Simon Raymonde is many things. Perhaps most famously, he was the bassist of legendary dream pop and shoegaze band Cocteau Twins. Ever since 1997 he has been one of founders and heads of the record label Bella Union. But most importantly to this interview, he is a writer, with his memoir In One Ear hitting the shelves in North America this month. Next week Simon will embark on a short book tour in support of his new publication, including a stop at Amoeba Records in San Francisco on November 11th. I talked to Simon about the book, the legacy of Cocteau Twins, and more.
Tyler King: First of all, I want to say thank you for agreeing to do this interview.
Simon Raymonde: My pleasure!
TK: How are you feeling about the upcoming book tour?
SR: I think I’m excited about it! The book is coming out in in America in a couple of weeks, but for for me it’s been out over a year already, and I had to wait for a year for it to come out previous to that. So it’s a very slow process. People talk about the music business and how slow it is to put records out. Well yes, but good lord, nowhere near as convoluted and slow as putting a book out. So, it’s not fresh. None of this stuff is fresh, but it’s certainly always interesting talking to people about the book.
TK: Why such a long wait time for the publication in North America?
SR: That’s just the way it is. It’s just how publishers are these days. You know, small publishers especially who maybe have three or four books each quarter that they’re focusing on. I think I’d finished the book in 2023 and then it was a full year and a half from when I kind of was pretty sure I’d finished it, and I thought it was going to come out the end of 2023 and then it didn’t come out till the end of 2024 and now the American version isn’t coming out until the end of 2025. Ultimately the book is still the same story. There’s no no great benefit to it coming out this day or that day. It’s been a long time coming and and I I’m certain that once I get on the plane I’ll be very excited to get there and and start seeing people and talking to people.
TK: You said that the book was finished at the end of 2023. When did you start on the book and what made you decide that now was the right time to write it?
SR: It’s probably taken me two or three years from the first scribblings um of when I sort of thought, ‘Could I do this? Should I do this? What is it? Am I am I capable of such thing?’ to actually finishing it. It definitely took a few years. But in terms of the concentrated writing period, probably the largest part of the book was done in about six months, but that that was literally me doing it every day, eight hours of writing. I tried to be disciplined in the way that I’m aware that writers have to be when they’re writing books. I did try doing it just sort of fitting it into my life but that’s just insane. If I had kept with that mode I would still be writing it now!
TK: There are specific dates and specific shows that you talk about in the book like Cocteau Twins playing the first 1996 Lollapalooza show, your first show in Japan, and others. Are those memories that you already fully had or were they memories that maybe you had to talk to some other people about because maybe you forgot a detail here or there?
SR: No, not really. I mean, I just think memory is a very, very fascinating thing. I honestly thought, ‘How am I going to remember any of this stuff? How am I going to remember my life because I’m so busy with this new life that I have and that old life that I had was 30 years to 40 years ago. How the hell am I going to remember it?’ But what I found with the book is, I obviously have physical artifacts, memorabilia from the tours and so on. So I would sit down one night and pull out all the magazines and issues of NME that I’ve got in a box and find a tour book. When you go on tour, basically the tour manager will create a tour book for everyone that has a front cover and a back cover and inside is each date you’re playing, what you’re going to be doing on this day, which press you’re going to be doing, basically just like a sort of travel itinerary for the tour. So I had all of those from from right back to the the mid-80s and that definitely opened the door to the memory.
TK: One of my favorite chapters in the book is UPS, when you meet David Sylvian. Did anything ever come of that meeting with him?
SR: I’ve never spoke to him since! [laughs] I’ve never met him since. Probably because he has no interest in doing so! It’s one of those weird things, when you actually do really admire somebody and then you meet them, it’s always quite weird.
TK: When I read about your encounter with uh John Lydon outside of the gig where he tells you to fuck off, my wife had a nearly identical encounter when she was about 13 or 14. She met Joan Jett and Joan Jett told her to fuck off, and so after that, my wife feels the same way. She does not want to meet her heroes.
SR: Luckily and thankfully I don’t have too many heroes. I mean, Nick Cave has always been somebody I like. He’s not really a “hero,” but I really do think he’s he’s put out some of the most incredible music over the last 40 years. I’ve liked all the stages of Nick Cave. Obviously, I work with Warren Ellis who’s in the Bad Seeds, so I had this kind of relatively close connection to Nick and the Bad Seeds going back many, many years.
TK: And your first band opened for The Birthday Party.
