Heaven or Las Vegas by The Cocteau Twins was a landmark achievement

“For me”, Lennox said, "Liz Fraser of The Cocteau Twins has a magical quality. When I heard the Cocteaus, it made me stand still and stop what I was doing. I went off into the middle distance somewhere, and I felt like I wanted to cry. It just makes me want to cry when I hear it. It's very strange.

“And I was very grateful”, she added, “because I thought someone is making music that is completely... I'm sure you could analyse it and say it's derivative of all sorts of things, and I can hear comparative elements in it, but nevertheless they come from somewhere else, for me”.

That interview with Q magazine was published in February 1987, when the Cocteaus had already released four albums - Garlands (1982), Head Over Heels (1983), Treasure (1984) and Victorialand (1986) - and eight EPs, all for the 4AD independent label. The band’s sound had evolved from its post-punk origins into something more seductive and otherworldly ("ethereal" was  much-used word), the trio becoming, with New Order and The Smiths, one of the most influential acts on Britain’s indie music scene.

Annie Lennox

Ahead lay albums such as Blue Bell Knoll (1988), Heaven or Las Vegas (1990, the record which many came to regard as their finest hour), Four-Calendar Café (1993) and the final one, Milk & Kisses (1996). As the music author and journalist Barney Hoskyns once observed, the Cocteaus’ best work, “on albums like Blue Bell Knoll, Heaven or Las Vegas and Four-Calendar Cafe, came from the blend of [Robin] Guthrie’s spacey, dreamlike sound, Fraser’s unearthly webs of vocal harmony, and [Simon] Raymonde’s yearning melodic feel”.

The Cocteau Twins - initially, Guthrie, Fraser and Will Heggie - were put together in the port town of Grangemouth, a place strikingly dominated by huge oil refineries and chemical plants. “The sets of Bladerunner have existed there for years”, novelist Alan Warner, a long-term fan of the band, observed in his liner notes to Stars and Topsoil, a Cocteaus compilation CD issued in 2000.

Robin Guthrie had been DJ-ing at a club, The Nash, run by his brother Brian at Grangemouth’s International Hotel; Elizabeth and her elder sister used to attend the club. The band was formed by Guthrie and Heggie, the name coming from a song by the Glasgow band Johnny and the Self-Abusers, who would later become Simple Minds.

“[Liz] was a couple of years below me at school, but in any small provincial town you get a little scene of like-minded people, who meet on Saturdays in the record shop, hang around the chip shop, drink beer”, Guthrie told Mojo in 2006. “Grangemouth was like Gregory's Girl but with an oil complex. Liz was insanely shy but was always singing, so I wasn't really surprised when she asked to join in. But I was surprised when she started singing with the band. I thought she was great, but then I thought we were all great. We were very naïve and idealistic”.

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Brian Guthrie, interviewed in Grant McPhee’s book, Postcards from Scotland, recalls hearing “this ethereal, other-worldly sound - a female voice”; this was Fraser singing with Guthrie and Heggie. Fraser “had this amazing voice, singing God knows what, because there was not an intelligible lyric there, but just this wonderful voice which Robin, for his part, used as another instrument, I think”.

The trio, confident of their abilities, dropped off demo tapes with 4AD’s London office and with radio DJ John Peel. Guthrie and Fraser, by now a couple, were living in a flat next to East Stirlingshire FC’s ground in Falkirk. They didn’t have a phone, so they gave 4AD and Peel the number of a phone box at the end of the road. In the end, Peel and the label boss, Ivo Watts-Russell, duly impressed, both wrote back; 4AD released Garlands, and Peel invited them for the first of several sessions for his show. Heggie left after the album was completed; London-born Raymonde, his replacement, joined in time for the third album, Treasure.

Then as now, critics sought to describe the gorgeous soundscapes that Guthrie and Raymonde interwove with Fraser’s “virtuoso, wordless” vocals. One critic was so impressed by Treasure that he wrote that “Surely this band is the voice of God”. The band’s refusal to play the media game only added to their mystique.

In the end, the music was really whatever the listener made of it. As Guthrie told Barney Hoskyns in 2000: "What you got with the Cocteaus, was a canvas onto which you could superimpose all your feelings”. (Hoskyns, for his part, believed that the band “made some of the staggeringly lovely music that ever came out of the British Isles” and that Fraser “is now more or less universally acknowledged as one of the great singers of our time – of any time”.)

Heaven or Las Vegas remains a landmark achievement, thirty-four years after its release; a glorious, joyous dream-pop classic, emotionally engaging from the opening track, Cherry-coloured funk, onwards; an album on which everything - the band’s advanced studio techniques and musical expertise, and Fraser’s lyrics and her dynamic vocal range - fused to create an undisputed masterpiece.

“Heaven Or Las Vegas”, Martin Aston wrote in his review for Q magazine, “is their finest hour yet – 10 exquisite moments that make Kate Bush – their only possible comparison – sound as airborne as Motorhead”. He spoke for many critics and for countless fans.

Heaven Or Las Vegas (Image: 4AD)

In August 2020 Paste magazine unveiled its list of the 25 top dream-pop albums of one time. Treasure was at number 17; top of the list was Heaven or Las Vegas. “The title track is the album’s literal and figurative centerpiece (and perhaps dream pop’s all-time pinnacle)”, was the verdict of Paste’s Max Freedman. “Atop guitars that gleam like diamonds, pianos that drip like water and a hefty whisper of a drum shuffle, Frasier’s voice resounds so beautifully it’s literally stunning. At one point she sings (fully audibly!), “It must be why I’m thinking of Las Vegas,” but dream pop’s best album is entirely heaven”.

The Cocteaus made two further albums (both excellent) in Four-Calendar Cafe and Milk & Kisses before, alas, splitting up. They remain active, however. Guthrie’s many projects have included film scores, the Violet Indiana duo, albums with the late Minimalist composer Harold Budd, and solo works. His latest EP, Atlas, has just been released. Raymonde, who runs the Bella Union label, which all three Cocteaus co-founded in 1996, is publishing a memoir, In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor and Me in September 2024.

Fraser has kept a relatively low profile, though she and percussionist Damon Reece have released music as Sun’s Signature. Her voice has also, over the years, been heard on everything from a bewitching cover of the Tim Buckley classic, Song to the Siren, to the soundtrack of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. She has also been a guest singer with Massive Attack and with Buckley’s late son, Jeff.

Heaven or Las Vegas remains a starting-point for many fans new to the Cocteau Twins. Taken with the other albums and the EP, it illustrates perfectly what Mark Prendergast -  author of The Ambient Century a book about the evolution of sound in the electronic age - has observed. The trio, he wrote, came to signify the ineffable in sound, existing quite resolutely in a world of their own making.

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