just nice. it will be superb, or it won't come out. no mediocrity allowed. BSE was mediocre. sorry to be such a downer, but that's how it is." -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] [Speaking on his contribution to The Lilies] "it was for the Tottenham football team, it was the Lillies, it has miki, me, russell and moose from moose and chris acland from lush too, it is rubbish and not worth 5 cents, and i wrote it so i should know.....i was cajoled into it, and young and foolish, and hey...it's not a 'football song', it's art about the artistic spirit of THFC...." -Simon Raymonde, November 4/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "a new solo record? well if i ever realistically got close to finishing one, it would not be as song-y. I think it would be more interesting musically and it probably wouldn't have my whiny voice all over it! I can harmonise fine and do loads of multitracking that makes the voice sound nice but i don't want to do that anymore...i either do it with one voice or not at all, and i think not at all is better for me right now....i may use other people who can sing!" -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "i would love to play more, but on many productions i do tend to play quite a bit, on Czars, James Yorkston, i did. As far as JUST playing, well yes I was a member of the band TRAM recently for a gorgeous show at the London venue Bush Hall. I played a lovely big grand piano, and some organ. The album Kind Of Closure, I played on, so it made sense that when they did a show, I did it too. It was hard work, all the rehearsals etc, with the string players and brass etc, but well worth it. Previous to that I played piano alot on the new Michael J Sheehy album for Beggars Banquet, ( he's recently been touring the US supporting Peter Murphy!!), so while I would be happy to have more 'music' on the go, it's fine for now. I am setting up a wee studio at home in next few weeks, so maybe i'll get round to making another record one day, but not like the last one! Urgh!" -Simon Raymonde, September 20/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
FAMILY, LIFE & LEISURE
"As far as our collective brood of children goes : they will, I'm sure excel, in their own time... for the moment though, we don't let them leave the house without spiderman suits and surgical masks.." -Robin Guthrie, June 19/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I'm sooooo on my way to the kitchen now to fuck with the coffee cups and rearrange the dirty dishes " -Robin Guthrie, May 17/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Thank you for your sometimes kind, sometimes confusing birthday wishes. I'm sorry I've not been around here for a while as I've been... elsewhere. Truth is I would have said thanks earlier but I couldn't log in. Anyway being 44 is very nice. Young people stand up to give me a seat on the bus now." -Robin Guthrie, January 31/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Discussing the role the month of September plays in the world of Cocteau Twins/September Sound]...my son Stan was born that month too." -Simon Raymonde, October 7/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "i know small amounts and some stuff [family history] from my mum, my fathers two sisters lillian and gertie both died young as did my father and my connections are less than they were then obviously. alot of the history seems to have died with them....i still have 2 uncles alive, lenny and harold but i don't see much of them sadly. my grandparents were polish jews but i only saw a couple of pics...my dad married outside the jewish faith when he wed my mum and i hear that there was some furore about this. of course by the time i was fascinated about all this, my dad and aunts were all passed away. I haven't given up, but it's not so easy....i know that they were given a name when they arrived at the port cos they didn't speak english at all and ended up with an 'adopted' name by default really so as i understand it that would make it hard to trace right?" -Simon Raymonde, June 13/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "i believe that when you have truly loved something (someone), you know exactly when you have to let go." -Simon Raymonde, October 8/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] [Reflecting on the September 11th tragedy]"i thought i would share this with you....no reason really. on sept 10 last year i arrived in ny for the cmj music marathon where i was to be a guest panellist, on some spurious subject. 24 hours later the world somehow was never going to be the same again. at the moment the first plane hit, i was on washington place and 10th street in a nice wee internet cafe emailing my friend tony at subpop records, and we are now bonded for evermore as the date/time stamp on my email is the very minute that is now history. i walked out on to the streets as a woman screamed 'call 911' seconds later. To me it looked like a little plane, and the cafe owner stuck on CNN immediately, and for the next blurry day the tragedy began to unravel in slow motion. I saw the second tower collapse in front of my very eyes, surreal stuff, and still upsetting, the HUGE calamity of it all. My time in NY was pretty traumatic, as the conference got cancelled, all my friends were out of town, and not coming in, and all my ny friends were immediately heading out. So it was a very lonely time. I could hardly use the phone as the lines were busy so much and i felt bad about clogging up the system, so after CNN overload, I really started to get depressed with the coverage, and how addictive i was finding it, and yet i needed to do something else to occupy my time., or else i would have cracked up. I am not a games-person but in the flat i was in , there was a nintendo 64 and a Goldeneye game , nothing else. Within the next 5 days i had become an expert. At bombing, shooting, sneaking up on people, quite a curious paradox. While the death and mayhem surrounded me, i chose to deal with it by playing a daft war game. That was surreal too. I haven't played a game since. I couldn't get home to london for ages, and i couldn't go out much as the air was quite appaling, a mix of electrical, burning metal, and who knows what else? Eventually I got a greyhound bus to toronto and caught a plane home from there. This year, on Sept 11, we had a Bella Union 5th anniversary party in Camden where i dj-ed and all our bands etc who were around came down, it was a good night. I played a lot of patti smith, television, strokes, you know just as a nod to my favourite city." -Simon Raymonde, September 21/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] Wednesdays are a whole different bag of liquorice allsorts, aren't they? Last night I was knocked back into the reality that the world that I live in is beautifully surreal if not surreality beautiful. The universe showered upon me many many little gifts yesterday, most of which I wasn't really in the correct frame of mind to access, but the best was easily granting me another opportunity to share in the joy of the world, or in this case, allowing me to be entertained by the kids who came trick or treating. Now to suggest that my host countrymen haven't quite got the Halloween thing down pat, would