In a bid to lose the trace of the pea-coat surrealism with which they had become identified, 23 Envelope’s designs for Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind were a miasma of colour and abstraction. Featuring a glowing red shape, part unopened rose, part shimmering sea-plant, the imagery took liberally from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, adding a blaze of colour to the film’s high-contrast brown monochromes. In one of the film’s most celebrated scenes, a single shot is used as the camera moves steadily over a pool containing a never-ending detritus of objects and signifiers of industrial and spiritual malaise: coins, a rifle, an icon, a coil spring. All are submerged in water and plankton before a hand emerges, resting upwards in the pool. If the sequence were to be paused at any random moment, the still in the frame would look uncannily like a 4AD sleeve from the era.
Amid this heightened creativity, Wallace, for one, was noticing that Watts-Russell was carrying a great deal on his shoulders. ‘As it sort of progressed and progressed, he was the eye at the centre of the storm,’ he says. ‘In retrospect, he should have delegated more, but because he’d always done it himself he was in total control of it.’
Along with being a hands-on A&R man who was deeply involved with the studio process, Watts-Russell usually sequenced the records and supervised their mastering. He was also in sole charge of 4AD’s intricate manufacturing and production schedule.
From behind his easel and PMT machine Vaughan Oliver was wondering how Watts-Russell wore so many hats. ‘I don’t know how he did it, to be honest. He would be on the phone to a band saying, “Why don’t you do a little bit of this with it a little bit of that with it in the studio,” then straight on to the plant the next minute, “Where’s me fucking records? I should have 10,000 records in there by now.”’
The Cocteau Twins’ ravished chamber music was a measure of Watts-Russell’s ability to create a private world, one with which 4AD remains synonymous. It was a world immersed in the musical language of reverb, female vocals and meditative song cycles and one to which Watts-Russell added his own project, This Mortal Coil.
‘I was upstairs at the Ritz at New York’, says Watts-Russell, ‘at a Modern English show. They come on for the encore and run two tracks together – “16 Days” into “Gathering Dust” – and I suggested they recorded a version of it. For some reason I thought I’d try and do it. To give this thing shape I asked Liz to sing it and asked Gordon Sharp to sing with her. It sounds like what it was, which was people who didn’t know what they were trying to do, but it had been recorded so it had to come out. I needed a B-side so I asked Liz to sing “Song to the Siren”. My intention was for it to be a cappella. I didn’t want to have any music at all. So the guitar that is on there is one take of Robin leaning against the studio wall bored out of his mind playing these chords.’
The depth and intensity of Fraser, Watts-Russell and Guthrie’s feelings for one another would be recorded in an almost unbearably beautiful context. Fraser’s reading of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’, part crofter’s lament, part three minutes of haunted eroticism and part one long echo drifting into a mist of tape hiss, is rightly regarded as one of the high watermarks of the 4AD catalogue. Its feeling of intimacy was a product of the hushed atmosphere in which it was recorded.
‘Liz threw us out of the studio,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and we went and sat at the garden at Blackwing and I couldn’t take it, so I crept in on the floor. She didn’t see me coming in – she was sitting on the floor right in the corner – the tape machine was on a loop and I sneaked in and heard her sing very quietly, exactly what was on the record, except quieter and I just jumped up and screamed in astonishment. She said, “Go! Get out!” And then she did it in one take.’
Guthrie in particular was keen not to get distracted by This Mortal Coil and was concentrating on the next Cocteau Twins album. ‘I invited Eno to meet them with a view to him producing Treasure. He turns up with this very quiet chap called Danny who sort of sat in the corner and Eno said, “I don’t think I should produce the Cocteau Twins because I don’t think I’d be as brave as you were on Head Over Heels, to use that size of reverb – it was extraordinarily brave, but if you want a good engineer why don’t you work with Danny?” Of course, Danny is Daniel Lanois, but by that time, Robin wasn’t going to work with anyone. He tolerated the idea of Brian Eno but it wasn’t going to work.’
