Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Ivo began work on a second This Mortal Coil album shortly thereafter. Eventually titled Filigree & Shadow (from the song by 60s band Fever Tree), it was again produced alongside John Fryer, who would become synonymous with the label through the mid and late 80s after earlier work with Mute artists including Depeche Mode and Yazoo. On this occasion Watts-Russell again used 4AD musicians, including Simon Raymonde and members of Dif Juz, Dead Can Dance, Colourbox and The Wolfgang Press, on a double album of songs featuring a number of cover versions; Buckley again, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Gene Clark, Van Morrison, Talking Heads, Judy Collins. The vocalists were mainly drawn from outside the 4AD inner circle, and included Rutkowski sisters Deirdre and Louise and Breathless vocalist Dominic Appleton. Ivo’s core influence, again though, remained the classic west coast songwriting of the 60s. “This Mortal Coil would often be referred to as a 4AD house band,” notes Watts-Russell. “Yes, the first record did have people who were close to hand, and most of them were connected or on 4AD to a certain extent, but I consciously moved away from that. There were less people on Filigree and Shadow, and by the time it came to Blood, there was no-one on there from 4AD – even Heidi Berry wasn’t on 4AD at the time.”

  This Mortal Coil’s spirit of shared adventure and collaboration was very much key to 4AD in the 80s. There were numerous collaborations. Elizabeth Fraser would work with The Wolfgang Press (on Standing Up Straight), for example, a band which featured former members of Mass and Rema Rema. Robin Guthrie would produce the same band. “It was a natural consequence,” notes Watts-Russell of these overlapping projects. “The engineering part would be engineering them towards Vaughan in terms of Vaughan and Nigel doing their sleeves, or saying we’ve got a really good relationship with Blackwing, or later Palladium and prior to that Spaceward. No, once people were ‘in the door’ of 4AD they would meet each other and be interested in each other’s music.”

  This also prompted healthy competition, with some amusing results. “I would personally put my hand up and say really, the master of all this was Trevor Horn,” he notes. “His ability, as a producer, to present complex treatments and reverbs, conflicting treatments of drums or whatever, but still to have the clarity and power there, was absolute genius. Brendan and Robin and John Fryer and Martyn Young would never entertain the idea it was Trevor Horn as much as it was Martin Hannett or whatever who inspired it. But I think there was something of a reverb war going on with my approach with This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins with Head Over Heels and Dead Can Dance with Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun. The first time I ever met Brian Eno, I was quaking in my boots, I invited him to meet Robin and Liz with a view to producing their next record, which would have been Treasure. Brian Eno came to my flat in Acton with this other guy who didn’t say much, just sat on the floor. Brian said, ‘I don’t know what I can bring to your next record, because you had far more courage in the making of Head Over Heels, when it comes to reverb, than I would ever have done. You just took it so far, it’s fantastic.’ He was almost in awe of what they’d done. But then he pointed to the little chap in the corner and said, ‘But you might want to work with him, he’s an engineer.’ That was Daniel Lanois.”

  The Cocteau Twins’ experimental instincts took hold in 1986 in the form of the acoustic Victorialand. Shorn of Raymonde’s bass, the frequency necessitated that the album be released as a 45rpm 12-inch. A subsequent collaboration with jazz pianist Harold Budd led to an album, The Moon And The Melodies, released under the billing Budd-Fraser-Guthrie-Raymonde – a seemingly natural exchange in which Budd lends ambient texture to the familiar but still radiant Cocteaus’ song cycles.

  That same year Watts-Russell was played an unlabelled tape by Peter Murphy while working on his solo album Should The World Fail To Fall Apart, his first non-4AD production. He determinedly tracked the source down, thrown by the purity and swell of these ostensibly choral sessions. The recordings were duly licensed from field recordist Marcel Cellier and released on 4AD as Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares. Somehow, the recording fitted perfectly with the label’s ethos and identity – an emerging element of which was that of the primacy of the voice, often solely as an instrument rather than lyrical medium. “Still to this day,” Watts-Russell reflects, “Tim Buckley is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard in my life, his voice and what he did with it. Somehow, with Elizabeth and Lisa Gerrard and Gordon Sharp of Cindytalk and the Bulgarian Choir, my God, I was working with, for me, the most beautiful, stunning voices on the planet.” 4AD consumers were almost wholly trusting in their embrace of such unlikely detours, growing their tastes alongside the label’s founder. On a less high-brow note, Colourbox’s ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ had a good run for selection as the year’s World Cup theme.