be somewhat of an understatement, for it was only introduced here, by the hallmark corporation, here some three years ago. But, you know, they have the whole pumpkin/scary mask/candy thing, as lifted from countless American movies, and the supermarket is full of orange and black attire in reverence to the pumpkin, the significance of which has always eluded me. Growing up in Scotland in the sixties we had no pumpkins, no, we had turnips, which are so muxh more scary than pussy pumkins. Anyway, as is evident, the French as up for as many holidays as they can get because it means not working and having a legitimate excuse for being trashed in the afternoon. So it was with this in mind that I dutifully answered the doorbell, just as darkness was falling, to what I thought would be a darling little bunch of children, dressed up as members of the cure, that I could give sweets to without the fear of being arrested. But it actually turned out to be, well, big kids, some of whom I'm sure I've seen in the bar. It went like this .. kids trick or treat? me trick ... (pause) kids trick or treat? me trick (long pause) kids (with vacant faces) quoi?, que voulez-vous dire ? me (losing patience sensing I'm about to take a beating) Um, ca ne fait rien, que voulez-vous? kids de l'argent me huh? kids des cloppes me les cloppes? ne voulez-vous pas des bonbons? fat kid (looked like robert smith) monsieur, vous avez du fromage? me ecoute, prenez mes bon-bons and fuck off (slipping back into english frustrated that my french wasn't up to transmitting the sentiment in the way I desired) And that, mes amis is all it took for me to start appreciating the world again. That French children can come to my house and try to terrorise me into giving them money, cigarettes and cheese (lol - the fucking french, I swear) on a night more traditonally known for, I don't know, scaring the shit out of little kids then giving them enough sweets to ensure future diabetes, makes me truly believe that I live a wonderful life. Little things are so important when walking along the edge." -Robin Guthrie, November 1/06 [SOURCE:robinguthrie.net
ALBUM LAYOUT & ARTWORK
"[Lullabies To Violaine] looks pretty... wonder when I'll get one?" -Robin Guthrie, February 7/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] " liz did (does?) have gorgeous handwriting but all the handwritten CT logos were usually done by calligraphers or by the design team V23. we rejected hundreds before they got it right....sleeves can be like that sometimes....when we were doing the sleeve for HOLV we could not find anything appropriate at all, and then with the designer we were meeting, we were about to pack up and go home, when we took one last look at the backgrounds of some of his photos with those little magnifying glasses-thingys and in the tiniest corner of one of his shots, there was this blur of lights, actually done by waving fairy lights around apparently. And that became the sleeve that you know and love! Pure chance." -Simon Raymonde, September 19/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "As far as the [remasters] artwork and fuck-ups like that were concerned they may not have happened had we been sent proofs....For the record : the artwork, to me, seems cheap and tacky, the onbody artworks are illegible and I'm overall disappointed with the results.. Has anyone asked how Vaughan Oliver felt about the artwork?" -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]
PERFORMING LIVE
"...we want to develop it and take it further, because it's not right yet, it's just not right. The sound, on everything we've done, hasn't been how we wanted it. There's a hell of a lot more power when we play live than anything we've ever done on a record." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "send money, drugs and guns and I'll play anywhere" -Robin Guthrie, October 22/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "by 96 we'd worked out how to do it...and then we split up. yes 96 was immense fun. I'd learned how to turn off from all the aggro, and for that couple of hours it was complete joy. I thought Liz sang brilliantly, and was enjoying it, but she had a new beau by then and was missing him alot and finding the days hard to get thru. We'd been thru quite a few different line-ups, the robin liz will one, the robin liz and tape one, the three of us and tape, then the seven piece band with 2 drummers (silly), then the five piece affair with dj, and that was certainly the most enjoyable. A kind of three-tiered affair. the cocteau hits bit (ha!), the ambient dubby chilled out seefeel kind of bit, and the twinlight-sy sort of quiet bit with piano and whatnot. i loved that tour yes." -Simon Raymonde, October 4/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "i do remember the olympia yeah, and the zenith, good memories...it's not like you say, i don't wanto forget the past at all, i just don't want to live in it....CT was a huge part of my life, and like all things, some of it was sublimely supreme and some of it was achingly awful. We had some excellent shows, recordings, little shared moments, and i have different faves, depending on my memory. My fave shows were 4 we did in London in a row, two at Brixton Academy and then 2 at the Town And Country Club. I guess we were pretty good. TV i mostly hated, though you're right, even though the show was appaling, (aah that presenter!!) the MTV thing was really nice. Jay Leno was shockingly bad! what a moron. anyway..what else? fave moment.....i think when we finished recording the track Blue Bell Knoll i was v excited...like fuck me, that was amazing! i don't ever want to go to sleep now....you know what i mean." -Simon Raymonde, September 20/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "...always remember those awful times when gigs would have to get cancelled and stuff. what can you do. it's not like we can just jam and whig out, it was in those days anyhow all so rehearsed there was no room for improvising a situation. the voice sometimes suffered in high altitude places and after stressful events or periods of no sleep and long travel and with no time to recover from one night to the next these problems sometimes just hit you hard like that. sorry about that show, we were generally quite good on that tour! at least you weren't at the one in ..norway(?) where liz left after about five minutes and r & i had to play the whole set without her...that was embarassing." -Simon Raymonde, August 8/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]
THE RECORDING INDUSTRY