SR: Well, yes, exactly. But always because of my sort of obsession with them as a kid when I was getting into music for the first time. The Birthday Party were almost like these gods to us. I’ve never really got over that bit. So even now when I might meet Nick at an event or something and he might be totally cordial thinking, ‘Oh that’s that guy that works with Warren,’ just being completely normal, I still turn into that kind of 15, 16 year old kid that was a bit star-struck back then.
TK: You don’t particularly mention it in your book, but how long into being in the Cocteau Twins did you stop feeling like the “new guy,” or did that never leave?
SR: That’s a great question. I think it probably took a lot longer than it should have. And that’s probably my fault rather than anyone else’s. I think the fact that Robin and Liz were a couple, a very sort of close, intimate couple at the time I met them, and certainly for the first few years until things kind of went a bit pear-shaped. But I think when a complete stranger, who’s also not Scottish, enters this relationship where they are two people in love, you’re naturally going to think, ‘Yikes, I feel a bit like a spare part here.’ But then add to that that you are replacing somebody that was there previously and therefore there is going to be a comparison from some fans of the early part of the band who are maybe going to not feel that you’re very welcome. So being probably a bit sensitive or hyper-sensitive, I think that would be an accurate description of me. So, I think I probably did find it quite difficult and felt like the new boy for at least a good couple of years. And I think it wasn’t until we made the Blue Bell Knoll album, that’s probably when I felt, ‘Yeah, I am accepted now as a genuinely equal part of this band. And I didn’t feel like I needed to ask if I could play piano on this track or if it’s okay if I add a couple of guitars. I just did it and there was never a response of “What are you doing,” which there may well never have been, but I would have expected there to be that in in the early days of joining. So maybe it inhibited me in what I was able to achieve musically in the in the first part of the band. So that’s a great question and it may well be true that I was the new boy for longer than I should have been.
TK: The band released a handful of EPs, specifically in 1985 through 1986, and I would argue that Cocteau Twins is one of those rare bands where the singles and the EPs are just as important to the whole discography as the major albums. In your book you talk about the recording of Treasure, the recording of Blue Bell Knoll, and the recording of Heaven Or Las Vegas, but not so much the EPs. I’m curious, did the band have more of an attitude towards the EPs where you all thought they were a little bit more disposable than the albums?
SR: Oh, no, no, no, no, not not at all. I think they were they were incredibly important and possibly that’s a section of the book that might have just got edited out a little bit in the kind of in the final edits of the book. Why? Well, just because maybe it wasn’t as important as the albums are considered to be. I agree though that the EP period is super important in the grand scheme of things because I think if you look at Treasure right through to to to Blue Bell Knoll, give or take the Victorialand or The Moon And The Melodies albums, it is just mostly singles and EPs at that point. And I think there is a reason looking back on it now. I think there’s a good reason why, I think we were still settling on our sound and and experimenting. I think the EPs were our way of experimentation. You know, we need to work more together, we need to do more, we need to try this, we need to try that. And going in for just short bursts into other people’s studios was certainly fun. And we never didn’t enjoy the sessions. But I think we definitely knew the more we did with other people in other people’s studios that we had to get our own place and and make our own music to be able to be truly happy or at least have proper control over what we were doing. Because even though you are producing your own music in someone else’s studio, just the fact that you’re in someone else’s studio with another engineer or with other people popping in and popping out, it’s not the same as when you’ve got your own key in your own door and your own gear. And what you do in there behind closed doors is your business and no one else’s. And that does definitely change the dynamic of what happens inside the studio on the musical side. And I think you can sort of hear that.
And the way I look at it is, Treasure was just like three strangers in a room together making something very interesting and quite unique. Is it a brilliant record? Well, some will argue that it’s our best because that’ll be the record that they heard when they were 15, 16, 17 and that means the most to them for whatever emotional reasons or what they were going through at the time at school or with friends or boyfriends or girlfriends. And that’s how we all are at that age. So, I totally understand why different records will mean different things to different people, but for us, it felt like, “Okay, well, that’s a kind of weird-sounding record, and I don’t think it’s great, but it’s certainly interesting and suggests some things we can do or can’t do.” And then I think the next few years are just more of the same of us experimenting with sound, with pedals, with gear, with guitars, with keyboards, with whatever we’re experimenting with and just learning a bit more about each other’s attributes. Me as where’s my place in this whole weird thing, Robin probably thinking how much do I let this guy in? And Liz was always off doing Liz things. So I think it was just a case of of those periods being very experimental for us and really, really useful.
