Let me start with this year, 2009. What was good? Hm; my prosthetic brain units at iTunes and last.fm tell me that it’s:

• Dysrhythmia, "Psychic Maps" [jaw-dropping instrumental math-metal, will have you banging your head in 7/13 time.]

• Isis, "Wavering Radiant" [post-metal? huge lowercase-’p’ progressive epics. so good I’m willing to overlook the cookie-monster vocals.]

• Pelican, "Ephemeral" EP [is it post-rock with big riffs? or restrained brainy instrumental metal?]

• Apricot Rail, "Apricot Rail" [ok, this is instrumental-post-rock for sure, but atypically cheerful, kind of like Do Make Say Think. they’ve even got oboes omg!]

• The Happy Hollows, "Spells" [this is the token recognizably-indie-rock album on the list. are they secretly Deerhoof covering the Pixies? Or Lush covering Interpol? also, they are hella cute and I can’t wait to see them live]

• Dirty Projectors, "Bitte Orca" [I still can’t figure this out, with its Afrobeat guitar lines, intricate interlocking vocals, weird rhythms and weirder lyrics. ok, that description makes it sound like "Remain In Light", which it isn’t at all like, but maybe is somehow.]

• Elisa Luu, "Chromatic Sigh" [can I say "eclectic" with a straight face? really interesting electronic music, clearly song-like, ranging between poles of rock and ambient.]

• Anduin + Jasper TX, "The Bending Of Light" [guitar-based drone. majestic.]

• Brock van Wey, "White Clouds Drift On And On" [exactly what it sounds like. it comes with or without beats, your choice.]

• Eluder, "Drift" [exactly what it sounds like, too. careful with this one, some people have had trouble returning to earth afterwards.]

• Jónsi & Alex, "Riceboy Sleeps" [Sigur Rós guitarist and his boyfriend do Stars Of The Lid. delicious in small doses.]

• Victoire, "A Door Into The Dark" EP [a string ensemble that embraces electronics as a natural part of their sound]

• Sub, "Id" EP [nothing new, but basically the best Photek tracks I’ve heard in ten years.]

PS: there might be some last minute additions to this list if Kate Simko’s "Sounds Of The Atom Smashers" and Concern’s "Truth And Distance" live up to their potential.
PPS: ZOMG I forgot Sunn O)))’s stark and forbidding "Monoliths And Dimensions", whose final track "Alice" is deserving of a space up there.
PPPS: Yes, a mix of this stuff is forthcoming…

* It’s not like I’ve been having trouble finding great new music, or that I resent other people for all picking different music than me; but it’s a little sad to not be part of the zeitgeist. Long ago it was really important to me whether punk and new wave would break dinosaur rock’s lock on the mainstream, or whether little-known underground bands like the Cure or the Pixies would get the recognition they deserved. I think the peak of my with-it-ness was circa 1990-91 when I could rattle off the name of every shoegazer band that mattered and I treated every issue of Melody Maker as a shopping list to take with me to the import bin at Tower to find the next Cranes or Chapterhouse.

“The social networking integration that we reported iTunes 9 would have seems to be part of a bigger social networking push by Apple,” the report states. “We’ve been informed that Apple has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social” application that they plan to release in the future.”

This sounds like the kind of app (though separate from iTunes) that Jessica Kahn and I kept trying in vain to get Apple to build, circa 2003-2005. Maybe they’ll get some use out of our abandoned prototypes.

The report goes on to say that the new application would allow users to share their listening habits with friends [and] send music to friends”

Mike Estee and I had actually prototyped this in iChat in 2003, but the feature never got approved since there were so many more important things to add, like 3-way video conferencing. (Plus the fact that Apple execs turned white as a sheet if you said the words “send music” near them.)

Anyway, personal bitterness aside, I think it’s really amusing that Apple keeps shoving the kitchen sink into iTunes, since that has to be the single nastiest, hardest-to-extend codebase they have — it’s their last remaining Carbon app, with a foundation that dates back to Casady & Greene’s SoundJam, circa 1998.

