Cocteau Twins: Carolyn's Fingers

               

     You susurr, try to talk...


     I went into my glorious little Cocteau Twins K-hole for a day there...literally fell down the rabbit hole....and have listened to Blue Bell Knoll (the album) about sixty or seventy times. These dense guitars quilting space will always do it for me. Robin politely attributes this density to lack of competence on the instrument, a type of "covering," but who cares. It's there. Listening carefully, I realize the connection with early Simple Minds (whom I also love---early stuff---even to the point of driving hundreds of miles to get new imports when I was a teenager; this is before the internet and ebay and such, Little Ones. Imagine!) is very strong in terms of guitar work.

     Cocteau Twins took their name from the lyrics of an early Simple Minds song (they're both Scottish btw) which sort of vanished. I think the song was renamed and then it vanished. Maybe the part of the lyrics or the title that had the "Cocteau Twins" in it got excised? But Simple Minds used to perform it live, and that's where Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth heard it and adopted it. The "Cocteau Twins" were two gay men in the song's lyrics actually. I guess they went to all the Cocteau flicks together, the two gay men, and were briefly immortalized (oxymoronic?) in one of Jim Kerr's songs, which was later ditched or something. There were never twins and rarely two in the CT lineup, but the moniker continues to throw people to this day.

     Here are "the" lyrics for the sublime Carolyn's Fingers (released September 19, 1988). You Tube this video for a treat. Liz is heavy in the video (preggers with Lily or Lucy?...she HAD to have named those daughters after the section in Four Saints in Three Acts! Never got confirmation but i'd wager) but beautiful, and her eyes are so hyaline & otherwordly...it's not to be missed....

    These are not definitive lyrics...no Cocteaus Twins song has "definitive" lyrics, since glossalalia plays such a big part, and Liz always admitted she changed things constantly to please the moment when singing these songs live. In this song, the inability of the vocables to form "real words" is perfect concinnity, since the scattershot and spluttered words are sung by someone absolutely destroyed, singing to herself in a place beyond reason. It's like trying to make a crying child make sense. Something like this comes out. It's almost English, but English of the shattered heart. Vocables. Words heard through blood and bone all distorted, mouthed by some imitative animal that doesn't really possess reason...in other words, the heart. But these lyrics, which I cut and pasted after a Google search, are very close to the album version. This backwards-skipping somewhat Elizabethan song is the ultimate breakup song. It definitely has a stellar scintillating crushed and dumped vibe. Sometimes I think Liz channels the spirits of people who have been dead for five hundred years or so and just starts singing their thoughts. Many of the songs have that centuried feel.

    One part of lyrics i'm sure they missed here is my favorite part to sing....it's a much lower range: "You're only closer to me at the fall...but you broke..." (bro-hoke...sung like a spondee.) I LOVES HER MELISMA!!




     CAROLYN'S FINGERS


When he said, 'You are full of love'
She fell down into this dirty mess(??)
Some people see me laugh and tell us,
'It's wrong to make fun of me'

Even they don't give any more
Try, try to fall
She fell down into this mess
Even then they don't give
Try, try to fall
She fell down and he's so sick of it all
And of me

This part not out of her saw fit to drop
Whispers might prove it all
You're just closer to me when you fall, but you broke
This would prove it all
You just closer to me, but you broke
This would prove it all
Sleep now
You susurr, try to talk
Reach out for that hand

Reach out for that hand
And even they don't give any more
Try, try to fall
Even then they don't give
Try, try to fall
You just closer to me at the fall
But you don't want, want my hand
You're just closer to me
But you don't want, want my hand