TK: My next question is kind of a multi-part question. It’s in regard to the chapter of the book where you talk about the “rules” that Cocteau Twins adhered to as far as the writing process went. The first question is that you specifically mentioned “Frou-Frou Foxes” as a song that began with you on the piano. I’m wondering first of all what other songs specifically came about from initial contributions that you had musically? And then the second part of the question is, since none of the songs were demoed before you all were in the studio, once the songs were done, did that present any difficulties in having to then relearn the songs for live setting?
SR: Um, well, yes, several parts to that question! Yeah, there’s there’s tons of songs that I would have started on on my own: “Rilkean Heart” or “Calfskin Smack,” there’s plenty. I can’t think of them just off top of my head because, as you say, we just sort of went in and did stuff together and who started it wasn’t necessarily who finished it. Maybe in the latter years I would go in and do my bits during the day and Robin would sort of do quite a lot of his things in the evening, just because of the way things had gotten fractured over the last few years. So that was just more circumstantial rather than musical choices. What was the second part of the question?
TK: The difficulty of then having to learn the songs live.
SR: Oh, yeah. I mean, every single time we toured, we would go and put the record back on and go, “How do I play that?” Because sometimes you’d be doing things in an open tuning or whatever, not even remembering to write down what the tuning was and then all of a sudden you’d have to sort of work it out from scratch again. But I mean once you spend 10 minutes on it, it sort of comes back. But given that you’re improvising on the day that you’re recording and writing and then maybe not rehearsing or thinking about the live show for maybe two or three years in the future, it’s really not that surprising. But yeah, we did literally have to listen back to the records to work out what it was that we were doing.
TK: I mentioned earlier that you write a lot in the book about the recording of the albums from Treasure through Heaven Or Las Vegas. But there’s not a lot in the book about the recording of the Four Calendar Cafe and Milk & Kisses albums. Um, And unfortunately as someone who is online and on Reddit or on Facebook or, there seems to be kind of this consensus of people who aren’t necessarily big Cocteau Twins fans that you guys recorded Heaven Or Las Vegas and then you did nothing after that. And I’m wondering, how do you feel now about the last couple of Cocteau Twins records? And what were those recording processes like?
SR: Well, for the most part, all Cocteau Twins recording sessions were hugely pleasurable. Some of them were difficult, but you can have pleasure and pain at the same time. And there definitely was a lot of that in the band! For sure Four Calendar Cafe was I would say the most difficult because of the events that were the backdrop to that record: Elizabeth and Robin breaking up, Robin coming back from rehab, and he had to work out whether he could still do it. And I think for a while he was like, “I’m not as good as a musician if I’m not off my edge.” You know, he really genuinely believed that for a little while. And we were like, “Mate, that’s just so not true. You’re just such a brilliant musician and the gift doesn’t go away because you’re not high.”
So definitely a difficult period and well, I mean I don’t know, we could talk about this forever, but obviously lyrically Four Calendar Cafe is for me one of the most important records in the canon because of the lyrics and how they change from what people might describe as lyrics that are unintelligible, which I don’t buy into that theory myself because a lot of them are actually perfectly straightforward English. But anyway, we don’t need to get into that now. But Four Calendar Cafe has Liz’s very honest, brutal kind of almost self-healing lyrics to sort of help her get over this trauma of, this is how I see it anyway, getting over the trauma of this breakup and and the issues that she was encountering during that time. And I think it’s a very brutal record in many ways. You know, it’s so honest and so revealing. I’m very surprised that people are a bit like, “Oh, yeah, it was that they were they were rubbish by then, they they were on a major label. Their stuff was pretty pretty pretty boring after that.” And I’m thinking, ‘Guys, well, maybe when we’re all dead and gone, you’ll listen back to that record and go, “Oh, fuck we were wrong!” The lyrics are actually incredibly insightful and revealing about the nature of of their relationship and what was going on in Elizabeth’s head at the time. That’s how I see it anyway. And I’m very surprised that more people don’t.
But I think by that point, when you hear a certain singer, you just think, ‘Oh, I don’t understand their lyrics.’ So I just think people just don’t listen closely enough to that record to be able to fully appreciate it. I mean, people can have their opinions about the music and say it isn’t as good as this or isn’t as good as that, and that’s perfectly fine. I can deal with all of that stuff, but I think from a lyrical perspective, Four Calendar Cafe for me is is right up there with the very best of our work.
TK: It’s been about 30-ish years since you released your solo record, Blame Someone Else. I know that you recently did a reissue of it through your label, Bella Union. I’m wondering, do you have another solo record in you?
