Treasure

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550, Giorgio Vasari describes the artist Fra Bartolomeo responding to criticism of his ability to represent the human body in his work, by first creating a model from wood, with limbs and joints, and then dressing it in clothing. This way he could have a subject which would stay perfectly still for as long as he needed to perfect his figures.

By the 17th century, use of such a device was common among artists, particularly in France, where initially they had been imported from nearby Flanders, and known as ‘mannequins,’ from the Flemish manneken or ‘little man.’ The French themselves were soon developing high quality, life-sized mannequins perfectionnés, covered with silk to mimic human flesh and with realistic features created from painted papier-mâché. An artist might use them for the basis of a portrait, for example, so an important patron need only briefly pose for the finished details. Before long, tailors were employing a similar tactic, reducing the need for their clients to be present during the lengthy process of constructing garments.

After the French Revolution, with standardised units of measurement and ready to wear clothing becoming more accessible to the working classes, a simplified mannequin took its place among the regular tools and equipment of a tailor’s workshop. What might now be referred to as a ‘dress form,’ a simple torso on a wooden stand where a garment could be held in place as it was assembled, or tested to ensure that the hang and the cut were as they should be. These were usually male figures for tailoring men’s clothing, but in the second half of the 19th century the emphasis shifted to womenswear, where tailor and entrepreneur Alexis Lavigne promoted his own ‘custom-made busts,’ encouraging wealthy women to use them to store and display their dresses at home. Under the influence of Lavigne, and later his daughter Alice Guerre-Lavigne, the dress form became a common tool for dressmaking in the home, and display mannequins were ubiquitous in the windows of Parisian shopping arcades, where the fashion-conscious bourgeoisie could parade in their finery without the risk of being rained on or a passing carriage splattering them with mud, as might happen on an open street.

Into the early 20th century, fashion and retail came to be perceived as the locus of the commodification and commercialisation of popular culture, with the values of mass-production physically embodied in the standardised mannequins of every window display. Female human models, also referred to as mannequins, similarly personified an idea of aspirational conformity. In Jean Rhys’s 1927 short story Mannequin, based on her own experience in Paris, the titular narrator interacts with a group of fellow models who have distinct individual personalities, but which are presented as archetypes, implying that every one of the many fashion houses has its own equivalent of each.

That same year, after briefly moving to Paris in 1926, Walter Benjamin began working on his Arcades Project, looking at the birth of consumer culture in 19th century Paris. The 19th century arcades were a new location for visual culture, where objects were presented as items to be valued for their visual qualities, as much as their practical purpose, and where a sense of modernity was emerging, with accompanying feelings of alienation. Often wandering among the audience for this visual culture would be the figure of the flâneur, who observes urban life from the perspective of an outsider and a connoisseur. The ultimate flâneur, capturing these scenes in his sketchbook, was ‘the Painter of Modern Life’ as Baudelaire called him, the artist and illustrator Constantin Guys.

In the 20th century, when Walter Benjamin became something of a flâneur himself, the department store had taken over as the centre of commercial retail. The objects in the arcades were now antiques and second-hand bric-a-brac, juxtaposed in random combinations which could be interpreted via Freud and the new fields of psychoanalysis and dream theory. A mannequin, and particularly a dress form, might be something of an empty signifier, open to interpretation as an aesthetic object, a human body with no fixed personhood, or an absence where the viewer projects their own fantasy. The mannequin could also be understood as a fetish, and the world of fashion as the ultimate site of commodity fetishism. By this time, the flâneur was carrying a camera rather than a sketchbook, following the example of Eugène Atget, who began documenting the streets of Paris in the 1880s but only gained acclaim after his death, also in 1927.

In his 1906 essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny,’ Ernst Jentsch detects the uncanny in the boundary between the normal and the pathological, and in 1919 Sigmund Freud expands on this in his own essay on the uncanny. The uncanny could be when something intended to remain secret comes into the open, when the space between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, when something presumed to be imaginary becomes real, or vice versa. For Freud this is an aesthetic investigation, and he emphasises its relationship to sight and to the eyes, relating a connection between a fear of being blinded and the castration complex.

