Drugs, whippets and a doomed love affair, my life with Scots cult band

Raymonde was still a teenager when he first met Associates singer Mackenzie. The band was signed to Situation 2 at the time and the label’s office was upstairs from the record shop in which Raymonde worked. So, Mackenzie would pop in from time to time.

Years later Raymonde was asked to produce Mackenzie’s posthumous album Beyond the Sun which means, I point out to him, that he got to work with the two greatest Scottish singers of the last half-century. Mackenzie (after the fact, sadly) and the Cocteaus’ Elizabeth Fraser.

“You’re absolutely spot on. I still rate Billy as one of the greatest singers of all time, maybe up there with Scott Walker and Liz Fraser.”

Simon Raymonde with Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie in 1991 (Image: free)

It’s late afternoon at the end of August. Raymonde is at home in Saltdean, near Brighton, talking about life, music and his new memoir In One Ear.

These days Raymonde can usually be found running the Bella Union label. But for most of the next hour he is remembering his younger years. The record shop employee who met Robin Guthrie and Liz Fraser when they left a cassette tape off in the record shop and then had his life transformed when they asked him to join their band. (They were fans of Raymonde’s own band The Drowning Craze.) Raymonde joined Cocteau Twins late in 1983 and would remain with Guthrie and Fraser until the band broke up in 1997 playing bass and keyboards. As such, he was a key component in one of the most beloved and influential acts of the era. Even Prince was a big fan.

But back in 1983 how easy was it to find his place? Guthrie and Fraser were a couple at the time, after all.

“Well, I didn’t really think about it if I’m honest,” Raymonde admits.

“I just figured they asked me to join for a reason. You don’t ask a complete stranger to come and join the band if you think it’s going to be a total nightmare. So they must have thought it was a good thing to do.

“And I like to think that it was,” he adds, laughing.

Guthrie and Fraser had come from Grangemouth to become alternative music’s first couple. Fraser, Raymonde recalls, was extremely shy and yet very funny back then. Guthrie was supremely confident.

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“Was it just Scottish bravado? I don’t know, but he was very good at it and he made me feel welcome.”

Raymonde’s input was first heard on the Treasure album. “We never really had a conversation about, ‘Hey, what are we going to do with this record? What direction shall we go in? What will it sound like? What instruments shall we use? What mood?’ We never did that.”

Guthrie and Raymonde would just go into the studio and see what happened. “The only way to do that successfully is to let go of all inhibitions and fears. It takes a leap of faith really.

“And somehow it worked.”

It helped, of course, that they had such an incredible vocalist singing over the music. What was it like the first time you heard Fraser sing in the studio, Simon?

“Like nothing on Earth. It’s hard to explain because there are only a few people that will ever get to experience that in the way that I have. The hairs on your skin stand up when you hear Liz Fraser sing on record. But when you hear her sing in the same room … It’s quite a profound experience.”

The story of Cocteau Twins is both beautiful and brutal. The music was immersive and glorious but drugs and dysfunction were also part of the story.

Raymonde is quite circumspect about his fellow band members in his memoir. “I hate books that are bitchy,” he says simply. But he can’t avoid the fact that Guthrie’s drug problems increasingly had an impact on both Guthrie’s relationship with Fraser and his relationship with the band.

“You can’t sugarcoat these things,” Raymonde suggests. “The problems are the problems. I can only talk from my perspective. I had never been around someone with such a hardcore addiction before.

Billy Mackenzie (Image: free)

“I think you are all stumbling through, wondering if the thing that you just did is helping or hindering. The enabling of an addiction is a complex thing; the co-dependency part of it. It was a big journey of discovery and self-exploration.”

Guthrie and Fraser’s relationship didn’t survive the experience. Surprisingly the band did.

There would be another couple of albums, 1993’s Four Calendar Cafe and 1996’s Milk and Kisses before Fraser finally called it a day.

Post-Cocteaus, the band’s relationships are, shall we say, mixed? Raymonde feels Guthrie is intent on writing him out of the Cocteaus story. “It’s almost like I wasn’t there,” he says now.

“We haven't spoken about it and I haven't talked to him in a stupidly long time. So I’m just going by the articles I’ve read and the things I hear from friends.

“I don’t stay awake worrying about it, but it’s sad.

“Everybody knows Robin’s vision for the band is the reason that it sounded like it did. I’m very clear in the book, I hope, that I admire his vision and his talents immeasurably.

“I’m not trying to take any credit for anything other than being there and being a significant part of it.”

Does Raymonde still speak to Fraser?

“Yeah, I do speak to Liz. We’re absolutely fine. She’s a wonderful person.

“I still feel it’s probably difficult for Elizabeth to dip her toe back in any Cocteau Twins stuff. I certainly don’t imagine we’ll ever get the chance to make any music again together. But I do love her a lot and I feel there’s a mutual respect there.”

Japan 1985, Simon and tour manager Ray (Image: free)

There’s much more to Raymonde’s memoir than just the Cocteaus, of course. It also provides an opportunity for him to restate the case for his father’s musical output too.

Son and father didn’t have a close relationship, outwith their shared love of Tottenham Hotspur. As such, it was only after Ivor’s death that Raymonde began to realise the true extent of his father’s musical achievements as a songwriter and arranger.

“My knowledge of his work was quite limited to the stuff everybody knows; the Dusty Springfield stuff, the Walker Brothers stuff.” (Raymonde senior co-wrote Springfield’s solo debut, I Only Want to Be With You and arranged the latter’s Make It Easy On Yourself.) It was only when Raymonde reached his late forties that he really began to explore his father’s back catalogue and realise just how prolific Ivor had been, including working with a young David Bowie and the likes of Cat Stevens among many others.

Raymonde ended up putting two albums of his father’s music out. That’s the advantage of running your own label. Over the years Bella Union has helped nurture the career of bands such as Fleet Foxes, John Grant and Father John Misty.

But it has been a rollercoaster ride. A cash crisis nearly brought it all crashing down in the late noughties. Maybe it would have if Raymonde hadn’t been so stubborn.

“We were owed huge amounts of money by companies that went bust. If it had been my own idiocy that had led us to that situation I would just have gone, ‘Do you know what? I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.’ “But I always felt like I kind of did know what I was doing, certainly in terms of picking bands. I’m confident in my own taste. The catastrophes merely emboldened me, if you like.”

That said, the landscape has changed so much since Bella Union began in the 1990s. How difficult is it making a living from music now?

“It’s incredibly difficult. That is the truth of it. Maybe less so for me. I’m not over, I’m not done, but I’m 62. I feel like I have contributed.

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“But if I was a young musician now starting out I would look at this industry and I would just think it literally makes no sense at all being in a band.

“But the thing is it never did. You’re not doing it for sensible reasons. You’re doing it because you have to do it, because it excites you, because it gives you the thrill that working behind the counter a Tesco doesn’t - not that there is anything wrong with that.”

It’s worth noting that Raymonde has achieved all he has in spite of living with a brain tumour. It was discovered after he lost his hearing in one ear near the start of the century (hence his book’s title).

He has never talked about the tumour or the loss of hearing before. “Obviously losing your hearing isn’t great, especially for a musician and somebody who is trying to make a living as an A&R man.”

But Raymonde feels he now needs to be open about it. “It is important to show that you can quite easily overcome these things.

“It's certainly a big part of who I am, I suppose. I definitely feel like I’ve got a bit of a superpower as far as that goes.

“Yes, I have this big egg in my head, but I haven’t let it take me down. Quite the contrary. I think it has emboldened me to live fully as much as I can.”

In One Ear by Simon Raymonde is published by Nine Eight Books, £22