SR: No, I don’t think so. My project Lost Horizons is kind of how I see my my solo stuff these days really. It’s me mostly and my friend Richie helping me on drums and with some other bits and pieces here and there. And we do love working together. And it takes the pressure away from me, and how I don’t want to sing. I don’t want to write lyrics. It’s not my forte. And I don’t even know why I did it at the time of my solo album. I think I was just kind of in a difficult place with all the stuff that was going on with the band and probably felt like I needed to do something to kind of sort myself out. And would I do it again? Well, you know, never say never, but I mean, I am 63 and I’m not sure what I’ve got to say right now lyrically that a million people can’t say a lot better than me. I do still play music a little bit. And maybe there’s some instrumental stuff coming. I don’t even know! I just don’t have the time to even think about it at the moment because I’ve been so busy with the label and the book and managing bands and all that sort of stuff. There’s no space in my brain for writing music right now.
TK: So no next Lost Horizons album?
SR: I have been asked this recently and I won’t say no because you just never really know, but my brain is too full of stuff right now that I need to deal with with management and the label. I don’t have the time to work on music like I did during the COVID lockdown because there was nothing else to do and that’s when I made that record. Like all of us, I suddenly found myself with an enormous amount of spare time and our lives changed dramatically as a result of it. You know, the way we the way we structured our day and I could literally… my studio is literally there in the garden and I could literally walk out the back door at 10:00 in the morning and and then go to bed at 3:00 a.m., because I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere else. So, I was able to make this record from nothing. So if we have another lockdown, maybe!
TK: As somebody who was in the band, why do you think it is that the music of Cocteau Twins still perseveres and still finds new fans every year?
SR: Well, apart from the obvious answer that there isn’t a better singer out there that connects with people on an emotional and spiritual level? You know, she is, I don’t like to use words like “the greatest,” but you know, she is one of the greatest singers ever and certainly is an incredible, incredible vocalist, not just from the performance perspective, but from the place that she goes to to write her music and to improvise this stuff that she does. She goes to a place that most people don’t want to go to or can’t go to. She accesses deep down and of course that’s why people love her so deeply in the same way they do Kate Bush, because I think it’s just so otherworldly. They’re like, “Where, how, what is that voice and the harmonies and the melodies and the counter melodies?” It’s so inventive and it’s so original. I think that’s a huge part of why people will always pay attention. The music is one thing, but what she’s up to is extraordinary and will be extraordinary whether you listen to it back in the day or 50 years hence. You know, it’s just that’s how it is. That’s just the fact.
But I think right now because the resurgence in our music or the renewed interest in our music due to whatever TikTok or whatever it is these days that drives people on, I think it’s because the demographic of people that are into our music right now is 15 to 25 year old women. That’s a fact. And I think why is that? Well, is it really that surprising? We live in a very confusing world where you’re being sort of force-fed lots of things. The doom scrolling, the cameras, the phones, everything’s just so insane. But then you hear this music and you’re like, “Oh, that is so beautiful. It’s sad and I’m sad. It’s melancholic and I’m melancholic and it’s not ramming a message down my throat, but it is healing me. It’s making me feel better.” I don’t really know why because it’s not really happy, but it’s not really sad. It’s, you know, so there’s all these sort of conflicting things that I think just work in our favor right now to be the kind of perfect music to listen to when you’re feeling a bit down or just something to reflect how you’re feeling. A bit like a mirror into your soul. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons why Cocteau Twins is such a popular right now because, you know, because of sad girls. [laughs]
TK: That’ll be the title of the interview! [laughs] For the signing in San Francisco at Amoeba Records are you just signing the book? Can people bring records to sign?
SR: Oh, yeah. You can bring whatever you want. Tamaryn is going to interview me and then we’ll do a Q&A sort of thing. I mean, you never really know how these things are going to going to pan out, but generally, talk about the book, do a little Q&A at the end, and sign some records and people can bring up whatever they want. It’s on November 11th so I’ll be around for a couple days in San Francisco, so there may be another event that gets added. I’m not totally sure, but I don’t have to rush up anywhere. Quite a few of the events I do I have to rush off to catch a flight to the next place, but for San Francisco I have a couple of days free after. So, yeah, I’m open to anything, my friend. Don’t feel shy. Come up. And I mean, maybe don’t bring like 50 records. What will happen is that you’ll be at the front of the queue and then there’ll be, you know, a load of people behind you getting very frustrated, very mad that I’m signing all of your records and they just have one book!
Simon Raymonde will be making an appearance at Amoeba Records in San Francisco to discuss his new book In One Ear on November 11th. Information on the event can be found Tickets for Substance Fest can be purchased here
