Kindred Spirits: Faye Wong and Cocteau Twins
Documenting the brief and unlikely creative crossover between a Chinese pop diva and a dysfunctional Scottish post-punk band.
This article was originally published on Luoo.net, a now-defunct Chinese music webzine, in 2016. Many thanks to Zhou Jingsi who commissioned and translated the original article.
They could not have been any more different, at least on paper. One was a Chinese pop diva, a megastar who dominated the Sinophone music world for over a decade. The other was a dysfunctional Scottish post-punk band, which enjoyed significant critical acclaim but only modest commercial success in the West. Yet in the mid-90s, while the former’s career was in the ascendant and the latter’s was unravelling, their creative visions would briefly align to produce a handful of incredible songs; the fruits of an uncanny alliance of musical kindred spirits from East and West.
Faye Wong should need little introduction to readers of this website [see note above]: a Beijing-born singer who moved to Hong King and found fame as a pop star, actress and celebrity in the 90s and 00s. Though now apparently retired from her recording career, she remains deeply revered, as the fervour around the release of a ‘lost’ album [1] earlier this year attests.
Cocteau Twins might need a little more introduction, remaining something of an enigma even in the West. Formed in Scotland, UK, in 1979, they had arrived at their own unique, ethereal take on post-punk by the mid-80s. The guitars of Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde sounded like lonely glaciers drifting through dark seas, while Liz Fraser’s otherworldly warblings flitted as free from any traditional sense of melody as they did from language, with lyrics employing a vernacular entirely of her own. While the genesis of their sound can be traced to the early works of peers such as Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Cure, their own ‘beautiful noise’ would be foundational to a subsequent generation of Shoegaze bands in the early 90s [2]. By 1997, after 8 albums and numerous E.Ps, the band was brought to a halt by drug problems and the collapse of a romantic relationship between Guthrie and Fraser.
So where and how did this peculiar pairing begin? Perhaps surprisingly, it was initiated by Wong, who began asserting creative independence over her pop career with the 1994 E.P《胡思亂想》(Random Thoughts), recording cover versions of two Cocteaus’ songs, ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Know Who You Are At Every Age’ [3]. The band themselves later admitted they had not heard of Wong at the time, unaware of her cover versions until after their release. As Raymonde notes:
“We heard that a big Asian rock star had covered some songs of ours, then when we heard them we were actually quite impressed. Usually, the Cocteau’s covers bands don’t quite get it, so it was a nice surprise, and instrumentally they even sounded like they had worked hard to get it right” [4]
Following this, the Cocteaus reached out to Wong by writing two songs for her 1996 album《浮躁》(Anxiety): 《分裂》(Fracture) and 《掃興》(Spoilsport). It is here that the similarities between the two entities are perfectly demonstrated, with both songs fittingly seamlessly into Wong’s own oeuvre while remaining recognisably Cocteaus’ creations [5]. The album itself was the result of Wong’s ongoing attempt to assert control over the musical direction, and indeed the influence of Western alternative rock and indie pervades the whole album beyond the two Cocteau related tracks. Wong’s use of made-up words throughout the album also appears to have been influenced by Fraser’s own playful use of language in the Cocteaus’ songs.
Wong would return the favour that same year by recording vocals for the track ‘Serpentskirt’, on the Cocteaus’ ‘Milk & Kisses’ album. This remains the only track to feature both band and singer on the same recording, resulting in a stunning vocal duet between Fraser and Wong over Guthrie and Raymonde’s brooding backing track. Sadly, this version of the song was limited to the Asian CD release of the album, which, while no doubt aiding Cocteaus’ profile in Asia, meant Wong would remain unknown to the typical Western indie fan.
And so these seven songs were the only fruit of this uncanny alliance. The singer and band did not meet each other in person or communicate directly throughout this period, with much of it facilitated by Wong’s producer Alvin Leong. Raymonde stated that he and Guthrie had considered moving to China to join Wong’s backing band after the Cocteaus split up, though this never occurred, perhaps due in part to the circumstances of their own bands’ demise. Wong’s own recording career would go on to follow many stylistic twists and turns, and while many of her subsequent songs would echo the influence of Cocteau Twins, there would be no further direct references to the band [6].
So why document this, beyond the curiosity value of such an unexpected team-up? Well, it reminds us that music is more than just a cultural product. We live in an age where the qualities we ascribe to music are determined by a cycle of production and consumption. That is, when we hear a piece of music, we think of it in terms of having been produced in a specific location: for example, East or West. We think of it in terms of being produced within the boundaries of specific, pre-existing genres: for example ‘pop’ or ‘indie’. How we subsequently respond to this piece of music depends on the way we let our tastes define who we are: for example, as the mainstream consumer partaking in the broader social milieu, or the clued-up, alternative consumer, wanting to be seen as being detached from the status quo.
The Faye Wong and Cocteau Twins collaborations take all of these dichotomies — East/West, Pop/Indie, Mainstream/Alternative — and implode them. Sure, collaborations between Eastern and Western musicians are nothing new, but for the most part, wherever such hybrids exist, this mixing of Eastern and Western characteristics is overemphasised. Faye Wong and Cocteau Twins each create ethereal, melodic music that transcends both orient and occident in their otherworldliness. Genre distinctions are exhausted; is it a pop song if Faye Wong sings it, but an indie rock track if recorded by Cocteau Twins? Such a question becomes irrelevant here.
Much of this is, of course, down to the idiosyncrasies of the artists themselves; Faye Wong, the creatively independent mainstream star, and Cocteau Twins, the alternative band searching for perfect pop harmonies. But faced with their uncanny sonic similarities, we are left to consider music in its purest form: as sound, mood, timbre, tone and rhythm, with infinite plasticity that can find its likeness anywhere. While it is a shame that they did not collaborate more than they did — one can only imagine what a whole Cocteau Twins-penned Faye Wong album would have been like — this handful of songs reminds us of the power of music to transcend mundane categorisation.
[1]《敷衍》(Be Perfunctory)，actually a repackaging of two late 90s Cantonese language E.Ps.
[2] The phrase ‘Beautiful Noise’ borrowed from the title of Eric Green’s highly recommended 2014 documentary about Shoegaze.
[3] Renamed《胡思亂想》(Random Thoughts) and《知己知彼》 (Know Oneself and Each Other) respectively.
[4] Simon Raymonde interview January 2003 by Bruce Stringer, retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20050207215856/http://www.lajabor.com/article/simon.html
[5] Cocteau Twins would later record these songs themselves as ‘Tranquil Eye’ and ‘Touch Upon Touch’.
[6] Although the “OohLalalalala”s on Wong’s 1998 song《小聪明》(A Little Clever) bear an uncanny resemblance to those on Cocteaus’ ‘Calfskin Smack’.
