ON THIS DAY IN 1990 - FROU-FROU FOXES BEGAN THE DAY AFTER SIMON RAYMONDE'S FATHER DIED

ON THIS DAY IN 1990, Cocteau Twins released Heaven or Las Vegas — an album whose closing song began in the immediate aftermath of a devastating loss. 🕯️

While the record was being made, bassist and multi-instrumentalist Simon Raymonde’s father, arranger and producer Ivor Raymonde, died. Simon was 27 and regarded his father as a deeply influential figure in his life.

Almost immediately, he returned to the studio and sat at the piano. 🎹 Raymonde has recalled writing the foundation of “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” the day after his father died; in another account, he described it as a day or two later.

The music came first: a dark, melancholic piano piece that Simon continued shaping until Robin Guthrie arrived. By then, Raymonde remembered, much of the song’s musical structure was already in place. Guthrie added his guitar work, and Elizabeth Fraser’s voice eventually transformed that stark beginning into the extraordinary finale heard on the album. 🌌

Its position at the end of Heaven or Las Vegas gives the record one of its most powerful contrasts. Elsewhere, songs such as “Pitch the Baby” reflected the joy surrounding the birth of Fraser and Guthrie’s daughter, Lucy Belle. Raymonde later felt that “Frou-Frou Foxes” supplied the darkness needed to balance that light. ✨

Released on September 17, 1990, the ten-track album ends not by resolving those emotional extremes, but by allowing them to exist together. 🖤

Behind its luminous guitars, surging rhythm and soaring voice is a piano part written when words were not enough — grief carried into the studio and given a place inside the music. 🔥

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