There is a natural human tendency towards anthropomorphism, to ascribe human characteristics to non human entities, animals, plants, domestic appliances. We project human qualities onto inanimate objects, a pattern on a wall looks like a face, a shadow in the distance looks like someone hiding in wait. When this causes confusion, we might encounter the uncanny, particularly when a figure appears to be human and then is revealed not to be, like the example of Olimpia in E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story The Sandman, which Freud discusses in his essay. In the story, the character Nathaniel struggles to distinguish fantasy from reality, he falls in love with Olimpia having seen her from a distance and is subsequently driven to breaking point when he discovers that she is not a real woman but a wooden automaton. Freud specifically related the uncanny to a feeling of fear, but in the early 20th century a wider aesthetic investigation into the space between fantasy and reality, the known and the unknown, the conscious and the subconscious, was taken up in Paris under the influence of his ideas.

André Breton had studied medicine and developed an interest in psychoanalysis and Freud, while working with neurological patients during the first World War. He also wrote poetry and, moving to Paris after the war, he associated with the avant garde Dada movement there and helped launch a literary magazine, Littérature. Breaking with the Dadaists he then issued his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, using a term which had been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. But where Apollinaire had used ‘surrealism’ in a general way to refer to new forms of modernism that embraced technological progress, Breton initially defined it more narrowly, as the direct expression of interior thinking, unmediated by reason, morality or aesthetic concerns, which would be achieved by accessing the unconscious or subconscious mind through techniques like automatic writing, as well as channelling dreams and hypnagogic states. In his second manifesto, five years later, he shifted emphasis to the relationship between the interior workings of the mind and exterior reality, where it was important to not allow one to take precedence over the other but, instead, let them merge or come into conflict with each other. Breton’s approach could be understood as dialectical, where we might encounter an idea, a concept, or an image, in a way that contradicts how it is usually understood, but through combining or reconciling those contradictions we reach a new and more sophisticated understanding. The three stages are sometimes referred to as ‘thesis’ (the accepted meaning or definition), ‘antithesis’ (an opposing meaning or definition) and ‘synthesis’ (where a third meaning or definition emerges through combining elements of the first two). Defining something using language can often limit our understanding of it, but by creating a situation where that language becomes paradoxical or absurd, we open ourselves to new and expanded ways of finding meaning.

For example, in René Magritte’s the Treachery of Images, an image of a pipe has ‘this is not a pipe’ written underneath it. So in a simple way of making sense of it, the thesis is that what the viewer sees is a pipe, the antithesis is that what they see is not actually a pipe but a picture of one, and then the synthesis is that what they see both is and is not a pipe, because the viewer’s understanding of a pipe is now the idea of a pipe, and both the object and the image are ways of representing that idea. Before looking at Magritte’s work they might have thought the word ‘pipe’ was a device for communicating the existence of the object, but now the object is just one component of a wider concept.

More often though, Surrealism seemed to defer synthesis and embrace ambiguity. Where Freud might seek to interpret dream imagery and understand the origins of subconscious thought, the Surrealist appeared to avoid interpretation. Where the psychoanalyst might approach the irrational as a first step towards an underlying pathology, the Surrealist would incorporate the random, the spontaneous, the illogical and deny any intentionality or extrapolation. When Salvador Dalí was asked whether the soft watches in the Persistence of Memory were inspired by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, he deflected, instead comparing them to melting Camembert cheeses.

Meanwhile, in photography, new techniques like photomontage, double exposure, solarisation, and the photogram helped realise strange, impossible or dreamlike images, and photography was also used to bring out the alienation and strangeness of the everyday and mundane. Presenting a scene or an existing photograph without explanation or context could render the ordinary somehow extraordinary or uncanny. Man Ray used Eugène Atget’s photographs to this end, publishing his work in La Révolution Surréaliste, Walter Benjamin suggested he could even be considered a precursor of Surrealism in the way he captured empty streets and minor details, rather than famous landmarks and grand scenes, and Man Ray’s former assistant Berenice Abbott would continue to champion Atget after establishing herself as a photographer in her own right and returning to the United States.

Many of Atget’s images featured shop doorways and windows, their multiple reflections particularly appealing to Man Ray, and the most surreal and uncanny of these depicted window displays of mannequins. Like Magritte’s pipe, a mannequin is both a person and not a person and like Breton’s aesthetic ideal, they exist as a surrogate human somewhere between the subconscious mind and exterior reality.

