ALL that came out of the Scottish new town of Grangemouth until the Cocteau Twins were the clouds of smoke from the industrial factory that lit up at night like Blade Runner's metropolis.

Mind you, podgy guitarist and technical wiz Robin Guthrie and saucer-eyed, gibberish-singing Elizabeth Frazer could have come from another planet so strange and melodramatic, abstract and futuristic was their combination of ugly and beautiful. Long overdue a box-set since divorce and Guthrie's chemical indulgence brought their creativity and doolally song titles to a halt in 1996, the Cocteau Twins' catalogue is instead reintroduced with Guthrie's re-mastering of the first four albums, none of them with attendant B-sides or EPs - a missed opportunity. The duo - later a trio - began in 1981 as spooky goths, peaked early with Treasure's mind-bending, hymnal ecstasy in 1984 and climbed back into the womb on 1986's petal-soft Victorialand, with another erratic decade still to go. This shimmering music for the senses with singing that didn't make linguistic sense was chill-out bliss ahead of its Thatcher times. Frazer has faded to turning up like a ghost on Massive Attack records; Guthrie this week has released his solo debut, Imperial, a soapy lather of an instrumental record, even slower than Victorialand, even softer on the guitar than the Cocteau collaboration with Harold Budd, The Moon And The Melodies. Lovely, soothing musical balm for candlelit coupling, but inevitably missing the Frazer factor.

Updated: 16:46 Wednesday, March 26, 2003