Well, a unilateral declaration on my part since they were on sale yesterday at €7.99 a piece (that's about a fiver in old money). I bought three: Heaven or Las Vegas, Victorialand, and Blue Bell Knoll.
Back in the 80s the Cocteau twins were off-limits in my neck of the woods. Their music was regarded as the sort of ambient toss owned by yuppies who worked in marketing, lived in converted warehouses in Wapping, and watched Peter Greenaway movies (remember Michael Nyman and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra? Me neither). What they wanted was not a soundtrack to their lives—they were too self-centred for that—but rather background music to accompany their conspicuous consumption, and the Cocteaus suited that requirement nicely. I'll own up that back then even I went through periodic fugues of pretentiousness: I bought Courtney Pine's first album (oh, the shame of it: no, that wasn't the title) and even went to see him at Manchester's International Club. Two and half hours STANDING STILL, listening to improvised jazz while squashed up against the beret-wearing Bourdeaux-swilling classes: I swear, that's the nearest I've come to hell on earth.
Pierre Bourdieu wrote beautifully and astutely on the role that musical taste plays as a means of social demarcation and delineation, and he had enough sense to realize that aesthetic merit has nothing to do with the adoption by particular class fractions of a musical genre. So what put me off the Cocteaus was not their music but their clientele, and it's only now that I've got over my inverted snobbery and am prepared to concede that it's okay to like them.
But if you liked them before I did, shame on you.
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7 comments:
Guess I am in shame then...
:)
Heaven or Las Vegas is one of THE best albums of the last twenty years.
Better a sinner repenteth and all that jazz ;-)
I DID have Iceblink Luck on a compilation and loved it but I was determind not to buy an album until the last wine bar closed.
We throw all shame back at you, John.I saw the Cocteau Twins at Glasgow Barrowlands nearly 20 years ago and, as far as I could make out, the crowd were pretty much the norm for any gig in town - and not a beret-wearing jazz lover in sight!
Did I miss something? The wine bars have all closed?!? What will happen now to all those bottles of chardonnay and spritzers?
BTW do compilations ever count in demonstrating knowledge / interest in a band or singer? And am I more or less redeemed by the fact that my knowledge of the Cocteaus came mostly through "home-taping-is-killing-music" (now known under the all-new-brand of "downloading will cause the next terrorist attack")?
The question is Reidski, did you go an see them again after that one aberration? After all, I saw Courney Pine ONCE.
And I can't believe that the audience would have been so daft as to dare to wear berets in Glasgow 20 years ago. They might have LOOKED normal, but did you get to see them dance? Like Alexei Sayle once said, there are two things working class people can do that posh people can't: They can have proletarian revolutions, and they can dance.
Lisa, all the wine's being drunk furtively at home by office workers trying to pretend they like it and they're still on holiday.
Taping is okay but dangerous because you can end up liking a band that's strictly for beret wearers. If possible, see them on video before deciding, or, better yet, hang around the local record store and see who's rifling through their section. That way you avoid any major musical fashion disasters.
Seems like an apologies in order to Reidski. I was in a pub last night in Dublin 4 and, would you believe it, ther was a bloke wearing a beret! Some people have no sense of propriety!
Seems like beret wearing and the Cocteaus have no connection after all. They just like following me around.
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