MAY 1984 ...Cocteau Twins hit the charts
“Top Of The Pops… I’d feel a fucking prick standing on-stage, miming .” ROBIN GUTHRIE
MAY 19
The upper end of this week’s UK charts were the ’80s in excelsis, with Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie and more bringing polished, pastelshaded pop perfect for daytime radio for years to come. Around the 30 mark, though, what are now seen as the big guns of British alternative music were congregating: The Cure’s Caterpillar at 26, Sandie Shaw and The Smiths’ Hand In Glove at Number 27, and Echo & The Bunnymen’s Silver at Number 30. Nestling between them at 29 were Cocteau Twins, a more mysterious prospect by far, with their cascading, opaque dream-waltz Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops.
The song, already an indie chart-topper, was promoted with a video showing vocalist Elizabeth Fraser pacing the empty Holloway Sanatorium, a Victorian “asylum for the middle-class insane” in Virginia Water, Surrey. The soft-focus promo’s illuminated stained glass, slo-mo waterfalls and Fraser’s bandmates Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde moodily burning leaves fit with certain tropes already gathering around the group – that, with their chiming, protean soundworld and Fraser’s ecstatic/infernal mouth music, they were the perfect pre-Raphaelite fantasia for those inclined to swoon. The band soon disowned it. “That video was terrible,” Fraser told Melody Maker.
“A disaster.” Guthrie went further: “PearlyDewdrops’ Drops was a clinical exercise to get on Top Of The Pops,” he told MOJO in 2011. “Ivo [Watts-Russell, co-founder of Cocteaus’ label 4AD] had asked for a single, to take us to the next level.”
Anyone at 4AD hoping for a smooth transition from indie chart stardom to a wider breakthrough – the previous year, Fraser and Guthrie had already got to Number 66 covering Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren with 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil – would be frustrated, it seemed.
Formed in 1981 in the petrochemical town of Grangemouth near Falkirk, the group had already released two LPs and three EPs, signalling elegant otherness with Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson’s chimerical sleeve art. Some thought their liking for Siouxsie &
The Banshees was to the fore on 1982 debut
Garlands, but after original bassist Will Heggie quit during a tour with OMD in West Germany in May ’83, romantic partners Fraser and Guthrie soon struck out into new, hermetic vistas of celestial reverberation with 1983’s
Head Over Heels. When Simon Raymonde, whose ’60s pop arranger father Ivor worked with Dusty Springfield and Scott Walker, joined in late ’83, he brought what Guthrie later called “balance” to the group.
Still, they seemed ill-at-ease with the prospect of success. They’d performed Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops on the Old Grey Whistle Test in February, but the idea of actually playing it on Top Of The Pops met with derision. “I’d feel a fucking prick standing on-stage, miming, with all those people behind me,” Guthrie told Q in 1987. “So what if you’re going to sell more records… it’s like a big disco and I don’t ever go to discos. Why go to a disco for the first time and be seen by 12 million people doing it?”
Media encounters revealed reluctant interviewees, though crumbs of info were panned by assiduous journalists in earlymid-1984. These included Fraser having tuition from celebrity voice coach Tona de Brett, the singer and guitarist moving in with Watts-Russell after losing their flat in Muswell Hill, the group having to tell radio DJ Tommy
Vance, live on air, that he’d been playing the wrong side of their hit, and the band refusing to let Smash Hits print lyrics to Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops.
What were those secret-language words, anyway? “I’ve remembered what songs are about,” Fraser told Blitz magazine of her unique spirit-howling, which was by now entering the realm of glossolalia. “I’ve just never remembered at the right time. I don’t understand why people get so upset. It’s the only chance they’ve got of finding something for themselves.”
With Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops at Number 1 on the indie charts, the group were open to discovery at the Royal Festival Hall on March 8. The performance, which survives on bootleg, is a torrent of luscious textures and programmed beats on tape, with Fraser trilling and soaring on the hit of the moment. After she faux-scolded fans for refusing to stay in their seats, attendees recall seeing celebratory fireworks for the opening of the Thames Barrier, visible from the South Bank, as they departed.
The Cocteaus’ story still had 13 years to run, and there was much outstanding music and personal drama to come. With shoegazers and chillwave acts, as well as samplers including The Weeknd, Arca and Grimes, among those in their thrall, it’s curious to think that Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops was actually their highest single chart placing. “It has to be about emotion,” mused Fraser in 1984, who’s sung the song at three of the five shows she’s played since her old group’s 1997 split. “It can’t be about anything else.”