Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd – The Moon and the Melodies CD

The eight songs comprising The Moon and the Melodies, alternately instrumental or with vocal accompaniment, were originally intended as a score to a documentary film. As Guthrie explained to Todd Eckert in OnlyMusic in 1987, “There’s this English television company that’s sort of approached us. They’d been doing this documentary for television involving people from different areas of the music business. They were going to get reggae artists together with jazz musicians and heavy metal people together with classical people, and stuff like that. Somebody suggested that our styles would work well. We thought it would be all right, but the TV company pulled out at the last minute. We just carried on with the idea and did it anyway.”

“They came to Los Angeles. We met and got along famously for a very brief time,” recalled Budd, in an interview with Electronics and Music Maker prior the the album’s release. “And we started swapping ideas on a collaboration of some kind. They asked if I’d be free to do it, and I said ‘yeah, absolutely, anytime, just give me a shout and I’ll be there’.”

“It’s not he sort of record we would make as Cocteau Twins,” continued Guthrie. “It’s more the sort of record Harold would make himself. It was very quick. He came here and we worked in our studio for two or three weeks and he sort of went away, so we finished it.” Later on, Robin reflected to Sound on Sound, “I don’t know if it actually worked, but working with Harold is great. I think it turned out more like four songs that sounded like us and four songs that sounded like him, which wasn’t really the plan. We met him and he just seemed like such a nice bloke. I don’t care about the music he makes or the music that any of the people I work with make, because quite often it’s that you meet them and you like them, and therefore you want to do something. I like Harold because of his very laid-back nature.”

Harold Budd told Record Mirror, “As musicians, I found them immensely interesting people to work with. And in spite of my inclination to work alone, it’s great to get into the studio with someone else and pick each other’s brains—very satisfying.”

The album, released under Budd | Fraser | Guthrie | Raymonde rather than Cocteau Twins means it wasn’t intended to be seen as a proper Cocteau Twins LP, but many fans have always considered it a de facto Cocteau record anyway.

Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde have both collaborated with Harold Budd in the years following their first engagement. Guthrie and Budd composed the score to the Gregg Araki films “Mysterious Skin” and “White Bird in a Blizzard,” and co-wrote several albums together (Before the Day Breaks, After the Night Falls, and Bordeaux) and with Italian composer and musician Eraldo Bernocchi (Winter Garden). Following Budd’s untimely death in 2020, Robin released their last collaboration, Another Flower, which had been recorded years earlier.