Music Arcades: Cocteau Twins: Head Over Heels

25th August 1983, we're back in the holiday flat in Milford-on-Sea (the same one where I first heard Back in Black), and I decide to try listening to John Peel again. Everyone says he's the greatest DJ on radio, and I've tried listening to him before — the first time must have been 1979 because I remember him featuring lots of tracks from the just-released second Siouxsie album. I'm 18 now, FFS, and not being being a regular Peel listener is a source of embarrassment almost on a par with still being a virgin.

Anyway, it all changed that night. No, not the virginity, the Peel habit. And I know the exact date not because it's etched on my heart, or because I wrote about it in a teenage journal (that was also still to come), but because the Peel website records the date of first transmission of Trixie's Big Red Motorbike's second session. Trixie's Big Red Motorbike did it for me. If Peel were to play just a little bit of music like this — and TBRM were what I guess we'd now have to call twee pop, C86 music three years ahead of '86 — I would be willing to stay tuned through all the other stuff that seemed unlistenable at the time.

TBRM were (I'm fairly sure) from the pop mecca of Ventnor, though they don't currently get a mention on Ventnor's Wikipedia page. For decades they never got a mention anywhere that I saw, even on the interwebs. Despite that I can still hear the tune to the chorus, "One nation under a brolly / My heart [?] is soaking wet," in my head. And in time, everything gets mentioned on the interwebs, so I'm pleased to see this short history and even a MySpace page.

I guess any time was a good time to become a regular Peel listener, but the second half of 1983 did seem particularly rich. The Festive 50 for that year gives something of a feel for it, but doesn't give a sense of the hinterland of the likes of Microdisney, some raggedy upstarts called Pogue Mahone, Ivor Cutler, seemingly nightly tracks from Clear Spot, and maybe a bit of Martin Carthy. It took me a few years to embrace New Order and The Fall, but only a couple of months to fall for The Smiths. To begin with, I liked the idea of The Cocteau Twins possibly more than the songs. But John Peel was so uncontainably enthusiastic about Head Over Heels — I think he played half the album one day and the other half the next — that it would have seemed churlish not to get it.

At the time, the "hits" were Sugar Hiccup, Musette and Drums and maybe Tinderbox (Of a Heart). Now those songs sound like the more traditional and straightforward end of their spectrum. In fact, if you strip away the trademark guitar-and-drum-machine sound of early Cocteaus from Multifoiled, it could almost be a Fun Boy Three song. Listening on the headphones in the morning (the Boy was having a lie-in, after keeping us up through the night), it was the first song, When Mama was Moth, that hit me as extraordinary in its sound and radical in its construction.