To start with, I didn’t get on in any respect with Cocteau Twins. When Head Over Heels got here out in October 1983, BBC radio DJ John Peel performed all the album on his present. Listening that night time in my scholar room, the wispiness and warbling rubbed me the improper approach.
I made a decision to offer the report one other probability after studying a rave evaluation within the NME. Instantly, I had the important thing to the key backyard. What had first felt bombastic and hole turned cavernous, like stepping inside a grotto glistening with stalactites. The insubstantiality of the guitar sound, initially so irritating, turned intoxicating, like a heady perfume. As for that wuthering voice: this was merely the sprite that would inhabit such a wonderland, singing in an alien tongue as impassioned because it was incomprehensible.
Head Over Heels is the proper title for this report. You’re not meant to cogitate or extract profound literal that means from these sounds, as was the case with a lot post-punk within the instantly prior years. You’re speculated to tumble into its cascading bliss.
“Head over heels” additionally describes the way of thinking of its makers, guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie has described it as an album of affection songs. If that’s the case, they’re veiled and opaque, hints glinting out every now and then in a stray music title (“My Love Paramour”) or uncommon intelligible lyric (“There’s solely a hair’s breadth between us”). Principally, the sensation comes throughout non-verbally, because it does virtually at all times with Fraser’s singing, via the swoony elation of her voice.
The romance sparked at a discotheque. Robin Guthrie, budding guitarist and occasional DJ at The Resort Worldwide in Grangemouth, Scotland, was spinning data by proto-goth teams like the Birthday Occasion, tunes that fully emptied the ground. Apart from this one woman with startling hair and jewellery product of hen bones. Guthrie reasoned that somebody who might dance that expressively may be capable of sing.
For almost all their profession, Cocteau Twins have truly been triplets: Simon Raymonde took on the position of bassist shortly after the discharge of Head Over Heels, a task occupied within the early days by Guthrie’s pal Will Heggie. However Heggie had give up by the point it got here to report Head Over Heels, so the lovey-dovey couple made the album alone collectively, which certainly contributed to its ambiance of just about stifling intimacy.