Guthrie taking over the producer’s role in the Cocteau Twins also meant he began to assert himself over Watts-Russell and began to distance himself, and refused to play the customary promotional games – a move that they would all come to regret. ‘Before they moved to London they always stayed with me,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘We were very close, and I really agreed with them about not doing television with balloons, and it was probably a mistake. I think they came to resent me for what they perceived to be their lack of success, when they themselves had refused to do interviews or refused to release singles from albums. The love was that intense that when it dies it cuts to the core and to this day one of the biggest tragedies for me is that I told them to go when I did. Everybody was on the same page – the graphic designers, Vaughan and Nigel, weren’t interested in putting groups on the sleeve and the bands weren’t interested in putting themselves on the sleeves either. They were serious about their art, and so was I.’
4AD’s intricately constructed house style gave the impression of a salon in London full of like-minded bands with cockatoo hair, all exploring the mysteries of the voice and the effects pedal. The impression was strengthened by the fact This Mortal Coil was something of a house band made up of different members of 4AD acts all collaborating over Watts-Russell’s exquisitely selected cover material.
‘There is this idea or perception that people have of the label, that it was a happy family with its own in-house sleeve designers so everything looked the same – the same engineer, me, John, Brendan, Robin – we were exploring reverb, all of us, because we loved it. Very briefly, around ’85 for about six months, it was like that. Everybody helped each other. Robin would produce Dif Juz or whatever it was for nothing, Manuela would play with the Wolfgang Press – everybody was friends, and playing on each other’s records. Then, of course, years later Robin would go, “I produced that Dif Juz record for nothing! You ripped me off.”’
Whatever the outside world made of This Mortal Coil and 4AD’s air of a heady and aesthetic boudoir, the records were constructed in as workmanlike a manner as possible. Rather than arrange the musicians to play together, Watts-Russell made the records in near isolation, piecing them together part by part, layering the songs into completion. ‘Because of my lack of confidence,’ he says, ‘I never ever wanted there to be more than one musician in the studio if I could help it. From ’83 to ’91, until the photo session that was done for Blood, people who’d played on at least two of the albums had never met each other.’
Watts-Russell’s choice of material for the first This Mortal Coil album – Big Star, Gene Clark, Roy Harper – was drawn from the same pool of introverted experimental singer-songwriters that he had played to Nick Currie a few years earlier. If Postcard had playfully referenced the Sixties and Seventies, This Mortal Coil were paying solemn homage to them and taking the spirit of the original recordings and turning them into tone poems, refracted through the gauze of 4AD’s sound world.
‘I still don’t think This Mortal Coil improved on anything we covered apart from “Song to the Siren”. Gene Clark – the beauty of that man’s voice. I [exchanged] letters with Chris Bell’s brother and with Larry Beckett: getting correspondence and being in touch with these people who were involved meant so much to me. Their response and their kind words was fantastic.’
One band Watts-Russell had signed were testing his A& R skills: a trio featuring two brothers who would regularly fall out, Martin and Steve Young, and a vocalist Debbie Curran. Colourbox were not quite a dance floor act. Their mix of cutting-edge technology and heartfelt lyrics ensured their debut single ‘Breakdown’ was
not only a mysterious and soulful listen, but, with its electro keyboard stabs and Street Sounds rhythms, as far removed from the art-house menagerie of the label’s reputation as possible. While Colourbox certainly answered 4AD’s critics who thought the label one-dimensional, the band struggled to find an audience. ‘I really liked “Tarantula”, which was the B-side of their first single, “Breakdown”, and ended up covering it in This Mortal Coil – which rather proves the point,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘but we kind of felt it slipped through the cracks so we re-recorded it.’
They re-recorded both tracks, and in doing so Colourbox explored the emerging world of studio technology even further, extending and dubbing music as sleek and smart as any that was now influencing them heavily, New York first-wave electro.
