Simon Raymonde had for years refused to write a memoir about his life in Cocteau Twins, the dreamy British post-punk group he’d been in with Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie from 1983 to 1997.
He’d never cared much for rock musician memoirs, finding most shallow and uninspired. And since Cocteau Twins ended, he’d been focused on his day-to-day life running the English record label Bella Union, which has released music by acts including Father John Misty, Patti Smith, Fleet Foxes and many more.
“I’m quite private,” Raymonde says on a recent video call from his home in Brighton, England, his white Pomeranian-husky mix Sunny sat on his lap. “I just think about today and tomorrow, and that’s about it.
“In the music business, you’ve got to keep moving forward; you can’t keep looking back,” he says. “I always had that attitude, like if I get a knock, something bad happens, don’t dwell on it. I just crack on, get up, dust yourself down and get on with life.”
But the interest kept coming back around. A few years ago, Raymonde finally said yes, even though it meant looking deeply into his past, the highs and the lows, something he’d never been keen to do.
“The nostalgic part of it, of course, is great,” Raymonde says. “And as you mentioned, I’d been running this label for the last 28 years, and that’s my life, really.
“I don’t walk around in a sort of Cocteau Twins haze and think about like, ‘Oh my gosh, what a life we lived.’ I just don’t do that.
“So now, because I’m writing this book, it becomes quite an emotional experience,” he says. “When the band broke up, OK, I have to get on with my life. And that’s sort of what I’ve been doing since whatever the date was in 1997 when Liz called.”
Cocteau Twins ended with that phone call from singer Elizabeth Fraser, he writes in “In One Ear: ‘The Cocteau Twins, Ivor and Me’,” because Fraser no longer could work with guitarist Guthrie, her longtime partner and father of her daughter, with whom she’d split several years earlier.
“Now I’m doing a book, I’m going back into the emotions of it all,” says Raymonde, who played bass and keyboards in the band. “Obviously, not as raw as the original experience, but certainly looking at yourself and what you did and the things that went horribly wrong and the things that went absolutely great.”
Documents and memorabilia he’d saved, such as the tour itineraries the band’s management created for outings in the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan and the United States, resurrected long-buried memories. Photographs borrowed from old friends and colleagues rekindled even more.
“What’s brilliant about memory is that when you sort of see it on the page,” Raymonde says. “And you see the names and dates and scribblings – ‘Must call Jim when I get to San Francisco,’ or whatever. All of a sudden, that door that has remained shut for whatever many years, decades, you’ve just popped it open a little bit. ‘Oh, (bleep), I do remember that.’
“All of a sudden, your toe is in the door and you kind of push it through and these other memories come out, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I remember when I did this and then I met that person,” he says. “It really is fascinating.”
“In One Ear” comes out Tuesday, Nov. 18. Raymonde will be in conversation and signing books at Book Soup in West Hollywood on Friday, Nov. 14.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, he talked about the book as a love letter to Cocteau Twins, how it changed how his feelings for his late father Ivor Raymonde, what he thinks about the possibility of a reunion, and more.
Q: How did you finally decide it was time to write this?
A: What am I, like 63 now? I’m sort of in that senior musician age, which is quite depressing on one hand, but on the other hand, I’m like, OK, I guess I have done things. But the more people would ask me – “You should do a book” – I would be like, “No, that’s not for me.”
And then I talked to Warren Ellis from the Dirty Three and Bad Seeds, who I worked with an awful long time. [Bella Union has released Dirty Three albums from 1998 to the present, and Ellis and Bad Seed Nick Cave were friends and neighbors in Brighton.] He moved to London recently, but when he was in Brighto,n we met up every time he was back to catch up.
He started telling me about his book, “Nina Simone’s Gum,” and it was such an amazing book. I enjoyed it so much and I kind of quizzed him about it. So I thought, “That’s quite inspiring,” and I thought maybe I should give that a go.”
Q: You write that you and your family kept emotions locked down for much of your life. How did it feel to open up here?
A: In addition to the book, Tim Burgess from the Charlatans did this thing called the Twitter Listening Parties during COVID. Sort of an album listening party for the world, and he asked me to quite a few Cocteau Twins ones. He said, ‘Make sure you listen to the record again because you might not have listened to it for a few years. Make some notes about each track and memories and all that.’
I found that a very emotional experience, because I hadn’t listened to the records at all since we broke up. It sort of opened the door to reexamining some of those relationships from that era. And just looking back at the band in a slightly different way, rather than being grumpy about the fact we broke up and we don’t have this beautiful band anymore.
It sort of enabled me to, I don’t know, fall in love with the band again in a way. Listen, when you write a book, you can go a million ways with it, right? You can just trash everybody you ever met and say this person was an absolutely (bleep). But that’s not really me, you know. I’m somebody that likes to look at the best in people, not the worst.
