Know Who You Are At Every Age
Those Eyes, That Mouth
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a bit about running, something that I do fairly, but not sufficiently, frequently, with a modicum, but no more, of enthusiasm, at a level that is (at least when measured at a population level rather than by purely sporting standards) better than mediocre, but well short of excellent.
This level of achievement probably applies to most things I’ve had a go at, and in turn reflects the level of commitment I tend to invest in doing anything. Occasionally, I feel a little rueful about this, and think maybe I should have been more decisive and identified what I might best have spent 10,000 hours or whatever is to become truly accomplished at something, and think of all the useful and impressive lives I might have led had I done so.
In a comment on that post about running, one of my sisters wrote, “For many years, in your youth, you avoided anything that could result in failure; so I see it as a sign of great maturity that you are prepared to trudge through mud with very little prospect of glory.” This was obviously intended as an encouraging compliment but, inevitably, my inner critic parsed it as ‘now you’re getting old you’ve accepted that you’re a failure.’
One of the many un-started book ideas I’ve had, that I then thought might make a more coherent substack project, but haven’t followed up of course, was a series of imagined counterfactuals in which I followed different imagined life paths I might have taken (I hinted at some of them in the fourth paragraph of this piece that was runner up in the Planet magazine new writing contest a couple of years ago). I could have called it ‘Know Who You Are At Every Age’ but as it’s a project I haven’t (yet?) pursued, I’ve co-opted that title for this post for reasons that are about to become obvious, if you either clicked the link, or got the reference without needing to.
For there is at least one thing in which my dedication and commitment has been unswerving and constant , and that is my devotion to the music of Cocteau Twins. Sure, I’m not exactly a ‘superfan’. Although I bought every piece of music they released since discovering them on the John Peel show in 1983, until their devastating split in 1996, I haven’t felt the need to be a completist, seeking to own every format of every release. Nor have I taken the trouble to make a podcast about the band, unlike these guys that I’ve been binge listening to over the past couple of weeks alongside, the Cocteau Twins Advent Calendar, and the audiobook of Cocteau Twins’ bassist Simon Raymonde’s beguiling memoir In One Ear.
I have briefly met Simon when he was playing with Lost Horizons:
But perhaps more telling was the potential encounter a few months before. I was briefly in Brighton for work and made the pilgrimage to the Bella Union vinyl shop, only to find it closed. I posted a picture of my sad face outside the closed shutters and went off to get my train home. Before I had left, Simon’s wife saw the post and messaged to say that he was only next door and could open the shop specially for me. Yes! - I had the opportunity of a private audience with one of the musical heroes I’d idolised since I was a teenager. So of course — I turned it down to get back home to my family at the scheduled time on my reserved train, concerned that I might otherwise miss the last connection and have to call my wife out in the small hours to pick me up from Swansea.
Perhaps advancing years have turned me from someone who “avoided anything that could result in failure” to someone who avoids anything that could result in success. Or perhaps I’ve been slowly uncovering what counts as success.
Which is a bigger (albeit provisional and tentative) conclusion than I intended for what was supposed to be a single paragraph introduction to another past piece of writing that I intended to recycle here while working on something more substantive.
Here it is:
Those Eyes, That Mouth
I have a singing voice that is adequate for holding a tune, but little more. One time, and one time only, have my vocal efforts been met with something like reverie from an audience. An audience of one, in the men’s toilets of a hotel in northern Finland just before Christmas 2003. We were, I suspect, both a little drunk. Certainly, I was, and he soon would be. Nevertheless, in my foolish attempt to mimic the oral ice-sculpture of Elizabeth Fraser singing Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren I must have channelled something that wetted a desiccated memory in my listener.
“What is that?” It wasn’t a casual question. “I’m sure I heard that in a pub in Leicester, must have been ten, fifteen years ago. Been wondering what it was ever since. Beautiful female voice; just an echoey accompanying guitar, I think.”