In 1981, a new group of ‘painters of modern life’ were observed to have been capturing scenes of alienation from consumer culture. That year, Illustrators, the official journal of the British Association of Illustrators published a special issue edited by Robert Mason, in which he places himself among a group of artists with an aesthetically uncompromising approach, identified under the title of this one-off issue: Radical Illustrators. Almost a manifesto, the journal presents these ‘radical illustrators’ as rejecting the slick polish of commercial graphic design in favour of individual styles that were expressive, idiosyncratic and provocative. Looking back to the radical experimentation of Dada, Surrealism and agitprop, they variously combined drawing, collage, photomontage and other techniques in a rough and ready way, that often might incorporate into the final image the creases, torn edges and tape involved in its assembly. Contributor George Snow looks back at the way the underground press emerging in the 1960s had allowed creative expression among illustrators to flourish, as they took advantage of newly available technology like the IBM Composer, which made phototypesetting easily accessible, and combined with offset lithography enabled publications like Oz and International Times to compete with the heavy industry of newspaper printing presses. While Jake Tilson advocates for self-publishing in the wake of punk, with advice for accessible DIY methods and laying out the steps involved, with different options, available services, and potential stockists, plus a handy breakdown of the likely costs involved.

Most of the artists featured in Radical Illustrators had come through the illustration course at London’s Royal College of Art in the 1960s and 70s, where the common thread was a political attitude rather than any particular visual style. Despite their innovations they received little recognition, and where they found work it tended to be in areas with relative creative freedom, like book jackets and record sleeves, but many went into teaching where their biggest impact was the influence they had on subsequent generations of students. One of the least recognised of the radical illustrators, but among the most innovative and influential, was Terry Dowling. Born in North Wales, Dowling had studied at Manchester School of Art before going on to the RCA in 1969. After graduating, he struggled to find commercial work but soon got a job teaching printmaking at Liverpool College of Art, before moving to the graphic design department at Newcastle Polytechnic (now the University of Northumbria) a year later. Teaching allowed him to be uncompromising in his illustration work and insist on complete artistic autonomy in any commissions he took on, as well as providing him with the facilities to experiment. He was an early adopter of Xerox photocopiers, and incorporated elements of ceramics, collage, film and photography, in addition to traditional forms of printmaking. He embraced mistakes and accidents, blurred the boundaries between design and fine art, and encouraged his students to do the same. In the late 1970s, two students were absorbing this influence and would continue take inspiration from Dowling into their professional careers long after graduating, Nigel Grierson and Vaughan Oliver.

Grierson and Oliver had first met in the early 1970s at high school in Ferryhill, a small mining town near Durham in the north east of England, where they bonded over a shared love of music and football, and similar tastes in books and cinema. With the encouragement of their art teacher, they expanded their interest in progressive rock album sleeves, by designers such as Roger Dean and Hipgnosis, into a wider engagement with fine art. Inspired by surrealists like René Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, Oliver won a school prize for his work, wrote his A Level exam paper on Dalí, had his own exhibition while still a pupil and was featured in the local newspaper. Still inspired by record sleeves though, and thinking an applied arts degree would be more likely to get him a job, he enrolled in the graphic design course at Newcastle Polytechnic. Grierson, who was a year younger, did the same the following year. 

Once both were at Newcastle, they often worked collaboratively, studying under Terry Dowling who became a mentor to the two of them. With his encouragement they became more expressive in their work, and he introduced them to fellow radical illustrators like Russell Mills, Robert Mason and the Brothers Quay, who he invited to speak and present their work to his students. At one point Grierson got a work placement with Storm Thorgerson at Hipgnosis, while Oliver saw himself more as an illustrator than a designer, but they also increasingly worked with photography, influenced by the uncanny and subtly unsettling imagery of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Ralph Gibson, who also spoke at the college. After Grierson graduated in 1980, the two moved down to London, where Oliver got a job with the design studio Benchmark, and Grierson began a postgraduate degree in photography at the RCA. At Benchmark, Oliver worked within the constraints of packaging design for big name brands, but after a couple of months he was invited to take his portfolio to meet someone about a job that might be a bit more interesting.

In the late 1970s Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent were both working for the Beggars Banquet chain of record shops, which by this point had also expanded into a record label of the same name. Watts-Russell had ambitions to get more involved in releasing records himself, and he and Kent would often enthuse about demo tapes that were coming into their offices, to label owners Martin Mills and Nick Austin. After their early success with Gary Numan and Tubeway Army, Beggars Banquet were receiving more demos than they could handle, and at the beginning of 1980 they gave Kent and Watts-Russell some funding to create their own offshoot label, which they called Axis. Immediately after launching however, a record company in Germany informed them that they were already using the name Axis, so their first successful single, ‘Dark Entries’ by Bauhaus, was quickly repressed with the Beggars Banquet label and then, when those sold out, under Axis’s new name, 4AD.

