by Martin Aston
‘Punk was cathartic in the sense you could scream and jump, and out of it came a lot of creativity,’ he concludes. ‘But I felt that people needed to have more faith in their own perception, about how to find their way, in relationships, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, handling money, aspirations and rebellion. I was myself trying to find a way through the impressions and inputs. We all were.’
However, in Ivo’s mind, this struggle had manifested itself in the studio, where he’d driven to survey proceedings. ‘No one seemed in the mood, so I just left,’ he recalls. ‘I’d heard the demos, and anyone who has released records based on demos knows that proper recording can lose something. Chapter II is OK, but there was no real direction, guts or energy. So for those reasons, I started to get involved more in the studio after that. If things were going wrong, at least I’d know why.’
‘It wasn’t my impression that things weren’t going well,’ says Bruton. ‘Either way, being on the edge was part of the creative process.’ The problem was, Dance Chapter’s collective spirit was fast dissolving, over money, or the lack of, and personal ambition. ‘We were also going in different directions. Steve [Hadfield] was still studying, and he left soon after the recording. I wasn’t looking to make a career from music, though I’d have gone on. But I didn’t have a way to hold a group together, or rebuild it. Ivo suggested I move to London and see what happened, but by then, I’d reached the places I needed to go, and I had the freedom to look at things in another way.’
Dance Chapter was the first of 4AD’s artists to fall at the second fence, and again, its four constituents didn’t make inroads into other music. If the band’s demise was a downbeat conclusion to the year, there was enough achievement to end 1981 with a compilation, which Ivo assembled for the Japanese market via major label WEA Japan, which was distributing 4AD in the Far East. Housed in a photo of two wrestling male nudes from one of Vaughan Oliver’s medical journals, Natures Mortes – Still Lives was a personal inventory of 4AD highlights, including the early Birthday Party single ‘Mr Clarinet’ that Ivo had reissued on 4AD, and tracks from Rema-Rema, Modern English, Matt Johnson, Mass, Sort Sol, In Camera, Cupol, Past Seven Days, Psychotik Tanks and Dif Juz. Gathered in isolation, 4AD’s formative years sound distinctive, predominantly original and, with hindsight, undervalued, though only in light of what was to follow.
In a letter to the American fanzine The Offense towards the end of 1981, Ivo said he thought he was ‘moving away from rock music, even in its broadest sense, as much as possible’. There was even talk of Aboriginal chants. He concluded, ‘I’m confident of change and a very valid and varied output – but my search for something far removed from anything I’ve ever done will continue.’
Ivo already had something in mind that fulfilled that brief. Driving back home from Spaceward after abandoning the Dance Chapter session, he stuck on a demo that he’d been given at the Beggars shop that week. ‘I got called upstairs and whoever was behind the counter said, that’s Ivo, and this cassette got stuffed into my sweaty hand,’ he recalls. ‘Something was quietly said, and the couple left. When I listened, I immediately enjoyed it. It sounded familiar, like the Banshees, though with a drum machine. And a voice you could barely hear. There was no indication that she was great or bad. But the power of the music made me call them to suggest they make a single.’
When Ivo called, he discovered his visitors that day, guitarist Robin Guthrie and vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, had come down from Grangemouth in Scotland to see The Birthday Party. ‘We first saw The Birthday Party open for Bauhaus, and we started to follow them around on tour,’ recalls Guthrie. ‘We were just teenagers, and painfully shy, but we started talking to them after shows. Eventually they said, are you in a band? Yeah, we said. They said they’d met these people in London – which was 4AD.’
Nothing would be the same for 4AD after Cocteau Twins.
chapter 5 – 1982
The Other Otherness
(CAD201–AD215)
Sorry for the delayed reply. I’ve been somewhat affected, in a truly depressed sort of a way since you came here. Not your fault, buddy, just a barrel load of worms wriggling about in my consciousness which I’m not dealing with too well. Apart from that, well, I’m OK.
Someone much wiser than me once told me that I had to make peace with my past in order to enjoy the present, but what if one’s past becomes one’s present.
And that, my friend, is where I am at.
Worms, Can, Opened.
