It felt like it was feted." But, she says, "It couldn't be sustained." Bands could do what they wanted and have a career. I could never have done it without him." The distinctive sound they developed "flowed from the chemistry between us", particularly once Raymonde, a Londoner, replaced Heggie.įraser didn't feel what they were doing was particularly experimental or original – "It felt like we got away with it," she says – but the early 80s was "a lucky time. By saying yes, Fraser acquired a soulmate and an enabler. She would go dancing at a local club, the Nash, which is where she met Guthrie: he spotted the 17-year-old Fraser on the dancefloor one night in 1980 and asked her to join the band he'd started with his friend Will Heggie. Back in Grangemouth, a "horrendous" petrochemical town in Stirlingshire, she had seemed destined to follow her mother into the local rag trade until she realised that having "boxing gloves for hands" meant she could barely operate the machines. It wouldn't be coming out at all were it not for a tragedy: Drake-Brockman died in September, and Moses is being released as a tribute. Her single was recorded some time ago with Damon Reece – Massive Attack's drummer, and her partner of more than a decade – and a close friend, Jake Drake-Brockman. Now she talks of her anxiety spreading to the studio. There's no middle ground." When she was still performing, she would suffer stagefright. At times I'm OK, and at other times I'm such a rubout. "I live in here," she explains, exasperatedly, pointing at her head. She is so nervous before the interview begins, she's actually shaking, The inability to pretend is evident even now. She has always struggled to write lyrics, she says, but suddenly something will click and she "goes with the sound and the joy" – that's why she sings sounds and words that have no meaning, of which she can only make sense later. She's been offered sums "beyond your wildest dreams" to collaborate with other artists – "the weirdest one was Linkin Park" – but all have been turned down.įraser sees making music as inseparable from her emotions. She sang on Massive Attack's 1998 album Mezzanine and exquisite hit Teardrop (and toured with them in 2006), but that's it. For the last 12 years, she has barely engaged with music. It's not just her former bandmates she has left behind. And when you're in something that deeply, you have to remove yourself completely." We're that different from each other now." She describes those differences in a sentence: "You take each other's breath away by doing something or saying something they never saw coming." She now can't even think about her bandmates, never mind see them. "There's still a sense of being committed," she explains of her relationship with Guthrie. However, Fraser almost immediately had reservations. Their childhood friend-turned roadie-turned-manager wanted them back together "so that everyone could be friends".
Now her voice is to be heard again, as she releases her first solo single, Moses.Īs Fraser tells it, that abortive reunion was not a career move, not a chance to gain the financial reward the Cocteau Twins' reputation merited: it was an attempt at healing. You still hear their influence in any band striving to sound ethereal and otherworldly. Guthrie provided shimmering swathes of effects-laden guitar – surely the inspirtation for what then Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright's spoof rock critic character called "sonic cathedrals of sound" – while real critics swooned over Fraser's otherworldly and often incomprehensible vocals, one describing her singing – to her embarrassment – as "the voice of God." Madonna loved them, Prince wanted to sign them and Scritti Politti's Green Gartside said the vocally gymnastic Fraser was his third favourite melodicist of all time (behind Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson). But while they were together, the Cocteau Twins established themselves as one of the three main pillars of British alternative music, alongside New Order and the Smiths. I knew it wouldn't happen and it didn't take long to want out."įraser's decision to pull out of the reformation was made for the same reasons that contribute to the band's split in the first place: she could no longer face working with the group's guitarist, Robin Guthrie – her lover until 1993, and the father of her first child. Even though something's staring you in the face, people just cannot see it. "I don't remember it being that much money and in any case that's not the reason ," she says today, in her first interview since the band split in 1998.
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