  That image and identity shifted again when Watts-Russell first heard a demo tape of a Rhode Island quartet led by step-sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly. Throwing Muses were the label’s first American signing, and Hersh narrated a fascinating story about Ivo’s initial reluctance to sign them to Gareth Grundy: “Ivo, who is the only record executive I’ve ever heard of who actually listens to demos – and still does – called us.” Initially, Hersh had to work out which of bass player Lesley Langston’s boyfriends this might be, and what lie she therefore had to tell. “He said he liked the demo, but he didn’t sign American bands. I’m like, ‘yeah, well, whatever. Bye, Ivo.’ Then he called back a few weeks later and said, ‘It’s still a good demo, but I still don’t sign American bands.’ I was like, ‘Who is this weirdo?’ So finally he called again and said, ‘OK, I’ll sign an American band, but JUST for one record.”

  “I read about those phone conversations,” says Watts-Russell. “I have no recollection of them! My recollection is only of talking to their manager Ken Goes. Certainly my first response was to Ken. But what she describes, yes, that had been the pattern for quite a few years. I still, to this day, enjoy, if I can, expressing to someone how much pleasure their creativity gives me. 99.9% of everything I ever signed was from demo tapes. People always told me that was highly unusual. In 1986 I was at the New Music Seminar in New York. There was a hurricane coming in. I was staring out of my window looking down on the Marriott Hotel, thinking I would, actually, be prepared to sacrifice myself, because the hurricane would take out about 80% of the English and American music industry – which wouldn’t have been a bad thing, even in 1986. I remember some arsehole at the opening ceremony addressing Joe Public, the people who had spent $150 signing up to this thing, where they might have the chance of meeting the world’s music industry under one roof. The keynote speaker said, ‘Don’t be so tasteless or tacky as to hand out demo tapes to A&R people.’ Why else would they want to be at this thing? I can’t believe that people don’t accept unsolicited demo tapes. If I got a tape from somebody and if I liked it, I would call them and say so. I would say I liked your tape, but I’m not looking to sign anyone. I wasn’t really looking to sign too many things, I actually liked working with a smaller group of artists.”

  “It was a similar thing with answering the phone,” he continues. “There were lines flashing that were specifically for 4AD, and I thought anyone, including myself, should pick up, rather than waiting for it to go through reception. People would be very surprised to have me saying ‘Hello, 4AD.’ But that’s part of the enjoyment, and being hands on and being aware of every stage and every aspect was absolutely critical to independent labels at that point of time. That’s why the whole thing was required and generated in the first place, because the industry had become bland and complacent and arrogant. I’m no socialist, but to an extent it was doing it for the people, and doing it an alternative way to the way that was owned by half a dozen companies.”

  4AD’s biggest, and most debilitating success, came about when AR Kane, the duo of Alex Ayuli and Rudi Tambala, gravitated to the label from One Little Indian. In the process of completing their ‘Lolita’ EP, produced by Robin Guthrie, they considered a collabor
ation with Adrian Sherwood. Watts-Russell suggested Colourbox instead. ‘Pump Up The Volume’, credited to M/A/R/R/S (an acronym devised using the first names of the participants), was the result. Despite legal action by the Stock, Aitken & Waterman production team, the single went to number one. It had initially been circulated around clubs as a blank, white label 12-inch (the 7-inch version was edited down and featured a number of new samples). In the process, it became a milestone in the development of both house culture and sampling. There had been precedents, notably by Coldcut, but this was Britain’s first domestic house music hit of major size. It also became one of the strangest stories in the history of popular music – few artists have ever reached such dizzying heights without ever issuing a follow-up, as divisions between the artists emerged. Colourbox did attempt to carry the name M/A/R/R/S forward, but backtracked when A R Kane demanded £100,000 for permission to do so.