So yes, it was Fraser’s version: the one in my head as I drunkenly warbled that had somehow arced across the years and porcelain stalls to evoke the song that had lodged in his mind after just that one listen. In those days before Shazam and Spotify, we could be transported by a piece of music and despair of ever hearing it again. Yet just a couple of minutes later he was listening to the song, headphone-embraced, on a mini-disc collection of 4AD label artists belonging to a new-found friend I’d met just a couple of hours earlier. We’d spent the evening in the hotel bar sharing an obsession with Fraser’s band, Cocteau Twins, in a spiralling bliss of cloudberry liqueur.
But now, I am resisting the siren-song of the Buckley connection (Elizabeth Fraser would later record a beautiful unreleased duet – All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun – with Tim Buckley’s son, Jeff, shortly before his river-bend drowning, as her relationship with Cocteau Twins bandmate Robin Guthrie, and subsequently the band itself, imploded). Instead, with oar-blades feathered, I’m striking out for that treasure hiding on the B-side of the transitional Love’s Easy Tears EP, the song I return to most: Those Eyes, That Mouth.
I hesitate before daring to try and write about Cocteau Twins’ music at all, and especially Those Eyes, That Mouth. If I’m lending you my very heartbeat, even for just three minutes thirty-six seconds, what if it is, for you, an ice-pulse? The song is not one of their most popular and (if any are) crowd-pleasing pieces. It contains echoes of what the group were when I first fell for them, when music seemed the only thing that mattered, because the things that ought to matter were unobtainable or incomprehensible. And it contains the essence of what they would become, when life outgrew their music, yet their music encompassed that life. You can hear the transition just after the two-minute mark. A spear of ice shatters in a scrape of reverbed guitar string; Elizabeth’s characteristically inscrutable lyric seems to say, if only to me, “worthy of young men”; the rhythmically three-swept melodic guitar and multifoiled bass-line subtly change key, Liz’s voice ups out and away, “now we are reaching”, and that glass grenade shard of guitar falls like piled snow from the pines outside that Arctic hotel, the year our eldest child finally saw Santa Claus for real, and realised he wasn’t.
I remember with the clarity of filtered memory my first playing of Those Eyes That Mouth, over seventeen years earlier, on the day it was released: October 13th 1986. Just a couple of weeks earlier I had arrived at university, sharing a flat with my best friend from home, a fellow Cocteaus fan.
A few weeks later I would catch my first sight, through the window of that flat, of the girl who was to marry me; a little later in this same room, she would be among a bunch of us chatting together after an evening at the Brewhouse, exchanging lengthening glances that would have a friend later mock that I had stars in my eyes (I don’t know if he was aware that phrase was one of the few fragments of Elizabeth Fraser’s usually inscrutable lyrics to find its way onto a record sleeve).
Now, Russ and I danced round the room like the wise idiots we were, and as that guttering guitar sliced a bleeding smile across the upturned face of the song once the needle had dialled two-thirds across the vinyl, laugh-lines crazed our meeting eyes, and our tinderbox hearts blazed.
Other records might have done the same in those few years when we seemed to live whole lives by the day, but few other than Cocteaus songs continue to feel fresh and vital across the looped rope of time to the present, while still containing that half-gift of nostalgia. We need a word for the experience of compressing time that this music creates with all that sonic stuff there are no words for, because if there were words we wouldn’t need the music (and some ethnographers speculate – it seems to me more than plausibly – that perhaps we wouldn’t have words but for the arrival of music).
I think of the Portuguese saudade, mainstay of the Fado song tradition, and of the Welsh hiraeth – a longing, a yearning for an ideal of home, a heart’s ease, that maybe there never was and perhaps never will be. This song, unlike most Cocteaus’ tracks, ends on a long slow fade, taking crystalline beauty with it, to who knows where.
Thirty-three years after first hearing it, as I listen to this song for the however-many-thousandth time, making coffee in the kitchen of our home, my wife approaches the doorway. She’s heard the music, sees me, and her arms come up, as if holding something, as if to a child, as if to a lover, as if to a friend. Before we embrace, for the first time in a while, our faces crease, laugh-lines haunting our smiles, and I look at her. Really look at her. It only takes a moment, in the collapsed time this music creates:
those eyes,
that mouth…