‘The second Modern English album was our first platinum album,’ he says. ‘“I Melt with You” was in the first Nicolas Cage film Valley Girl; the soundtrack was a million-selling album in the USA. “I Melt with You”, the track, is in the top 500 most-played tracks on the radio. They were hugely successful without having a hit. People were fired at Warner Brothers because they didn’t get out their Top Forty chequebooks at the right time to translate that into the colossal hit that it should have been.’
‘I Melt with You’ was an early example of the polished new wave track that would cross over from John Hughes’s iconic run of coming-of-age movies in Eighties America. Valley Girl was directed by Martha Coolidge and, in its tale of star-crossed lovers from different sides of the Reaganomics tracks, was a precursor to the Hughes template. Setting a precedent for movie tie-in tracks like Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ and Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget about Me’, ‘I Melt with You’ was a hook-laden rush of lustful teenage anxiety. Unlike the singles used in the John Hughes soundtracks, the video for ‘I Melt with You’ lacked any of Valley Girl’s footage, denying the track the benefit of the emerging marketing tool of the MTV age, synergy. The track reached only no. 70 in the Billboard chart. Despite all of this, 4AD had a six-figure-selling album on their hands. For Watts-Russell, still operating the label from behind the counter of the Beggars shop, the experience was bewildering.
The combination of the ineptitude of Warner Brothers in missing an open goal and the realisation that discreet levels of payola and insider trading still permeated the mechanics of Top Forty America meant that the success of ‘I Melt with You’ left a nasty taste in the mouth. Everything Watts-Russell distrusted about the music business – sloppy work, sharp practice and a wholesale lack of attention to detail – had given him his first hit.
‘That experience put me off licensing stuff to America and record companies in general for many, many years,’ he says. ‘I never even wanted to feel like I had a record company. From working in a record shop, you’d see the reps from places like Phonogram – they were like shoe salesmen, they knew nothing and cared nothing for music. We sold half a million albums; it culminated in the band playing a matinee performance and teenage girls throwing underwear and cuddly toys at Modern English. Quite extraordinary. Then they’d return to England to play at the Venue in New Cross if they could.’
Much to Watts-Russell’s annoyance, 4AD was starting to gather a reputation, via the Bauhaus and Birthday Party catalogues that continued to sell in great numbers, for black-clad cheekboned art-house records that fed the High Street underground phenomenon of Goth. One of 4AD’s next releases couldn’t have been further from the stereotype: an unsettling hybrid of a singer-songwriter album and a collage of soundscapes that might colour an Industrial album: Matt Johnson’s Burning Blue Soul. ‘That was our fifth album,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘The first time I met Matt he was more interested in the football, so we got on really well; he’d played me this tape that had been produced by Graham and Bruce from Wire and that’s what we put out.’
Mixing some early examples of sampling with a twelve-string acoustic and discordant rhythmic textures, Burning Blue Soul had been pieced together by Johnson, a tape op, using dead studio time. The album’s cover, featuring a Thirteenth Floor Elevators-style psychedelic eye, was a fitting metaphor for the music – jarring and intoxicating, it inhabited its own private sphere.
Releases like Burning Blue Soul ensured 4AD was developing a roster of distinct and individual pedigree, but it was Watts-Russell’s next signing that would fix the label’s identity and aesthetic: the Cocteau Twins. ‘To this day I remember hearing their music for the very first time,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’d driven to Spaceward Studios, where you watched them erase the masters at the end of the session, all kind of depressing. I was driving back, stuck the tape in and remember really enjoying this Siouxsie and the Banshees-esque distorted guitar where you could hear someone clearly sort of singing over the top.’
Watts-Russell had received the tape from the Cocteau Twins bearish guitarist Robin Guthrie who, having travelled overnight from the refinery town of Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth to see the Birthday Party, killed time by loitering in the Beggars shop, hoping to catch a moment with the man who had released their records. Hearing the tape, Watts-Russell was convinced enough by the two tracks to invite the band down to record. What Watts-Russell hadn’t heard on the tape was the voice of Guthrie’s girlfriend and Cocteau Twins vocalist, Liz Fraser, which had been submerged beneath the distorted guitars of Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie.
