It's so hard to remember sometimes - so much has changed. It's the 21st Century and we stand on the cusp of endless possibilities, as every global certainty crumbles beneath history's hooves.
But nothing quite illustrates the gulf between the way we are and the way we were as well as that reliable old barometer, the listening habits of the student. Today, sixth formers think Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson and Britney Spears (ironically, of course) rule. But in 1985, we all wore black, nobody smiled, and everyone owned at least one record by the Cocteau Twins.
What Robin Guthrie, Simon Raymonde (who replaced founder member Will Heggie, whose name clearly wasn't ethereal enough) and Liz Fraser did defies easy categorisation, conventional understanding and, in many respects, good sense.
Possessed by a desire to craft music of boundless space and emotional resonance, and empowered by their discovery of the Flanger, an effects pedal that makes guitars sound like they're being played underwater to calm the nerves of passing whales, the Cocteaus made music that was at once quite magical and at the same time utterly stupid.
The technique was a piece of piss to understand, yet pointless to replicate. Guthrie and Raymonde, accompanied throughout by a drum machine that sounded like it had a day job as a demolition tool, provided diaphanous veils of melody and watercolour washes of intricate sound, while Fraser sang lyrics in her own made-up language.
They had a hit with a single called 'Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops' and released songs named after their friends, their children, and types of butterfly. In interviews they swore like troopers, and Guthrie was once involved in making a Cup Final record for Tottenham Hotspur FC, knowledge which ought to have been as iconoclastic a revelation as watching Mother Teresa smoke crack, but only ended up making you love them more.
And this estimable collection of their work for the 4AD artefact production house ("record company" never seemed so inadequate a designation), sequenced - of course! - chronologically, brings it all cascading back. OK, so it's daft, it's vaguely embarrassing to own up to liking, and it hasn't aged particularly well. But by God is it good.
So while us '80s teenagers looked glum and thought that irony was something our mams did to our shirts, we knew the difference between dope and doo-doo. Although we probably would have phrased it rather differently back then.