It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.

Everyone wants their experience of music to be shared. To play an instrument or sing for others, to blast the song from car speakers. To identify with music meant to shock, and use it to shock others. To attend a concert and know that those around you are hearing and feeling the same thing you are, right then: sitting following the intricacies of Bach, or exploding in a mosh pit. Drugs of many kinds help to collapse this emotional waveform, unite a group into a Bose-ian condensate, whether it’s alcohol to bring out desire and anger, or Ecstasy to turn arpeggios and filter sweeps into spinal shivers and universal love.

Nowadays I experience music by myself, mostly on headphones, like right now on the bus to work. Little circuits inside them are actively removing the signs of the outside world, leaving a weird sibilant hush that I fill with the noise I choose. My eyes are on a screen where I sort my music into playlists, or read what other people say about the music they love, and sometimes reach out and listen to their music myself.

I take little piles of songs and chain them together, finding the little hooks at the ends where they fit, making daisy chains to share with people. Is this creation? I didn’t create the songs, but joining them can make something new, like a work of collage. I would love to use the songs as words given to me, and string them together to tell a story. In some of the mixes I’ve made I can hear some of that: abstract arcs of emotion flying across 80 minutes, or juxtapositions that change the sounds on either side into something new that reflects the other.

The worst part about creation is finishing, and throwing the end product out the door into the sunlight where it blows away in sheets. Diana tells me the abalone are dying out because they reproduce by scattering their seed into the ocean and hoping the eggs and sperm will meet; and as their numbers decrease, so does the likelihood of this success. In some ways the progression of my musical tastes has been like that. The Internet has been a tremendous boon, but the distance involved always makes me doubt, as the notes and bytes fly away out of sight, that they’ll ever find a mate, or if they do, whether I’ll even know.

I finished it four days ago and I’m still very pleased with it. Several of the overlays and transitions feel like they’ve become more than the sum of their parts—that’s what I aim for, but don’t always attain.

I really hope they thought ahead and used a 64-bit int for the number_of_songs_sold variable, otherwise some Bad Stuff might happen in the next few months.

(We already know they used an unsigned int, otherwise there would have been a crazy press release a few years ago like “Apple announces iTunes has sold over -2,147,483,648 songs”.)

(And once again, the beautiful cover is by my daughter Naomi.)

Official web page

Download: Shiver2.mp3 (91MB)

Preview: [audio:http://mooseyard.com/recordings/mub51/Shiver2.mp3]

[web page] [MP3] [more mixes]

I can’t claim to be an expert on music: I can only barely play an instrument, my dj skills are wack, the theory hurts my brain, and my knowledge is encyclopedic only in a few micro-genres. But I’m rabidly enthusiastic about it; and fortunately, music nowadays is tightly entangled with computer technology, which (like any engineer) I can easily sound like an expert on.

And fortuitously, this month is open season on “open letters” on digital music. I thought SJ’s was pretty damn good really, probably better than I could manage; but fortunately many of the answer letters have set the bar so low that I think I can hold my own even though I’m neither a half-literate sports team owner nor a PR duckspeak generation algorithm.

First some ground rules.

1. I don’t speak for my employer. I don’t work on or cruise-direct anything directly music-related, and I’m not palzy-walzy with anyone who does. This is my blog on my domain, and I’m writing this on my computer on my patio on my weekend off. “I am not a number — I am a free man!” †
2. I don’t have answers. Questions and doubts are more interesting and useful at this stage. “If a man … be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” †
3. I am not trying to sound cooler-than-thou (q.v.)

My background.

As disclaimed above, I don’t have serious Musical Skills. But I can listen to it real good! I love playing music, and the ancillary activities like discovering new artists, hunting down obscure albums, poring over liner notes and biographies, making mixtapes, and babbling to my friends about how they have to listen to this awesome new album I just found.

