Upon its release ‘Pump Up the Volume’ instantly connected; as a white label it caught fire in the clubs and began picking up plays on daytime radio. Demand was growing to the point where 4AD, whether it wanted to or not, was poised to have its first hit single.
The events that followed took a drastic turn as Watts-Russell received an injunction to cease production of the record. The production team of Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) had detected a snippet of their track ‘Roadblock’ on ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and, taking their cue from small, streetwise dance labels in America, issued 4AD with a writ.
If he had disliked its methods before, Watts-Russell was now in four-square confrontation with the music industry, with a date in the law courts in the diary to remind him. To make matters worse, away from 4AD, his personal life was adding to the pressure.
‘In the middle of [me] being sued, my cat died and my dad died,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I remember being in the car with Deborah talking to me and just screaming at her telling her to shut up. I thought I was going to lose it, because she was talking and I couldn’t hear what she was saying.’
The one bright spot on the horizon was Simon Harper, 4AD’s label manager at Rough Trade who faced the challenge of negotiating ‘Pump Up the Volume’s uneasy chart life alongside Watts-Russell and provided invaluable support. ‘Simon was on the other end of the phone at Rough Trade going, “We’ve got to get more of these”, because it was flying. We had more injunctions arriving in but we were talking on the phone every day about stock levels. It was a great example of, just, a record taking off – there’s nothing you can do at that stage to stop it or try and make it more successful, it’s just got its own natural momentum and that was absolutely the case with “Pump Up the Volume”. It suddenly just exploded.’
‘Pump Up the Volume’ became a test case in the legality of sampling, a hitherto unknown aspect of music production as far as the entertainment laws were concerned. The single represented one of the first times the jurisdiction of using or ‘stealing’ another piece of work – via its having been sampled – would pass through the courts. What made ‘Pump Up the Volume’/4AD vs Stock, Aitken and Waterman even more labyrinthine and opaque was the fact that the piece of music Stock Aitken Waterman were claiming ownership of had already been taken from another source.
‘The thing SAW were trying to sue us for sampling was something they’d sampled!’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I had to go to cloisters up in the city to sit with wigged people. “Eugh Heullo!” reading a quote from Martin Young in Smash Hits saying something like, “We bunged ‘Roadblock’ all over it, they’d taken a bit of this track.” The judge looked down his nose over half-moon glasses going, “BUUNGED WOOOADBLOCK all over it!” To this day I believe in saying, if the experts are telling you for certain it’s one thing, for certain it’s not guaranteed. We’d sat with a musicologist we’d hired who confirmed that it wasn’t an infringement of a copyright and then two days later we had to go back and listen to their musicologist outline their version. So I was, “For fuck’s sake, we don’t need this. We’re settling.” We gave [£]25,000 to charity and that was the settlement.’
SAW, a very different company from 4AD but an independent label nonetheless, had shown their street smarts in knowing when to try their luck in the courts. 4AD had got off lightly: ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was almost nothing but uncredited samples.
‘We should have been sued to fuck by everybody,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was a brilliant record. Eric B and Rakim, who were sampled heavily, thought it was fine. We licensed it to Fourth and Broadway in the USA as they had a lot of the material that we’d sampled and could provide new ones. So it was a completely different version that came out in the USA, with all new samples that we got clearance for. We didn’t get one fucking sample clearance for the original one, that’s how maverick it was. This was done all the time on pirate radio in New York but no one had dared put it on the thing you actually paid money for. This was all pre-De La Soul. It was hair-raising stuff.’
While Watts-Russell’s energies had been taken up with the case, Rough Trade had had to cancel the record from its release schedule or be in contempt of court.
‘Pump Up the Volume’ had caught like wildfire then had to be withdrawn from the market place. The result was that once ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was cleared for release once more, such was the pent-up demand, the single became 4AD and Rough Trade’s first no. 1. ‘M/A/R/R/S sold, whatever, a million records,’ says Watts-Russell, who still single-handedly oversaw 4AD’s production schedule, ‘more than any records I’d ever physically handled – and we didn’t have any overstocks. Whilst I was doing production we never had any overstocks on sleeves never mind finished product.’
