Some artists spend their lives mythologized by others. Few take the risk of narrating their story themselves. Simon Raymonde has always been the quiet engine behind some of the most influential sounds of the late twentieth century, shaping entire textures of dream pop through his work with Cocteau Twins and shepherding new voices into the world as the founder of Bella Union. His presence has been felt for decades, but rarely has he stepped forward to speak about the life behind the music.
In One Ear; Cocteau Twins, Ivor, and Me marks a rare shift. What began as a project he had no intention of writing became a meditation on lineage, loss, artistic integrity, and the strange, sustaining force of music. It is not a typical rock memoir and refuses the familiar swagger or score-settling. Instead, Raymonde writes with a clarity that feels reflective without nostalgia, personal without self-mythology. The result is a book that folds together the histories of a band, a label, and a family, while tracing how sound can tether us to the people we lose and the people we become.
His recollections feel intimate without being confessional, grounding the reader in the emotional terrain behind some of the most distinctive albums of the 80s and 90s. At its core, the book becomes less a catalogue of memories and more a study in gratitude, craft, and the quiet determination to honour where one comes from.
Raymonde speaks with the same generosity in conversation. Here, he reflects on the unexpected path that led him to write In One Ear, the vulnerability of revisiting the past, and the ways music continues to orient his life.
It’s so nice to meet you, thank you so much for being here.
RAYMONDE: Ah, my pleasure!
I’m a little bit of a slow reader, but I’m slowly working through the book and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I’ve been a Cocteau Twins fan for a long time. Going beyond the book, I read from an interview with The Independent you hadn’t initially considered putting your life into a book until encountering Warren Ellis, who had just finished his own. You mentioned self-preservation and losing the worry of what people think about you being part of the reason this book came to be. What did it look like to transition from letting go of that worry to allowing it to motivate you to create In One Ear?
RAYMONDE: I don’t suppose I ever really thought about any of it that deeply. I think because I’m so busy with my label and stuff like that, I don’t dwell on anything particularly for too long. If it’s troubling me, I worry about it for five minutes, then my brain sort of kicks into ‘Okay, that is what it is, let’s deal with it, move on, and do something else.’ I’m not somebody that ever worries too much about things, so I made a conscious decision that I didn’t want to write a book. I don’t like books that are written by musicians generally. I find them quite boring and sort of one-dimensional. ‘I had sex with this person, then I took loads of drugs, and then I was in a band, and wow, aren’t we fantastic?’ This is my generalized mind. I figured that wasn’t something I should entertain. I also felt my band was very private and my experiences with the band should remain private. I had these silly, guardian feelings about the whole thing. Talking to Warren, who’d had the exact same feelings about an autobiography as I had–he had no interest in it at all, but he kept being badgered by someone to do it. ‘You’ve got such an interesting life, you should write a story,’ and I’ve been delivered these same sentiments from a lot of my friends and people I work with. In a way, it put me off more. The more people asked me, the less I wanted to do it. But when I talked to Warren, I was at that point in my life where I was like ‘You know what, it is an interesting life I’ve led.’ I can’t shy away from it and pretend that it isn’t. Talking to him definitely spurred me on to at least try writing some stuff down and see if the voice that I was writing in seemed authentic and real, and I actually really ended up enjoying the process enormously.
And when you did decide to take that step into writing the book, what did those first steps to getting the process started look like for you?
RAYMONDE: Well I mean, because I’m not a writer, there was a naive approach to it. Every now and then I’d think ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea,’ and I’d start writing down something or ‘I remember this thing I did,’ and then I’d write it down. It was all very anecdotal–little episodes, short stories of things that I did in my life, and I just thought ‘I don’t know if that’s very interesting.’ There’s a place for a book like that, Flea [Red Hot Chili Peppers] did a book like that, didn’t he? It was a series of ‘I did this, and then I did that,’ and that’s a very well-worn way of doing things. But once I actually sent stuff off to a literary agent, which you’ve got to do to be able to get a publisher, that’s when I started to work out that my naive view of writing a book needed to be addressed. I sent it to the agent, he said ‘How far have you gone?’ and I said I think I’ve pretty much got my whole book and I sent the stuff that I’d done. He came back and went ‘Well, that’s just not a book, that’s about a third of the book. This is 30,000 words.’ He said a book is at least 100,000 words and I was like ‘Holy shit, okay. I need to grow up and start working on this thing properly.’ At that point, it was no more occasional-dipping into my memory banks, I needed to sit down every day for however long it takes, from 8 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, and just write, write, write. Don’t look back on it, don’t check it. Just write it. And then when you’ve literally exhausted your memory banks, maybe you can go back and read through it to see what’s good and what’s bad. That’s how I did it. The literary agent giving me that shock that this ‘ain’t no book,’ made me realize that I needed to do a lot of work on it, and that’s what I did.
