by Martin Aston
The new ‘Breakdown’ (‘Tarantula’ was only remixed in the end) wasn’t radically different, just sharper and fuller. The single even got interest from the States. Before the licence deal with major label A&M, Ivo had been exporting every 4AD record, in limited numbers. This helped financially but also built an aura of enigma for this UK imprint with the atmospheric underground sound and artfully enigmatic sleeves that rarely featured the artists. Who were these bands? What was their story?
Ivo’s introduction to major label culture had not been auspicious. A&M in America was already licensing Bauhaus from Beggars Banquet, so Ivo had accompanied Martin Mills to a meeting. ‘Martin introduced me as 4AD, Bauhaus’ original label, and the A&M guy said, “Listen to the radio, get an idea of what works here or doesn’t.” It turns out he thought I was Kevin Haskins. I gave him copies of “Breakdown” and by the time I’d got to the airport, Martin had paged me to say A&M told him they had to license “Breakdown”. Yet they never again licensed anything by Colourbox.’
A&M would have clocked a cool-Britannia take on American influences – a winning combination. But neither A&M nor 4AD had any success with ‘Breakdown’, though the twelve-inch mixes went down well in the clubs, where the edits came into their own. After a period that might be kindly referred to as ‘research’, Gary Asquith and Danny Briottet were to begin their own dance project, mixing hip-hop, sampling and electro as Renegade Soundwave, with Mick Allen and Mark Cox closing ranks as a duo to become The Wolfgang Press, named after German actor Wolfgang Preiss. ‘We added “The” to the front, which conjured up an image, something massive, a big machine,’ says Allen. ‘I thought it was funny.’
Ivo had agreed to go halves on funding new Allen/Cox demos, and on the evidence of two songs, ‘Prostitute’ and ‘Complete And Utter’, asked for more. It was partly an altruistic act, and one of faith: ‘I liked Mick and Mark so much, I wanted to support them,’ Ivo says. ‘They were the only people ever on 4AD I worked with that wasn’t just based on enjoying their music.’
Mark Cox: ‘I never asked Ivo how many records Mass had sold. He was slightly frustrated, almost dismayed, that we had no ambition and were still asserting our right to be free. Compare that to Modern English – they had a dream that Ivo could relate to, but he wasn’t sure what to do with us. We weren’t interested in playing live, and we lived in short-life housing with no phone, so things could take days or weeks to happen.’
Mick Allen: ‘Rightly or wrongly, we were left to our own devices because Ivo had confidence in us. I wanted to make music that you hadn’t heard before, although drawing from the past. I was aware of PiL, the bass and the drums and the simplicity and the space, and I think we achieved that.’
The PiL comparison was to dog them: NME claimed The Wolfgang Press’s debut album The Burden Of Mules could be marketed as a collection of PiL studio out-takes. But freed from accommodating a guitarist at the start, Allen and Cox had begun to explore a wider remit, sometimes gravitating towards a mutant funk that unfolded through a shifting landscape, as though Mass had opened the doors and let in some light and air. But the mood was still oppressive, such as the opening and typically provocative ‘Prostitute’ (‘Prostitute/ Spice of life’) with Allen’s slightly creepy delivery, while the title track – too closely – tracked the ‘death disco’ aura of PiL. ‘Complete And Utter’ wore more urban-tribal colours but ‘Slow As A Child’ was six minutes of unsettling and shifting ambience, and ‘Journalists’ (a soft target, though Allen says his lyric was aimed at anyone in his path) and the ten-minute finale ‘On The Hill’ were as uncomfortably intense as the Mass album.
Ivo still wasn’t won over. ‘It’s a very difficult record and I didn’t like it deeply at all. Like Mark said about Labour Of Love, it had great ideas, badly executed.’
Cox: ‘We were still determined not to be produced, or to be open to guidance in case it meant compromise. But we still didn’t know how to achieve our aims.’ Even so, the duo had agreed with Ivo’s suggestion to add some guitar, and to use In Camera’s Andrew Gray – they had all met when Mass and In Camera had shared bills in London and Manchester – whose oblique approach fitted their own better than Marco Pirroni or Gary Asquith’s heavier style. Dif Juz drummer Richie Thomas and In Camera’s David Scinto (on drums, not vocals) also chipped in.
