The Cocteau Twins were a band my friend Sufi who now runs Dissensus loved. I remember staying with Sufi in the Avon countryside aged, ooh, 16 and him owning a copy of "Victorialand". I can picture the cover nestled beside his record player. Sufi played me records of Felt's "Primitive Painters" and This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren" as we sat in his bedroom. Lovely music.
They were never a band that meant a huge amount to me. For instance, I have owned the Cocteau's LP "Treasure" on vinyl twice; and sold it twice in 1996 and 2024. I always found it a bit cold. However, recently reading Simon Reynolds' wonderful book "Still in a Dream" caused me to want to double-back to be sure I hadn't dismissed the band. Looking at the numbers at RYM and Allmusic it seemed like I should once again investigate "Heaven Or Las Vegas" which was released on 17th September 1990.
Re-investigate because another pal, a school-friend called Nick Lumsden, the single person I knew from public school at university, had played me his copy of "Heaven Or Las Vegas" in my dorm. I remember Nick, standing by the fireplace upon which my record collection teetered, and him rhapsodising about the Cocteau Twins gig we two freshers were going to attend that week at Glasgow's Barrowlands venue. This is what you did before a concert - work yourself up into a delightful froth about the band you were heading to see.
Nick and I never hung out again at Glasgow University - I ended up voluntarily spending most of time alone that first year driving around the Trossachs, wandering around its hills and lochs, listening to music, writing poetry, and making drawings with my left hand only. My notebooks from this period, when I was 19, are extremely beautiful outsider art. I had arrived back from time spent in India, Nepal, and Thailand where I'd mostly traveled alone. I'd lost a lot of weight and was, at one stage, down to seven stone. I don't remember eating very much that first year at university - mainly because I was totally preoccupied by music and ideas...
What was I listening to? From this precise period I particularly remember Skip Spence's "War in Peace" (which I recall playing to my friend, the young Luke Sutherland), CAN's "Pinch", John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way", Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Going On", Funkadelic's debut, Big Youth's "Dreadlocks Dread", the Network compilation Bio Rhythm "Dance Music With Bleeps", DFC's exquisite "Ambient House" compilation, R.E.M's "Reckoning" (which I have always loved), Television's "Marquee Moon", oh and Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and the final EP of his unreleased material which appears at the end of "Time of No Reply" pretty much all the time. At the end of 1990 I was no longer invested in the indieverse that The Cocteau Twins represented. When My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" eventually came out in November 1991, I read the reviews, but had long since moved on from the band. However, I was not yet in possession of the codes of dance music which was incredibly seductive but totally mysterious to most punters as consumers. Only DJs bought those records.
All of which circs conspired to my being oblivious of the significance of this concert by The Cocteau Twins in support of their new LP "Heaven Or Las Vegas". Only now reading these old reviews (posted below) have I realised that this was the group's first live performance in five years. Hailing from the coastal town of Grangemouth at the western end of the Firth of Forth, Glasgow Barrowlands will have been their largest local venue. I also did not catch any of the rave reviews at the time for the LP, their greatest, so never exactly a major fan, I expect I will have consigned the group to history. At the concert I remember going directly to the front, literally beneath Liz Fraser as she stood on stage, and dancing manically throughout the whole proceedings. I was really into dancing and the music functioned superbly for that purpose - but this will also have been my gesture aimed at establishing that dance was the new lingua franca. I distinctly remember Fraser clocking me and looking perturbed as I flailed around. Most of the other audience members were stock still - so, stick-thin and spasmodic, I must have been very conspicuous. What a funny memory...
This week I have been listening to "Heaven Or Las Vegas" on repeat. Under their own name it is by some margin the best thing they ever recorded. The title track is especially ravishing - the music at once soothing and exorcisory in what for me are times of radical dislocation, and dissonance.