  “It was a frustrating project,” states Mills. “Well, it was a mixed-emotion project. Because not only did you have the two components of M/A/R/R/S not getting on well together – the Colourbox camp and the AR Kane camp. We had a lawsuit going on with Pete Waterman about his sample. And, in fact, it destroyed Ivo’s enthusiasm for being involved in the business of music. The disagreements that ensued from the success of that record just drove him out. And it was a shame. It was a classic example of ‘where there’s a hit, there’s a writ’. But it was a complex record legally in most ways, apart from the fact that 4AD owned the rights to the recording. But it was a groundbreaking record. I think it was the first Cartel-distributed number one single. And their first number one album had been the Yaz album [You And Me Both], so it kind of validated the reach of independent distribution in the UK as being competitive with the majors, which was really important I think, in retrospect.”

  Is Mills right to characterise this moment as the time when Watts-Russell’s interest in the music business took a sharp downturn? “(LAUGHS) He’s spot on! Up until that point, metaphorically speaking, just like in the cowboy movies, I was the guy in the white hat. I was the good guy. I worked really fucking hard, I was really fair, I loved music and was supportive of it, and people seemed to like me because of that. God, how insecure can you get! But because of the falling out over the M/A/R/R/S record, friends, people I’d known for quite some time, whenever money is involved – God, the rulebook is out of the window! Yeah, absolutely falling out. All I tried to do was remain unmoved. I just stuck with the original idea. The original idea was that AR Kane had come to 4AD from One Little Indian and wanted to make a record. They’d liked Derek [Birkett], but Derek’s idea was that they maybe work with Adrian Sherwood. But Derek wasn’t committing to anything with them. So they came to me. I said, ‘Everyone works with Adrian Sherwood. Why not work with Martyn Young? He’s better.’ That was the seed of the idea.”

  In the end, however, producer John Fryer couldn’t get the two parties to gel in the studio and both recorded tracks ostensibly separately. “The reality is that ‘Pump Up The Volume’ had that errrrrr-eerrrrrr bit [a guitar overdub], that was AR Kane,” notes Watts-Russell. “And the only thing that was Colourbox on ‘Anitina’ was the drum programming by Stephen Young. So they were two very split sides. But at the time it seemed like we’d never, ever get Martyn back in the studio. He’d dried up. Colourbox kind of realised this was going to be quite successful, and they wanted to get rid of ‘Anitina’ on the b-side, because they didn’t see why they should give up any money to these people. My attitude was, that’s really unfair having agreed to do this. If it hadn’t been AR Kane being the catalyst for the project, this thing wouldn’t have happened anyway. So no, we’re going to stick to it. In hindsight, I wish I had sided with Colourbox. We might never have got a b-side, but the whole experience would have been less traumatic. It was a bad year. My father died, my cat died. We got sued by those awful people!” He is referring, of course, to Pete Waterman’s lawsuit. “I remember sitting with a barrister in cloisters discussing this case. (ADOPTS POSH VOICE): ‘In Smash Hits, Martyn claims ‘we bunjed’ ‘Roadblock’ all over it. What does he mean, ‘bunjed’?’ ‘Bunged, your honour, we bunged ‘Roadblock’ all over it!’ Martyn, the idiot, had admitted it in print.”

  The sample as such was merely seven seconds of an anonymous voice saying ‘hey!’ and could never have been considered plagiarism in the standard literary sense. Others pointed out that at the same time Waterman was claiming ‘wholesale theft’, his artist Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, locked in competition with ‘Pump Up The Volume’ at the top of the charts, employed the bass line from Colonel Abrams’ hit ‘Trapped’. “It was all too much,” sighs Watts-Russell. “The record was flying. I never had it in stock. I literally touched every box that came through our building, because I could never keep it in there – it always had to go directly to other places to be distributed. It was just flying out and somehow, after an injunction and losing the ‘important’ weekend sales, it still got to number one the following week. That was the closest I got then, from just work alone, to having a nervous breakdown. It was horrible. I never allowed myself to get as close to the artists I worked with ever again.”