At Rough Trade Richard Scott was keen to mark the occasion of Distribution and The Cartel’s first ever no. 1; taciturn to the last, he also recognised that ‘Pump Up the Volume’ had opened a can of worms for both companies. ‘It was our first no. 1,’ he says, ‘and it was more or less suicide for 4AD. We’d arranged some party in Alma Road in the pub next to their offices there. I phoned the landlord, asking how big a bottle of champagne we could buy, and he was a bit non-plussed, so I phoned Harrods and we got this enormous bottle and we couldn’t get the cork out. In the end we had to cut the top off and push the rest of it in.’
Watts-Russell’s shyness was exacerbated by the stress of the ‘Pump Up the Volume’ debacle but he managed to drag himself across the road to the Alma pub where he stood in the corner, all but absent from his own feast, staring at his shoes as the staff of Rough Trade endeavoured to toast their mutual success.
‘They all came over from the Rough Trade warehouse and someone opened this champagne bottle, this tall, big, black thing, and they must have thought I was a right tosser. I was in the middle of being sued so I went over there for five minutes. I can’t speak in front of more than about three people so I’m sure I didn’t say thanks to anyone and I certainly didn’t drink any champagne.’
In the building next door, Martin Mills had kept a watchful eye on 4AD’s unexpected and unhappy brush with the top of the charts, acting as a counsel and confidant for Watts-Russell who, he had noticed, was under considerable strain. “Pump Up the Volume” being a no. 1 independent record through Rough Trade/Cartel felt different,’ he says, ‘and it was such an explosive no. 1, as well, accompanied by a writ. It was deeply stressful for lots of different reasons: firstly, 4AD was doing something it hadn’t ever really intended to do, which was have a no. 1 single; secondly, there was the Pete Waterman writ, and thirdly there was what turned into being the fighting between the component parts of M/A/R/R/S about money. All of which led, I think, to Ivo’s eventual disillusionment with the music business. In the meantime he was getting wined and dined by majors.’
‘Martin was a rock through all of it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I was seriously losing the plot by then and being courted by the music industry.’
‘Ivo probably only had about two dinners,’ says Mills. ‘I’m surprised he had any, but he hated them as much as he was always going to hate them.’
Watts-Russell had had a bitter experience. Blanching at the idea he was anti-success – an accusation that the majors regularly aimed at the independents – he had wanted his bands and his label to thrive, but on his and their own terms. ‘I always said that if a record existed, then that was a success,’ he says, ‘but everything had changed.’
As far as Watts-Russell was concerned, the terms on which 4AD had reached no. 1 had been undignified and sordid: having to deal with judges in order to release a record, even if it reached the top of the charts, was not remotely worth the time, effort and distraction. The substantial income 4AD generated from the single felt like blood money.
‘I think that first taste of success, and everything that brings to the table, be it business affairs, bullshit, the accounting issues, for anyone to get their head round that is a major pain in the arse,’ says Simon Harper, ‘and it absolutely lef
t a bad taste in Ivo’s mouth. I know it did.’
*
‘I see a turning point in 1987 with the release of M/A/R/R/S,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and hot on the heels of that, the Pixies going mental.’
In 1986 Watts-Russell had signed his first American band, Throwing Muses, a quartet of teenagers from Rhode Island, and with them came Watts-Russell’s first taste of having to work with an American manger, Ken Goes, who handed him a demo by a Boston band called Pixies which became known apocryphally as The Purple Tape. Watts-Russell immersed himself in the Pixies, playing the cassette on his Walkman while wandering around New York and wavering between signing the Pixies and rejecting them for being slightly antithetical to the 4AD ethos. He was nevertheless playing the tape relentlessly, as was Deborah Edgely back in London.