Gray also signed up for a handful of Wolfgang Press shows, supporting Xmal Deutschland. Allen says it was a frustrating experience: ‘We were not easy listening. It affirmed what we were doing was either bad or unheard.’ Gray soon stepped down. ‘The crowds wanted a particular industrial punk sound, and I didn’t. I’d become more interested in photography at that point.’
Ivo: ‘My take on Mass, The Burden Of Mules and the first live experience of The Wolfgang Press is that people were scared away from them for life. It was impenetrable to some, a different type of music.’
While the nocturnal sounding The Wolfgang Press had been recording an album during the cheaper night shift at west London’s Alvic Studios, Modern English had been taking the daylight shift for parts of After The Snow’s pop levity. The band hadn’t had much success in Britain but the album had been licensed to America by Warners subsidiary Sire. Seymour Stein, the label’s savvy and experienced MD, claims to have been the first to re-appropriate the cinematic term ‘New Wave’ for the new breed of bands after he’d felt that the punk rock tag was putting people off before they’d even heard the music. He had signed the Ramones, Talking Heads and The Pretenders, and after snapping up an unknown local singer called Madonna, he had turned his attentions back to the UK and added Modern English to his stable of UK licensees (The Undertones, Depeche Mode, Echo & The Bunnymen), to be joined by The Smiths.
Stein was especially keen on Modern English’s ‘I Melt With You’. ‘I knew within the first eight bars that it was a smash, it was so infectious and strong,’ he recalls. ‘I also knew I had to grab the band there and then, without hearing any other songs, or someone else would take them. Other things Ivo signed were too experimental for me, though you could always expect the unexpected from 4AD.’
Ivo’s A&R ears weren’t attuned to unearthing or spotting hits, though his brother Perry Watts-Russell – now working as the manager of the fast-rising LA band Berlin – says he’d instantly recognised the value of ‘I Melt With You’. ‘It struck me as really catchy and a definite hit, which didn’t sound much like 4AD but could take 4AD into a different space.’
Modern English had played just a handful of US dates in 1981, and when After The Snow was initially on import, Sire had licensed ‘I Melt With You’ at the end of 1982, becoming the first 4AD track to be licensed in America. Sire followed it by licensing the album in early 1983 when the band returned for an east coast tour. But the breakthrough turned out not to be via a show, or even radio, but a film soundtrack. Stein secured ‘I Melt With You’ a spot in what became that spring’s rom-com film smash Valley Girl, and MTV began rotating the video despite its alarming absence of merit. American audiences simply saw Modern English on a par with Duran Duran, without any of the post-punk image baggage that might have been hindering them in the UK. ‘It all went haywire from there, in a Beatles and Stones way, with all the trappings that went with it,’ says Robbie Grey. ‘We played Spring Break in Florida to thousands of kids going bananas.’
Ivo: ‘I had the bizarre experience of seeing Modern English one afternoon, with screaming girls throwing cuddly toys at them. The band’s name moved to the top of the film poster when “I Melt With You” kept selling.’
The single reached 78 in the national US charts in 1983, with After The Snow making number 70 and also selling half a million. But the breakthrough could, and should, have been even greater. ‘Warners didn’t open their cheque book to help move things to the next level,’ says Ivo, ‘such as the top 40. “I Melt With You” is still one of the most played songs ever on American radio.’
For Modern English, the joy of popularity was tempered by the reality of where th
ey’d landed. ‘We played San Diego baseball stadium to 60,000 people, with Tom Petty top of the bill,’ recalls Mick Conroy. ‘The change was immense and the pressure got insane. Ivo hooked us up with an American manager, Will Botwin, who gave us practice amps, and said to start writing the next album, between gigs. It was so different to 4AD’s approach.’
That didn’t stop 4AD from joining in marketing the band, with a view to breaking them further. As Sire did in America, 4AD released ‘Someone’s Calling’ in the UK, its first attempt to take a single from a preceding album – though the twelve-inch version had a new, booming remix by Harvey Goldberg and Madonna associate Mark Kamins – and a similarly amped ‘Life In The Gladhouse’ remix by Goldberg and Ivo with additional edits from Martyn Young. The latter was a reasonable success in American clubs but ‘Someone’s Calling’ reached a miserable 43 on the UK indie chart, barely higher than ‘Swans On Glass’ three years earlier.
