Cocteau Twins’ Elizabet...Since 1998

The last time I saw Elizabeth Fraser was in 1984 on the stage of a short-lived Birmingham nightclub called the Powerhaus. I was then 18, and she, fronting her band the Cocteau Twins, was 20. It was, on my part, love at first sight. The Cocteaus, at the time, were high in the John Peel pantheon, on an independent cloud somewhere alongside the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain, and like both of those bands, they sounded like no one you had ever heard before. Fraser's ecstatic vocals, which carried just a hint of her growing up in Grangemouth, Falkirk – were not only hair-raising, they also dwelt in unique soundscapes of her own devising. Her lyrics formed an invented language, words chosen for texture rather than meaning, and the adjectives that clung to her among ardent critics in the artier music pages were "ethereal" or "otherworldly".

On recordings, the most successful of these compositions, Sugar Hiccupor Pearly-Dewdrops Drops, had a dreamlike, almost prenatal quality; I seem to recall grown men in the New Musical Express routinely confessing to being reduced to tears. Watching Fraser sing these songs live you saw their point. That night in a Birmingham basement the emotional force of her voice was held in constant tension with a palpable anxiety in her performance, which gave the music a nerve-shredding high-wire tension; by the end of the evening, the audience (and her band, led by her partner Robin Guthrie) seemed to be collectively willing her on to her next improbable feat of melody; an encore seemed almost an unfair ordeal to impose on her. As my friend Stuart memorably observed at the time: "It's like watching Alice in fucking Wonderland." He meant that in a good way.

For a decade or so after that concert, the Cocteaus followed their own creative path with increasing commercial success, but the fragilities that seemed apparent that night didn't go away. Interviews with the band became a kind of rite of passage for music journalists; Fraser, in particular, was an infamously reluctant and awkward subject, sometimes seemingly tortured by the obligation to explain the music she helped to conjure with Guthrie and bass player Simon Raymonde; shy to the point of monosyllable.

She had a daughter with Guthrie in 1989 but by the time of their seventh album, Four-Calendar Café, three years later, the Cocteaus were close to breaking point; Guthrie had been addicted to drugs and alcohol, they had been in dispute with various record labels, and Fraser resorted to confessional songwriting for the first and only time ("Are you the right man for me?" she wondered. "Are you safe? Are you toxic? Are you my friend?").

Another album followed but the band – and Guthrie and Fraser – had already split. Fraser subsequently became close to the mercurial Jeff Buckley, one hallelujah voice attracting another. After Buckley died tragically in a river accident, Fraser was said to have had a breakdown of sorts, she moved from London to Bristol, became mother to a second daughter (with her partner Damon Reece, sometime drummer withMassive Attack) and, though there have been whispers of a solo album for more than a decade, the rest has mostly been silence.

This silence will be broken this summer when Fraser sings her own songs on stage for the first time this century, at the invitation of Antony Hegarty for his Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre. For Hegarty, it is the "centrepiece of the festival" and for Fraser's legion of fans, it is a wish come true. Still, on the train to see her in Bristol on a summer Saturday afternoon, to talk about all this, with her soaring voice in my headphones, I have a slight trepidation about whether she will turn up at all.

She has suggested we meet outside WH Smith – something else I haven't heard since the early 1980s – and she hurries up a little late, already apologising for everything, severe-fringed as ever, but now silver-haired, suggesting we walk over to the park in the local square to sit on a bench and talk.

I say talk, but listening back to the tape of that hour and a half of conversation there is at least as much pause as chat; at certain moments, birdsong seems to have taken over for good. Fraser is a small and wonderfully spirited presence, quick to laugh, self-deprecating to the point of embarrassment, but words remain a problem for her, at least in the artificial context of an interview. She can't say one thing without wishing immediately she had said another. Her speech is endearingly punctuated with caveats – "this is so difficult", "what do I want to say?", "I understood it for a moment then, but, no, it's gone now" – and I hear myself attempting to finish her sentences (always wrongly) gamely willing her on, just as I recall doing watching her on stage all those years ago.

And this, she assures me at one point with a wild laugh, is her in decisive mood – she has turned a corner, having said no for such a long time she has resolved to start saying yes.

What's happened, I wonder, to make her feel so uncharacteristically bullish?

She thinks for a moment. "What can I say?" she says. "I think it has to do with sevens."

Sevens?

"I've always had a thing about sevens. And I am coming up for my 49th birthday in August. Seven sevens. It feels like a really important moment to consider all the things that are coming toward me." She stops for a while, reconsiders. "And my mum died very recently so maybe that has something to do with it too."