So I found myself writing very much of a love story to the band, love letters to the band, in my own weird way, I think. I actually found it surprising because I didn’t think that was what would happen.
Q: You write that the Cocteau Twins are more popular than ever. How do you understand the band’s enduring love?
A: I don’t know. It’s a funny one, because I think at the time, you know, we were sort of painted as being these weird mysterious ex-goths or whatever. Just floating around on clouds of gossamer. We were like, God, so not like that. We were just ordinary people that liked going to the pub and smoking weed, same as everyone else.
We couldn’t understand this image people had of us. But as the years wear on, you sort of accept it as a beautiful thing and an inexplicable thing in many ways.
Q: Cocteau Twins sound like no one else. How did the late-’70s punk and early ’80s post-punk scenes influence that?
A: Punk was a bright, super-exciting anarchic moment in time. Post-punk was less so. It was actually more thoughtful and considered, political and meaningful. I think much more meaningful than punk, in hindsight. We went through that, and the music we made and influences that we had at the time, it makes so much sense people are into that again now.
Whether it’s people just rediscovering Slowdive or Spiritualized or My Bloody Valentine or whoever it is, the core of that music is that it’s emotional and melancholic. I love music with melancholy because I’m just a generally melancholic kind of person. [He laughs] I don’t really like things that are too jolly just in general.
So I like to think it sort of suited our mood. It suited our time. And, you know, the biggest demographic for our music today is 15-to-25-year-old women. It’s a mystery, but it’s a beautiful mystery.
But that was always the end. To make something that would sound good 30 years hence, and we got it right once or twice. Certainly, with “Blue Bell Knoll” and “Heaven or Las Vegas,” I think we got it right pretty well.
Q: Your father, Ivor Raymonde, was, like you, a musician but a distant presence. Did the book change how you saw him?
A: That’s definitely true, and not just all the tapes of his life. [Raymonde had access to recordings his father made on which he recounted his life’s story.] Also listening back to the music he did, and that didn’t just start with the book. Having my own record label, I was able to be quite self-indulgent about shining a light on the work he did that hitherto would not have been showcased anywhere.
He was a virtuoso piano player who started off playing on the QE2, the Queen Mary, in the ’50s, going to New York from Southampton and playing in a jazz trio. He came back and started working in Soho, doing sessions and then arranging and orchestrating. [Ivor Raymonde’s work as a musician, arranger and songwriter included collaborations with such artists as Dusty Springfield, Scott Walker, Tom Jones, David Bowie, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads.]
I finished the book, and I was like, you know what, I’m so proud that he was my dad. I never told him that. I never really had a conversation with him about anything other than football and boxing, really.
But I think the book enabled me to have a much more rounded relationship with him, even though that sounds kind of stupid given that he’s been dead since 1990. It helped me kind of join the dots a little bit more and make some sense about my life as a musician in comparison to his.
Q: People would love to see and hear Cocteau Twins again. How do things stand between the three of you?
A: I hadn’t spoken to Robin in many, many, many years for a lot of reasons, not all of them good. That had definitely been gnawing away at me for a long time and probably him too. But recently, and it’s nothing to do with the book, we have sort of been back in touch and really pleasantly, thank God. We had some really deep, long conversations and got over whatever the hump was.
Elizabeth, I see fairly regularly, to be honest, and have a great relationship with her. She’s wonderful. She’s managed by one of my greatest friends who also works with John Grant [a longtime Bella Union artists, solo and with the Czars]. She’s off with Massive Attack most of the time.
As far as the band goes, there was a minute there back in I think it was 2006 where there were talks and we all got round the table with the views of doing something again. But that baggage … . Not really my issues, but when you remember they were a couple and they had a baby, and then it was painful for both of them for different reasons.
It was always going to be tough. I mean, the minute we’d got on tour, they would have had some row about something probably, and it might have ended and wasted all that time and money. So we just sort of abandoned it in 2006.
Q: And since then?
A: Obviously, we’ve been asked a lot of times, and promoters still offer us really incredible sums of money to come back and play a few shows here and there. But we’ve never had a conversation about it, the three of us. I’m not saying I wouldn’t, but I don’t think it’s really up to me.
Maybe time passes, and you think, “Hey, the music was great. We had a brilliant time making the music. So let’s just get over ourselves and go out and play some shows.” That is a perfectly legitimate reason for it potentially happening in the future. But human beings are quite weird, aren’t they?
I think we haven’t got to that point yet where we’re all like, “Oh, it was so great back then, wasn’t it? Let’s join hands and go play shows.” To be honest with you, I wouldn’t be averse to it because the music is awesome, and it would be really fun to do it again. But it would be no fun if there was some tension there or issues that haven’t been resolved.
You have all got to be 100% happy to be there for the right reasons, not just because you’re interested in the check that is going to come at the end of it all. Because that is really not a good reason to do anything.