Peter Kent was friends with Mark Robertson who also worked for Vaughan Oliver’s employers, Benchmark, and Robertson did some design work for the new label, including the first 4AD logo and the sleeve for their first single with early signings Modern English. When they contacted Benchmark to get Robertson to design the sleeve for the band’s next single ‘Gathering Dust,’ it turned out Robertson was on holiday and Oliver was sent along in his place. They liked his portfolio, he liked the band’s music, and they went with his design for the sleeve. He was also interested in the other bands 4AD was working with and, now that his foot was in the door, whenever Oliver saw Watts-Russell at gigs he would talk to him about the label, suggesting that what 4AD needed was its own distinct visual identity. During this time Watts-Russell took sole charge of the label, Kent left to focus on managing Bauhaus, the pace of their success was more than 4AD could keep up with and they signed directly to Beggars Banquet, who also retained a majority stake in 4AD. Vaughan Oliver soon introduced Ivo Watts-Russell to his photography student friend Nigel Grierson, he too liked the music and Watts-Russell used a couple of his photographs for a single by Sort Sol. When it came time to design a sleeve for Modern English’s debut album, Oliver and Grierson decided to collaborate, as they had in Newcastle, and when Mesh & Lace was released, instead of their names, the design credit on the inner sleeve read “record cover thing by twenty-three envelope.”

On the 28th of December 1978, Simple Minds played at Grangemouth Town Hall supported by a local band. In their set that night was a song which would end up on their debut album the following year as ‘No Cure,’ but which they were still playing in the punkier style of their previous incarnation Johnny and the Self Abusers, under the song’s original title, ‘Cocteau Twins.’ Support band, the Heat, were a group of sixteen year olds, John Barrie, Stuart Everest, Robin Guthrie and William Heggie, managed by Guthrie’s older brother Brian, who would change their name the following year to The Liberators when Mike Tonner replaced Everest as the singer. In June 1980, The Liberators recorded a three track EP of songs written by the Guthrie brothers and Heggie, but then split up the day the record was released.

Grangemouth was established at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the Forth and Clyde Canal was built to connect Glasgow on the River Clyde and Edinburgh at the mouth of the River Forth. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company built an oil refinery next to Grangemouth Docks to process the oil they were importing from the Middle East, taking advantage of an existing workforce which had been employed refining oil from locally mined shale. After oil was discovered under the North Sea in 1975, Grangemouth became a main terminal on its pipeline network and British Petroleum, as Anglo-Persian were now known, the town’s major employer.

Will Heggie and Robin Guthrie had grown up in Grangemouth, had gone to school together and had been inspired to start making music by the emergence of punk. When the Liberators split, they had both left school and were now working for BP as apprentices but were keen to start a new band. As part of his apprenticeship, Guthrie was studying electrical engineering at Falkirk Technical College and, looking to get away from the conventional guitar playing he had used with the Liberators, began experimenting with building and modifying effects pedals, trying to create interesting sounds and textures, which he hoped would detract from what he believed he lacked in musical ability. This shift was also inspired by some of the post punk records he was playing when occasionally DJing at a hotel function room that served as their local nightclub. Artists like the Pop Group and the Birthday Party didn’t go down particularly well at the Hotel International, known as the ‘Nash,’ but he and Heggie noticed one girl who did seem happy to dance to Guthrie’s choices. Reasoning that if she could dance that well, she could probably sing too, Guthrie asked her to join the band.

Elizabeth Fraser was seventeen, two years younger than Guthrie and Heggie, but had left home the previous year. Not keen to work in a factory like her mother, she was contemplating becoming a waitress, but had no real plan for the future and allowed Guthrie to persuade her to become their singer. For moral support, Fraser brought in her friend Carol as a second vocalist, the line-up was completed with the addition of drummer John Murphy, and they named themselves Cocteau Twins after the song Simple Minds had played a couple of years earlier. Carol drifted out of the band after a couple of weeks, quickly followed by Murphy when he demanded to be paid for his travel expenses, but instead of replacing him they started using a drum machine, which gave Guthrie more control of the overall sound. As a trio they played a couple of gigs which don’t seem to have been documented, but were possibly with a post punk band from Airdrie called End Result, as well as their friends from nearby Linlithgow, the Freeze, who were fronted by Cindy Sharp and would later change their name to Cindytalk. Mostly they rehearsed though, Fraser wasn’t yet comfortable singing in front of other people, and then they travelled to a studio in Lanarkshire (accounts differ, but possibly Emblem Sound in Strathaven) to record a demo.

