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met his French wife, but it’s a convenient location, near enough to keep in touch with his past, far enough to keep out of reach.

      Fifteen minutes’ drive from Rennes city centre, the house where the Guthrie family (they have a daughter of eleven) live is elegantly aged and comfortably spacious. The vast attic doubles as home studio, office and storeroom for his solo career, which is predominantly about albums but also occasional touring. Posters, photographs and record sleeves, detailing triumphs from Cocteau Twins and solo eras, line the walls.

      These days, Guthrie sports a beard, the significance of which will become apparent. He once claimed to be ‘too fat to be a goth’, and given the cooking skills he displays over the weekend, he won’t be dieting any time soon. Cheerful and broody in equal measures, Guthrie keeps the conversation flowing, but the can of worms lies open, kicked around, its contents spilling out. The past still lives, heavy, bewildering and threatening, in his head, especially since he’s recently heard that Elizabeth Fraser, his Cocteau Twins partner, and his girlfriend for seventeen years (the couple have one daughter, born in 1989) was to play her first ever solo shows, a full fifteen years after Cocteau Twins had split. The problem wasn’t her belated return, but her plan to sing Cocteau Twins material, music that Guthrie had written and arranged, for which he says he will receive no credit during the expected adulation for the singer.

      Fraser, on her part, has admitted that she finds Cocteau Twins too difficult to talk about; since 2000, she has only discussed it twice, and passes up the opportunity to recall her side of the story for this book, a story stained by dysfunction, vulnerability, substance addiction, childhood trauma and astonishing music. ‘You take each other’s breath away by doing something or saying something they never saw coming,’ she told Guardian in 2009 when she released her first solo single ‘Moses’ (a tribute to her late friend Jake Drake-Brockman). ‘They were my life. And when you’re in something that deep, you have to remove yourself completely.’

      Guthrie’s memories are clearly torturous as well. Long after midnight on the first day of recollection, Guthrie disappears upstairs, returning five minutes later, beaming, with a box full of memorabilia, of cuttings, stickers, leaflets, tour laminates, letters. The next morning, Guthrie’s mood appears to make it more likely he’ll burn the box’s contents. ‘And then, I found that big bag of stuff,’ he wrote in an email a month after we’d met. ‘Goodness, some revelations were made which have left me feeling, if possible (!!), less comfortable with my past than even I could have imagined. My wtf? turned into a WTF? I feel like I’ve had surgery performed but the surgeon forgot to sew me back up.’

      Earlier in the afternoon, he’d sat down to recall his and Fraser’s first visit to Hogarth Road. ‘I don’t remember meeting Ivo, but we already knew 4AD because we’d collected their records. We were enthralled by The Birthday Party and also Dif Juz. I quite liked Bauhaus, Elizabeth more than me, though I loved “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, and Rema-Rema. We’d hear things on John Peel and read the music papers. I wasn’t into Cupol but I’d been a bit of a Wire fan. Burning Blue Soul was one of the best records of that decade, right out of the mould. But The Birthday Party was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. And Rowland Howard’s approach to guitar – I didn’t realise you could do that and still be taken seriously.’

      Equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh, on the banks of the Firth of Forth, ‘Grangemouth was a village around an oil rig,’ claims Ray Conroy, who was to become Cocteau Twins’ tour manager after first taking on Modern English through his brother Mick’s connection to 4AD. Guthrie and his schoolmate Will Heggie were among the town’s punk renegades, making stroppy, noisy protest in bands such as The Heat. ‘Punk to us didn’t mean your clothes, but doing what you want,’ says Guthrie. ‘Self-expression. A teenage cry for help.’

      Guthrie had worked as an apprentice for BP Oil, with a talent for electronics, which he put to good use by building effects pedals for his guitar. ‘The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty, and that shiny, dense Phil Spector sound. I was trying to make my guitar sound like I could play it, so I was influenced by guitarists who made beautiful noise, like The Pop Group, or Rowland S. Howard.’