I’m sure you had an initial vision for this book, how did the final product match or differ from it?
RAYMONDE: It definitely changed over the last few months between when I delivered what I thought was the final draft, and then the publisher, who was also the editor, came back and said, ‘That’s too long.’ I’d gone from having a 30,000-word “book” to having 130,000-word book. I’d written too much. Both the literary agent and the editor were like ‘It’s all great, but we need to edit it down.’ I was like ‘Oh, so we’ll have to lose some of the story’ I had to lose 30,000 words, which is a third of the book. I thought ‘Oh man, I’m going to really struggle to lose some of this stuff if I really like the bits that they want to lose.’ There was a lot of back and forth, but ultimately, I’m a musician that runs a record label, that’s my world. They’re publishers that work in book publishing, he’s an editor, they understand how to tell a story in words way better than I do. So whilst I do have opinions, or I say ‘I don’t want you to lose that bit, because I really like it.’ He’d go ‘Okay, I hear you,’ or he’d say ‘No, I’m sorry, you’re wrong, that definitely has to go because it’s boring.’
I had to swallow my pride, and accept that I can always use it later on. I can always use those bits that they didn’t like on something else, it’s not like the words will just fall into the ocean. It’s just about give and take. When I make music, I don’t ever think about what anyone else thinks, I just make the music and there you go it’s finished, put it out. But accepting that when you work with a team, on a book with a publisher, you obviously have to take their opinions into consideration up to a point. He’s such a lovely person, the publisher, he’s a good friend, so I did trust his opinion enormously. He never said anything just to be annoying, he said it because he genuinely wanted the book to be as good as it could possibly be.
100%. Now referring to specific points of your life that you covered within the book, can you recall times where you felt you knew all the answers, but since then you’ve looked back, written about them, or thought of them further down the line to realize you didn’t know the answers at all?
RAYMONDE: I think the day you think you know the answers to everything is the day you should stop living, stop doing what you’re doing, right? We’re nervous as shit about everything, let’s face it. Could any of us have predicted that the world would currently be as it is? You know what I mean? It’s a horror show out there. I think you have to just be humble about these things and think ‘Okay, now I’ve written the book, this doesn’t mean that this is how I define my life.’ I’ve hopefully still got quite a bit of living left to do, but it is nice to have put down what I’ve done in words that I’ve written as honestly and as authentically as I can, and maybe someone can take something from that. Because obviously, I’m not an idiot, I know Cocteau Twins is an important band for many, many, many people. It means a lot more than just pop music. It’s significant for some people, it’s helped them in their lives, and I’m really super aware of that.
I wanted to be sure that the book was never going to be a sort of ‘kiss and tell’ book or a book where I dissed the band. There’s plenty of books like that. I read Chris Frantz’s book, from the Talking Heads, and they’re obviously a band that had some issues internally because they’ve never reformed. I was interested to read his story, but I don’t think I even got into chapter two because I thought the book was so bitter. He was so bitter about what happened, and I’m sure that was his motivation for writing the book. I was so glad I didn’t write that type of book.
When you’re in a band, there are many things that happen that are not savoury, or particularly glorious–things that you do or people do to you, things that happen, experiences over time with your labels or promoters, whatever it is, where you’re like ‘Fuck that.’ I could have easily written a book where I was just like ‘This person was a fucking a-hole.’ I could have written that book 10 times over without even blinking, but that’s just not me. I’m not that kind of person. I’m a nice person, I want to have nice things to say about other people, if there’s something to be said. I felt with the Cocteau’s, there were an awful lot of good things in there that I focused on. I could focus on bad things, but I choose not to. I think that’s something important that I learned from doing the book for sure.
I’ve always enjoyed the music from Cocteau Twins, but I’ve never actually fully gone into the history of the band. I’m sure there are people like me who are going to be reading this and it might be their first time learning more of the history behind the band and your part in it. You’re giving someone their first perspective into the band beyond the music. When you talk about how some autobiographies have a bitter taste in it, it’s interesting to ask how you’d want people to remember your band if they were learning about it for the first time. And what you could do in helping them want to learn more beyond that point.
RAYMONDE: Yeah, and then the other interesting thing is about the demographic of who the Cocteau Twins fan is of 2025. It’s you. You are the age group of the general fan of the band. Our demographic is 15 to 25 year old women.
That’s me! 25 years old, right at the end of the mark there.