"[Being signed to 4AD] It's all the result of Rob's sheer hard neck really. We were moseying along a bit aimlessly and then one night at a Birthday Party gig Rob decided to wheedle us all backstage and sat himself down next to Phil [Calvert]. I was bloody terrified at the audacity of it, but Phil was genuinely interested and helpful, he gave us the address of 4AD and told us to write, and of course Rob being Rob, he did." -Liz Fraser, 1982 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "They [4AD] wrote back and told us to send more tapes...we did, and things have just escalated from there." -Robin Guthrie, 1982 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "[On reading about remaster release dates at cocteautwinsforums.com]...you'd think that someone at 4ad would keep me posted with this stuff.." -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...shame though but that's record labels for you, full of cunts..." -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "As far as the [remasters] artwork and fuck-ups like that were concerned they may not have happened had we been sent proofs [from 4AD]" -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I'm not someone ungrateful, in fact gratitude, I believe, is one of the fundamental parts of my make up, one of the few things that distinguishes me, in my head at least, from a whole bunch of greedy cock-sucking music business whores, the likes of which I've known well in the last twenty five years or so." -Robin Guthrie, October 31/06 [SOURCE: robinguthrie.net [In reference to the remasters 'Blood Bath' typo]"now that IS funny. and pathetic...incidentally there are a few fraZers rather than fraSers on some of these re-issues, so i guess no-one was paying due attention.." -Simon Raymonde, January 31/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "Jeezus. thanks guys.nice to know that the remasters are out to buy already when robin who remastered the buggers has not seen it yet. I can't speak for Liz but i certainly have not received anything either. That is no surprise but i can't believe they [4AD] didn't send one to YOU RG. that is taking the biscuit as it was you that did the bloody thing." -Simon Raymonde, June 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "To those people who accuse us, the band, of being cynical, it should be pointed out that these albums [remasters] are being sold at a discount, thereby greatly reducing or even curtailing the royalties that we receive.. Yes, the winners here folks are 4ad and the retailers.." -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] [When asked about attending at 4AD's 25th birthday bash]"I'll can't make my mind up. To catch Roy Orbison, even if I have to endure The Beatles, or go to the Jimi Hendrix show but be bummed out by Jim Morrison... Nah, fuck it, Hendrix, couldn't cut it acoustically, Jim Morrison is currently... dead... as well as is The Big O, who even dead would make a more interesting show than the fucking Beatles. Nope ... Me, I'll be looking forward to the $AD (oops typo) 4AD party.....[that was a genune shift 4 typo, by the way] . Well I sure can't wait for some of those artists to come back... Hope I get an invite." -Robin Guthrie, August 30/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[When asked if 4AD had joined the ranks of labels that never give their artists due credit/money? Robin sarcastically replied] you are fucking with us, right?" -Robin Guthrie, June 23/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Sarcastically]I'm back from a well deserved holiday, after all, spending all day at the Swiss bank paying in all my royalties can be very tiring...So I decided to chip into this very obscure thread just for starters, that is before the pizza’s I have to deliver are ready..." -Robin Guthrie, July 28/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[On not having received advanced copies of the remasters from 4AD he noted:] Somethings don't surprise me anymore....I mean it'd be nice to at least see a copy of the remastered BBK and HOLV before it's released..mojo, if you read this, walk over to Steve's desk, give him a slap and tell him to send me a proof or a copy of the finished record will you?" -Robin Guthrie, June 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "the wider issues apart, historically record labels exist by 'exploiting the catalogue'...take those words quite literally and you will be half way there. While there are sunny days when everyone rides the waves and takes the foam, the tide does eventually go out ( i think i exhausted the sea metaphor there didn't i?)...and all that's left is to 'exploit the catalogue'. Now I am not suggesting that 4AD is a spent force, it may well lazarus its way back at some time, but re-whatevering is a fairly tried and tested way of rekindling the fire ( good grief this boy is etaphor crazee tonight!!!) and bringing the label profile back into view. Not totally abhorrent really. I mean we wouldn't do it, but then we are just starting out as a label right? We have new music to support. For a while there, CT, DCD and Pixies etc will all have shifted from our view, and it is only right and proper that people are nudged, to see just what influence some of this music may have had on what's going on today. Quite how one goes about nudging is of course up for discussion, but there is hardly a shameless marketing campaign on these cds. If I had the cds i probably would not consider buying them, but if i was curious what this band was like, it may be a good enough place to start. Nothing cynical about that. I look for the cynical in everything. And indeed money for old rope is a considered opinion by some. But it is, let's face it, old rope. And i know a lot of people who could do with a bit of old rope. I could certainly do with the money for a bit of old rope!! I am insane. I apologise." -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post]
CHARTS, HITS & AWARDS
"...had one [gold disc] once..gave it to a nice welsh coulple who visited my studio....think it was treasure. Also know that other albums sold more but nobody ever gave us any more discs..I think they must have been expensive ... or maybe mender has got them all." -Robin Guthrie, June 11/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "this is strange i know but in two territories we actually sold one record per capita. In Christmas Island we sold 424 cds and the population in June 2002 was cited as ......424! Weird huh? and in Bikini Island we sold 22 copies and the pop. there is .....22 ! what can i tell you..?" -Simon Raymonde, July 8/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "...this is strange i know but in two territories we actually sold one record per capita. In Christmas Island we sold 424 cds and the population in June 2002 was cited as ......424! Weird huh? and in Bikini Island we sold 22 copies and the pop. there is .....22 ! what can i tell you..?" -Simon Raymonde, July 8/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...those sales figures by the way....a little off the mark....albums can sell that many sure back in the day but singles no way...we got to no 28 with that little chap [Pearly Dewdrops' Drops] and i think 100,000 would have got us closer to no.1!! made me laugh tho'....sales were pretty good on albums both in usa and uk...the perception is that usa was where CT were biggest but comparatively no i don't think so..." -Simon Raymonde, July 4/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]
FANS, FORUMS & COLLECTORS
