Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie on the ‘Pain’ (and Gain) of Remastering This ’80s Classic
Robin Guthrie is in what appears to be his kitchen, a Welsh dresser against the light-blue wall behind him, and a rustic-style table with a collection of odds to his right. His cozy, modest home is in Finistère, France, the westernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. Finistère is derived from the Latin term “finis terrae,” which means “end of the earth.” And that’s fine by him. He likes the reclusiveness of it all.
“What are you doing? Is this like an interview? What is it? What’s your vibe?” Guthrie asks me in his thick Scottish accent.
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He’s been doing rounds of interviews to promote the upcoming vinyl reissue of the band’s 1986 album, The Moon and the Melodies, and I can tell he’d much rather be doing something else. But Guthrie is very cordial and jokes around a bit. He’s wearing an old black T-shirt with “Cuba” emblazoned on the front and plastic-framed glasses that hover between his white beard and thinning hair. I tell him my purpose for the interview and ask him why he felt now was a good time to do a repressing of The Moon and the Melodies.
“I didn’t really have any need to listen to that record ever again in my life,” Guthrie says. “but it comes around because it’s part of the catalog. And I’d never looked at it in terms of remastering… just, there seems to be somewhat of a wave of people sort of discovering Cocteau Twins now after all this time.”
To be fair, this record wasn’t originally released under the group’s moniker. A collaboration with American minimalist composer Harold Budd, the album was released under the names of each contributor: Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser, and Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins, and Budd. But in the decades since its initial release, The Moon and the Melodies is now considered part of the Cocteau Twins catalog, and one of the band’s best.
Guthrie goes on for a bit, and then asks me, “What do you know about my history?”
What we don’t go into detail about, but what I assume he’s hinting at, is his relationship with Fraser.
Guthrie formed the Cocteau Twins in 1981 with his friend, Will Heggie, in Grangemouth, a small town between Edinburgh and Glasgow. While Guthrie was DJing at a club, he spotted Fraser dancing, and she joined the band shortly thereafter. Heggie left in 1983, one year after the Cocteau Twins’ first LP, Garlands, was released; Raymonde replaced him later that same year. During that time, Guthrie and Fraser began a relationship that would last until 1997, when the band broke up. The couple has a daughter, Lucy Belle.
From what Guthrie tells me about making The Moon and the Melodies, he and Fraser were the kind of couple who shared such a bond, such a deep love that it seeped into every aspect of their lives, personally and professionally.
“You have to understand the songwriting process thing between Elizabeth…we were a very, very tight couple from very, very young, from a small town,” he says. “It was almost unspoken, but it was very much like, ‘This is what we do, and this is us against the world… It was just a different dynamic introducing somebody else into the studio. And something that I’ve always found difficult to do.”
That someone else, of course, was Budd.
Producer Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder of 4AD, the independent label that signed the Cocteau Twins, was a big fan of Budd’s and introduced him to the band.
“It started as a social call, really…” Guthrie tells me. “Because we met Harold and then there was this idea of recording together. And then we recorded together, and then it was out and…there was not a great deal of thought that went into it. It was just done very quickly and very basically, and not really with the idea of making an album. I mean, just historically speaking…it wasn’t a Cocteau Twins record.”
Guthrie says that they referred to The Moon and the Melodies as a bunch of demos because there was no practicing, no preparation before the session with Budd. “It never got to the point where we had actually created some music and then wanted to record it properly,” he says. “This was just me doing my thing with a studio that I had at that moment. And this is what came out.”
If you listen to any Cocteau Twins album, you’ll notice the way Guthrie’s lush, multilayered guitar work and Fraser’s melodically ethereal voice intertwine into a swirling ocean of sound. While you will indeed hear that on The Moon and the Melodies—with the addition of Budd’s Yamaha electric grand piano—the eight-song album, as Guthrie points out, is stylistically, half Cocteau Twins’ songs with Fraser’s vocals, and half Budd’s instrumental compositions.
Guthrie points out the album’s first song, “Sea, Swallow Me,” as a very Cocteau Twins song, with Fraser’s trademark voice. “She was doing really, really cool stuff with words and her voice,” he says.
While Guthrie was initially skeptical about introducing another person into his and Fraser’s songwriting process, the collaboration with Budd was the start of a prolific musical partnership and friendship.
“There’s a huge amount of chemistry, personally…hence he was my friend, and we made so many records after that,” he says. “And the chemistry there worked because I can look back now and it’s very clear that he never tried to stand on my toes and I never tried to stand on his. It’s like we had both got fairly distinctive things going on that were able to sort of flourish within the context of what we gave each other.”
As I broach the topic of the album’s reissue, Guthrie is sensitive about it, which at first perplexes me. But I eventually come to understand.
If you go on the Cocteau Twins Subreddit, there’s a post called, “Guthrie Remasters (Annoying part of being a CT fan.)” with fans criticizing Guthrie’s remastering efforts on the band’s first six albums. Other online forums had similar comments. Guthrie admits that he tries to avoid reading anything about himself because it’s not good for his well-being. But to hear him talk, it sounds like he’s well aware of what’s been said about his process. “I can honestly say it pains me going to the stage of remastering this record and having it coming out on vinyl,” he says. “Why am I even bothering, you know? Because I know that somebody’s going to say, ‘But my cassette from 1986 sounds better.’”
He points out there’s a common misconception about remastering and remixing. While remixing tweaks a recording’s initial structure, he says remastering is something quite different. “Really, in the simplest terms, it’s like going across to your hi-fi and turning the tone controls. In the case of a 40-year-old tape, it’s trying to restore it.”
He explains that when he was in the Cocteau Twins, part of his mixing chain was the analog mastering process so that when the tapes left the studio, they would be made into vinyl as is, imperfections and all. Guthrie tells me that when the band was recording, it was more or less a live performance.
“On an emotional level, it’s always just a big show when I go back to my catalog, because of course it just consumes you for a month or so…because it does take you back. And I have to live with that, as well as doing a good technical job. But nobody else really has an idea of what it was meant to be like,” he says. “It’s quite challenging to hold my hand up and say, ‘Oh, I’m really proud of the way it sounds now.’ I’m not particularly proud of the way it sounded back then either because, like I say, it wasn’t a full-fledged, proper production job. But it’s part of the journey, and that’s cool. And I think I’ve made it sound as good as I can.”
Guthrie admits, however, that he’s excited for new generations to discover The Moon and the Melodies as well as other Cocteau Twins albums.
“I think it’s absolutely amazing…It’s probably gaining more momentum than it has for a long time. And this is great. How many of those people who are picking up on the music now have any conception of the way that it was to hear something like Bluebell Knoll or something the first time it came out, where they would have to actually sit and listen to the songs in the order they were meant to be in? It’s quite cool to know that they could actually be out just playing games and being on social media and doing all the other things young people do—driving about with these little scooters, trying to knock me off the pavement when I’m walking somewhere to the grocery store— it’s like, they can be doing young people things like that, but they’re actually listening to this as music. That’s amazing. I have to remind myself sometimes that not everybody that was making music from the ‘80s onwards has their music listened to. There’s an audience, and that’s brilliant.
‘The Moon and the Melodies’ will be available for the first time on vinyl since 1986—remastered, not remixed—on August 23.
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