Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Nick Currie, one of 4AD’s most articulate observers, could also see what 4AD had achieved, and what might come:

  I saw 4AD as a coffee table label, with a mild bourgeois aesthetic worldview, which appealed to other tender-minded people. Ivo seemed attracted to suburban places to live in or an office slightly out of the centre of town, with these semi-detached English houses, but then you’d notice some of those very houses had an Arts and Crafts sensibility, with stained glass windows, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of being an aesthete, and importing those sensibilities into people’s lives. Indie labels were not so well known or established at that time, yet labels like 4AD and Factory were already so refined, in a new hyper-glossy manner, with top-flight art direction. It was at the peak of post-modernism, and it felt distinct from what had come before. In my mind, Ivo and Vaughan were very much going to define the decade.

  * In 1983, Currie signed to London independent Cherry Red’s artful imprint él and released his first recording, The Beast With Three Backs EP (catalogue number EL5T), under the name Momus. Currie’s new baroque folk sound felt more like 4AD than The Man On Your Street. Currie sent Ivo an advance copy of the EP. Inside was a sheet of paper with a limerick that gently mocked 4AD, as well as the label’s system of catalogue numbering that has assisted in its collectability: ‘There was a songwriter so glad to be given two sides of a CAD/ That his blatant good humour carried dangerous rumours/ That life was more funny than BAD/ But when he composed EL5T consistent in perversity/ He slowed and depressed it, dear Ivo you’ve guessed it–/ He out 4AD’d 4AD!’ Sadly, it never reached Ivo, or he never realised the sheet was inside before selling it. The EP, with sheet of paper still inside, was eventually bought in a second-hand store and its purchaser revealed the limerick in an online blog.

  chapter 6 – 1983

  The Family That Plays Together

  (BAD301–MAD315)

  The conversion of a large dry cleaning and laundry service gave the Beggars Banquet and 4AD labels the chance to leave the Hogarth Road shop for a standalone office. Alma Road was a street of Victorian houses in London’s south-western borough of Wandsworth, an anonymous suburb six miles from central London’s entertainment hub where every major record label occupied office blocks or stately mansions. The Slug and Lettuce pub was conveniently located on the opposite corner of the road from their building, at number 17–19.

  Alma Road also symbolised the difference between 4AD and its independent label peers. Mute was based over in the west London enclave of Westbourne Grove, near to Rough Trade’s shop and label, deep in the heart of Notting Hill, the heartland of West Indian immigration, reggae, Rock Against Racism, carnivals, riots and streets of squats, a thriving low-rent bohemia that had made the bumpy transition from the hippies to the punks. Wandsworth had its less salubrious quarters but carnivals and riots were in short supply.

  With room to breathe, and enough funds, Ivo also took on his first employee: Vaughan Oliver, who had previously been designing in a freelance capacity. Ivo knew design and packaging was part of 4AD’s identity, a visual language that gave 4AD an extra dimension of distinction. He could also see that many of 4AD’s artists were producing sub-standard images when left to their own devices.

  It was a mutual admiration society between the two figures; strongly opinionated, stubborn and deeply involved with their particular line of work. ‘Ivo had this whole world of musical knowledge that enthralled me, and I looked up to him, and adored him, from the start,’ Oliver recalls. ‘And I think he had a secret admiration for me, educating him visually.’

  Ivo: ‘Vaughan singlehandedly opened my eyes to the world of design. In his portfolio, he had samples of Thorn EMI light bulb sleeves. It hadn’t occurred to me that behind every object, utensil or drainpipe was a designer and I never saw the world in the same way again. Maybe I didn’t show it at the time, caught up in the sheer business and joy of watching this thing called 4AD blossom, but it was a privilege that I still cherish, sitting four feet away from this outpouring of creativity. Nigel [Grierson] was around a lot too and Vaughan and Nigel at full throttle was an experience to remember.’

  The friendship was firmly based around work: ‘We didn’t talk about anything but music, and we didn’t have a drink together – Ivo didn’t go to pubs,’ Oliver says. ‘Whereas one reason I took the job was the pub over the road!’