"[Online chat with Cocteau Twins fans] I haven't had so much fun since I gatecrahed a duran duran party....did you see the look on those peoples faces?" -Robin Guthrie, January 4/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I've been reading all the stuff you wrote and I'd like to confirm that you're all fucked..too much time on your hands, I recon..." -Robin Guthrie, September 24/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "i'd like to buy my own autograph. i've suffered some memory loss recently due to a collision with a magnet ( don't ask me how!) and i can't remember how to write my name...any help appreciated." -Simon Raymonde, April 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...'roud here [cocteautwinsforums.com], it's best to be careful in case I find out from my 'fans' that in no uncertain terms that I was 'absolute shite before nineteen eighty one' and 'absolute shite after nineten ninety six'..." -Robin Guthrie, June 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I'm sure I passed by kansas city to enterain y'all...OK so maybe metallica were there [Lollapalooza] too, but they're nice boys from nice families and if you'd just joined in the fun of throwing lots of mud at liz and simon (I was spotless, I have to add, probably due to my ozzyness) I'm sure you would have had fun too....ps.. do they put something in the water there or what? ps.. in real life metallica are only just over 3 feet tall....." -Robin Guthrie, June 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post "the BU forum serves a different purpose to this one. Some of you may find it hard to believe but many people who like artists on BU may not be really into the Cocteau Twins. I mean, I can't imagine Jetscreamer or Laura Veirs fans congregating in the Cocteau Twins forum...Therefore the BU forum is a place where they can exchange their thoughts and ideas without having to continually use the Cocteau Twins as a reference. Of course there will be a crossover as many people who like Cocteau Twins also like some of the BU stuff..me : I like it here, I'll stick around a bit.." -Robin Guthrie, June 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...i do mostly have my tongue deeply embedded in my cheek when i am here [cocteautwinsforums.com], knowing that the 'fan-artist' relationship (esp with CT historically) can be quite erratic! i expect nothing from you and popped in here out of courtesy to leesa who asked me to. I found it quite a pleasant, intelligent and amusing trip, so I pop back. I read all the negative and positive posts and can step back and feel detached from it all and not feel personally involved in many of the topics, so don't worry about me. carry on the rants at will, no holding back." -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "[Addressing fan attraction to the band] shit, and there i was thinking it was coz we were sex gods & coz you just all wanted to have sex with us! shows how wrong you can be huh?" -Simon Raymonde, April 10/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "You know, I've been away for the weekend and I missed you lot [forum members]..." -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post "it's sooooo informative in here [cocteautwinsforums.com]...you'd think that someone at 4ad would keep me posted with this stuff.." -Robin Guthrie, June 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Joking with serious collectors]I've even got the 8 track cartridge [of Tishbite]...." -Robin Guthrie, May 26/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[Joking with serious collectors]i personally think that the venezeulan limited edition 8 track tape with scratch and sniff cover (smells of plastic and children) and the free whoopee cushion that made the noise of Robin wheezing when you sat on it was the best item of FCC stuff I have seen...and i must say that the Albanian 78rpm version of Loves Easy Tears has to be seen to be believed, it comes wrapped in this communist newspaper like a bag of fish and chips and when you play the vinyl the world instantly seems like a safer place..." -Simon Raymonde, April 5/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...touched I am, of course, that so many of you [fans] seem to like the music I have made but I can't help feeling that nothing I do, from here to eternity, will live up to your [fan] expectations. I mean I could be wrong here but I imagine even if the cocteau twins got back together you'd be saying 'ah but they're not as good as they were'....I could be a little paranoid here but I think probably not..." -Robin Guthrie, May 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I think some consideration should go to Mr Borum and Ms Beales who have tirelessly dedicated many man and wo-man hours to co-ordinating this 'ere shindig [CocteauFest] coming up soon, and halt any sniping and plotting of imminent rival bids for parties in other global hotspots. I am sure the CT fest would be transferable in idea-only to other interested parties, but let's leave the chat about these other plans till the embers from the ct-fest have cooled to nothing. We will be sending some stuff over for the party in good time, some bits and pieces you know. I think a european one and a usa one does make sense seperatelybut it would make more sense would it not to do ct-fest usa 2003 and ct-fest eu 2004 etc etc..one thing that unites you all is this once-fine band and for that we are all agreed, but one thing i think you forget is it is not a competition to be the best fan and we should respect each others efforts even if they do not marry with our own ideas. i am sure the owners of this list would be more than happy to see other ct-events thrive globally, other sites open, other nights of celebration, but i DO think it would be better right now if this particular up-and-coming event was supported by all or not commented on. If it sucks then i am sure the organisers will be the first to know and the forum will be the place to see the reports but while there are many out here who are making plans to travel hundreds of miles , let us simply look forward to a cracking night out." -Simon Raymonde, July 2/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "treasure is 'unique' i'll give you that...artists cannot possibly feel the same way as fans about everything that would be weird, but it is folklore that the band have dissed treasure and that the fans adore it..i know that and i love you all like my own children ( of course i don't, i'm just being nice), but listening to treasure for me cannot sadly be just about listening to some music by another band and being objective, it brings back memories of unfulfilled half-ideas, uncomfortable feelings and a certain preciousness that i am not sure painted a particularly favourable picture. I think it's a unique record and one that may stand out in time as the epitome of what people perceived the CT to be. And hey it really doesn't matter what I think. I am amazed and delighted that so many people seem to love it." -Simon Raymonde, April 4/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "you know what, i don't have anything rare at all and it sucks. I should have collected stuff shouldn't I, and now i am all jealous. oh well, i had the rarest thing really, i was in it." -Simon Raymonde, January 31/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "i am a bit weird. i do collect a few things but not CT -related, though i have a FCC jigsaw i think somewhere and a dutch mag with a cocteaus flexi disc, but to be honest i am not that bothered. i was/am a bit wary of being a sad old man who sits staring out of the window looking at a scrap book. I have the internet, and you lot to remind me what i did, and to send me photos I loathe to look at! The music is really the only thing i think i may be curious to hear sometime in the future, and really that is the only thing i think is particularly relevant, because for me, listening always conjures up very strong pictures and memories for me. I don't own a camera for this reason. I prefer to witness something and capture it inside and experience it first-hand. I collect Orson Welles memorabilia, old film posters by Saul Bass. I have every episode of Sgt Bilko-the Phil Silvers Show, and a 15 yr collection of Time Out magazine which i am getting rid of. Oh yeah, I once had a really cool Jap vinyl bootleg which was similar looking to treasure i think it was called something stoopid and all bansh-gothie, like 'scream' maybe. But this interviewer from a CT fanzine came to my house and started being really weird and i wanted to get rid of him, so i gave him that. I hear it's quite rare? Never mind." -Simon Raymonde, September 26/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