I’ve been in this state since about age eight(?) when I discovered my parents’ copy of the Beatles’ 1962-1966, the “Red Album”. After playing that to death and nearly going blind reading the black-on-red lyric sheets, I started buying their other albums. I was pretty monotheistic (quadratarian?) about the Beatles for a few years, but in high school I got into first jazz, then Classic Rock (which wasn’t that classic yet), then prog-rock, then New Wave and punk. Since then I’ve mostly listened to various flavors of indie-rock, post-rock, electronic-music-with-beats, and ambient music; with forays into New Music (aka minimalism or “that deedly-deedly stuff”), experimental noise, Balkan folk, big-band / swing, Baroque, instrumental surf, and so forth.

I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of history and the globe, that’s spanning the gamut of genres from A to B, but at least I know what I like. And I’m always willing to try new things — Renaissance polyphony, death-metal, 1930s country music, rai, Justin Timberlake — if, like Linus’s pumpkin, they’re sincere.

By the way, this is not meant to put down anyone else’s musical taste, or point out how cool I am. I could (and have) walk into any college radio station and get that attitude aimed at me by some DJ with a crate of out-of-print Lithuanian ska-tech remix 12”s. That’s no fun! If you want to club people with ‘tude, explain to them why their favorite API sucks. You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it, not to alienate people.

—skritchy turntable backspin SFX—

“…You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it…”

Oops, there’s that loaded word “share”. Where’d that come from?

• Who told me I had a right to “share” music?
• What do “friends” have to do with what is, after all, a commercial transaction?
• Where did I “find more of it”, hmm? At an officially-sanctioned retailer of shrink-wrapped CDs or DRM-wrapped files? Or maybe … on the interwebs???

Boy, those are some swell questions. Too bad I’m out of time for now. I gotta go.

[Typed in by hand from a crumbly old copy of the November 16, 1985 issue of Melody Maker]

How do you interview THE COCTEAU TWINS? Steve Sutherland, who considers them to be something like the voice of God, doesn’t know. Well, he sat down and talked to them for a bit, and this is what happened.

THE END

“In the best of all possible worlds,” said Robin, “this wouldn’t be happening.” Hold it right there. I’ve read this before. I don’t want any more.

“But…”

No buts. I’m determined that this will not be another Cocteau Twins interview about how The Cocteau Twins hate interviews because that, after all, after hours of agonised silence and blank incomprehension, is all that anyone’s ever gleaned from this lot on paper. I won’t sit down and discuss this again. I won’t attempt to defend the pathologically rigid rigmarole of the rock’n’roll interview, nor will I perpetrate it further.

So what shall I do, Robin? What shall I do? And what will I get? Will I get anything? Or is there nothing there to get? Nothing at all?

“Well, we’re not divs but people make us out to be … we come over like …”

Yes, I understand that I don’t understand.

SOME JUSTIFICATION

The Cocteau Twins make my favourite music in the whole wide world ever and, on November 16 and 22, they release two four-track EPs. I want to talk about them, but I know it’s no good. They want them well treated because they envisage a Cocteau Twins backlash on the horizon and they don’t think it’s fair. Just because they don’t fit in, folks think they refuse to fit in but it’s not the same thing at all. There’s nothing willful about The Cocteaus’ refusal to play along, they just don’t because they do what they do, that’s all.

Hey, they live on our planet, believe it or not. They eat, they drink, they see what we see and hear what we hear. It’s just that what they create when they’re locked away somewhere has no bearing on any of this whatsoever. My task, I suppose, is to reconcile this into some sort of sense but all I can come up with is intricate babble which, even in the act of praising, seems to tarnish the pure simplicity of what The Cocteaus do.