  As Ivo discovered, Oliver was not one to dirty his hands with anything but ink. ‘I seriously expected Vaughan, like any other employee when they later joined, to help unpack the van when it arrived with records. But you’d always have to track him down. I saw very early on, for example, that he’d take two weeks to design, by hand, each individual letter for the Xmal Deutschland logo. Design was a full-time job for Vaughan.’

  Oliver’s first task as staff employee was The Birthday Party’s new four-track EP, The Bad Seed. The band had handled its own artwork to date, with mixed results, and Oliver was forced to work with supplied ideas: the band’s four faces and realistic illustrations of their core subjects, a heart wrapped in barbed wire, a cross and flames. The contents were much more inspiring, ‘Deep In The Woods’ tapping a newly smouldering vigour (perhaps because, for the first time, Rowland S. Howard didn’t write anything on a Birthday Party record), though Cave’s opening gambit – ‘Hands up who wants to die!’ – on the thrilling ‘Sonny’s Burning’ was as much a self-parody as anything he could accuse Peter Murphy of.

  The Bad Seed had been recorded in West Berlin after the quartet had decamped there two months after Junkyard’s unanimously strong reviews. Though Ivo considers the EP the band’s ‘crowning glory’, the cost of maintaining The Birthday Party overseas was prohibitive. ‘Ivo was disappointed but pragmatic about not being in a position to provide financial support,’ recalls Mick Harvey. ‘That’s when we switched over to Mute. They’d had worldwide hits with Depeche Mode and Yazoo and were pretty cashed up.’

  Chris Carr: ‘I think Ivo was miffed, but he realised there was nothing he could do, given the financial structure that Beggars could then cope with.’*

  As one band departed 4AD for Germany, taking their testosterone-fuelled fantasies with them, so a band departed Germany for 4AD, bringing a jolt of oestrogen, but with as much energy and discipline. If anyone thought Ivo’s penchant for dark paths had diminished, Xmal Deutschland would make them think again.

  Living again in her native Hamburg after several years in New York, Xmal’s founding member and singer Anja Huwe has abandoned music for painting, but she describes herself as a synesthete (a stimulus in one sensory mode involuntarily elicits a sensation in another) who paints what she hears. ‘I had a wonderful time playing music, and achieved everything I wanted,’ she says. ‘But colour is my ultimate music.’ It’s why she turned down the chance to go solo when Xmal Deutschland finally split in 1990. ‘Music was art to me; I didn’t want to be a pop star,’ Huwe says. ‘I knew the price would have been me. It’s why 4AD was perfect at the time. I saw it as a platform or a nest. People there understood what we did.’

  Huwe was destined to be a model, but she turned down an offer to move to Paris when she was seventeen after visiting London in 1977 and seeing The Clash and the all-female Slits at the London Lyceum. ‘The bands were our age, whereas even Kraftwerk felt like old guys to us,’ she recalls. ‘I also saw Killing Joke and Basement 5 on that trip, bands that had this fantastic mix of punk, ska and reggae. I started buying this music, cut my hair very short, and started seeing every band I could in Hamburg.’

  The original Xmal Deutschland line-up had joined forces in 1980. ‘We weren’t in either punk or avant-garde camps, and we had a keyboard. No one could label us,’ says Huwe. That didn’t stop the German press from trying: ‘We were repeatedly told we sounded more British than German. A friend recommended we move to London, which wasn’t meant in a nice way. But we thought, why not?’ Once there, their black garb, nail varnish and song titles such as ‘Incubus Succubus’ (the second of two
singles that had been released in Germany) had Xmal tagged as goth. ‘That drove us nuts. The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission – that all came later.’

  A foothold in London was established after sending 4AD a rehearsal tape. ‘It was the label we wanted, because of Bauhaus and The Birthday Party,’ says Huwe. ‘Our English wasn’t that good, and we were aliens really. But Ivo respected what we did.’

  Ivo says he had instantly enjoyed what he heard: ‘They were boiling over with energy, and Manuela Rickers was an incredible, choppy rhythm guitarist. I flew to Hamburg and agreed to an album.’

