The Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas
/First shimmering onto the scene in 1980s Scotland, the C-Twins pioneered the sound that soon swept the British Isles. Fellow Scotsmen The Jesus and Mary Chain next picked up the thread, followed by Irish noisemongers My Bloody Valentine, and from there the sound leaped across to the English mainland inspiring bands like Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Swervedriver and others.
But it was the Cocteau Twins who the laid the foundation.
And I have a strong personal theory about why this sound arose in Scotland.
Listen to the guitar solo beginning at 2:23.
What do you hear? I hear bagpipes.
The droning, distorted harmonics central to the shoegazing sound are a direct translation of the reedy, fuzzy harmonics of the bagpipe to the guitar. This is what happens when Scottish kids who grew up steeped in bagpipe music pick up guitars and smoke some weed, or maybe take some Ecstasy, and play the sound that emerges from the nostalgic, echoing vaults of their minds. It's their national sound, improved, electrified, and turned up loud as hell on the guitar.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it: Shoegazing music emerged in Scotland because it required ears marinated in a bagpipe drone to find this singular potential in the guitar. And once that sound was discovered, it exploded like a rocket, ricocheting around the British Isles and eventually crossing the pond to America, gradually blending with more traditional rock forms in proportion to its distance from the motherland.
On the Contradiction of Video
I'm hesitant to even show the official music videos for any of these bands. Because almost by definition, shoegazing music is not to be seen with the eyes, it's to be heard with the ears, and perhaps felt with the body. The gaze falls upon the shoes in order to tune out the other senses and focus the mind on the texture of the sound. So a music video for a shoegazing song is almost a contradiction. And yet it was required by the music industry, and the bands delivered, perhaps against their will and sometimes, almost certainly, against their better judgment.
So I struggle, in almost every case, with the choice to post the official, often embarrassing, music video, or simply post the audio track. My instinct always tells me to post the audio, with instructions to listen at full volume with eyes closed, or, if you must have them open, in a room full of candles. Ideally under the influence of an entheogen, with your fingertips on the skin of a loved one.
On the other hand, you deserve to see Liz Frasier at least once. To realize that there is a real human being, with ice-blue eyes no less, creating and delivering this portmanteau poetry is to be reminded that real human beings are capable of brave, reaching art.
Liz was by all accounts terribly shy, even reclusive, and one can only imagine the embarrassment she felt singing with a camera in her face, take after take. But she did it for us. God bless her.
Now that you've seen it, listen again with your eyes closed. And your fingertips, perhaps, on the skin of a loved one.