
Written by Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde.
Arranged by Dan Gee.
Originally performed by Cocteau Twins.
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We first sang ‘Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops’ in 2019 at our goth-inspired concert. I had never heard the song before and I’ll be honest: the first time I listened to it, I didn’t like it. I remember thinking, what on earth is that? And how will it work for a choir?
I shouldn’t have worried. Dan’s arrangement brought a new energy to the piece, just as Jack must have known it would. Jack always had a strong artistic vision for our concerts, pulling together seemingly disparate threads to create a special little world, tailored just for us as a many-personed instrument. Our performances are always more than the sum of their parts. Such is the beauty of singing in a choir.
‘Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops’ got its second outing on 19 June 2021, in a brief window between covid restrictions on group singing. For me it was a real highlight of those gruelling covid years, a sweet reprieve where we could again share the precious joy of singing together. The concert happened just as cases were ramping up. Lockdown was reintroduced across Sydney the following week, and group singing was once again banned.
And here we are in 2025, having lost our dear Jack and finding ourselves navigating a world without him. It is fitting that once more this song brings us together during a difficult time, the instrument of many voices gathering to create something that Jack dreamt up, something bigger than us.
My experience as a member of Polyphony since 2017 has taught me that it is a privilege to be bound together by music, connected through time and space via song. How lucky we were to share this with Jack, and how lucky we are to share ‘Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops’ with you.
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The cover art for the Cocteau Twins’ 1984 single ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ is purplish. It’s marbled, too, like an end paper in an old book, and pasted over this pattern is a blurry photograph – nineteenth-century, one would assume – of a woman looking into a crystal ball.
Crystal is a Cocteau Twins kind of word, as is Pearly, and Iceblink, and Spangle. Their songs are a world of other-worldly words, so much so that half the words they sang aren’t real. But what’s real? Cocteau Twins made their own, glossolalic glitter-real, spun their music from echoes and twitches. They were, and maybe still are, the last word in indie mystique: they gave few interviews and never put pictures of themselves on their record sleeves. Emerging out of Scotland in the late 1970s, at the end of punk, they grew darker and sweeter, lighter and darker than that. They sugared their own crystal bed.
Robin Guthrie, who was Cocteau Twins’ guitarist, remixed Jack’s song ‘In My Dreams’, adding to it his distinctive, reverberant playing. Jack was very proud of this, and rightly so; Robin recognised him as a songwriting peer. Jack kept the 7-inch single of ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’, with its crystal ball cover, in the glass-fronted bookcase which sat just inside the door of his flat, along with other artefacts he treasured, like his autographed book of Kate Bush lyrics. He, like them, was a hurlwind, pearl-gleaned maker of worlds.