I’ll admit, at this point, that I was going to wax all wonderfully lyrical about the new Cocteau Twins stuff. I was going to construct some elaborate review of Tiny Dynamine (“Pink Orange Red”, “Ribbed and Veined”, “Plain Tiger” and “Sultitan Itan”), some glowing testimony to Echoes In a Shallow Bay (“Great Spangled Fritillary”, “Melonella”, “Pale Clouded White” and “Eggs and Their Shells”) but I realised that all I’d be doing was conjuring fantasies, evolving mythologies and warping expectations so, at the risk of encouraging accusations of lethargy and cop-out I say this: Buy these records, I think they’re brilliant. They exist.

Why am I squirming? Here’s my problem: The Cocteau Twins can’t talk about their music because there’s nothing to say and I can’t write about it because, as it’s instrumental with vocal impressions, all I can produce is mind’s-eye gibberish. And believe you me, I’ve said some pretty embarrassing stuff about this lot in the past. Stuff, incidentally, that I stick by.

“The things you’re allowed to write!” Robin’s smiling. “You went and wrote something about God in one of our reviews. You said we were the Voice Of God or something. I hated that. It gives people the wrong impression. It gives people your impression. If I read that, I’d think ‘No fucking way am I buying that!’

“And another time you said I hadn’t developed much further than some Banshees album and that we were too loud. That was insulting. The idea of three people totally stationary on stage with no affiliation at all to rock’n’roll making the loudest fucking noise you’ve ever heard kind of appeals.”

“And that thing you said to Robert Smith about his lipstick,” Liz is trembling.

What?

“You said that Liz Fraser wants to know why you wear your lipstick like that. That was very naughty of you Steve, very, very naughty. I was so embarrassed.”

Contrary to common belief, The Cocteau Twins care. A lot.

THE UNMENTIONABLE MENTIONED

The Cocteau Twins don’t exactly scream at you to ask them about their sex lives or the colour of their socks so it all comes down to self-justification and that nebulous area where you’ve no idea what you’re talking about or what will come out and the smallest detail assumes the stature of enigma. Or…

Robin: “I’m still completely at a loss to understand what people want to know. I’ll tell all. We do tell all. That’s the thing. I can’t understand, what more can I say?”

Some minor hack from the NME spent seven hours grilling them last spring, searching for the Holy Grail, seeking to establish his own reputation as Raider Of The Liz Bark.

“He completely fucked himself up,” Liz laughs and laughs.

Simon: “He was so frustrated. He actually admitted he was getting nowhere. He’d obviously come with this plan of getting us softened up with all these questions about football and films and all the things we like that would make us think he was a really good bloke and then, wham!, in with the big questions at the end. What he didn’t quite understand is that there are no big questions and there are no big answers.

THE BIG QUESTION

Why? Why do you sound like The Cocteau Twins?

ROBIN’S BIG ANSWER

“Why not?”

THEY CONFESS

Robin: “It almost gets to the stage where you just want to turn round to somebody and say ‘Yeah, I’m really magical and mysterious, that’s what I think about myself. I’m weird and obscure and it rubs off on the music…’”

Simon: “Yeah, we’re religious, spiritual…”

Liz: “Would you like some tea or coffee just now?”

Robin: “There’s some tins aren’t there? I’ll have another beer.”

Liz: “You’ll want a fuckin’ straw with it next—get you pissed quicker.”

Robin: “Got any gin?”

Liz: “Um … er … NO! I distinctly remember you finishing it off last night. Don’t drink…”

Robin: “But I’m getting my haircut tonight.”

Liz: “Yes, I know. You’ll fall asleep and wake up with a skinhead—that’ll fuckin’ sort you out. You’ll never drink again.”

LIZ FRASER

Small, very funny, and very, very shy.

At the photo studio, Liz is being made-up, having her face and hair done. By her side, by the mirror, is a note pad into which she jots every later of foundation, every tint of eyeshadow for further reference.

“That’s typical,” says Robin. “Did you notice at home by the record player, there’s a piece of paper with instructions on it about how the stereo works, step by step. And by the video there’s another list of how to work it. And she wants to learn to drive—can you imagine that?”