  Xmal Deutschland became 4AD’s first European act, but didn’t record anything until their line-up settled on Huwe, Rickers, Scots-born keyboardist Fiona Sangster, new drummer Manuela Zwingmann and the first male Xmal member, bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock. The German contingent found London a marked contrast to Hamburg, where people had ‘health insurance, affordable apartments and heating’, says Huwe. ‘Many British bands we met were very poor, and desperate for success. I spent a summer with Ian Astbury [frontman of Beggars Banquet’s similarly goth-branded Southern Death Cult), spending his advance. He’d say, I will be big one day, a pop star, and he did everything he could to get there. That wasn’t our goal.’

  That was clear from Huwe’s decision to sing almost entirely in German, which she saw as a much harsher language than English and which suited the band’s pummelling mantras and Huwe’s chanting style. ‘I was like Liz Fraser,’ she recalls. ‘British audiences couldn’t understand us! But they got the spirit of it. Ivo sometimes asked what I sang about. Oh, this and that, I’d reply! Relationships, loneliness, emptiness … what young people sing about. But I saw my voice as an instrument and myself as a performer, not a songwriter. The performance and the sound was the most important.’

  Xmal Deutschland’s debut album Fetisch – ‘a word in both German and English, and a word of the time,’ says Huwe – was a faster and harsher take on the cold, black steel of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Mass and In Camera. John Fryer engineered the session at Blackwing, where Ivo was again co-producer with the band, but the album could have sounded less dense and flat. ‘I did them a disservice by producing,’ Ivo reckons. ‘I don’t take all the blame, as John wasn’t the best at that time at micing up a drumkit, which then hinders positioning the guitars around it.’

  On stage, Xmal was freer to pull out the stops. The memory of the band’s debut UK show, opening for Cocteau Twins at The Venue, is etched in Ivo’s memory: ‘I’d never seen an audience, clustered around the bar, run so fast to the front of the stage when Xmal plugged in. You could see the audience think, who are these women? They looked really striking.’

  Both bands set off on tour, sharing a base in London. ‘Because of their Scottish accents,’ says Huwe, ‘only Fiona could understand a word they said – and the other way around too!’ Xmal later supported Modern English. At that time, Huwe says, ‘4AD felt like a family’.

  Oliver expanded the 4AD family by briefly dating Xmal drummer Manuela Zwingmann, who Ivo says he alienated by hiring a Linn drum machine for his lengthy remix of Fetisch’s opening track ‘Qual’. ‘What Manuela played on Fetisch was fantastic, but she struggled to get good takes, and the drum sound was the weakest part,’ he feels. Ivo’s remix remains his favourite Xmal recording, though at the Venue show, Ivo recalls John Peel DJing between sets: ‘After he played the “Qual” remix, he said, “That’s another interminably long twelve-inch single”. And he was right.’

  The Qual EP was still fronted by the original album version, but longer remixes were to become a permanent fixture of singles and EPs, as the newly expanding synth-pop, New Romantic and electro sounds accentuated the dance element across both mainstream and alternative scenes, leading to an increase in club audiences and more specialist radio stations. Post-punk’s monochrome palate was slowly receding. Even a resolute rock band such as Xmal got the twelve-inch remix treatment. The apotheosis of the medium was New Order’s single ‘Blue Monday’, released in March, which was to become the biggest selling twelve-inch single of all time; it had only been just under three years since Ian Curtis died, but Joy Division felt like gods from a past age.

  At least the twelve-inch format gave Vaughan Oliver the opportunity for a larger canvas for singles. Ivo encouraged every 4AD signing to use the services of 23 Envelope, as it made both artistic and financial sense. The finished image might result from Oliver’s interpretation of a demo or a finished track – for example, his book of medical photographs for ‘Qual’. However, Nigel Grierson was responsible for the layout of Cocteau Twins’ new single ‘Peppermint Pig’, as well as the photo of a woman (shot from behind, submerged in water) in an outdoor Swiss spa bath. ‘That was more for the texture of the hair and the soft misty feeling,’ Grierson explains. ‘I can’t recall why the band chose it. Maybe they didn’t have much input.’

  Robin Guthrie approved of the image for the single, but not the music. The Cocteaus had accepted Ivo’s suggestion of taking on, in Guthrie’s words, ‘a pop producer’. Alan Rankine of The Associates was dispatched to Blackwing. ‘That was a huge mistake,’ says Guthrie. ‘Alan just sat at the back and read magazines. I did all the work.’ Guthrie also claims that Ivo suggested the band ‘write something upbeat for a single’. According to Guthrie, ‘We had a tour coming up supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and we needed a record out. “Peppermint Pig” is absolutely terrible, but we didn’t have the strength of character to wait for the right song to come along. It was an early indication of the power of the music industry, and of too many cooks.’