SUBSTANCE ABUSE & RECOVERY
"...too many hard drugs in the 80's has slightly confused my old mucker..." -Robin Guthrie, December 1/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[When told all releases add up to just over 8 hours of music]god how depressing! all that fuckin work for what...8 bleedin' hours..?? good grief, put it like that, no wonder we did so many drugs" -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "send money, drugs and guns and I'll play anywhere" -Robin Guthrie, October 22/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "S'funny I remember all the pre-rehab recording as if it were yesterday and the later stuff is a little more vague. I blame the sobriety..." -Robin Guthrie, November 14/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]
MUSIC VIDEOS
"The [Pearly Dewdrops' Drops] video was shot in the abandoned Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water in Surrey. The waterfall was nearby at the lake. The hairstyling was questionable. I know all this because I have a photo album with stills from the days shoot and a memory capable of remembering the set list for a show in Groningen in 1982 but unable to remember what I had for breakfast this morning." -Robin Guthrie, October 6/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...asked to see some CT videos....i had to draw the line at Pearly Dewdrops' Drops tho' !Evangeline and Tishbite vids were actually not too hideous which was a shock. Iceblink Luck was ok, and reminded me what a killer track that was. How was that not number one all over the place ?( ''because no-one could understand a fookin word the girl was wittering on about, you eejiot!'' Oh yeah right. Sorry.)" -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "Man, the worst tv apart from jay leno (what a tosser) was that planet [sic 'Hotel Babylon] babylon thing with tishbite, got what anight mare that was, eh?" -Simon Raymonde "I was really sick when I saw that ["Song to the Siren"] getting played on the radio all the time and the Cocteaus had never been played. So the only way we could get played on the radio was to do somebody else's song under a different name. Regarding the video, it's very nice except I'm in it. That kind of spoils it. It's got a black background. There are all these leaves whizzing about, really autumnal. Then there's wee Betty here singing...she's in black and white on top of that." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Rorschach Testing]
GRANGEMOUTH & SCOTLAND
"Went back [to Grangemouth] recently when my mother died" -Robin Guthrie, October 14/06 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Grangemouth is not exactly a hive of social activity. The only excitement for a 30-mile radius is the 'Nash,' a local hotel disco where Rob was DJ. That's where we all met, although Rob and Will have been in bands together before." -Liz Fraser, 1982 [SOURCE: Sounds Magazine] "Seem to remember William Heggie's wedding was at the Lea Park [Grangemouth]" -Robin Guthrie, January 14/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]
BELLA UNION & AKA LABEL
"i really don't care if people don't like something on bella union-shit if i did i would have given up long ago! but it would be good if they listened to it first...our stuff is super-marginal, and if i were in it for the popularity stakes I wouldn't be here right now, but i do CARE,and feel protective to a degree about the bands, yes and i am not crazy about people spouting off about something they are not aware of...and creating negative vibes about something i put so much effort into. freds halou story is incorrect, the Francoiz Breut story is incorrect, the lack of females on BU is incorrect. I have merely put my perspective on what i regard as misrepresentations of my label. Listen i am hypersensitive little sod when i want to be. I have invested 5 years of my life into this label, i don't take a penny out of the business and i work my bollocks off, because i am superpassionate about the bands i/we have found and if people just want me to come here and talk about CT and Liz and nothing else and then listen to how my label should have more CT soundalikes on it, then expect me to have an opinion. I can make the flippant remarks and have a good laugh with you all when that's relevant, but i will continue to defend the art and culture of Bella Union till i am run out of business cos no-one has bought any of the albums!!" -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "AKA yeah. i had this idea that there were a ton of things we all liked that we'd like to sign if only.....i figure there are a load of bands that would like a leg-up, a limited one-off release pressing, once sold never repeated kinda deal, just to get their stuff out there..also i didn't want BU to be like some 4AD for the 21st century, and if we feel like releasing some hip hop record or some folk record or some whatever kind of record at some point then that would be cool too... i don't want people to ever really know what kind of a label it is..cos i don't fucking know, there's no way anyone else should!" -Simon Raymonde, January 29/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "...the day to day bella union stuff...well everyone here does different things, fiona looks after production of cd, manufacturing all that kind of crap, and she look after the money, cos i don't have a care about that much, and i trust her and i don't trust myself. peter he looks after all the tours, pre-production, and other special projects. lourda she do all the mail-order internet kinda thing, lindsay she do all the international stuff, like liasing with licencees and distributors....(you're regretting asking me now!), and i do all the interesting things that i wouldn't let anyone else do!" -Simon Raymonde, September 20/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
THEIR UNRELEASED FINAL ALBUM