RAYMONDE: It’s like holy shit, you know, I’m 63, and the age group that’s listening to our music the most is young women. That is an incredibly humbling statistic. It’s not just a few, it’s many, many, many thousands of people of your ilk who are listening to that music. That’s something I’m not going to trash, because I could quite easily say things that would perpetuate stories that have been in the press, which you probably don’t even know about. But there were plenty of stories during the breakup with the band that were ‘You know, he was a terrible drug addict, they broke up…’ but life’s like that, right? People do break up, and people do have drug problems. Whoop-dee-doo. It’s not like that’s anything particularly revelatory. There was no benefit to me in talking about that stuff in a salacious way. I would much rather deal with the things that people do genuinely care about, which is the music, and give maybe a little flavor into some of the mystery that has perpetuated about the band. How did they make that sound? How does that even happen? How did this music transpire? And why does it sound like it did? I don’t give you all of the answers in the book, but at least I give you some of the background, hints of how it all came about, and some facts that some readers might think ‘No shit. I didn’t realize that they did that.’ It should be interesting.
For sure. I find it interesting, what you said about the age group of people who are listening to Cocteau Twins now. I told my mom about me doing this interview and she was so psyched. I learned about the Cocteau Twins from her. I started listening to you guys on my mom’s ex boyfriend’s iPod that he gave her. It’s interesting to see how in the internet age, people are naturally discovering your music through social media, or TikTok has been very beneficial to the resurgence of Cocteau Twins.
RAYMONDE: TikTok has been a revelation for not just Cocteau Twins, but bands I work with. Like Beach House–Beach House and TikTok have a phenomenal relationship. ‘Space Song’, which is one of the songs we released in 2015, was on an album called Depression Cherry. It did well when we put it out, it sold well. But about five years later, all of a sudden, this track just starts popping off on TikTok. Most Beach House songs generally stream well, 30, 40, or 50 million streams or something like that. Most bands would be very happy with that. But this song now has 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, and that’s through the power of TikTok. So I’m very aware of how important that is, and how this has created this younger audience for us. But it’s absolutely incredible because it’s sad music, isn’t it? A lot of it is melancholy. When you’re a teenager, you’re obviously going through a lot of high emotions. With girls, with boys, with school, with your parents. with drugs, social media, dating–the whole thing is just a head fuck when you’re that age! I think music seems to just calm people down a bit. Like a mirror, it just sort of reflects what you’re feeling internally. Like ‘Somehow, this band have managed to encapsulate the mystery of whatever it is I’m fucking going through right now.’ I mean, it certainly wasn’t intentional, but I’m very pleased.
I remember when ‘Space Song’ came out, I think I put it in almost every single playlist I had from when I was 15 to 20.
RAYMONDE: It’s crazy how that happens. I think the band felt absolutely bewildered to start with. I must have seen 50 Beach House shows now and you know, we’d been working with this first record and everyone at the shows would be a similar age group to me, maybe a bit younger, 35 to 55. Now it’s just young girls screaming and it’s really beautiful to watch. But I think the first time that crowd turned up in a Beach House show following the TikTok thing, the band were like ‘What’s going on?’
It’s so interesting to see that difference. But going back to the book, a lot of the time with autobiographies, the initial reason to read for most people is just wanting to learn about whoever they’re reading about. They want to learn more about their music or life in some regard. I’m curious to know, what are some of the underlying lessons that you would hope are getting communicated through people reading your story?
RAYMONDE: Well I think there’s a lot of answers to that question. I am so old now and I’ve been working in music since I was a kid, like 15. The book also includes a few chapters about my father, the icon that he was and growing up with him as my father without ever really knowing him, he died so young. That’s an interesting part for children of a certain age who would probably relate to that. Some people who didn’t have great relationships with their parents, or didn’t because they died young or whatever. There’s the part about how I had a brain tumor, which deprived me of hearing in my right ear. That’s interesting, and maybe of some comfort to other people going through hearing loss and things like that–saying you can have a career in music despite having a disability like that.
There’s a lot of things I think people could get out of the book. I don’t think I really realized what I got out of the book until I finished it, went through all the drafts, and read it over a million times. What I got out of the book was that the connection that me and my father had, I was developing with him over the last 10 years, even though he died in 1989. I never had a relationship with him, but my relationship with him now is amazing, if that makes sense. I’ve researched his life so deeply in the last 10-15 years and I picked up every piece of music that he ever worked on–I collected it, treasured it, and stored it. Then I actually put out two albums of his work on my own label, which again, was the most beautiful thing I could do, to honor his work and his memory. I think the book is a huge part of that. It’s not just about culture. It’s about a life lived in music, where music is incredibly important to me and trying to understand ‘Why is it so important to you?’ It could be a lot of things–feeling like I needed to prove myself to be a good son, to reflect on all the good things that he did, stuff like that. I don’t even know if I’ve fully worked it out yet, but I guess I’ve got a few years left to go.
