Cherry-Coloured Funk

The opening of Heaven or Las Vegas: moody verses that break into an enraptured chorus, and the song The Weeknd built on.
Cocteau Twins, from Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)

Written by
Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, Simon Raymonde
Released
1990
Length
3:12
Album
Heaven or Las Vegas

Play on hypersongs

Heaven or Las Vegas opens with Guthrie's melting chords and a song that moves from shadowed verses into a rapturous chorus, a shift Petridis called divine, ranking it second only to Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops among their songs. A few words, cherry among them, rise out of Fraser's singing. It was never a single and has no official video, but it became one of their most streamed songs, and Pitchfork placed it among the best songs of the 1990s. Mark Clifford of Seefeel reworked it for the 1995 Otherness EP.

The Weeknd sampled it for The Knowing on House of Balloons in 2011, stretching it, The Quietus said, into a syrupy paste with only Guthrie's guitar recognizable. It has been covered more than twenty times, including a 2023 version by La Mere with Johnny Marr on guitar, and Fraser sang it at her 2012 Meltdown concerts.

Covers and versions

More songs by Cocteau Twins

Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops, Carolyn's Fingers, Cico Buff, Iceblink Luck

Sources

  1. Cherry-Coloured Funk, Wikipedia
  2. The Strange World of Cocteau Twins, The Quietus (2018-03-05)
  3. Cherry-Coloured Funk covers, WhoSampled