Guthrie and Fraser were fans of the Birthday Party and had followed them as they played a few dates in England supporting Bauhaus in May and June of 1981, both were now unemployed and had very little money, so after a show they would spend the night in a shop doorway or wherever they could find shelter. Then, on the 25th of August, the Birthday Party played their first gig in Scotland, headlining themselves this time, at the Nite Club in Edinburgh, a small space above the Playhouse theatre. Guthrie would have been familiar with the venue, so it was probably there that he headed backstage with Fraser and Heggie in tow, and struck up a conversation with their drummer, Phill Calvert. When Guthrie asked for advice about his own band, Calvert suggested he contact the label that the Birthday Party were signed to, 4AD, and told him where to find them. The Birthday Party were playing in London a couple of weeks later, so the three Cocteau Twins made the long journey down to go to the gig, taking the opportunity while they were there to visit the Beggars Banquet shop where 4AD had their office. They waited around for Ivo Watts-Russell until eventually a member of staff pointed him out as he passed through the shop, and they were able to hand him one of their demo tapes. BBC Radio DJ John Peel was also a fan of the Birthday Party, so when they saw him at the gig, they managed to give him a cassette too. Guthrie was confident that when they heard the tapes, both would get in touch.

When Watts-Russell did call the number supplied with the demo, it turned out to be a public phone box. No one in the band had a telephone so Guthrie had specified a time they could be contacted and waited by the payphone near his flat each day for the call. Watts-Russell felt he hadn’t got a full picture of the band from the tape, but that they had something, and was intrigued enough to invite them to record a single. So that December they again travelled down to London where they were booked in at Blackwing Studios. Fraser’s vocals had been quite low in the mix on the demo, so when Watts-Russell heard the two songs they rerecorded for the single, her voice was something of a revelation. He proposed they continue recording and make an album, which they did, and around the time they were completing it, on the 11th of January 1982, John Peel played one of their songs on the radio for the first time, ‘Speak No Evil,’ the A side of the intended single. Incidentally, the B side of that single was ‘Perhaps Some Other Aeon,’ which leads me to believe that the demo version which appeared later that year on the fanzine cassette release An Hour of Eloquent Sounds is probably from that original demo they’d handed him. On the 5th of March they played their first major gig, supporting none other than the Birthday Party in London, and in June they recorded a session for Peel’s radio show. The single didn’t appear in the end, but the album, Garlands, was released on the 10th of July, coincidentally the same day as the Birthday Party’s Junkyard.

In 1981 Vaughan Oliver had moved on to Michael Peters & Partners, where he was still working on packaging design and becoming more interested in the possibilities of typography, which he’d initially dismissed in favour of illustration. At the same time, under the collective name 23 Envelope, he and Nigel Grierson continued to contribute designs for 4AD, including the sleeve for Garlands and subsequent Cocteau Twins releases. By 1983, Ivo Watts-Russell had come round to Oliver’s point of view about a visual identity and made him 4AD’s first full time employee when the label moved out of the offices above the Beggars Banquet shop and into their own space in South London. That same year, Will Heggie left the Cocteau Twins and back in Grangemouth formed a new band, Lowlife, who would be managed by Robin Guthrie’s brother, Brian.

The Birthday Party had played two gigs in London back in September 1981, if it was the one on the 18th that the members of the Cocteau Twins attended, then the support act they would have seen was a band called the Drowning Craze. They were signed to Situation Two, the label Peter Kent had set up after leaving 4AD, and their bass player, Simon Raymonde, worked in the Beggars Banquet shop where the labels had their offices. He had met Guthrie and Fraser when they dropped by to deliver mixes of their first album to Ivo Watts-Russell, and got to know them when they moved down to London. The Drowning Craze had split up by the time Heggie left the Cocteau Twins, when the labels moved offices the Beggars Banquet shop closed, and Raymonde was now working part time in a small recording studio. He told Guthrie and Fraser that he could get them studio time for free and, when they took him up on his offer, Guthrie suggested they try working on something together. The ultimate result of this collaboration was The Spangle Maker EP, the band’s biggest commercial success to date, and Raymonde joined them as a permanent member.

