A sugar hiccup and a walnut safe

When I first decided to study new wave lo those many years ago, I began writing pages and pages of detailed, though rather tangled, notes about what it was that I wanted to talk about. In a nutshell (O, infinite space), I wanted to talk about everything. Obviously, for a work of 3 to 4 chapters, plus footnotes, that’s not really a feasible goal. I had to cull a lot of my original ideas and pare the thing down to a more manageable size.

One of the bands that unfortunately fell by the wayside was the Scottish group, Cocteau Twins. I’ll admit that I’m not the strongest authority on them, since I only have two of their albums, and one of them is sitting in Florida in a storage locker somewhere. I’ve tried to remedy this with many hours trawling YouTube, which has the added bonus of getting to see Liz Fraser sing. However, this lack of knowledge was still a large part of the reason why I wanted to study them. The music of theirs that I do own ranks among my absolute favorite; it contains some of the most disorienting and lovely sounds to come out of the Britain in the 1980s, a sea of reverb, layered guitars and sinuous bass, and, of course, Fraser’s voice, that incomparable instrument that is at once vulnerable and commanding, sweet and growling. So you only catch every tenth word she sings and at least half of them are in a language that’s probably not English. So what? Listening to Cocteau Twins is like watching an aurora, it’s about enjoying the colors and textures as they continually shift, rather than trying to assign any fixed shape or pattern. You can’t and you shouldn’t. This is music that requires to you just listen.

Of course, this was part of the reason why I couldn’t include them. They didn’t fit anywhere into the patterns or shapes I was trying to understand—at least, not in a way that I could fit into 20, 000 words. If 80s music is a bell curve, then Cocteau Twins are one of the ultimate outliers. Even if I never get to write about them, I still want to understand how they fit and why. But for now I suppose I’ll just listen.