I’d never seen
anything like it. There was this fucking tape machine and this incredible angel
of a woman, and these two guys with big hair, making the most sublime noise.
(Rudy
Tambala, AR Kane)
The funny thing about writing a book like [post-rock] is you can have all the
fancy theories you want about ‘development of a sound’ and ‘collective
influence’ (and so on), but until you actually start talking to the musicians,
you’ll get it at least partly wrong.
Before I heard
them music was just something I listened to. When I heard their music it was
genuinely life-changing. I think partly because I realised I didn’t have to be
good to play, it was more about making sound. […] They were revolutionary.
Everything about them, the whole set-up, the sound, the singing, everything.
(Mark
Clifford, Seefeel)
Cocteau Twins. Like all the best
revelations, it’s a complete curveball that, once you’ve caught it, makes perfect sense and you wonder why you were previously so blind to it. I
missed it because, before now, I was distracted by the shiny baubles of Cocteau Twins (voice; indecipherability; hypnagogic atmospherics) and, to my
shame, had never tried to understand why they sounded like they did.
I started addressing this with 1982’s Garlands. And why not? It was the first,
and I knew nothing from it. I was initially surprised that it was indebted to
Siouxsie And The Banshees, but the more I thought of it the more it fitted with
the picture I’m building up. The Banshees are another area of underexplored
influence, since John McGeoch and his delay pedal fashioned black ice
soundscapes, something enthusiastically taken up by a strand of [post-rock]
musicians.
Back to Garlands.
This track, this, is currently
everything to me.
If people know anything about the Cocteaus,
it’s Elizabeth Fraser’s voice. They know it’s beautiful; they know it’s hard to
understand the words (and even harder to grasp their meaning). What listening to
‘Wax And Wane’ taught me, and which I had not appreciated before, was that
Fraser is not difficult to take in because she’s being obtuse, evasive, mannered,
or mysterious. Instead, she’s about emotions and situations so
intrinsically ambiguous that the only possible way to make sense of them is to
deliver her words in a way reflective of that ambiguity.
‘Wax And Wane’ was my entry point into this
understanding because, compared to some other songs, Fraser enunciates just enough for some contact between your straining ears and her quicksilver
voice.
‘The devil might steady me / wax and wane’.
- The devil might steady me as I wax and
wane.
- The devil might steady me; his steadying
of me waxes and wanes.
- The devil might steady me; ironically,
this steadying makes me wax and wane.
The thought processes ‘Wax And Wane’
triggers off within me are somewhere between an interwar Mitteleuropean novel and R.D. Laing’s Knots. This relationship of possibility between artist and listener is central to my very favourite [post-rock]; that opening up of meaning to such an extent that it can induce nausea, agoraphobia, and
euphoria.
As I move on through the back
catalogue, I’ve found many hugely impressive moments on Head Over Heels (1983), Treasure (1984), and especially Heaven Or Las Vegas (1990). But, CRAPPING CRAPPING HELL: Victorialand.
Released in 1986, during the period when
bassist Simon Raymonde buggered off to work with This Mortal Coil and Richard
Thomas of Dif Juz was called in on sax and tabla, it is a mindblowingly voluminous
work. Guitars so saturated they’ll shapeshift into sodden grass, while the
vocals reach for the essence of devotional fervour. It seems – to me – that Victorialand is a primal scream arising
from shared unconsciousness. The spaces between the words and the sounds are
important, and obviously so; the music concentrates on the liminal zones
of life that are usually, sometimes intentionally, rendered imperceptible.
Now, when was the last time I had an eye-opening
musical experience like this, one that made me look at life differently while
trotting out ornate phrases like a sixteenth century court poet? Oh, yes. This
man.
It happened when I was writing Seasons They Change, and it was at exactly the same point in the process as I am with [post-rock] now. Unaware of much of his
music, I’d dismissed Tim Buckley for two childish reasons (I didn’t like Jeff
Buckley; I didn’t like the group Starsailor) and one genuine one (his music
wasn’t obviously psychedelic or even, in many cases, folk). But as soon as I
started to talking to musicians, the influence was clear. Tim Buckley freed folk music from expectation and structure and, in doing so, he let all kinds of
crazy shit into it. His musical children, the best ones, didn’t sound like Tim Buckley. Instead, they
took on his ideology, and filled folk music with loads of crazy shit of their
own.
And that’s why Cocteau Twins are
important. The relationship between [post-rock] artists is not wholly, or even primarily, sonic.
Instead, it’s about something far less tangible. And something far more intoxicating.
