Friday, June 19, 2009

Cocteau Twins - Laugh Lines

The Cocteau Twins are one of those bands I feel like I'm supposed to like more than I actually do. I appreciate them, let's say. But I never really feel like listening to them, certainly not for extended periods of time.

I can actually trace back to the moment I realised this. I was about 15 or 16 and was in a queue outside a venue, the name of which I can't remember, to see a band whose name I've also forgotten. It might have been Echo and the Bunnymen or it might have been the Smiths. It was a big summertime gig anyway and, as with all big summertime gigs, my friends and I queued up outside all day. You wanted to be one of the first people in the door so that you could be right up at the front of the crowd and then maybe the lead singer (or someone else in the band - and if it was the Smiths it must have been someone else in the band!) would see you from the stage and realise you were The One for them and would pluck you up out of the crowd and take you away. Or something like that. Well, there must have been some reason we wanted to be the very first people in the door...

Anyway, since we were going to be there all day somebody would have brought a boombox to keep us entertained and at one point a Cocteau Twins tape went into it. A tape of a full Cocteaus album (or Cocteaux, if you want to be pretentious about it). I think we might have got halfway through it and it was starting to do my head in. I asked if we could put something else on - please. And from that day on I've had a relatively low tolerance for the Cocteau Twins.

That said, I seem to have an awful lot (read: just about all) of their records, so maybe I'm talking nonsense again.

This is one of the tracks from the "Peppermint Pig" EP. It has that darker, Siouxsie-esque sound of their debut, Garlands, which was always my favourite album of theirs.

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