‘I didn’t invite the Cocteaus down to London to record two songs at Blackwing because of Liz Fraser,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘so being in Blackwing when Liz opened her mouth it was “Oh My Fucking Lord!” Talk about icing on the cake.’
Blackwing studios in Southwark was located in a deconsecrated church, with its bell tower used for storing master tapes and a walled garden. It was a location with which Watts-Russell had a great affinity. As his workload as a producer increased it became a second home, the studio’s ecclesiastical architecture providing an echo-chamber for his thoughts, and its mixing desk a means of unlocking them.
Hearing Fraser sing resulted in an epiphany that would resonate within Watts-Russell with the intensity of first love. Having initially asked the Cocteau Twins to record an EP, Watts-Russell, realising he was smitten, immediately asked them to agree to a more long-term arrangement with 4AD. ‘I heard Liz for the first time and said, “You’ve got to record an album, right?”’ he says. ‘“You’ve got the songs?” – and, of course, I found out later that they didn’t and so I had those two songs they’d done at Blackwing pressed on to an acetate just for John Peel, and it took him for ever to listen to it and, when he did, he liked it and we got the session.’
Watts-Russell’s relationship with Peel had blossomed from that of a boy having his world changed by radio to one of mutual respect as the broadcaster recognised a kindred spirit in Watts-Russell.
‘John Peel was so supportive,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘All our communication was by letter. Someone invited him to a session saying, “Please will you come down?” but he said, “No, everyone stands around staring at their shoes.” And when I first met him, sure enough, I looked up from staring at my shoes. I was so nervous. I went up and went, “Hi, how are you doing?” and he went, “You don’t have to talk to me like that.” I saw someone I admired enormously, but who was probably as shy as me.’
The Cocteau Twins’ first tentative attempts at delivering on the promise Watts-Russell had heard were fraught: a combination of shyness, the inability to communicate and being thrust from their detached incubation in Grangemouth into the strange world of early Eighties show business. Colin Wallace their friend, confidant and roadie had come from the same background as Fraser, Heggie and Guthrie. ‘Liz’s mum and my mum used to work in the same factory and I worked there for five years’, he says, ‘and, God it was awful, and I became their roadie through default. The first Cocteaus album, Garlands, was written off in the UK as another Siouxsie copy band, and Elizabeth was a huge Siouxsie fan – she had Siouxsie tattoos which she’s had lasered off since.’ If the music was, at least in the UK, brushed over lightly, the Garlands sleeve was arresting in the extreme. A mixture of colour photography and extravagant handwriting, it looked like a cross between a poster for a low-budget European horror movie and a fine arts student’s degree-show interpretation of their dreams. The startlingly contemporary artwork was credited, for the first time on a 4AD sleeve, to 23 Envelope.
23 Envelope was the name of the graphic design practice that Vaughan Oliver, a young graphic design graduate – whose retention of his Mackem accent from Sunderland instantly earthed any pretension that could be detected in his designs – had started along with his colleague Nigel Grayson. ‘Vaughan came in when we moved to Alma Road in 1983,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘He taught me so much about how to use my eyes, and there was a
n absurd coincidence in how I got to meet him.’
Alma Road was in Wandsworth, London W18, where Martin Mills had opened Beggars Banquet’s offices and the Beggars Group remains today. The premises were located on a quiet side street and housed a small 4AD office; and along with moving out of the record shop into a new workspace, Watts-Russell hired Oliver as his first employee on the recommendation of a friend of a friend.
‘All I knew was, this chap called Vaughan was going to come and visit me one night. Modern English had used this Diane Arbus image on a T-shirt and they wanted to use it on a sleeve. Whatever, all I had to tell him was to use this Diane Arbus image. He walks in with his portfolio, and in it is the very same Diane Arbus image that he’d treated in his own usual way. Huge coincidence, we got on very well. It was the two of us for a year, 1983.’
Oliver would, with designers Peter Saville and Neville Brody, introduce a new graphic language into the teenage bedrooms of the Eighties. Through the sleeves in the record-shop windows to the type, print and collaging in publications like The Face, they would educate the music- and style-orientated audience into a new visual awareness. The intensely creative collaboration between Watts-Russell and Oliver meant that 4AD had a musical and visual character with a particular and singular resonance.