"...correct in the never say never theory. i have been firmly camped in the shoot-me-if-i-ever-agree-to-that-idea tent but maybe even I have mellowed a bit over the years. i can't see how or why it would be appealing right now, but i do have to agree that we were beginning to become vaguely exciting live on that last tour and while some of the last (official )recordings were a bit all over the place, in the theatres we were becoming a bit more adept at giving everyone something without feeling cheap and compromised. Instead of standing there like frightened sheep, we realised that to make the set enjoyable for ourselves meant that we could play it with some joy in our hearts rather than with jelly. but then again, the thought of playing Pearly dewdrops' drops one more time, does fill me with vast clouds of heavy dread even now......It won't happen, but I have been known to be wrong." -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "as far as the lost/last album goes, no-one asked me about it so i never mentioned it....all you have to do is ask. No, I can't really see how any of those songs could ever be released, fascinating though some of them are in the half-dressed stages they remain. It would not be fair for any one of us to work on these songs without the full backing of the other. Things have been weird enough between members at various times, without creating more shit to deal with. And it would require an enormous amount of work, conversations and energy to get anything like that underway and i cannot speak for anyone else in the band, but i don't even have enough time to do about half of things i want to do at the moment so this kind of project would not make life any easier. i think what with all the eps and albums we left a fair legacy behind of decent stuff, and whether we all agree on what was good and bad about certain albums, when a record was finished it did signal some kind of 'agreement' that that recording time was OVER. I cannot really see that happening with the stuff that was left behind. To describe the kind of things we were working on: Everyone was working on their own to start with and then we came to together to put things on each others stuff...Liz wanted to be more hands-on with the music and was working on sampling things from old vinyls and tapes etc and getting into the computer programmes etc which i thought was brilliantly adventurous of her as she had always shied away from any composition ideas apart from her amzing voice arrangements of course . She came up with some stunningly good melodies and vocal sketches over a couple of sample pieces, but they were never really close to being finished. Robin worked on some lovely chord progressions with guitars and keyboards and a few pieces were close to completion. I had quite a few bits and pieces that were only a day or so away from being finished, but Liz had either done loads of verses and no choruses, or the other way round, so again it is v difficult to see how one could ever go back to these tracks and finish them." -Simon Raymonde, September 24/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com]
INFLUENCES & OTHER ARTISTS
"...with books or movies, my tastes can be really transient.. Of course there are things which touch me to the core and will stay with me all my life, to be re-listened/read/watched....But....that amazon list is OLD and has a few that would still be up there, like the Keith Jarrett and Serge Gainsbourg, but a few who had dropped out and a few new ones added...I think we're all the same on that...we grow up and experience more, thus finding new things which can, over time, grow to become favorites. The question is could I make another list? Well yes, but not now, I'm OD'ing on music right now as I'm in the studio, where I tend not to think about music at all..(?). ...ps for Denshion, The Amoeba spy, it was a CD set of interviews with Henry Miller." -Robin Guthrie, March 18/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "We bought an Edith Piaf LP the other day, a spur of the moment thing. I'd never heard her but we seemed to get compared. So I thought go for it, Liz. We've been buying an awful lot of Billie Holliday records as well..." -Liz Fraser [Rorschach Testing, 1983]. "[Now Playing] Bruno Nicolai - Attesa Inutile" -Robin Guthrie, May 26/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "little fucker didn't even ask, just stole it [Prince sampling 50-50 Clown]" -Robin Guthrie, May 18/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "[On meeting Eamon Holmes] couldn't get that close to him as a/ he's a vip, b/ his make up was 'very thick', perhaps several yards, c/ I was still asleep." -Robin Guthrie, December 5/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "so glad to read so many nice things about robin's shows. it's brilliant that he is out there doing that thing he does. cos you know no-one else does it quite like that. and seems that the turn-outs are all great too, so let's hope this all grows and grows for robin and he can spend more and more time doing what we all know he should be doing, spellbinding us with his immense talents. it pleases me greatly that someone so innately gifted yet often misrepresented is now reaping the rewards of just doing his own thing. with mysterious skin release around the corner, the renaissance seems to be edging ever closer. i don't think any of us like to see our heroes go so far underground that any streak of light pushes them further into the darkness, so it's beautiful when returns like this get embraced so fully." -Simon Raymonde, November 5/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "I am very sad to report that John Peel, the most important figure in radio for the past 35 years has died today aged 65. He was holidaying in peru with his wife sheila when he had a heart attack. I spent many hours glued to the radio in my teens and early twenties, recording sessions by joy division, fall, the associates, birthday party etc etc and then to be in a group actually championed by him was perhaps the ultimate accolade. through the 90s he continued to support the left side of the music business and even though his show got cut, he was still a brilliant dj, passionate, genuine and thoughtful. He was a very big fan of Lift to Experience and Explosions in The Sky from our label Bella Union and recent meetings with him at sessions at the fabulous Maida Vale studios in London were lovely. he was such a sweet man, and all the bands who ever came into contact with him, thought the same. His influence was enormous and there will NEVER be anyone to touch him in a medium that has very few true characters any more. He will be so sadly missed by all of us. My sincerest condolences to his wife and family." -Simon Raymonde, October 26/04 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "...this band [Tresspassers William] for me exemplify that ct ethic..." -Simon Raymonde, September 17/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "you realise when you ask this [influences?], i am going to take up a lot of your time...well, difficult to find the beginning point as at home growing up in a house full of scott walker, dusty springfield, beach boys and beatles must have seeped in somehow..but as far as my OWN obsessions, well at 15, Pistols yes they were important, probably more than The Clash, but my faves after that were The Slits, then Subway Sect, Buzzcocks, Wire, then yes saw lots Joy Division living in London, lots of Birthday Party, but also very into early PIL, Television, and also more scratchy scottish Postcard pop bands like Josef K, Orange Juice ( long before Rip It Up, gone