Oh yes, a very Liz thing to do.

ROBIN GUTHRIE

Fat, funny, delightfully sarcastic, he crimps his hair to stop it looking pubic.

This thin guy with glasses comes up to him in the Croydon Underground, brandishing a poster advertising the 4AD night and asking for an autograph. Robin looks him up and down, snorts his disapproval and begins to read it out.

“Xymox, is that us?”

No.

“Wolfgang Press. Is that us?”

No.

“Dif Juz. Is that us?”

No.

“Well then, shouldn’t you be going to get their autographs?”

The bloke slinks off, bemused. Robin turns to me and says: “It’s bad enough when they want you to sign Cocteau Twins stuff.”

That’s a very Robin thing to do.

SIMON RAYMONDE

A genuinely nice and sincere sort of guy.

Simon was “disgusted” by the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon. He’d seen them three or four times before and considered this “heavy metal”. Worst of all, though, he considered the encore “dishonest”.

That’s a very Simon thing to say.

MY METHOD

Well, what was there left? The personality angle wasn’t paying dividends because, as the antithesis of all they are, it couldn’t. The enormous review wasn’t on either—all that verbiage trying to describe something defiantly inarticulate. No, I was left with flotsam, with various meets in various places, with circumstantial evidence. Whether it comes any closer to anything, whether it helps, I don’t know but anyway…

Meet one: Liz and Robin’s flat in Chiswick. Ground floor. Clean and bare with a Siamese kitten called Otto (after the punk in Repo Man ) who bites and scratches and has never heard of house-training. No books about so no clues there. A record player. A video. Lots of videos. A photo of Lillian Gish in the toilet. The door handle comes off in your hand and you have to keep the lid down or the cat might fall in the bowl.

Meet two: Riverside for That Petrol Emotion.

Meet three: The photo session in Covent Garden. A small studio and a pint or two in the pub. (Liz is on cider and Babycham, fact-fiends.)

Meet four: Simon sees the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon.

Meet five: 4AD night at Croydon Underground—very much the visiting stars. Robin hates it.

THEIR METHOD

Robin: “You can’t push progression, you can’t plan it. Well, if you did, you’d sound really contrived. I’m just starting to realise now that there’s a difference between Garlands, Lullabies and Peppermint Pig but it was probably all very evident to someone who listened to it at the time. We’re so close to it, we can’t tell.

Their last album, Treasure, was the sweetest luxury, a placid lagoon of dreams after the exotic carnival of Head Over Heels. Ivo once told me that he discerned Heels being born of the love affair between Robin and Liz whereas where Treasure came from was a marvelous mystery.

Simon: “I can see what you’re saying but … no.”

TEMPTATION

If anybody around pop today is enjoying the fact that language obscures as much (and as well) as it reveals its intentions, it’s Liz Fraser. Her lyrics are noise games, not nonsense but emotion liberated from cliche. When she sings, my world moves and it means something beyond and without all the blasted, blighted baggage of linguistic nostalgia.

She uses words but the words never matter, their sounds carry the fullest impact, her voice—the most desolate ever recorded—cuts the crap but can’t avoid it. We can’t handle The Cocteau Twins, we don’t possess the critical apparatus to do them justice. It’s no big deal on their behalf, no deliberate setting themselves apart from the mainstream, no arrogant isolationism. It’s simply that the channels we stomp down to beat pop to a pulp and render it comfortable and comprehensible don’t lead us anywhere near The Cocteau Twins.

We don’t touch them and yet, still we try. In Japan, for instance, they’ve published lyric sheets with all the albums, even renaming Treasure at whim The Woman Who The Gods Loved.

Robin: “Tell me if any of these words are what Liz is singing, right? I’m not joking. ‘Let us rock you so / Rock you so good.’ ‘The wave of the earth has got me all fooled now.’ ‘Should have fixed it before it floated away.’”

