Can you think of a better way to close out the week than with an hour-plus of excellent-quality audio live Cocteau Twins? Maybe you can, but surely this is in the top five.
In May 1996, in the midst of touring their final album Milk & Kisses, the Cocteau Twins took part in what was then a groundbreaking and risky endeavour – a live webcast concert. The novelty and technical difficulty of this seems impossible to understand for someone in the present day, but if you were using the internet in the mid-90s, you can understand how the idea of getting anything besides text and low-resolution GIFs with any kind of quality would seem a monumental task.
The concert – cybercast from a studio in Twickenham, outside of London – was documented in a magazine article published six months after the concert, thankfully transcribed and archived by the Cocteaus themselves:
Real Live Wires @ System Magazine, via cocteautwins.com
The audio from the show was captured by longtime sound engineer Lincoln Fong, whom you may remember from the recording of their 1985 concert in Tokyo posted this Spring. He shared the opening song – “Fifty-Fifty Clown” – last year as part of his Cocteau Twins Advent Calendar, but has this year opted to share the whole show.
While there were those in remote locations who enjoyed the performance, many were let down by a global internet straining at the very edge of 90s capability. The show was also simultaneously recorded on multitrack tapes for later mixing. I’ve no idea where those tapes are now if they still exist. What you have here is a backup live stereo recording (DAT tape) that I ran off while mixing the sound in mono for the web feed. I’ve done a few tweaks to make it presentable and posted it here for fans’ enjoyment. 2026 will be the 30th anniversary of the event but who knows what we’ll all be doing then so here it is right now.
He talked about the circumstances of the recording in a little more detail last year – that they recorded it to 24-track analog and stereo DAT as a backup – simultaneously, and that it’s unclear if those multitrack tapes still exist somewhere, But he still had the DAT tapes so after a little refinement with technology from 30 years into the future, we have this.