‘We recorded “Breakdown” again,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’ll never forget watching all the cuts on the tape. At that point on trips to New York, hearing pirate radio and having mix tapes on the first Walkmans, you’d hear all this electro stuff, cut up and chopped to pieces, I mean brilliant stuff, then you’d go and buy the 12-inch, and it was all a load of nonsense because it was what they’d been doing live in the studio, but that cut-up process highly influenced Martin Young.’
The cut-and-splice sounds of Kiss FM, the endless loops of possibilities as beats were edited into a seamless flow and cut to vinyl as a white label for that week’s radio show or club date, made perfect sense in the sidewalk environs of what journalist Cynthia Rose called ‘beatbox business sense’. For Colourbox, their releases framed in some of Oliver’s most vibrant and ultramodern artwork, being tied to the 4AD release schedule ensured the sense of stasis around the band was hard to break.
‘We released a mini LP of material that had been dubbed up by Paul Groucho Smykle, who was a house engineer at Island who was doing all the Black Uhuru stuff and Sly and Robbie stuff,’ remembers Watts-Russell. ‘At the time it felt like Martin was never going to do anything again, and he never really did.’
The self-titled Colourbox, or Horses Fucking as it became known from its artwork, was as fresh and euphoric in its use of sampling as anything else released in 1983 and sounded more like a release on Island’s electro imprint Fourth & Broadway than anything on 4AD. A new vocalist, Lorita Grahame, had brought rawness to their sound on their debut full-length album The Moon Is Blue. Veering from futuristic lover’s rock to dubbed torch songs and making full use of cut-ups from B-movie dialogues, Colourbox’s genre-hopping only managed to confuse most listeners. ‘That was a bit of a messy collection,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘The album came out in 1985 and because we’d effectively released three singles from it I encouraged them to do more, which is why it became a double – which they began to resent me for, but, you know, we weren’t selling any records.’
If 4AD were struggling to connect Colourbox with an audience in the UK, the band’s futuristic – if erratic – series of releases was not going unnoticed at other record companies. ‘I was in New York and this bloke kept talking to me about Bauhaus,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and turned to me and said, “Tour over? I tell you what you should do. You should stick around and listen to American radio for a couple of weeks.” He thought I was Kevin Haskins from Bauhaus! But that didn’t stop him from paging me at the airport to tell us he wanted to sign Colourbox to A&M and, stupidly, I did.’
The move was disastrous. Watts-Russell signed the band over to Arista, an A&M subsidiary, and once again found himself at the mercy of the whims of American executives with no real understanding of the product they had now been asked to market. ‘I just thought, oh shit,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s changed.’
For the first time, Watts-Russell was also being courted by the mainstream industry in Britain. ‘Paul Russell, who was the face of CBS, invited us, as in Colourbox, over,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘then I got called over again on my own and had a very private lunch in the bowels of CBS Soho Square, which was Paul Russell doing a number on me. He was trying to sign them through us. I called up Colourbox and said, “If you want to do it, you are free to go but I cannot work with these people.” I rang up Paul Russell and he said, “You tell them, when their kids are old enough to go to school and they have to end up going to Brixton comprehensive or something, and they still need a little bit of help, you tell them to give me a ring then.” It just confirmed that I didn’t want to work with the record industry.’
If Watts-Russell had had his worst fears about the record industry confirmed by being wined and dined by CBS, fate held an enormous and unsettling surprise for him around the corner. Colourbox’s digital and sampling skills would be put to use on another 12-inch single that would turn 4AD, its distribution company Rough Trade and the world of ‘beatbox business sense’ on its head.
* Photomechanical transfer (PMT) was a method of preparing artwork using a camera, now obsolete, but no doubt worthy of a revival.
5 Oblivious
Set list from the Go Betweens concert at the Boston Club, London, 12 August 1985 (Cerne Canning archive)
‘I remember Paul Conway coming round, the person who actually drove Stiff,’ says Richard Scott, ‘asking us to stop putting out some new record of theirs, because it meant that they didn’t have time to actually establish an act, and work the media. I mean, that was the whole point.’
