Robin Guthrie

Fucking rules.

It's Robin Guthrie from...

the cockatoo twins who does the soundtrack, but it's a Greg Iraqi movie.

It's based on, I think the advantage is also that's based on a novel.

And this will cover the story through the Heaven or Las Vegas album of 1990.

We'll also tell the story of the last couple of albums in the '90s that followed before the group disbanded in 1997, in part due to issues stemming from the disintegration of Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie's romantic relationship.

The previous episode that we mentioned here talking about those early days, we did that one about a year ago, so you can always check that out.

It's available on all the platforms.

1985 began with a March release of Akea Guinea as a seven-inch single and a 12-inch four-song EP featuring all non-album tracks.

This was issued on 4AD Records on the independent label, just like the previous LPs and EPs from Cocteau Twins, and they would continue with this label until 1990.

According to Robin Guthrie, the word, the title of the single, Akea Guinea, is another word in Scottish for seashell.

This song would reach number one on the UK Indie chart and number 41 on the regular chart.

So I didn't think anything much of it until I actually had an opportunity to listen to it properly a few days or weeks afterwards and realized just what an awesome piece of recording this was.

It's a wonderful, wonderful debut by Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie and Guy Heggie, who was on bass at the time.

Will Heggie.

Will Heggie, that's it.

And it was awesome.

It was music that was... just draped in this Arctic coldness.

An unadorned drum machine, which is clinical and stark, Heggie's bass coiling around, and Robin Guthrie with layers of effects on his guitar, creating these huge, shimmering, panoramic ice sheets of gorgeous music.

And then on top of that, you've got Liz Fraser, and that voice which...

In the early 1980s, the Cocteau twins start to make music that doesn't sound like a lot of typical British rock and roll.

Robin Guthrie does not treat the guitar primarily as a vehicle for riffs and big spandex-wielding solos.

He runs it through chorus pedals, delay, distortion, reverb, until these individual notes kind of blur into a texture.

Elizabeth Fraser's voice behaves a little bit similarly.

Yeah.

It sounds kind of like a wash, but yet with distinct melodies, which is a different thing than some of the more abrasive versions of similar ideas.

So Robin Guthrie's own explanation of this gets pretty close to the philosophy that shoegaze will inherit some years in the future.

He later puts it that he was playing the sound and the processing as much as he was playing the guitar itself, which is really an emblematic kind of core piece of the shoegaze quote unquote sound.

It was definitely a shift.

I mean, Robin was doing, he'd been doing, Robin Guthrie had been doing it for years with, you know, probably pedals and then he was using actual studio effects, which cost,

Quick question.

When was the last time a display ad changed your mind? Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved.

Although we had Falling Down remixed by Stephen Haig for the album.

So that's slightly posher version of it.

um we were going to remix some something more and auto sleep with robin guthrie but when we came to work with him robin um with auto sleep he was happy to work with what we'd recorded and i just i just did redid the vocals and then he stuck it through all of his Space Noise Duff

that's a great that's probably my favourite track on the album it was great