‘I was sort of thinking that 4AD was becoming a label that was abstract’, say Watts-Russell. ‘Also, having worked with Throwing Muses and their less than ideal manager, Ken, and the fact that he’d be doing these Pixies … Then Deborah said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid, sign them.” I called Charles [Black Francis] up and he said, “Come on, Pilgrim – Billie Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse 5 – let’s put it out, and I want it to be called Come on Pilgrim.’
Come on Pilgrim comprised tracks taken from The Purple Tape and was released to imminent acclaim in the UK in 1987, in the slipstream of Throwing Muses whose debut, a tightly woven set of shifting time signatures and the hallucinatory domesticity of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly’s lyrics, had garnered large amounts of critical praise.
‘England took Throwing Muses to their hearts – that first album got incredible press,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘They re-recorded the demos and we signed them for one album. Kristin was full-on pregnant recording the LP with what became Dylan. She was seventeen, and bipolar and a cutter, and a gorgeous person and so smart, scary smart. They were all such gorgeous people.’
Seymour Stein, seeing the reaction to Throwing Muses, signed the band for the world outside the UK and a Throwing Muses tour had been booked with the Pixies as support. As the reaction to Come On Pilgrim began to take hold, the running order was quickly reconfigured and the Pixies became headliners. While monitoring the success of the Pixies in Europe, Watts-Russell became aware that Throwing Muses, now with Sire and Warners in Europe, were losing ground.
‘Throwing Muses and Pixies did the Town & Country and then went off to Europe, and the billing by that point was switched,’ say Watts-Russell. ‘The Pixies were on 4AD – this tiny UK label – going absolutely mental with their first-ever record. Throwing Muses were turning up at Warners somewhere in the mainland and the people at Warners were enquiring when their singer was going to arrive. I just got on the phone to Seymour saying, “Come on, you’ve got to sort this out and do something for this fucking band.”’
Once the tour was completed, the Pixies were ready to record their second album. An idea from Colin Wallace prompted Watts-Russell to call Paul Smith at Blast First and ask for Steve Albini’s number. ‘Wallace came up from the warehouse saying, “I think I know who should do the Pixies: Albini.”’
Throwing Muses and Pixies came out of a different milieu from the Blast First bands. Spared the rigours of the SST punk circuit and licensed early in their careers via 4AD to major affiliated labels in the States, both Pixies and Throwing Muses were perceived in their homeland as in the collegiate REM mould and would start to develop a medium-grade momentum on the CMJ college radio networks. In the UK they were the next logical, more accessible, generation of visiting Americans with guitars.
Wallace’s idea of pairing a band as direct and melodic as the Pixies with Albini, a producer who could emphasise the band’s dynamic shifts and bring out the rawness of their sound while doing so, was inspired. Wallace was part of the wider scene around Paul Smith and Richard Thomas that congregated long into the night in Thomas’s Kings Cross flat,* as various epicureans like Shane MacGowan and Nick Kent told ever taller stories of lives spent in rock ’n’ roll. Wallace had been a regular at Blast First gigs. ‘British indie music sort of went Wedding Present and all that,’ says Wallace, ‘and it wasn’t very interesting. I became quite friendly with Paul Smith. Me and the Cocteau Twins went to see the Butthole Surfers at ULU. The film they had showing behind them was of a castration and Elizabeth threw up – she had to leave.’
In the meantime, Watts-Russell had no time for any kind of social life. His post-‘Pump Up the Volume’ disillusion with the industry was starting to harden on the back of the Pixies’ success. Throwing Muses’ and the Pixies’ manager, Ken Goes, came from the American tradition of litigation and full exploitation of rights, a world that was both foreign and repellent to Watts-Russell, who was now having to spend more and more time renegotiating and arguing over clauses in the Pixies’ contract.
‘Ken Goes later refused to fly,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘but this was early on and he’d taken so much medication that he could fly over to England with the Muses and Pixies. But he got in a bad mood at the airport because Kim in particular refused to sign his management contract before she’d had someone look at it. Deborah had gone to meet them, and Ken gets off the plane completely valiumed out, and Deborah asks, “Where are the bands?” and Ken goes, “I don’t know, back there somewhere.” That was indicative of the calibre of management that we had to deal with.’