One thing Modern English did achieve was a knock-on shift in profile for 4AD. Even legendary Asylum and Geffen label head David Geffen, who had worked with several of Ivo’s American west coast icons, ‘was sniffing around, wondering what the story was,’ says Mick Conroy. The story for Modern English turned out to be a typical one, of success breeding pressure. Tour manager Ray Conroy was the first to bail. ‘I’m very cynical about arrogant singers – once they start believing it all, it’s not worth the bother,’ he explains. ‘Nick Cave, for example, I found full of shit. And Robbie turned into an asshole. We had a flaming row in New York, and when we got home from America, they went off on their merry way.’
Robbie Grey: ‘We were pushed too hard. I especially didn’t like soundchecks, standing around for hours, only to go on stage and the sound would be all different anyway. I was probably snappy and distant, but I was in my own cocoon, protecting myself.’
Ray Conroy was now tour-managing any 4AD band that required help, such as The Wolfgang Press, Xmal Deutschland and Dif Juz, but he singles out Cocteau Twins as the stand-out live act of the time, even without Will Heggie. ‘Robin had just one guitar pedal and a drum box, but as they got more popular, he got the biggest FX rack ever! It was pretty raging stuff, with Liz screaming her head off. Robin loved noise and our mission was to make them the loudest band in the world.’
The personnel of Modern English and Cocteau Twins became entwined in a project of Ivo’s instigation. He had flown over to see Modern English play New York’s The Ritz in December 1982, where the band’s encore conjoined two tracks, the ‘Gathering Dust’ single and Mesh & Lace cut ‘Sixteen Days’. Ivo liked the version enough to ask the band to re-record it in that segued form, but they turned it down: ‘We were more interested in recording our new material,’ says Mick Conroy.
Trusting in his own judgement, and in John Fryer to press the right buttons, Ivo decided to create his own version. He asked Elizabeth Fraser to sing ‘Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust’ accompanied by Cocteaus’ pal Graham Sharp, who had sung the high, delicate vocals on the band’s second Peel session and was now fronting his own band, Cindytalk (Sharp now likes to go by the first name of Cindy). Martyn Young and Modern English duo Mick Conroy and Gary McDowell were on hand to create the backing track. ‘Ivo was so much into music and creativity that it seemed a natural step for him,’ says Conroy.
Ivo: ‘I loved the experience of affecting the sound of a record, but it wasn’t my place to impose anything. I couldn’t play music and I wasn’t technical. So I needed to create a situation where people gave me sounds that I could have ideas about, that could be manipulated in the studio.’
With Sharp woven around Fraser’s lead, the vocals had power and presence, but the speed of the recording and Ivo’s inexperience of direction showed in the stiff and overlong (at nine minutes) result. ‘The programming is boring and I’d rather forget about it,’ Ivo says. ‘But obviously I thought it was good enough at the time to release as a single.’
Ivo now needed a B-side. He had a brainwave: to conjoin his new vocal crush, Fraser, with the song that Ivo had told the pro-4AD American fanzine The Offense Newsletter ‘was probably the most beautiful song ever written by anybody’, and to UK music weekly Melody Maker, he said, ‘[It’s] probably the most important song ever … it’s moved me more than anything.’
Today, Ivo still holds the track, and the singer, in the same regard. ‘If anyone wanted to demonstrate what’s so special about Tim Buckley,’ he says, ‘I’d play them “Song To The Siren”, because he soars. His voice is the closest thing to flying without taking acid or getting on a plane.’
Though he had first recorded ‘Song To The Siren’ in 1968, Buckley didn’t release a (re-recorded) version until 1970, after being stung by a comment poking fun at the song’s lyrics, written by his writing partner Larry Beckett. In either incarnation, ‘Song To The Siren’ had that uniquely, uncannily eerie lull, using metaphors of drowning to allude to what Ivo calls, ‘the inevitable damage that love causes’.
Fraser agreed to record Buckley’s ballad a cappella, and Ivo gave her a tape of his version so that she could familiarise herself with it. ‘Liz never went anywhere without Robin at that time, so he came along to the studio too,’ says Ivo.
