Call me old-fashioned but on the whole I prefer songs with good lyrics that you can hear clearly. If the words are barely audible I wonder if the singer has confidence in their voice or really believes in what they are singing. Some bands put music together and add the words as an afterthought. The group might be full of musical talent but lacks a wordsmith with something to say. And some great musicians come up with cringeworthy lyrics. Listen to just about any Beach Boys’ album and you should see what I mean.

I first heard the Cocteau Twins in my last year at school. John Peel often played them and they even made an appearance on our school jukebox. With song titles like ‘Aikea-Guinea’, ‘Quisquose’ and ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ they seemed to be stretching the boundaries of the English language. The music was amazing. A real full-bodied sound created by a combination of chiming guitars and Liz Frazer’s incredible vocals. “Ethereal” was the word often used by the music press.

On YouTube someone has set Cocteau Twins music to images of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I can see where they are coming from. It’s like a sound from another world or another age. I also think the Cocteaus were a big influence on some excellent music that later came out of Iceland – Bjork and her Sugarcubes, and more recently Sigur Ros. This kind of abstract music goes well with images of erupting geysers and volcanoes.

But the Cocteau Twins music belies their origins. They came out of the Central Belt. Grangemouth to be exact. A town which is, how can I put it without offending the locals? The heart of industrial Scotland. It’s a sight more suited to the brushes of L.S. Lowry than William Morris. Driving from Edinburgh or Glasgow up to Stirling you cannot miss the glow of the petrochemical plant casting long shadows below the Ochil Hills. This might be William Wallace country but a distant view of Grangemouth is as far removed from the tartan and shortbread image of Scotland as it’s possible to get. How the hell can such beautiful, other-worldly music come out of a place like that? The Cocteaus should have been angry and disaffected social commentators.

A friend of mine, a photographer, once remarked that Grangemouth looked spectacular at night and he wanted to go and take pictures there. Maybe he has a point. I recall travelling through France on a bus and waking up to see the darkness broken by petrochemical factories on the outskirts of Lyon. The landscape was ablaze with beacons. It smelt like everyone on the bus had farted at the same time but the night was stoked up in a big way.

I only recently studied the words to this great song. They are quite poetic and intriguing. But without the lyrics in front of me, I feel like a medieval traveller, a novice of modern English struggling to pick out more than the odd word here and there.

Steve Porter is a Scottish author living in A Coruña, Spain. His articles, often on Spanish culture, travel and sport have appeared in publications such as The Sunday Herald, Travelmag, soccerspain.com and threemonkeysonline.com. His ebook entitled 'The Iberian Horseshoe' is available from Barcelona-based www.badosa.com. He runs several blogs including www.galidonia.blogspot.com and www.catadonia.co.uk. More details and links to writing can be found at www.myspace.com/stevenjporter.

© 2008 Laura Hird All rights reserved.