The success of the Pixies and the fact that 4AD had the band for the world meant that the transatlantic way of doing business was a permanent feature in Watts-Russell’s life whether he liked it or not. It was another indication that merely added to his sense that the more successful the label became, the less grasp he had on the company he had so carefully nurtured.
‘I love Ken, but he was a nightmare,’ says Wallace. ‘This is a massive generalisation, but American managers are quite brutal really, and very money-orientated and that’s probably what did Ivo’s head in.’
As Watts-Russell’s nerves were becoming more frayed, so his temper would start to make itself known in the office, an environment where he was feeling increasingly claustrophobic. A consummate A&R man who was happiest in the studio or going through the finer details of the production schedule, Watts-Russell had no interest in managing the office. ‘When there were more people working there,’ he says, ‘I would really resent people making me behave like a schoolmaster or an employer.’
‘Ivo was under a hell of a lot of pressure at the time,’ says Wallace. ‘The Pixies’ rise was meteoric, and it wasn’t just in the UK. It didn’t touch America really, but everywhere else, if you’d seen how many records we were selling – it was almost out of control.’
Still on the receiving end of Watts-Russell’s more incendiary outbursts, Vaughan Oliver was producing sleeves for the American bands with his customary witty juxtapositions. The artwork for the Pixies’ debut single ‘Gigantic’ was a photograph of a baby screaming, an image that had struck Oliver when he saw Black Francis singing on stage. ‘That was seeing Charles for the first time,’ he says, ‘the bald head, the rotund figure, the primal scream.’ Simon Harper, whom Watts-Russell had recruited in an attempt to let someone manage the office as well as keep up with the label’s developments overseas, witnessed the relationship between Watts-Russell and Oliver boil over regularly. ‘Vaughan is obviously extremely charismatic, a very funny and kind-hearted man in many ways,’ says Harper, ‘but he does get a little thirsty and he and Ivo had a very very fiery relationship often, which was no surprise, frankly.’
Oliver too was feeling the heat from having to work with a new layer of control. Having been given the freedom of an in-house designer that had developed a distinct and remarkable house style, he was now having to tailor his ideas to Goes’s interpretation of what might work in the market. ‘The beautiful thing when we started was that the bands never had managers,’ Oliver says. ‘That was crucial in terms of the creativity that came out of the graphic side of it. There’s no manager and upstairs, there’s no marketing person, there’
s only Ivo. And Ivo would say at times, “I don’t know what you’re doing, man,” and he’d have the grace … six months … maybe four years … later to say, “Fantastic,” so he had confidence to let go. There was nobody else putting their oar in. It was great.’
Many of the staff at 4AD were becoming reliant on something other than their work ethic and the buzz of success to get through the day. Following the Top Ten crossover of ‘Pump Up the Volume’, the company had reached a new echelon of music industry approval – it had its own drug dealer. ‘We were all doing too many drugs, me included,’ says Wallace. ‘Vaughan’s dark room’s probably still got fucking razor marks on it, we were doing it all the time.’
‘My dark room was a focal point for that,’ says Oliver. ‘Everyone was doing lines of coke off the top of my PMT machine. Those were hedonistic days all round.’
The label’s sales were surpassing anything Watts-Russell had expected: the Pixies’ follow-up to Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, entered the national charts at no. 8; the momentum behind the band was vastly different to anything he had experienced with the Cocteau Twins, and unlike the success of M/A/R/R/S it was with an act that he had signed long-term for the world. Despite the interventions of Goes, the band and label also enjoyed a healthy, mutually respectful, working relationship.
‘I’ve never experienced that level of critical and commercial success [we had] with the Pixies anywhere else,’ says Harper. ‘You’re always wondering when the backlash is going to start, and with the Pixies that backlash was a long time coming. It was pretty effortless in some ways.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 30