This turned out to be a godsend for Ivo. ‘I couldn’t think of what to do between the verses,’ he recalls, ‘so Robin had, very reluctantly, put on his guitar, found a sound, lent against the studio wall looking decidedly bored, and played it once to Tim Buckley’s version in his headphones.’ He, Guthrie and John Fryer sat in the garden as Fraser – who hated being watched, worked out what to sing.
Ivo: ‘I couldn’t bear the suspense so I crept back inside and listened to what she was doing! I probably only heard her sing it once before I let her know I was there and thought what she was singing was brilliant. But because I couldn’t make the whole thing work without any instrumentation, and because what Robin had spontaneously done was so gorgeous, it was easy to forget my original a cappella idea. Three hours later, the track was finished. I tried to think of ways of taking away the guitar, but I just couldn’t get away from that swimming atmosphere, which is a tribute to Robin’s genius.’
John Fryer: ‘A-sides of singles can involve tension and stress but B-sides like “Song To The Siren” have less pressure on them. This was one of those times, and the B-side totally outshone the A-side.’
Bucking the trend of cover versions paling in comparison to the original, this new ‘Song To The Siren’ was exceptional, casting its own and equally haunted spell. ‘Buckley got so close to the edge of a loneliness and yearning that’s almost uncomfortable and stops you in your tracks, whereas Fraser’s version floats in your ears and washes over you, like the sea that’s constantly represented,’ reckons singer-songwriter David Gray (who covered ‘Song To The Siren’ in 2007). ‘Each time I hear either version, I’m transported somewhere else, outside of myself.’
‘Jesus Christ, I made that happen!’ was Ivo’s reaction. ‘And I wanted to do more.’
On the same September day in 1983 as Modern English’s ‘Someone’s Calling’ and Xmal Deutschland’s re-recorded version of ‘Incubus Succubus’ – prosaically called ‘Incubus Succubus II’ – 4AD released a twelve-inch of ‘Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust’. An edited version on the seven-inch became the B-side to the lead track ‘Song To The Siren’. The name that Ivo gave to this collective adventure was This Mortal Coil, a phrase that had originated in William Shakespeare’s most famous play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, whose themes centred on treachery, family and moral corruption. The play’s most famous speech, beginning with ‘To be or not to be’, contained the lines, ‘… what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’
The word ‘coil’, derived from sixteenth-century English, was a metaphor for trouble, or in the Oxford English Dictionary’s view, ‘the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life’. Not being academically minded, Ivo hadn’t known the provenance of the phrase; his source had been Spirit’s 1968
track ‘Dream Within A Dream’, specifically the line ‘Stepping off this mortal coil will be my pleasure.’
‘This Mortal Coil somehow suited the music,’ Ivo explains. ‘I didn’t take long to decide. I can’t say I still love the name, but I became comfortable with it.’
Less comfortable with the affair was Fraser, who was mortified to discover after the recording that she’d got a lyric of ‘Song To The Siren’ wrong. The promised sheet music from the publishers had never arrived, so she’d tried to decipher the words from Buckley’s version. ‘A few mind-bending substances were involved along the way,’ recalls Sounds journalist Jon Wilde, whose flat Fraser and Guthrie stayed in for several months. ‘By the time they had to go to the studio, one line continued to elude us.’
Fraser eventually sang, ‘Were you here when I was flotsam?’ instead of the correct line, ‘Were you hare when I was fox?’ which was an understandable error given the context for Beckett’s lyrics was water and not earth. The mistake compounded Fraser’s already self-conscious view of her performance; she’d felt rushed into the recording and was unhappy with what she’d achieved. But this was just for a B-side so it she let it pass.
The NME, while featuring Depeche Mode on the cover, buried its review low down on the Singles page, citing, ‘a respectable job on “Song To The Siren” and that’s about it – no revelation’. But if the leading UK music paper was still being sniffy about 4AD (The Burden Of Mules had been reviewed six weeks after release), ‘Song To The Siren’ entered the independent chart, and Fraser and Guthrie were asked to perform it live on BBC TV’s late night show Loose Talk. ‘I’ve never been more nervous in my life for anyone as I was for Liz that day,’ says Ivo. Fraser was visibly shaky but still cut a mesmerising figure.