By 1982 Rough Trade had developed at breakneck speed to the point where it was now operating in parallel to the established industry and in its own nimble way moving much more quickly. Among any advances it was making as an alternative infrastructure, it was also developing a reputation as a talking shop. The lasting impression was of an environment run by worker committee with a communal kitchen and a cleaning rota.
‘We sat and talked a lot about what to put out and how to put it out,’ says Scott, ‘and how to organise people to clean the place and all that kind of stuff. In the Kensington Park days, at the most there were only ever about ten people working there. Upstairs all kinds of really weird things used to go on, but it was just pressure, pressure, and it was great fun.’
In this atmosphere of knocked-together shelves, hastily typed stock lists and overflowing ashtrays, an ever-increasing quantity of records was being sold and shipped around the country. Travis, who has been perhaps unfairly characterised as a corduroy hippie owing to the position Rough Trade took in its early years, concedes the company’s beginnings were of their time, when the radical politics of the Seventies was being absorbed into the mainstream, informing the records, delivery methods and payment percentages that Rough Trade was creating.
‘Certainly at the beginning there was more of an ideology,’ says Travis. ‘It was more like we’re a collective getting the same wages. I’m not the boss, that’s your area, that’s my area, it wasn’t like I was walking around telling them what to do, it really wasn’t like that. It was great: those were the good times at Rough Trade, really those first few years, and having Factory, Tony and Rob, John Loder at Southern and Daniel, all that wonderful explosion. There wasn’t a hierarchy or politics other than, “You can be Skrewdriver but we’re not distributing your records – someone else can support you but not us, these are our reasons, take it or leave it – we don’t care.”’
Although operating under the auspices of a collective, and certainly perceived as one by the outside world, Rough Trade was in fact a partnership with Travis as the senior stakeholder, an arrangement that would be of significant consequence through the ups and downs of Rough Trade’s lifetime.
In the wider culture of the times, ideas like co-operatives and self-critiquing organisations like Rough Trade that promoted feminism and vegetarianism and were anti-apartheid were encouraging behaviour that would get criticised as PC during the ascendency of the New Right and the New Lad backlash of the mid-Nineties. Rough Trade and its perceived ethos crystallised at a moment when the Left, enthused by movements like Rock Against Racism, held great sway over the emerging DIY and alternative cultures.
Richard Thomas, a Welshman with an owl-li
ke countenance that would earn him the nickname ‘the Druid’, was a student at North London Polytechnic dipping his toe into concert promotion. ‘I started in 1980 when I was at the North London Poly,’ he says. ‘They still had these things called social secretaries: if you were in the right political party [and] had lots of friends, you’d be elected into a job which you had no experience of whatsoever. I had an 800-capacity hall to pledge. Every other thing that they had ever done had been a disaster, because if you get 800 students wanting to go to one show, then probably that act is capable of pulling 15,000 people. So I just came up with the idea of aiming at a student-type audience.’
The student-type audience was coalescing around the music press, particularly the NME which was taking a deliberately Leftist stance. With regular features on the Socialist Workers Party and interviews with left-wing politicians featuring alongside ads for the Greater London Council’s Christmas concerts for the unemployed, the weekly had firmly aligned itself to an anti-Tory narrative. Nearly all gig promoters differentiated between waged and unwaged in their pricing structure, in full realisation that in an era of widespread youth unemployment most of its audience would be jobless. The term ‘trendy lefty’ just about summed up this marriage of hip(ish) cultural awareness and centre-left(ish) politics. It would reach its apogee in Neville Brody’s rebranding of New Socialist magazine in 1986 and during the 1987 election, when Red Wedge, a collective of left-leaning musicians, toured in overt support for Labour. In the early Eighties this emerging sense of the Left being on the side of street culture was disseminated through concerts against apartheid and benefits for Nicaragua and Afghanistan; and as Thomas discovered, there was a market for the music associated, however vaguely, with the prevailing ideas of protest and counter-culture of the time.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 12