  Contrary to Guthrie’s view, Ivo recalls he was very happy with the single, though says it does sound too much like The Associates. ‘But if I was interested in a “pop” producer, I’d have chosen someone like Mike Hedges [who had produced The Associates’ 1982 masterpiece Sulk]. I know Robin wasn’t happy with the single but it’s silly to suggest that I was trying to commercialise their music. It’s not my interest or one of my strong points. But accepting a producer actually did Robin a favour. By imposing myself on Garlands and Lullabies and then foisting Alan Rankine on them, he was so pissed off that he took control from then on.’

  ‘Peppermint Pig’ was only kept off the top of the independent singles chart by ‘Blue Monday’. But it’s easily Cocteau Twins’ least memorable single for a good reason: none of its assets – the melody, the production, the cover – are special. That all was not right in the band’s camp was underlined by the departure of Will Heggie. The OMD tour had been fifty-two dates long, a huge number for an inexperienced band such as Cocteau Twins, and the bassist left the band as the band itself left the tour two shows before the end. Guthrie says it was Heggie’s decision: ‘Maybe he had more integrity than me. He didn’t want to tour that much, or to move away from Scotland as we had planned.’

  Ivo also suggests that Elizabeth Fraser felt Heggie had come between her and Guthrie, while Guthrie wonders if Heggie was himself keen on Fraser. Ivo only knows for sure that it was Guthrie and Fraser’s choice, and that he was asked to tell Heggie. ‘They all returned to London, but only Robin and Elizabeth stayed with me. I remember Liz doing some ironing in the living room when they said they no longer wanted Will involved. The next day, he and I met at Alma Road.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ says Guthrie. ‘To my knowledge, Will said he was going home – and I’d suddenly lost my best mate, so what the fuck’s happened there? But every cloud has a silver lining, because that’s when Cocteau Twins started to really happen for me.’

  By bringing the core down to two members, Guthrie and Fraser closed ranks to create a strong unity and, it seems, more confidence. That touring had meant a dearth of new material only inspired the pair. As Guthrie recalls, ‘We were in a chip shop, unable to eat because of the speed we’d taken, and Liz said, “Let’s make the next album, just the two of us, get money off 4AD and say we have lots of songs, and then produce it yourself.” We wrote it all in the stu
dio, and everything just fell into place. It felt like the chains had been taken off.’

  It was still a big step to allow Guthrie to take charge, so Ivo sent John Fryer up to Palladium to assist. ‘John and Jon [Turner] were happy to play pool and let Robin get on with it,’ says Ivo. ‘This is where his courage to do these huge reverbs first appeared.’

  ‘I’d leave Robin on his own, and if he needed help, obviously I was there,’ Turner recalls. ‘Liz was another story. She had to be in the right mood to sing, so it was better if I walked out. I’m amazed how it all came together. I was used to people knowing exactly what they were doing, and on what budget, but I learnt from the Cocteaus that it doesn’t matter how you get there, the end result is what counts, and they got great results. But it seemed a stressful way to work if you were in a relationship.’

  Ivo also felt that Colourbox needed objective input, enlisting Mick Glossop (whose post-punk CV included PiL) for a re-recording of both ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Tarantula’: ‘The band wanted another go, and we thought it was worth using a successful producer,’ Ivo explains. If this was a step up, it was also a worrying step; didn’t Colourbox have new songs they wanted to record?

  Martyn Young was more interested in perfecting the editing tricks he’d heard from the pirate radio tapes that Ray Conroy and Ivo had started to bring back from trips to New York. ‘These incredible mixes, which would sound nothing like the twelve-inch single,’ says Ivo. ‘Nowadays, you press a button and it’s done for you, but back then, you’d bounce down fifteen snare hits and edit them together to get a repeat sound. Mick [Glossop] and John Fryer would do the actual cuts amazingly fast, with Martyn to guide them, but he became an incredible editor.’