The success of the EP put some pressure on them to follow it up with an album, which Watts-Russell suggested they bring in Brian Eno to produce, and arranged for them to meet. Guthrie was open to collaborating on something with Eno perhaps, but not to produce a Cocteau Twins album. They had an established working process and he knew how to get the sounds he wanted, plus things had not gone well the last time they worked with a producer, Alan Rankine of the Associates, despite the fact that Rankine was a similar age and from Linlithgow, about five miles from Grangemouth. Eno, for his part, seemed to understand and agreed that they probably didn’t need a producer, but recommended Daniel Lanois, who he’d brought to the meeting, as engineer. Guthrie preferred to use someone he knew and trusted however so, instead, in August 1984, they travelled up to Palladium Studios on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where they had recorded several times with studio owner Jon Turner engineering already, including that Liberators single back in 1980.

Palladium was located in a suburban bungalow which was also Turner’s home, and which the band would stay in. His wife, Anne, would sometimes make them meals, and it was a fairly relaxed environment with little else to do other than concentrate on recording. Despite this, time constraints did create some tension during the recording process, as the way they worked was to write songs in the studio rather than arrive with prewritten material. A Cocteau Twins song would invariably begin with a drum loop which Raymonde and Guthrie would improvise over until they arrived at a sequence they liked, and which they would then develop into a fully finished instrumental composition. Only then would Fraser add a melody and lyrics, often by improvising over it herself. One of the attractions of Palladium was the range of instruments available, which were useful for generating new ideas, as a professional musician Turner was a keyboard player, and they were particularly keen on the Mellotron he had there. At the same time, Guthrie was still an electrical engineer at heart and interested in the possibilities of new technology. In addition to widely used effects like distortion, flanger, delay and reverb, most of his guitar parts were put through a Roland Dimension D, a stereo modulating effect similar to a chorus pedal but smoother and cleaner, sometimes described as creating a ‘sparkling’ effect, he liked it so much that it was often used on other instruments, and sometimes even Fraser’s vocals. Many other sounds, most notably the chiming bell sounds that appear on several tracks, were produced with a Yamaha DX7, and to beef up the drums Guthrie had installed the newly available ‘Rock Drums’ chip into their E-mu Drumulator, which were apparently created with samples of John Bonham from the intro to Led Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’ (you can hear those same drum sounds on later records like ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears, or ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ by Depeche Mode). For the final stages and mixing, they decamped back to London and Rooster Studios, with Drostan Madden engineering, to make use of their state-of-the-art Quantec Room Simulator, Lexicon 224 digital reverb and dbx noise reduction system.

With the pressure of those time constraints during the sessions in Edinburgh, Elizabeth Fraser felt something of a creative block at first, and unable to come up with lyrics she was happy with. Much of her inspiration had always come from the written word, where a phrase or sentence would capture her imagination, and she now pushed that further by leaning into the enigmatic and estranging effect of individual words and syllables removed from their context. Privileging sound over syntax and playing with aural forms, in a manner reminiscent of the way concrete poetry might play with the visual appearance of text. This abstract approach also allowed her to focus more on other aspects of her voice, she had recently spent some time studying with vocal coach Tona De Brett and this was her first real opportunity to put the experience to use, and on the new album her voice would stretch out in ways it hadn’t previously.