In this sense, she suggests, the call from her friend Antony Hegarty came at a propitious moment. Was she minded immediately to answer in the affirmative, I wonder.

She laughs at the idea. "Well it wasn't an immediate yes, of course not! But part of me was saying, you know, 'Come on, Fraser! This is it! This is the one you have to do!' But then there is always another part saying: 'What are you thinking? You can't do this! You are really going to need the rest of your life to think about whether this is a good idea...'"

Have those two voices always been chuntering on in her head?

"Well," she says, "I do have to respect the 'not ready' voice. But then: seven sevens – hard to argue with."

The concert will include quite a lot of new material, the songs Fraser has been working on for the past 15 years. She composes in the way she always has, starting with single phrases or melodies, recording them, and passing them on to someone else to add more layers, her bass player, or her keyboard player, before working on them some more, like a painter returning constantly to a canvas. The process itself is the important thing, the creative thing, she tells herself, and whether the songs are ever put out in the world is not essential, but she would like people to hear them, of course she would. Is one of the reasons for the waiting, I ask, a sense that she always feels she is competing against what she has done before?

"Oh, you can't compete," she says quickly. "I am really learning this from rehearsing. Going back and listening to old songs and thinking. 'Christ, I can't do that!' I am so much older than I was then, and a female voice in particular changes so much over the years. It just felt like such a gift then, you can't compete with that."

Fraser was the youngest child of six; her father worked as a tool maker in a factory. "He would come home sometimes with this metal beard," she says, "all these tiny bits of metal embedded in his face." Her mother made all their clothes, "and if she couldn't make it, we couldn't have it". When, I wonder, was she first aware of her voice?

"The enjoyment of it started at school," she says, "quite young. There were a few singers at home, one or two aunties. We did have a piano but I think that got put on the fire eventually."

Fraser's two daughters, 22 and 14, can both sing too, though she seldom hears them, she says, and they seldom hear her. We talk a little about the difference in teenage girls, their worldliness. Can she recall herself at 14?

"I was very dreamy," she recalls. "Insular. I'm always amazed I survived adolescence at all and wasn't squashed flat by a juggernaut. Gaping, I think was my main skill. Staring out of the window."

She joined the band at 17, after Guthrie saw her dancing in an absent-minded way in a nightclub. Were her dreams always of escape from the harder realities of Grangemouth?

"No, I never thought of the next day," she says. "I had no aspirations at all really. I just had a lot of something – what was it? So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful sun!

An Apollonian spirit, if that is a word."

Was she writing at the time?

"Terrible poems, I think. But the thing was I wrote them without fear. It's not until you get asked about your writing and you don't know the answers to things that you start to get scared. I used to just do it, you know. And then people would ask me what it meant. And I didn't know. And then I felt: I can't talk. I can't write. And I would get all twisted up about it."

I mention reading back through interviews from her early career, a lot of ambitious, slightly self-obsessed young men expecting hard-won pop philosophy from her. No wonder she didn't have many answers…

"Well, we were all pretty self-obsessed," she says. "I mean, I had been making up languages! Looking back, that was a tool to help get things out. I didn't have the confidence just to sit down and write something. I was always running away from that… It's funny," she laughs. "I go to college now. I'm so proud of myself! I do creative writing. At this wonderful college, Emerson College, in Sussex. Paul Matthews, a poet, is our tutor. And one of the first things he said was: 'Right, today, we are going to make up our own languages.' I knew somebody else out there did that! I used to think everyone did it…"

That playfulness, she suggests, was always at odds, too, with the business the Cocteau Twins found themselves in. It's the familiar tale, she wanted to let ideas come in their own time, but contracts and commitments prevented that; when she looks back on her years in the band, it is "the pressure to perform, the pressure to create" that she recalls first. She wouldn't have missed it for the world, she says, but she's "sad that it all went on so long".

The last two albums were a particular regret. By that point, she and Guthrie, with their young daughter, had taken to working shifts in the studio to avoid each other; he'd do nights and she would do days, or vice versa. Drugs had got in the way of everything by then too.

"I resisted it for a long time," she says. "I thought they would get tired of all this soon, and we will be back to normal but, of course, that didn't happen, unfortunately. Then, weirdly, I got into this pot smoking. I guess that was the part of me saying: 'Right, if you are going to let this slide, you might as well do it properly.' I should never have smoked pot. That was the end of the band really. Before that, I wouldn't have smoked because I am a singer. And I can't string a sentence together as it is. Christ! But there it was. And then quite a few other things happened together."