Liz: “Oh that’s fucking disgusting … disgusting. They must think we’re a bunch o’ perverts or something.”

Robin: “Take this fish / Harder than roe / Who sauntered away.’”

Liz: “Jesus!”

Robin: “Julianne was first called a genius / Julianne a genius too / Our song is framed by a genius / Suddenly she got up and turned it on.’”

Liz: “Definitely drug-induced hysteria.”

Robin: “’I don’t mend no fence.’”

Simon: “’I’m a prisoner of the fence.’”

Robin: “Look at the sleeve notes. It says here that The Cocteau Twins are three girls, right? And that I sing all the backing vocals on the LP and that my backing vocals are ‘psychedelic but never freaky’.”

Liz: “Bloody hell!”

ALL THE THINGS THEY LIKE

Simon supports Tottenham Hotspur and owes me a fiver.

Crime and the City Solution—especially Roland Howard and his brother’s way of smoking fags. Dif Juz—“best group in the world”. Steve Martin—Robin’s got all his films plus albums. Bedazzled, a Sixties spoof on Faust starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore—“The best film ever” (Robin). Pale Rider, although Liz wanted to see Peter Pan. The Philadelphia Story, on the box recently.

Simon: “What a film.”

Liz: “Yeah, we just saw the end of it.”

Robin: “We saw the whole fucking thing! We saw it from five minutes after it started.”

Liz: “Oh, did we? I thought we only saw the end. It did seem to last for a long time though.”

The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Simon: “They’re so good.”

Robin: “Yeah, but their records are all becoming a formula. They’ve had brilliant tunes but they’re all Spector/Beach Boysy-type tunes with loads of feedback on top. “Just Like Honey” is the same, just toned down a bit. I’d like to mix one of their records…”

That Petrol Emotion: Robin would like to produce them.

The Damned.

Liz: “I want to go see them. I think they’re really great. I really do.”

Robin: “I had a ticket to see them once but it was too foggy and all the trains were canceled.”

So he decided to form his own band…

Simon: “Because you couldn’t see The Damned…”

Robin: “Maybe you could help us write a legend!”

ALL THE THINGS THEY HATE

Rambo—“Rubbish! Have you seen it? There’s this bit where he comes out of this wall of mud and a few seconds later he’s clean. And the girl in the jungle with all the make-up on … I’ve seen loads of films lately which have been really good but the endings are just moralistic, patronising, telling the audience what the whole film’s been about. Ken Russell’s Crimes Of Passion is just like that, it’s appalling, absolutely disgusting, like being at a dirty movie. The sex scenes go on for about 20 minutes and everybody else in the cinema was an old man with a raincoat over his lap—I was thinking “Hang on a minute, I shouldn’t be here.”

Desperately Seeking Susan?

Simon: “I don’t want to see it because I don’t want to like Madonna. I actually like not liking her, thinking she’s a real slagbag.”

Sigue Sigue Sputnik?

Simon: “They’re dreadful, abysmal. They won’t do anything will they?”

With a good producer, a Chris Thomas, someone who can hone down their eight minutes of noise to three minutes of melody…

Robin: “They look so silly. Mind you, for that sort of money, even you’d dress up, look silly and make bad records wouldn’t you?”

Yeah.

MERE MORTAL CONCERNS

Self parody?

Robin: “It happened to us about a year and a half ago. It happens to everybody. You can’t do anything about it, you can’t deliberately stop and change. You’ve got to work your way through it.”

4AD?

Robin: “It’s been good to learn about the music business this way, to learn about all the nasty little things that I don’t think we’d have learned from a major because we’d just have been exploited straight away. I don’t think we’d get ourselves into that situation now because we’re older and wiser. It actually seems quite an appealing idea to screw a major for as much as you could possibly get and then just do nothing because you know how corrupt the whole thing is and how everyone else seems to do it.”

Money?