(Robin Guthrie, email, July 2012)
Rennes, to the east of north-west France in the region of Brittany, is an hour by plane from the southern tip of England. It’s where Robin Guthrie met his French wife, but it’s a convenient location, near enough to keep in touch with his past, far enough to keep out of reach.
Fifteen minutes’ drive from Rennes city centre, the house where the Guthrie family (they have a daughter of eleven) live is elegantly aged and comfortably spacious. The vast attic doubles as home studio, office and storeroom for his solo career, which is predominantly about albums but also occasional touring. Posters, photographs and record sleeves, detailing triumphs from Cocteau Twins and solo eras, line the walls.
These days, Guthrie sports a beard, the significance of which will become apparent. He once claimed to be ‘too fat to be a goth’, and given the cooking skills he displays over the weekend, he won’t be dieting any time soon. Cheerful and broody in equal measures, Guthrie keeps the conversation flowing, but the can of worms lies open, kicked around, its contents spilling out. The past still lives, heavy, bewildering and threatening, in his head, especially since he’s recently heard that Elizabeth Fraser, his Cocteau Twins partner, and his girlfriend for seventeen years (the couple have one daughter, born in 1989) was to play her first ever solo shows, a full fifteen years after Cocteau Twins had split. The problem wasn’t her belated return, but her plan to sing Cocteau Twins material, music that Guthrie had written and arranged, for which he says he will receive no credit during the expected adulation for the singer.
Fraser, on her part, has admitted that she finds Cocteau Twins too difficult to talk about; since 2000, she has only discussed it twice, and passes up the opportunity to recall her side of the story for this book, a story stained by dysfunction, vulnerability, substance addiction, childhood trauma and astonishing music. ‘You take each other’s breath away by doing something or saying something they never saw coming,’ she told Guardian in 2009 when she released her first solo single ‘Moses’ (a tribute to her late friend Jake Drake-Brockman). ‘They were my life. And when you’re in something that deep, you have to remove yourself completely.’
Guthrie’s memories are clearly torturous as well. Long after midnight on the first day of recollection, Guthrie disappears upstairs, returning five minutes later, beaming, with a box full of memorabilia, of cuttings, stickers, leaflets, tour laminates, letters. The next morning, Guthrie’s mood appears to make it more likely he’ll burn the box’s contents. ‘And then, I found that big bag of stuff,’ he wrote in an email a month after we’d met. ‘Goodness, some revelations were made which have left me feeling, if possible (!!), less comfortable with my past than even I could have imagined. My wtf? turned into a WTF? I feel like I’ve had surgery performed but the surgeon forgot to sew me back up.’
Earlier in the afternoon, he’d sat down to recall his and Fraser’s first visit to Hogarth Road. ‘I don’t remember meeting Ivo, but we already knew 4AD because we’d collected their records. We were enthralled by The Birthday Party and also Dif Juz. I quite liked Bauhaus, Elizabeth more than me, though I loved “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, and Rema-Rema. We’d hear things on John Peel and read the music papers. I wasn’t into Cupol but I’d been a bit of a Wire fan. Burning Blue Soul was one of the best records of that decade, right out of the mould. But The Birthday Party was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. And Rowland Howard’s approach to guitar – I didn’t realise you could do that and still be taken seriously.’
Equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh, on the banks of the Firth of Forth, ‘Grangemouth was a village around an oil rig,’ claims Ray Conroy, who was to become Cocteau Twins’ tour manager after first taking on Modern English through his brother Mick’s connection to 4AD. Guthrie and his schoolmate Will Heggie were among the town’s punk renegades, making stroppy, noisy protest in bands such as The Heat. ‘Punk to us didn’t mean your clothes, but doing what you want,’ says Guthrie. ‘Self-expression. A teenage cry for help.’
Guthrie had worked as an apprentice for BP Oil, with a talent for electronics, which he put to good use by building effects pedals for his guitar. ‘The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty, and that shiny, dense Phil Spector sound. I was trying to make my guitar sound like I could play it, so I was influenced by guitarists who made beautiful noise, like The Pop Group, or Rowland S. Howard.’