off it by then), then more bands like Fire Engines, Scars, early Scritti Politti ( only up to and including 1st album), early Fiction bands like Associates, early Cure, then The Fall, The Ruts, Pink Industry, Magazine, early Human League (1st few singles), early Teardrop Explodes, Snatch , Pop Group. Only had 7 inch singles of SLF, but i liked 'em live too, The Lurkers, Meat Whiplash, Suicide , The Saints, The Models, Go-Betweens, Gang of Four, 23 Skidoo, and then once smoking grass became commonplace early On-U Sound stuff like Singers & Players, Bim Sherman, then into dub stuff like Lee Perry...so yes why is my own music so......drab! Ha! I think when i made my own record, i was healing myself from being inside a very strange relationship stuck in the middle of R & L for so long and maybe the gentle melodic nature of the music i was writing was just all i could manage on my own at the time. I also think just because i am a bit of a punk at heart does not necessarily mean that my solo stuff would sound like the UK Subs! But i get your point....if i ever do one again, it would hopefully sound a bit more subversive! I am not keen to try again right now tho'!!!" -Simon Raymonde, February 23/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "...you should investigate Meat Beat Manifesto's founder Jack Dangers' BU release. Quite groundbreaking glitszch electronics if you ask me. I love that stuff, and as for Mr Kid Loco, after he produced the Departure Lounge album ( another occasional electronic foray) Too Late To Die Young, we release the Kid Loco solo album in Oct 2003 called Kill Your Darlings. He is a star. But if you want a record that will totally surprise you and end up being like your fave new record in the way dj shdow was when he first came around, get the v cheap Departure Lounge instrumental album Jetlag Dreams. It is quite brilliant. ONe of my faves to have on at any time of day really." -Simon Raymonde, February 4/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "i am not a trumpet blowing sort of man, but all this talk of ct reissue and massive attack newies is getting my goat, can i implore you all for just one minute to ignore MY inane ramblings, and listen to that foul-smelling organ the NME, that dullest of mags Q, the fab daily UK paper The Independent, that awful broadsheet by aussie dickhead murdoch The Times and go out and buy something even these papers agree is one of the best albums of the year so far...Devics album The Stars At Saint Andrea. I won't even tell you what i think....but they all gave it more stars than my hero Nick Cave, and they can't all be wrong can they. well yes i know they can, but they AREN'T!!! i better than most know what you guys all like and it is SO up your alleys, you would shit if you could. do YOURSELVES a favour, not me , i don't see a penny of it i can assure you, do yourselves a favour and find this record. YOU need it. contact your local MTV2 station and request the video for Red Morning, it is so beautiful and Sara looks bloomin' lovely." -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "i was excited to hear it [Massive Attack]. i was extremely disappointed. like the music you hear on channel 5 made for tv movies. MA by numbers. wow, even we never peaked that soon!" -Simon Raymonde, February 3/03 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "well there is SO much amazing music out there, and not all of it is on Bella Union of course! Domino has some fabulous bands like Clinic, Clearlake and James Yorkston, the latter 2 admittedly i am biased towards as i produced their records, but i am not on royalty points so it is not a money-motivated tip! As for up and coming stuff, i can drool over the new Devics stuff, my word this would be right up everyone here's alley. The last record had some faults for sure, but i knew they had potential, and they are fulfilling it now. New single Red Morning is quite beautiful and compelling. Only on 7" limited so snap it up when you can. Most exciting for me is new artists like Laura Veirs from Seattle whose forthcoming album 'Troubled by The Fire' is extraordinary. I cannot stop listening to it, it's sorta experimental country and the SONGS make me cry, smile and sigh, and I am so amazed she chose BU over many other labels who were chasing her. Also I hope to tie up a deal with LA's The Faraway Places, a cool boy-girl kind of group with nods to Velvets, Spiritualised maybe, but a very interesting and inspiring band. From Denton, I await the new album from Jetscreamer, if you like your music with an edge, Lift to Exp, Sonic Youth that arena, then you'll love them. And a young guitarist by the name of Robin Guthrie has crafted a mesmeric solo release (instrumental) which i hope to announce details on soon. beautiful.....the new Dirty Three album 'She Has NO Strings Apollo' just arrived in the office for next years' release and it is breathtaking...i mentioned on these pages already the Czars, and their new single 'X would Rather Listen to Y' is something i think everyone here should own. Pure soulful achingly beautiful stuff...don't hold back....buy music...it makes you remember why you're alive" -Simon Raymonde, October 15/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com Post] "No, dave brubeck and modern jazz quartet did not/does not feature in my or robin's record collection i can safely say. i am still a bit funny about jazz, i only really love thelonius monk, miles, john coltrane and a couple of specific records like the soundtrack to Round Midnight, so no, it is your wild imagination. MIght sound stoopid but we used to deliberately not listen to anything much when we were writing. it was only on tour, in the boredom that we would seek out new and old for the tour bus/walkmans etc to fend off insanity." -Simon Raymonde, October 10/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "a quite amazing band [Clearlake]. In my opinion till now, to some degree were potentially brilliant without ever quite attaining. They really do not know how good they are, and i only hope that the forthcoming album Cedars will finally open people up to them. It is a very melancholic record, achingly beautiful in parts, but with an edge and a brutality that is both alarming and alluring. It is confident and adventurous and has so many twists and turns,it is hard to believe one band can be so strong. I had a brilliant time working with them. all lovely boys and work so hard, they deserve everything that comes to them. We worked in the Levellers studio in Brighton for about 5 weeks all in, and the results will soon be available through the fantastic Domino Records. Stand out tracks. I Wonder If The Snow Will Settle, Trees in The City, Treat Yourself With Kindness, The Mind is Evil, Keep Smiling, I'd Really Like To Hurt You." -Simon Raymonde, October 7/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "do i like the Cure? right now, i have to say i didn't realise they were still active, so apologies for my ignorance. In the past i have loved them for periods yes. I loved the first few records, actually saw their first or one of their first london shows at the marquee where robert was so-ooo young and with just slightly foppish hair!! some good bits over theyears right up to the mid 90s but i dunno....i would produce his solo record yeah." -Simon Raymonde, October 5/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "If they'd [Siouxsie and the Banshees] meant half the things they said when they started, they would have finished after their second LP - that would have been that. Now they're the establishment they were fighting against when they started. They've really overdone it, just making fucking idiots of themselves. They're so old and they just go on and on making records. It's not relevant, what they're doing, anymore. I'm not saying we'll stop but I hope we have the sense to know when we're past it." -Robin Guthrie, 1983 [SOURCE: Rorschach Testing]