‘There was mutual respect going on,’ says Oliver. ‘I was kind of educating him visually and he was very definitely educating me musically. I think he had the impression I was a different person to what I actually was in the daytime. So he thought I was going to do all the radio and the plugging, go out there amongst them – that’s not me in the daytime. I was his first full-time employee, and that gave me great confidence, that that was how much he cared about the packaging of the whole thing that he was prepared to stick his neck out and do that.’
In making Oliver his first employee, Watts-Russell was, like Tony Wilson before him, putting his company’s visual presentation in the hands of a young graphic designer. Watts-Russell had also assumed that as well as developing a visual language for the label Oliver would be equally hands-on with the mundane tasks of running a small business. ‘I thought I need some help,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘As far as I was concerned, you design a couple of sleeves, then you get down in the warehouse and you start packing boxes.’
For Oliver, however, the idea of multitasking and helping out as an ad hoc warehouseman was anathema to the creative process. With Watts-Russell at his desk, keeping his eye on the production schedule, and Oliver in the corner, lost in his ideas for a new language of record sleeves, the atmosphere between the two staff members of 4AD was redolent of an isolation tank.
‘One of the first things he said to me’, says Oliver, ‘was, “I don’t do conversations … not interested in small talk … me and you … right?” I just sat there quietly in the corner. I’d never had an easel or a drawing board before, so I remember, for the first six months mine was completely upright. I hadn’t worked out how to put it back. I’m struggling with one of the first sleeves and it must have taken me three weeks. I’d found an old encyclopaedia, photocopied this face, blew each letter up to giant size, for all the track listing, etc., and I remember sitting there for ages … doing these letters up to there and putting them all together and then reducing them on my PMT machine* … and I’m also being introduced to printers and I couldn’t do printers’ talk.’
Watts-Russell was increasingly worried that, along with the inability to help out in the everyday tasks of shifting stock and packing boxes, all of which he would regularly attend to, Oliver’s design process would start hindering the momentum of the release schedule.
‘One of the first things Vaughan did in 1983 was design an Xmal Deutschland logo,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and I sat there and I watched him, and it took him two and a half weeks. So he dictated when our records came out. That was tough and frustrating, I’m sure I gave him a very hard time about it, I now recognise’.
Watts-Russell, who loathed meetings and brainstorming sessions, could work in a detached, highly concentrated manner. The dreamy overlap between music and art that formed the outward perception of 4AD was in reality often a terse and incommunicative set of encounters between the graphic designer and label boss. Whatever they lacked in social skills, the pair were creatively on a high.
*
Oliver’s designs utilised photography and layers of inks printed over dreamlike imagery which he dispersed and refracted in saturated colour. His photographer of choice and partner in 23 Envelope was Nigel Grayson. ‘I was at school with him, college with him, and we did a lot of the early sleeves together,’ says Oliver. ‘Instead of Nigel and Vaughan, we gave ourselves a studio name, 23 Envelope, so out of that studio might come all these various styles or ways of seeing, if you like … but the thing is, with me and Nigel, we had too much of a similar aesthetic.’
While 23 Envelope would come to be seen as an innovator in sleeve design, rendering their images with the broadest possible brushstrokes to make full use of the size of a record sleeve, the name 23 Envelope was originally a rather ordinary trouvaille and a world away from the Mannerist flourishes with which they coloured their sleeves.
‘There was a packet of envelopes next to us and there were twenty-three of them left,’ says Oliver, ‘and we ran out of Letraset, so it was 23 Envelope, not Envelopes. Twenty-three is the most recurring number in the world and every time I read a newspaper it’s in there somewhere. It was nonsense. Where does 4AD come from? Nonsense. I like the idea that 23 or 4AD has come to mean something in time and it’s not a string of names, it’s not an agency name it’s not Rough Trade, it’s not Factory, which already has an image – if you hear the word “factory” you think of a factory. 4AD has no image other than the one it made.’