The new band couldn’t be complete until they’d found a singer. They vaguely knew a girl, Elizabeth Fraser, two years below them at school, who they’d see dancing at the Hotel International, a local club where Guthrie would sometimes DJ. His playlist included The Birthday Party and The Pop Group: ‘Most people weren’t happy with my choices, but Liz was, as she kept dancing,’ Guthrie smiles. ‘We struck up a bit of a friendship.’
Colin Wallace, one year above Guthrie and Heggie at school, recalls Fraser as, ‘This little vision in fishnet tights, leather mini-skirt and shaved head, smoking cigarettes, playing truant until lunchtime. Shy and quiet too. She was ostracised at school, as a weirdo, but to me she was unbelievably brave.’
Wallace recalls Guthrie saying, ‘If she’s that good a dancer, I bet she can sing. Robin asked her, and she said yes, but she wouldn’t even sing in front of Will. But I’d hear them rehearse, above some shops, and in the old derelict town hall, and she was astonishing.’
Guthrie: ‘Liz was insanely shy but as her mum later told me, she always sang as a child. We just assumed that she’d be brilliant, like I thought we were all great. We were very naïve and idealistic then.’
The name Cocteau Twins came via the Glasgow new wave band Simple Minds, who The Heat had once supported: ‘They had a song called “Cocteau Twins”, so we nicked it,’ says Guthrie. This wasn’t any reference to the fact that the band initially had a second vocalist: ‘Carol, a friend of Liz’s,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘But she only stayed two weeks. I forget why she didn’t last.’ There was also a drummer, John Murphy, though his request for travel expenses encouraged Guthrie to choose the cheaper and more manageable option of a drum machine. The band even broke up for a couple of months: ‘Liz and I probably fell out with Will, or he was busy elsewhere,’ Guthrie thinks. ‘But a friend asked us to support his band, so we re-formed.’
Fraser’s memory, in an interview with Volume magazine, was that she’d got fed up: ‘I didn’t feel like [the band] was for me at all … I think it was more the lyrics that I didn’t have the faith in. But I started going out with Robin, so I came back into the band.’
During rehearsals in the local community hall, Communist Party office and a squat the trio developed their nascent sound, and after just two shows, they recorded a demo of ‘Speak No Evil’, ‘Perhaps Some Other Aeon’, and ‘Objects D’Arts’ (Guthrie says Fraser purposely spelt it wrong). Fraser’s buried voice, Guthrie recalls, ‘wasn’t done on purpose, we just couldn’t record it any better. We only had one microphone and one cassette recorder, so we had to record the songs twice [Wallace says more than twice, as he has a copy too], once for a tape to give to Ivo, the other to John Peel when we met him [at The Birthday Party show]. We had no phone so I wrote down the number of the phone box down the road and “call between five and six” on the cassette box, and I’d wait outside every night for a call! There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they’d both ring.’
Ivo initially sent the trio to Blackwing to record a single, where he was astonished to hear a voice rise out of the music’s shivery dynamic: a powerful, plaintive, hair-raising cry of a voice. Recording the new versions of ‘Speak No Evil’ and ‘Perhaps Some Other Aeon’ went so well that Ivo suggested Cocteau Twins record an album instead. The band readily agreed. ‘We got very handy at the night bus, up and down from Scotland, sixteen hours each way,’ says Guthrie. ‘No one would take us seriously in Scotland, or give us any shows, because we weren’t hipsters from Glasgow or Edinburgh, and we weren’t on Postcard Records.’
The Glasgow-based independent Postcard had been started in 1980 by nineteen-year-old Alan Horne as a vehicle for the band Orange Juice, fronted by his friend Edwyn Collins, whose knowing and inspired marriage of The Velvet Underground with The Byrds initiated the Sixties revival that was eventually to redefine the British underground sound, from The Smiths to The Stone Roses. Adding Josef K, a cooler and droll version of monochromatic post-punk, and the exquisite folk-pop of Aztec Camera, Postcard operated with a lightness of touch and irony – each record had the logo ‘The Sound Of Young Scotland’, a pastiche of Motown Records – with Horne more of a media-savvy, plotting figure in the mould of Factory’s Tony Wilson than reticent Ivo. As a result, Postcard had instantly been championed by the press in a manner withheld for the more heavyweight and less conceptual 4AD.