      The new band couldn’t be complete until they’d found a singer. They vaguely knew a girl, Elizabeth Fraser, two years below them at school, who they’d see dancing at the Hotel International, a local club where Guthrie would sometimes DJ. His playlist included The Birthday Party and The Pop Group: ‘Most people weren’t happy with my choices, but Liz was, as she kept dancing,’ Guthrie smiles. ‘We struck up a bit of a friendship.’

      Colin Wallace, one year above Guthrie and Heggie at school, recalls Fraser as, ‘This little vision in fishnet tights, leather mini-skirt and shaved head, smoking cigarettes, playing truant until lunchtime. Shy and quiet too. She was ostracised at school, as a weirdo, but to me she was unbelievably brave.’

      Wallace recalls Guthrie saying, ‘If she’s that good a dancer, I bet she can sing. Robin asked her, and she said yes, but she wouldn’t even sing in front of Will. But I’d hear them rehearse, above some shops, and in the old derelict town hall, and she was astonishing.’

      Guthrie: ‘Liz was insanely shy but as her mum later told me, she always sang as a child. We just assumed that she’d be brilliant, like I thought we were all great. We were very naïve and idealistic then.’

      The name Cocteau Twins came via the Glasgow new wave band Simple Minds, who The Heat had once supported: ‘They had a song called “Cocteau Twins”, so we nicked it,’ says Guthrie. This wasn’t any reference to the fact that the band initially had a second vocalist: ‘Carol, a friend of Liz’s,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘But she only stayed two weeks. I forget why she didn’t last.’ There was also a drummer, John Murphy, though his request for travel expenses encouraged Guthrie to choose the cheaper and more manageable option of a drum machine. The band even broke up for a couple of months: ‘Liz and I probably fell out with Will, or he was busy elsewhere,’ Guthrie thinks. ‘But a friend asked us to support his band, so we re-formed.’

      Fraser’s memory, in an interview with Volume magazine, was that she’d got fed up: ‘I didn’t feel like [the band] was for me at all … I think it was more the lyrics that I didn’t have the faith in. But I started going out with Robin, so I came back into the band.’

      During rehearsals in the local community hall, Communist Party office and a squat the trio developed their nascent sound, and after just two shows, they recorded a demo of ‘Speak No Evil’, ‘Perhaps Some Other Aeon’, and ‘Objects D’Arts’ (Guthrie says Fraser purposely spelt it wrong). Fraser’s buried voice, Guthrie recalls, ‘wasn’t done on purpose, we just couldn’t record it any better. We only had one microphone and one cassette recorder, so we had to record the songs twice [Wallace says more than twice, as he has a copy too], once for a tape to give to Ivo, the other to John Peel when we met him [at The Birthday Party show]. We had no phone so I wrote down the number of the phone box down the road and “call between five and six” on the cassette box, and I’d wait outside every night for a call! There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they’d both ring.’

      Ivo initially sent the trio to Blackwing to record a single, where he was astonished to hear a voice rise out of the music’s shivery dynamic: a powerful, plaintive, hair-raising cry of a voice. Recording the new versions of ‘Speak No Evil’ and ‘Perhaps Some Other Aeon’ went so well that Ivo suggested Cocteau Twins record an album instead. The band readily agreed. ‘We got very handy at the night bus, up and down from Scotland, sixteen hours each way,’ says Guthrie. ‘No one would take us seriously in Scotland, or give us any shows, because we weren’t hipsters from Glasgow or Edinburgh, and we weren’t on Postcard Records.’

      The Glasgow-based independent Postcard had been started in 1980 by nineteen-year-old Alan Horne as a vehicle for the band Orange Juice, fronted by his friend Edwyn Collins, whose knowing and inspired marriage of The Velvet Underground with The Byrds initiated the Sixties revival that was eventually to redefine the British underground sound, from The Smiths to The Stone Roses. Adding Josef K, a cooler and droll version of monochromatic post-punk, and the exquisite folk-pop of Aztec Camera, Postcard operated with a lightness of touch and

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