Cocteau Twins interview (LONG) part 2 of 2

[Chris Ridd <RiddCJ@computer-science.birmingham.ac.uk>]

HAILING FROM THE SCOTTISH industrial town of Grangemouth, Liz and
Robin met at a nightclub and moved to London to pursue music after
early demos to John Peel and 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell met with
encouraging responses.  Thus, says Liz, she was rescued from a
probable career in the sewing factory where her mother and sister both
still work.  Simon, a London native, joined the Cocteaus in 1984 after
the departure of original member Will Heggie.

  With the release of each successive album, the Cocteau Twins have
inspired ever more poetic ramblings of extravagent praise, and the
band's talent for creating a euphoric surrealism through their
enigmatic word melodies has had some music press critics spouting
theories of a kinship with higher powers and speculating on Liz's
ability to speak in tongues.  All of which leaves Robin and Simon
perplexed.

  "A piece of music doesn't just happen in a second," Simon points
out.  "It evolves over a day or a week or however long it takes.  It
would be impossible to have some spiritual reason for it sounding the
way it did.

  "We don't all do it at the same time.  We're not all in a room going
bosh, and it's some magic happening.  It takes time.  I do my bit.
Robin does his bit.  Liz does her bit."

  "It makes you laugh a bit," Robin says.  "But anything religious
bothers me because that's a dangerous territory isn't it?"

  "Sometimes it makes you laugh,"  Simon agrees.  "But sometimes it
just makes you pissed off you know?  There are days when you think it
doesn't matter what people say and you'll laugh at it.  On other days
when you're feeling more vulnerable you'll think, Bastards!"

  What about the widely-touted claim than Cocteau Twins music is
extremely conducive to good sex?

  "I don't know, we should put it to the test sometime," says Robin
with obvious relish.

  "It's religious, it's sexual, it's spiritual," Simon shrugs.  "I
mean, it's anything you want at the end of the day, isn't it?"

  "We're not trying to put across that you should go and fuck people
in church..." Robin adds illuminatingly.

  Simon: "But if you want to that's absolutely fine."

  Liz leans into the tape recorder: "But remember to get the consent
of your parents."

  The whole party momentarily convulses and Robin concludes the topic
with an enlightened piece of advice about handcuffs which sends
everyone into another brief fit of hysterics.

WITH THE COCTEAU TWINS' decision to use a sampler rather than backing
tapes for their upcoming tour, the band is currently involved in the
laborious process of listening to old material, trying to remember how
they did it, and then attempting to duplicate it.

  "The trouble is," Robin sighs, "if we spend half an afternoon making
up this guitar part and we get to be really happy with it, then in two
year's time when we want to play the song live we can't actually
remember what we played because we only played it once.  More
traditional bands, they practise their songs every seek and they know
them inside out.  We don't.

  "We don't go into the rehearsal room and write songs and then
record, we do everything in the recording studio.  We start with a
piece of tape and make it up from there, and at the end of the day
we've got to turn it into something that sounds like a band playing in
a rehearsal room.

  "It's kind of backwards.  I've got a lot of admiration for someone
who can just sit there with a guitar and write a song.  I could never
do that."

  Liz also admits to running into trouble with live performances,
which demand perfect recall of lyrics that generally rely more on
phonetics than standard sentences.

  "It was just impossible," she sighs when Robin mentions having to
resort to "bits of paper" during their previous tour.  "But it can
work the other way as well.  It can be quite easy to memorise
sometimes if it's not actual words."

  "She's great with tunes though," Robin interjects.  "She'll never
forget tunes, even to the point where she knows everyone else's tune.
And she knows all the TV commercials.  We'll be driving along and
she's singing all the adverts.  She's very good at picking up things
like that."

  "Yeah, well they're really complicated aren't they?" murmurs the
object of praise, exasperated.

  "A lot of people think that Liz just opens her mouth and does it,"
Robin continues.  "But everything she sings is precisely worked out.
In the studio she'll sing over and over again hundreds of times until
she gets it right."

  Beginning in October, the Cocteau Twins' first tour in four years
will eventually take them to the cultural mecca for lounge lizards
worldwide, Las Vegas.  Robin had earlier dismissed the significance of
the album title 'Heaven Or Las Vegas' as "just two more places where
we've never been", but greets the prospect of a sojourn in sequin city
with more enthusiasm than might be expected from the man who once
said, "our music doesn't go well in places with plastic palm trees".

  The spirit of Elvis has won out.

  "We're going to play a hotel or casino or something, like Elvis
did," he enthuses.

  "So two fingers up to the ethereal brigade," Simon adds.

-- Clodagh O'Connell, 'Select' magazine October 1990

   Phew.

-- Chris Ridd, Computer Science, Birmingham Uni, UK -- RiddCJ@Cs.Bham.Ac.Uk --

"'It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it,' said War testily, 'the One
Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse.'" - Sourcery