Ivo appreciated Josef K’s ‘It’s Kinda Funny’ but saw 4AD ‘as an alternative to Postcard’, though he says he understood Postcard’s dedicated following. Ivo would not have deviated from obeying his A&R instincts for a similar concept or status, yet it’s a curious coincidence that 4AD’s next find – via a demo – involved members of Josef K and a spindly, hyper-literate Postcard-ian pop that broke the conventional 4AD mould.
The Happy Family wasn’t the most satisfying or productive vehicle for the band’s singer-songwriter Nick Currie – or Momus, the alter ego he subsequently chose for his solo guise, after the Greek god of satire and mockery. Having lived in London, Paris, Tokyo, New York and Berlin over the years, Currie’s current home is Osaka, Japan, where he continues to fashion spindly, hyper-literate albums but in a electronic/folk fusion he calls ‘analogue baroque’. He also writes novels and essays, teaches the art of lyric writing and gives, he says, ‘unhelpful’ museum tours.
Currie was born in Paisley, to the west of Glasgow, a centre of printed wool manufacture that gave its name to the Indian pattern so popular among Sixties flower children. Currie was no hippie or drop-out, taking an English Literature degree at Aberdeen University while leaving time to study John Peel’s radio show at night. At a gig in Glasgow, he’d given Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross a demo with instructions to pass it on to Alan Horne at Postcard, but Ross kept it, and after Josef K’s surprise split, Currie found himself in a band with Ross, Josef K bassist Dave Weddell and local drummer Ian Stoddart.
Currie christened the quartet The Happy Family. ‘It was tongue in cheek,’ he declares. ‘I already had a concept for an album, about two children in the [German terrorist organisation] Red Brigade who assassinated their lottery-winning fascist of a father.’ The anticipated album would be called The Man On Your Street: ‘It was about totalitarianism, the idea that your street equals the whole world, with fascism as a global threat, and mapping that with the oedipal dynamics of the family. My mother had just run off with a wealthy accountant with very conservative views. I was working through the break-up of my actual happy family.’
Currie hoped that his perception of Josef K’s ‘star power in the press’ would rub off on The Happy Family – ‘People were shocked by Josef K’s early demise and interested in what would come out of it,’ he says. Ivo admits he was one of them: ‘I never had any intense involvement with any of the band, but Nick was a smart fellow, and I liked his concept.’
Currie agrees that he and Ivo never bonded. Both men were shy, though Currie’s droll, intellectual way of compensation was more Alan Horne than Ivo. At their first meeting, Currie suggests, ‘To Ivo, I probably looked extremely young, skinny and chinny, and not like a pop star.’ Such criteria weren’t dea
l-breakers at 4AD, so Currie is probably more accurate when he adds, ‘I was probably an opinionated and prickly kind of fellow’, which also described Ivo to a point. But Currie did feel some connection: ‘Ivo was kindly and avuncular, a very good teacher and indoctrinator, with a very strong aesthetic, and he knew all this music.’
Currie also got a glimpse early on of Ivo’s home when The Happy Family stayed at his flat: ‘It was awful, suburban hell on the outside but aesthetic and tidy inside, painted lilac and everything filed away beautifully, with fine art coffee table photography books like Leni Riefenstahl in Africa and Diane Arbus. He drove us around in his BMW – the cheapest model [only leased, Ivo says], but still a BMW. So he resembled a playboy entrepreneur to me. But in his mild English way, he talked about his childhood on the farm. I said, “That’s great, all the family together like that”, and he looked at me strangely, like it was my ideal and not his.’ Which was true: a happy family wasn’t how Ivo remembered his past.
Before any album was recorded, Ivo wanted to release a Happy Family single. A three-track seven-inch headed by ‘Puritans’ was recorded at Palladium Studios, ‘a weird pixie-like place in the hills outside Edinburgh, a bungalow with a studio inside,’ Currie recalls. Ivo didn’t know it but Palladium would soon become as crucial to 4AD’s fortunes as Blackwing, handy for any local Scots and for bands that needed a residential wing for extended visits. Palladium was cheaper than Jacob’s Studios, and run by Jon Turner, a musician whose accomplishments were far in advance of any 4AD artist – he’d even regularly backed Greece’s psychedelic hero turned MOR entertainer Demis Roussos.