The final Cocteau Twins album, Milk & Kisses, is thirty years old today.
Many would argue it’s not their “best” record but it was the first album of theirs I heard and adored. It’s my favourite of theirs by a long way, and probably my favourite album of all time. It was also what first got me thinking about working with guitars.
When I first heard Milk & Kisses, in 1998, I was so out of touch with guitar music that I thought this was more or less a “normal” indie record. Blame the musical diet I’d grown up on in the 90s: Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel. Britpop passed me by; I liked ambience, keyboards, reverb. I hadn’t realised until I heard the Twins that all of that could be done with guitars.
And there was something about Elizabeth Fraser’s voice that made me keep coming back. Something that made me (as strange as this sounds) feel as though I recognised the kind of person she was; that there might be something in her background that chimed with my own.
Years later I began to wonder why so many of the women I felt an immediate kinship with in art, like Agnes Martin or Virginia Woolf, turned out to have lives marked by trauma, depression, and self-doubt, even if I hadn’t known that when I first discovered their work.
My years listening to world music had prepared me for Elizabeth Fraser; I was used to music in different languages. And of course, part of the point of the Cocteau Twins was that Fraser’s words hung just beyond meaning. Trying to decipher lyrics on albums like Victorialand or Blue Bell Knoll was a fool’s errand.
But on Milk & Kisses I liked that I could catch fragments of broken English within her elaborate puirt à beul. At the time I was studying English under the aegis of a powerful and inspiring teacher (another female idol), and living daily in the nuances of language, so the urge to decode her lyrics came naturally. I wanted to know what she felt, what she meant.
On this record Elizabeth seemed to be wrestling with the pain of receiving love in fragments, of giving more than she got, and of turning back to the quiet consolations of life.
I felt a lot of empathy for that. The landscape for queer people in the mid-1990s was very different from today, especially in rural places like where I grew up, and although I was yearning for love, my early relationships were far from satisfactory; I was the king (or queen) of unrequited love. Perhaps that’s why this record spoke so clearly to my situation at the time. I clung to the simple wisdom of her lyrics like talismans:
Well, I’m still a junkie for it
It takes me out of my aloneness
But this relationship cannot sustain itself.
And:
Intimacy’s when we’re in the same place at the same time
Dealing honestly with how we feel
And who we really are.
And:
I have my friends, my family
I have myself
I still have me.
I know every detail of this album so well that I probably don’t even need to play it anymore. But I think I’ll give it a spin this weekend. I would wholeheartedly recommend that you do the same, too. It's a beautiful piece.