These things included splitting up from Guthrie, leaving the band, losing Jeff Buckley (she devoted the song Teardrop she wrote with Massive Attack to him), and experiencing the beginning of the more crippling creative doubt that she has fought since. "I just got so depleted and exhausted by everything," she says. "I was in a horrible place. I had always thought of myself as a sanguine person, quite light and airy. But for a long while, no one could have possibly made me laugh or smile. It was awful."

Fraser's journey out of that depression began with her meeting Damon Reece, sometime drummer with Massive Attack, moving to Bristol, devoting herself to motherhood, and obsessively avoiding a lot of the pressures of the life she had found herself trapped in.

Her profound and understandable mistrust of returning to any of those pressures since – despite requests to collaborate with everyone from Prince to Peter Gabriel – have not gone away. Slowly, she has tried to reconnect with her gift, as well as to analyse the source of it. Hence the creative writing course, the painting trips to the Alps – "though I can't paint for toffee!" – using pigments made only of wild flowers, and a reading list that has moved on, she says, from "theosophy toanthroposophy – though I don't understand any of it enough to explain it, I am desperate to. I'm interested in lots of things I don't understand. I so wish I did! It makes me so sad. I think I'm such a feeling person but, obviously, you can't just let it run riot. Especially with age. And I would never wish to or pretend to be that youth again. I could not wait to have grey hair! I love my grey hair! I just wish that some fucking wisdom had come with it!"

She grits her teeth with frustration, talks of needing to be more closely connected to natural things – later that afternoon, she is taking herself off to West Wales to try to finish the songs she is working on. Does she like wilderness, I ask.

"I do, in my own way," she says. "But I don't have the wherewithal to go somewhere remote on my own. I can't do that. I can't drive, for one thing [a fact which I can't help thinking might come as a relief to other road users], but my strategy is to create the right atmosphere for myself and that is really going somewhere where it would be safe for me to panic. I find making decisions really very difficult. The torture of deciding about something is almost too much for me. That's why I'm so excited to have made this decision to play. I need that commitment! I'm honestly not as bad as I used to be."

I believe her, I suggest. And it will be great to hear her voice again. Thank goodness for the sevens, I say.

"Exactly," she says, brightly, "the sevens!"

I'd like to hear what her solo work sounds like. I have all the Cocteau Twins albums, but the fact that the lyrics were mostly gibberish prevented me from really loving them. When Elizabeth sings 'proper' songs like the above "Teardrop" or This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren", it's heavenly.

sextonseven said:

I'd like to hear what her solo work sounds like. I have all the Cocteau Twins albums, but the fact that the lyrics were mostly gibberish prevented me from really loving them. When Elizabeth sings 'proper' songs like the above "Teardrop" or This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren", it's heavenly.

Her philosophy of lyrics I've come to understand as her way of retreating from the world of words. She's so shy, and emotional. And so uncertain of herself that speaking seems like its painful for her. Every interview Ive ever read of her is the same. I feel like she agonizes over words, words she should say, shouldn't say, could have said differently. And I think not having words protects her from having her words out there in that uncertainty. Singing through sounds as she's described it in previous interviews is the closest way to reflect her emotion without drowning them with the weight of words.

This is the first single from her album that she put out two years ago (showing just how slow she works)..

But the real treat of her performing at the Meltdown festival with Antony Hegarty is that the world will get one of the best treats in the world... getting to hear HOPEFULLY Antony singing next to her! That will be history. The two of them have two of the most distinct voices in the history of modern music.

AWESOME.

lezama said:

sextonseven said:

I'd like to hear what her solo work sounds like. I have all the Cocteau Twins albums, but the fact that the lyrics were mostly gibberish prevented me from really loving them. When Elizabeth sings 'proper' songs like the above "Teardrop" or This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren", it's heavenly.

Her philosophy of lyrics I've come to understand as her way of retreating from the world of words. She's so shy, and emotional. And so uncertain of herself that speaking seems like its painful for her. Every interview Ive ever read of her is the same. I feel like she agonizes over words, words she should say, shouldn't say, could have said differently. And I think not having words protects her from having her words out there in that uncertainty. Singing through sounds as she's described it in previous interviews is the closest way to reflect her emotion without drowning them with the weight of words.

I understand all that. And if that's what Elizabeth has to do in order to get the songs out--the alternative being no music from her at all--then I'm all for it. But there will still be a ceiling there for how much I can potentially like her work compared to others that use real words--even, strangely enough, if the artist sings in a foreign language I don't understand. I need to know that there is a real narrative behind the music available for me to read if I choose. It's an odd quirk with me.