Simon: “It’s all relative. These groups who get signed for 250,000, it doesn’t mean ‘We’re giving you 250,000, go and buy yourself a house and lots of cars.’ It means ‘Here’s a loan until you make your records.’ We don’t get very much money and the records sell.”

Robin: “We don’t take big advances and we recoup so we don’t owe anybody anything. I’d rather be in that situation. Funnily enough, Liz and my biggest form of income’s Garlands because it cost 800 to make so that recouped long, long ago. Our budgets for making records are ridiculously small, not ‘cause we’re mean or we rush things, it’s just that we don’t really take very long to do it.”

Heroes?

Liz: “When we were in Los Angeles, Robin found a … well, you tell it Robin.”

Robin: “No, you tell it.”

Liz: “We found a bookmatch of the hotel John Belushi died in. Well, when we found it we didn’t know that but then we found out but Robin lost it.”

Silence.

Robin: “That’s a Liz anecdote.”

WHAT WAS…

The Cocteau Twins toured Japan this year, rode the bullet train, felt restricted by the cities and affronted by the Westernization. They also played in America where they were constantly asked when and why they formed This Mortal Coil and where, against their better judgment, they released a “Best Of” LP.

Extra-curricular duties include building a 16-track studio in Maida Vale, dismantling and relocating it in Acton, and producing Felt, Dif Juz and the Wolfgang Press.

WHAT IS…

Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In a Shallow Bay were recorded under no pressure and were never intended for release. The tracks evolved into two EPs because “When you do an LP, it’s like a statement of what you’ve been doing, a concerted effort. This is more complacent probably.” Robin laughs. “They’re not singles, there are no seven inches obviously, they’re 12 inches, they’re not long versions of anything, they’re not remixes. They’re just a bunch of songs, EPs in the old sense of the word. No one song is any more important than any other. People think we’re being weird or something but we’re not…”

WHAT SHOULD…

There’s a collaboration on the cards between The Cocteaus and Harold Budd, the avant-gardist they met in America. He’s about to send them backing tapes and vice-versa and the cross-cultural experiment may well be filmed for Channel 4.

AND WHAT WILL NEVER BE

The Cocteaus were asked to appear on Wogan but, much to their regret, it was turned down on their behalf.

THE FUTURE

Robin: “Obviously a revival, probably American. I can’t understand it. Everybody took the piss out of the Mod revival but nobody’s taking the piss out of this blatant Byrds revival. Everybody’s taking it seriously.”

So where does that leave The Cocteau Twins?

“In 10 years time, there will be a Cocteau Twins revival.”

Aha.

I CONFESS

If the process of interview is to ascertain some truth, to nudge some reality, to realise there really aren’t any answers, then I’ve failed. If the essence of this piece was to avoid an obsessive autopsy of The Cocteau Twins’ problematic relationship to the interview, I’ve let you down badly. It’s here, it’s inescapable and I’m circling, searching for something I can’t define, struggling to discover whether that there isn’t anything to discover is the big fact or just a conveniently mystical cop-out.

Certainly the people I met and the records I hear don’t match up too well, don’t fit. I’m speaking of what stubbornly won’t be spoken of and it’s the best I can do to tell you that, of all the outfits I’ve ever met, the lives of the characters of The Cocteau Twins are the least informative when applied to their music. And naturally, in saying that, I open two options, each equally inappropriate: they’re not fakers, they wear no masks, they hide nowhere, nor are they recipients of some mysterious muse, they don’t act as ciphers for some spiritual genius descending from the aether.

The Cocteau Twins just go and do and they don’t know why so why the hell should I?

(IN) THE BEGINNING (WAS THE WORD)

“That was the shittiest interview we’ve ever done…”

It’s okay.

“But we said nothing, talked about nothing…”

It’s okay.

“But what are you gonna write about?”

Oh, I’ll make it up. I’ll write about you. I’ll think of something.

“But that means we’re in your hands, we’re at your mercy…”

Aha, well the hack always has the last word. This is it…