The 4AD image being made was in the likeness of Watts-Russell’s tastes and intensity. The music was otherworldly, lambent and wrapped in a shroud of reverb. However much the 4AD catalogue was starting to sell and connect with an audience, the press were dismissive of what they perceived as a world of cobwebs, floral prints and rosaries. In the UK the music weeklies were quick to paint Watts-Russell and 4AD into a stripped pine, Laura Ashley fabric-shrouded corner.
‘Journalists weren’t always supportive of what we did,’ he says. ‘I was attracted to people whose easiest method of communication was by music and with whom I shared a shyness. And shyness is often interpreted in the world as arrogance, so words like pretentious would creep in later. I didn’t have mates at the paper, put it that way.’
The negative press reaction had taken its toll on Liz Fraser, who decided that she would now sing in her own language, disguising her feelings in an enchanting and powerfully sung gobbledegook. ‘I remember talking to Liz about the reviews,’ says Wallace, ‘and how they were slagging off the lyrics, and I remember her saying to me, “They’ll never fucking slag my lyrics off ever again.”’
The retreat into a private linguistic universe made Fraser’s voice richer and more assertive. The combination of Guthrie’s arrangements and Fraser’s unfathomable rhapsodies was an intense deluge of aqueous sounds and soaring melodies whose otherworldliness was earthed by the strict crack of a drum machine. Watts-Russell rose above any ridicule directed towards the Cocteau Twins and felt a strong emotional bond between himself and the band. ‘I just loved them so much I didn’t care what anyone or any journalist thought about them,’ he says. ‘I didn’t care one iota. I was proud to represent them.’
Within the band themselves, ominous tensions that had been building caused their first crisis. They had embarked on a disastrous tour, which resulted in the firing of bassist Will Heggie, and a decision for ever more to shun the conventional methods of the industry. ‘We sent them on a tour with OMD in 1983,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘England and Europe, and it was a huge mistake: they did fifty of fifty-two dates, came back to England and I was left with the job of firing Will Heggie.’
The realities of being a support band with meagre resources had worn down wh
at little enthusiasm the band had for touring. ‘We toured for three months non-stop,’ says Wallace. ‘The sound guy from OMD was out of his nut on coke the whole time, we were sitting in the dressing room and he said, “It just sounds like Liz is singing, we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die,” which summed it up. At the end of that tour, Will accused Elizabeth of being a pop star, because she wanted to go out and talk to fans and stuff like that. It all kicked off and the dressing room was totalled, everything was smashed.’
On completion of the tour the band returned to Ivo’s flat to deal with the tensions that the three months away had produced. ‘Liz was jealous of everyone around Robin and was jealous of his relationship with Will,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was a nightmare – the phone ringing, thunder and lightning in my flat. I think round about then I offered to quit 4AD and start managing them – thank God, they never answered me.’
The Cocteau Twins were increasingly prolific, releasing two EPs of non-LP material and their second album, Head Over Heels, in 1983 alone. Head Over Heels, which Peel played in its entirety on consecutive nights, was more or less a duo album with Guthrie playing and programming all the instrumentation. ‘Head Over Heels is where Robin took over,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I did him a huge favour by producing Garlands and Lullabies and I made him use Alan Rankine for Peppermint Pig. By then he could turn round and say, “Fuck off, I can do it better than that.”’ In the meantime Watts-Russell had found a likely candidate to replace Will Heggie on bass. ‘Simon Raymonde was working in the Beggars shop and I suggested him, and they got on. So that was the end of the Cocteau Twins ever doing traditional anything. And I think they recognised the power in that position’.
The image of the Cocteau Twins was developed by 23 Envelope’s baroque sleeves, which featured a Lewis Carroll suburbia that was amplified by Fraser’s waif-like appearance; in videos she would wear gowns and lace, while drapes billowed elegantly and a cat might scamper by. ‘Victoriana had been attached to the Cocteaus,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was hard to get rid of it, but get rid of it we did. Having been well aware of Nigel and Vaughan’s working methods I would say no more effort, energy, or pretension could have been applied to any record cover than Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind. Borrowed completely and utterly from Tarkovsky.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 11