I’m super excited to get to that part of the book about your father. When I was growing up, my parents would take me to all these shows like The Rolling Stones and I never appreciated it, I was six or seven years old at the time. I look back all these years later, and I’m wowed at how my parents put me into rooms that I’d be honored to be a part of now. Now I get to read autobiographies from people like you, and I’m also reading Keith Richards’ autobiography. It’s given me a whole new sense of encouragement to look into the lives of the music I listened to. I didn’t have that interest or appreciation when I was younger.
RAYMONDE: The music business and the way people consume music today compared to when Keith Richards was starting his band and when I was starting my music career, it couldn’t be more different. It’s a different world altogether.
I can’t even imagine what it was like to put out music during those times. Before I started reading yours and Keith Richards’ books, I read Meet Me In The Bathroom, about the 2000 to 2011, New York-rock scene and when the internet age started.
RAYMONDE: That’s when my wife was in New York, she was part of that whole blog-scene, she took photographs of all those people in 2000 to 2020. That is a very important part of music, the different eras and the things you go through to learn and get into gigs when you’re a teenager, sneaking in the back, and all the sudden things that you do just to just to have this obsession you have satisfied. I think that’s what music can do. In the last five or 10 years, probably since COVID, a lot of teenagers’ lives were kind of ruined by COVID. Having to stay in and not socialize with their friends, go to shows, hang out and smoke weed and all the other things that teenagers do. I’m not sure what the effect of it will be long term. Maybe we won’t know for a while. But I think it’s definitely made people more insular. And just physically, people are more comfortable staring at their phones and not looking other people in the eye and having conversations because they don’t know how to do it. Because the age when you’re supposed to be having conversations, hanging out with your friends, getting drunk and having a laugh, a lot of teenagers are just stuck in a room staring at the TV.
Finally, you said you had 130,000 words by the end. Before scaling back, how did you know or feel a complete completeness in the stories that you wanted to tell? Can you describe how you felt when the book was actually finished?
RAYMONDE: It’s always hard to know when you finish. It is very difficult when you’ve got 50 years of stories. How do you put it into a book where it’s interesting to read and not just ‘Well, I was born, then I did this, then I did that, then I went to school, then I…’ you know. I wanted to make it not that. Having the editor to bounce those ideas off was very helpful. Especially the Ivor Raymonde section and figuring out ‘Where does this go?’ Because if it goes at the beginning, that’s not going to work for a lot of people.
Chronologically, it would make sense–he came before me, his career came before mine. But It won’t make sense to the Cocteau Twins fan. They’ll be like, who’s this guy? I don’t want to read about him. I want to read about this phrase. We needed to work out a kind of mechanic to tell the story I wanted to tell in a way where it had an arc to it, like in a movie where you could do it. and then at some point, you look back or you look forward. I think having this device of having the Ivor Raymonde bit where it now is in the book, definitely helped.
Once we’d settled on that and the place where it was, it enabled me to know how to finish the book. Because the book finishes, and I won’t reveal all, but there’s a significant artist in the book that keeps popping up. Scott Walker, who my father worked with in the 60s with the Walker Brothers, one of the all time greatest bands of the 60s. Fast forward, however many years, and I’m working with Scott Walker. I’m working at the Royal Albert Hall on this concert with him and his management. And it’s like, what the fuck? How is this thread that started in the 60s when I saw Scott Walker come to my parents’ house, and I looked out of my window at him in the garden–his shirt billowing in the wind, this beautiful man with gorgeous, wavy hair. My sisters were in their teens, I was at least five or six years old. But I remember it because everyone in the house was like ‘Whoop, Scott Walker’s here.’ I forgot about it because I was a child, and here I am, 50 years later, working with this iconic person in my life.
So it was quite easy for me to finish the book because that was the right place to finish it, starting where the band started and finishing with Scott Walker. The fact that I’m working with this guy doesn’t really make any sense to me. So having that wonder about music, even when you’ve been in music all your life and you should be a bit blasé or a bit ‘Whatever, another record, boring…’ you know, you probably should be a bit cynical about the whole thing. I’ve somehow managed to retain my enthusiasm and my wonder in music. That’s why it was easy for me to finish it, because I wasn’t going in a cynical way. I needed to finish it on a very positive note, even though it’s a bit sad.
Izzy Petraglia is a publicist, writer and photographer based in Toronto. Within her work, she loves to tie in her passion for music, fashion, and pop culture. Follow her on Instagram.