At the end of August they interrupted the recording process, to go down to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios and record a John Peel session with producer Barry Andrews and engineer Nick Gomm. At that point the three new songs they played had working titles, which only ‘Otterley’ would retain, the other two, ‘Whisht’ and ‘Peep Bo,’ would have different names when the album was released. As with writing lyrics, Fraser had also struggled at first to come up with song titles she was happy with. Conscious of the way the band’s music was being portrayed in the press as grandiose and elaborate, she decided to give the songs simpler one word titles which could also be forenames. They were not everyday forenames though, but ones which had an emotive appeal, and mostly from literary sources. ‘Whisht’ became ‘Beatrix,’ which may or may not be a reference to the novel by Honoré de Balzac, likewise ‘Amelia,’ could be from the Henry Fielding novel, and ‘Aloysius’ from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. ‘Persephone’ and ‘Pandora’ are names from Greek mythology, and ‘Lorelei’ from German folklore, while ‘Cicely’ is a flower often seen in hedgerows, riverbanks and fields in central Scotland. ‘Otterley’ and ‘Donimo’ perhaps kept their working titles as they sound like they could be forenames, but ‘Peep Bo’ became ‘Ivo,’ after Ivo Watts-Russell. ‘Pandora’ also has in its title the dedication ‘for Cindy,’ referring to the band’s friend Cindy Sharp, who also goes by the mononym Cinder, possibly intended as an acknowledgement of her gender identity. Cinder’s band, Cindytalk, released their debut album Camouflage Heart the same year, with a dedication to Fraser on the inner sleeve.

As part of her creative process, Fraser kept a notebook where she wrote down ideas and collected words that appealed to her aesthetically, many of them her own inventions or modifications. At one point during the recording, Robin Guthrie explained to John Oomkes in the journal Emigre, someone told him that they’d had a dream where the Cocteau Twins released an album on compact disc, then a new technology that 4AD hadn’t yet adopted. Guthrie had a similar dream a couple of days later, in which he saw the disc himself and it had a title: Treasure. The next day, looking through Fraser’s ‘book of words’ as he called it, the same word caught his eye, and Treasure became the new album’s title. The prophesy wasn’t entirely accurate though, as the first CD to be released on 4AD would be the Cocteau Twins compilation, The Pink Opaque, in 1986.

When Vaughan Oliver began working for 4AD full time, 23 Envelope set out to create a consistent visual aesthetic for the label, which would be reflective of the music it was representing without defining it too narrowly. They involved the individual artists in the development of each design, taking on board their likes and dislikes. Cocteau Twins had many dislikes but weren’t so forthcoming about what they did like, generally they seemed to prefer abstract to representational imagery. One thing they were clear about early on though, was that they wanted the band name to be in hand script, on Garlands this had been drawn by Nigel Grierson but with subsequent sleeves, and as he developed his interest in using typography, Oliver would refine and evolve the hand scripted logo. His increasing engagement with typography and layout also led Oliver to focus more on design and art direction rather than creating images himself, while Grierson saw himself primarily as a photographer and was freelance rather than employed by 4AD, after his photography master’s he’d progressed to a PhD in film, also at the Royal College of Art.

Contrary to the band’s apparent preference, Grierson’s photograph for the cover of Treasure does include representational imagery. A dress form mannequin is mostly hidden behind drapes and folds of lace fabric, dramatically lit to create a high contrast, or chiaroscuro, effect. Perhaps evoking renaissance or baroque art, but more likely inspired by the work of the Brothers Quay, who Grierson and Oliver had met at Newcastle Polytechnic and would continue to cite as an influence. The fabric and the mannequin itself had come from an expensive clothing boutique owned and run by Yvonne Damant, who happened to be the wife of Martin Mills, co-owner of Beggars Banquet which still had majority ownership of 4AD.

Surrealism would also continue to be an important touchstone for Vaughan Oliver, always keen to use ostensibly ordinary subjects to create a sense of mystery and ambiguity, to occupy that uncanny space between the legible and the illegible, or between the elegant and the absurd. The dress form mannequin, an almost human body but with no recognisable features, naturally occupies that space, and its eeriness is accentuated by the sense of a place long abandoned, where the lace fabric could be seen to resemble dust and cobwebs, caught in the sliver of light from a broken shutter or gap in a doorframe. In keeping with the mythology of some of the song titles, it also brings to mind the story of Arachne, who pioneers new ways of constructing cloth but then, after daring to win a weaving contest against the goddess Athena, is transformed into a spider by her as punishment, and her weaving confined to spiderwebs rather than beautiful fabrics.

It's possible that this choice of imagery was inspired by Elizabeth Fraser’s naming of the songs, the mannequin suggesting the idea of a person behind each name, but as a prompt for the listener rather than an illustration. Fraser’s lyrics could also be interpreted as surrealist under André Breton’s terms, where her use of language might seem paradoxical or absurd, but it is exactly those qualities which make it emotive and beguiling. The uncanny sense of meaning and comprehension being just beyond the listener’s grasp, with Fraser, like the surrealist artists, deferring synthesis, embracing ambiguity and evading interpretation.