  Didn’t that strip away some of the joy of running the label? “Yes. Equally at that time Robin Guthrie was being – not himself. And being incredibly rude and critical, and plain outright nasty, especially to Deborah. It took a couple of more years before it got directed at me. But you started that game of treading on eggshells around Robin because you didn’t want to upset him. I remember being out with the Pixies somewhere, and someone pointing out that Robin and Charles [aka Black Francis] were in a corner – OH NO! Robin’s going to poison Charles against us! Whether he did or didn’t I don’t know.”

  Some would have taken a number one single as validation. “I don’t need a chart position to tell me that the record is good or beautiful,” Watts-Russell counters, “and that we should have put it out – almost the opposite. I’m really proud we had the first Rough Trade distributed number one single ever, great. What was interesting was that the people in the office came alive, their eyes were sparkling from this success. [It meant something] to their contemporaries and peers at other labels and the press, and people they hung out with. It sounds naive, but it was an eye-opener to me. Everyone had been wonderfully supportive of my music taste or direction or ideas, but it was interesting to see that there was something else that would make them feel even happier. And that was the start of chart position expectation with every fucking release.”

  In what might have been taken as a portent, or perhaps metaphor, for the trouble that success would bring, Richard Scott at Rough Trade remembers the celebrations for that first number one single. “We had a party in the pub next to 4AD,” he recalls. “We’d ordered the biggest bottle of champagne we could find – from Harrods in the end, I think. It was three or four feet high. But we couldn’t get it open! We had to attack it with a Swiss army knife to get the cork out.”

  Throwing Muses’ debut album, meanwhile, produced by Gil Norton of Ocean Rain fame, was immediately critically revered. “Chris Bigg, the first sleeve he got to do alone with 4AD, without Vaughan, was the Throwing Muses record,” says Watts-Russell. “I can’t remember if there were five or seven special colours [beyond the conventional Pantone matching range], and everyone was a ‘special’ colour on that sleeve. If you get one ‘special colour’ on a sleeve, it would be more than a major label would pay, going for five would be extraordinary.” In the end, in a rare act of fiscal prudence, the outlandish design was ditched. But it had little effect on the record’s reception. “When the first Throwing Muses album came out, it was received really well. They were brilliant. That original four-piece – some of the best times I’ve had in my life in a live music situation. Just simply to watch Leslie Langston, and to watch Dave Narcizo, not taking away from Kristin and Tanya, but Leslie and David were quite extraordinary considering their years. So there was a hell of a lot of interest. Dear old
Seymour Stein from Sire came along. I signed them for that one album, and for the world I felt, how on earth can I represent, long-term and internationally, a band that isn’t even in the same country as we were? I didn’t think that was right for them. So Seymour signed the band worldwide excluding the UK. And that led to my visit to America to meet Ken (Goes) and the group themselves to persuade them not to sign with Sire for the rest of the world – sign with Sire for America, that would make sense. But not for the rest of the world. Warner Brothers [Sire’s owners], a group like that, was going to be a disaster. So I pleaded with them not to do it. And that visit was when I was handed a Pixies tape.”

  Though initially sceptical about whether or not the Pixies’ punk-derived ferocity would sit well with the roster he’d built up, after playing their demos several times on a Walkman in New York, he was persuaded to sign them by the enthusiasm of Deborah Edgely. His initial reluctance came because he thought it might be ‘too rock ‘n’ roll’. “That is true,” he admits. “Quite a lot of my experiences of listening to the Pixies ended up for one reason or another being on a Walkman. I remember being in New York, striding around – not my favourite place on the planet – listening to that infamous purple tape, and having a thoroughly good time with it. This was 1987. And at that point in time I think I really felt that 4AD could be something that was really nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll any more. I really liked Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance – things that were vocal-based and non-quantifiable apart from, maybe, the 4AD adjective itself. Otherworldly voices singing in non-language, or at least non-English, combined with an infatuation with reverb that we all had. Yeah, that generated one thing, which I still find very attractive. I was thoroughly enjoying The Pixies, but I thought it was a bit rock ‘n’ roll for what I want 4AD to be. And I may well have said something like that to Deborah. And she definitely turned round to me and said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, they’re brilliant, let’s do it.’”