One week at number one on w/e 21st January 1984
I currently live in a terraced house next door to some students, a situation which causes endless eye-rolling and sighs when I mention it to any locals. These are usually followed by comments along the lines of “What did you ever do to deserve that, eh?” and commiserations for my sleep deprivation and the inevitable vermin crawling through the walls.
In reality, I’ve been through three sets of student neighbours now and at worst, they’ve all been no more noisy than a family with small children. Only occasionally do sounds of loud music or conversation seep out of open windows in late Spring and early summer, and on one of these warm days in 2023, I was decluttering the front garden when I heard a familiar drone drifting my way. It was The Cocteau Twins, leaking gently into the June air outside, making Liz Fraser one of the first singers I heard when I started university in 1993 (as mentioned in the This Mortal Coil entry) and one of the earliest things I heard when I first bought a house next door to some students thirty whole years later.
There’s a neat linearity and consistency to this which suggests that the Cocteau Twins have some timeless boho/student quality about them, and while we shouldn’t trust anecdotal evidence – I honestly don’t believe most student digs in 2025 are humming to the sound of their work – it’s not unreasonable to suggest that they’ve largely resisted the winds of change. There are any number of acclaimed indie groups this decade whose sound could be, consciously or otherwise, described as having a debt to their ideas. By saying this, it’s not as if I’m offering a fresh viewpoint either; a quick look at the comments section of just about any of their YouTube videos will surface a ton of comments along the lines of “These guys invented dreampop/ shoegaze!” for anyone who couldn’t tell that just by using their ears and checking the copyright date.
So it was with this in mind that I cued this EP up, ready to give it a close listen and dissect it in a frothing way, hailing Fraser, Guthrie and Raymonde as prophets who understood the likely direction of alternative music far beyond the early edges of the eighties, when something strange happened. I realised that, in the context of the years running up to it, the individual components making up their sound aren’t as radical as you’d think. For the last six months now, as I’ve ploughed through weeks of indie chart listings, numerous groups have surfaced with hazy, out-of-focus guitar lines droning against deep Joy Division inspired bass lines. Within that early eighties lineage, the sounds on “Sunburst and Snowblind” are neither alien nor entirely fresh, just oddly aligned.
You can hear it in the low throbbing bass, the guitars obscured by aerosol mist, in Liz Fraser’s proud and emotive but vague psychedelic pronouncements; this is really just post-punk with a twist at this stage. For all the surprisingly familiarity, though, they share with The Smiths a technique and ability which combine to create something which sounds more confident and less fumbling than most of the work which preceded it, and in the process something much more strange and distinct.
Fraser’s commanding presence – she’s often written about as if she’s a frail waif warbling mystical spells, but these vocals are bold and precise – feels key here, but Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde were also prime contributors. Little was made of it at the time, but Simon is the son of the arranger Ivor Raymonde whose credits are splashed across numerous sixties singles from artists as varied as The Walker Brothers, Dusty Springfield, The Stylistics, Ken Dodd, and then rather more messy, scuzzy acts such as The Flies and Los Bravos, and the largely forgotten, melodramatic likes of Paul Slade.
Having a parent who played a key backroom role in music probably gave Simon Raymonde the confidence to pursue a living on his own artistic terms, but it’s hard to hear much of father Ivor’s influence in The Cocteau Twins work. His work usually consisted of either pin-point precise orchestrations or rough sixties rave ups (try on Los Bravos “Going Nowhere” for size) while, if anything, The Cocteau Twins specialised in what could be described as abstract smudginess – manipulating the studio to create imprecise waterlogged sounds the likes of Dusty Springfield would have rejected. If Ivor was the man wandering around the recording studio polishing everything until it shone, Simon’s (and Guthrie’s) default mode seemed to be pride in their vagueness, stomping pastel crayons over their canvas rather than creating airbrushed prettiness.
You can hear it in the lyrics also, reams of imprecise nonsense about pigs soaring and swooning it’s impossible to hear as either poetic or directly meaningful; just one more tool to create a pretty and indistinct mess, a diesel rainbow of artificial sound.
The group inevitably had their detractors as a result – the insult “hippies” was hurled a few times among music journalists who came of age during punk – and there’s certainly an argument to be made that if you strip away the after-effects, none of the tracks on this EP are great songwriting in and of themselves. All are anchored to the same minimal chords and drones, their simplicity blown up into something grander by the after-sheen; there’s a reason nobody has ever released an “unplugged” acoustic Cocteau Twins covers album.
That’s almost besides the point, though. The group weren’t interested in creating tunes the milkman could whistle, or “wee toetappers” as Fraser sarcastically commented to a Smash Hits journalist, and were instead picking up the debris of minimal post-punk and using it to build a strange culture of their own, like the musical equivalent of those close friends at school who spoke in their own coded language behind the caretaker’s shed at break times. “Sunburst and Snowblind” is ageless partly because its stylings were much borrowed, but also because they were so eccentric, skilled and tamper-proof that they defied uninspired carbon copies. Nobody else would ever confidently spout forth about sugar hiccups in the eighties or any other decade, however much they were in awe of the result. The group claimed their own territory, and built such a lop-sided, strange looking building on it that they were almost daring anyone to rip them off directly - some may have edged close to the threshold, but nobody has yet entered their world wholly.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
21. Indians In Moscow – Naughty Miranda (Kennick)
Peak position: 6
Strange things were brewing in the basements and garages of Hull, obviously. “I just killed my father” is a fairly daring opening line to give a song, and shortly following it up with a jaunty “They call me naughty Miranda!” ups the ante further.
The lyrics seem like something off a confused popsike record from 1968, whereas the group’s sound is bargain basement brassy synth-pop set to a demented tango. It probably sounded daring in 1984 but unlike the Cocteaus, time has softened its edges, the stilted limitations of their Do-it-Yourself synthetic sound and their punkish need to shock (complaints were addressed to Right To Reply when they appeared on The Tube) timelocking them firmly in their own era.
29. The Defects – Suspicious Minds (IDS)
Peak position: 12
Another second-wave punk cover version of an old classic to add to the wobbly pile in the corner. Maybe one day it will fall over and some of them will get damaged. Yeah maybe, but who would honestly care?
Recorded (once again) as the label pressured one of their acts to remain relevant, “Suspicious Minds” still sounds nothing like you’d expect. If it weren’t for the occasional boisterous vocalisation of “Woah!” you’d never realise this Belfast lot were ever punks; the bouncy rhythms and sweetly non-committal vocals are closer to a cover which might have come out on Bell Records at the arse-end of glam in 1975 – more “Lift Off With Ayshea” than “Revolver”.
Also in common with a lot of the cynical edges of that scene, there’s no particular reason to hear it. It’s competently executed and cutely sung, but it’s unfathomable that anybody thought that The Defects fanbase could get behind it, or that the pop kids of the eighties would have willingly taken their place. Unsurprisingly, this was the last record they recorded prior to reforming in the 21st Century.
For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forum
Number One In The Official Charts
Paul McCartney: "Pipes Of Peace" (Parlophone)
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