BREAK-UPS, REUNIONS & MOVING FORWARD
"I've tried to say my part.. If I were invited to play something I'd be happy to... Fuck, I've not even spoken to simon about this...... I'm sure he has is own thoughts on all of this and I feel certain there will be a certain amount of distress and regret on his part. Unfortunately I cannot speak for Elizabeth, or even imagine what her reasons for cancelling the reunion may be, in any form that I can understand. I could hazard a guess, but it would only be a guess and here, would surely not be an appropriate place to voice that........And, you know, to be fair to her, she has the right to change her mind, we all do... I feel it's just not the sort of thing I would have done, after taking on a commitment and winding up the fans.. but, hey, we're all different....I doubt very much if there is any reason to feel me and simon 'should' play together - that was not the event - the event was the three of us approaching making music together again - Unfortunatly it was never given the chance.. What can I say?" -Robin Guthrie, March 14/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "if any of you are bereft of new music and i guess you must be if you're all still listening to the cocteau twins, then my wee label has some highly fine artists." -Simon Raymonde, September 18/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] [When asked about a Cocteau Twins reunion at 4AD's birthday bash] "Well if an official denial would amuse you all more, I can't help, I speak for no one but myself when I say, I know not of this project, nor care for the idea much. Of course that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen, but, I, of course, know nothing about it." -Robin Guthrie, August 30/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Hey. This is getting ridiculous and quite frankly offensive. I didn't pull out of coachella, and, although I haven't spoken to him, I'm pretty sure Simon didn't either... I'm damn sure I haven't used the word 'blame' anywhere, so get a grip people. It's not a question of blame. Maybe it's a question of responibility.. That's very different from blame.... Some of the things that have been said around here have been very ugly.. We're not children.. Damn, analogies of wife beaters, or even worse, fleetwood mac, make not very pleasant reading.. Me, I will not stand accused of not even trying to make the reunion happen... Truth is, it never got of the ground. Perhaps it may have been a different situation, had we had a chance to play in rehearsal together, perhaps not. But that chance was never given... And that's about that really... Oh, and one more thing, please don't split hairs over the wording of the press release... of course we all express regret... wtf?" -Robin Guthrie, March 20/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "Ah, the official [Coachella reunion] announcement..Many apoplogies to all who tried to get confirmation from us about this...We weren't teasing, it's just that nothing could announced before the damn thing was confirmed....So, who's going?" -Robin Guthrie, January 31/05 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "something I never quite understood - there are a gazillion bands who 'moved on' and then people lost interest because they were 'not as good as they used to be' i.e. they lost that initial something ...thankfully I don't have this problem as 1/ I'm not doing cocteau twins anymore... 2/I don't choose to make my music the way it is, it somehow just seems to come out that way..now don't misunderstand me here, things change, things progress but when you force progression things often dissappoint...it's always much better to follow your heart than your brain. stupider maybe but better." -Robin Guthrie, May 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post] "the bands that split and reformed can never recapture the past glories, because that is not whay they reform. When you split from a friend/lover and years later meet up, you still have deep feelings of course, but it is NEVER the same, because time changes us all, experiences harden us, shape us, whether we care to believe it or not. With our past records, time can stand still, in fact not exist at all. We are transported back to that moment we heard THAT song, and it is a seductive almost eden-like experience. BUT reforming does not make much sense for a band like CT. New Order just about managed it, Echo and The Bunnymen just about managed it, who else? From that era, not too many. I don't think CT should 'just about manage it'. So just why was it so special then? I really do not know. Because a million things all happened that made no sense at all, except when we stepped inside a studio, for a few glorious years, things made perfect sense? You don't need to know us or our personal shit to realise that reforming bands is a conscious, calculated, obvious thing to do, and you should remember that CT (for the most part)was not about conscious anything or calculated anything. It was about now, spontaneous thoughts, gambles, mistakes, going down roads with no signposts. The music business has changed too dramatically for such a fragile concept to survive. And we couldn't even deal with it then when it was far easier to deal with. Now it's all about accountants and lawyers and figures. I think for a brief period in CT history, all that crap was totally irrelevant. We didn't even have a manager for 8 years! We could not have existed in 2002 for that long. we'd have been eaten alive. And cynical though i sound, i hark back to a comment by the sea made something about me obviously still caring about the band, and loving it blah blah, i have romantic memories not just of CT , but of that part of my youth, and that is not me hankering after a replay of it, not me wishing i was 20 again, it is just purely me able to say for the first time in a long while, that i have warm memories of the whole time, rather than awful memories of the end. I do not want to go back there. I cannot see the band reforming ever....but hey, strange things happen." -Simon Raymonde, October 7/02 [SOURCE: cocteautwinsforums.com] "...touched I am, of course, that so many of you [fans] seem to like the music I have made but I can't help feeling that nothing I do, from here to eternity, will live up to your [fan] expectations. I mean I could be wrong here but I imagine even if the cocteau twins got back together you'd be saying 'ah but they're not as good as they were'....I could be a little paranoid here but I think probably not..." -Robin Guthrie, May 23/03 [SOURCE: CocteauTwinsForums.com Post]