Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Despite his indifference to music, Raymonde was the first violinist and so the leader of the school orchestra. When his older brother Nick bought him a bass from Woolworths for his fifteenth birthday, he learnt to play in one afternoon and formed the school band Disruptive Patterns. Leaving school, Raymonde moved to Earls Court with his best friend Stan and began to see concerts every night: ‘Wire, The Teardrop Explodes, the Bunnymen and Joy Division, it could all be in the same week. It was the best time to live in London that you could possibly imagine.’

  The Beggars Banquet shop was just down the road, where Raymonde got a job while he played in the instrumental band The Drowning Craze, which was comparable to Dif Juz (who remain Raymonde’s favourite 4AD band). Peter Kent had enjoyed their live performances but suggested they try out a singer – first was New York art school student and promising jazz singer Andrea Jaeger, then another American, Frankie Nardiello. The band had released three singles on Situation 2 before splitting up. At the same time, Ivo told him that Cocteau Twins was looking for a bassist.

  By this time Raymonde had become Ivo’s regular gig-going companion, so the Cocteaus had heard the Drowning Craze releases. Raymonde was no longer working at Beggars after the shop suddenly closed in 1983 – ‘a huge shock – Nick Austin came in one day and told us not to come back tomorrow’ – (Martin Mills says he had no memory why it happened, or why so drastically), and he was balancing two part-time jobs: for music chain store Our Price and a recording studio in Camden.

  ‘I told Robin and Elizabeth, if they ever needed somewhere to record, they could use it for free,’ says Raymonde. ‘So they accepted. When they came in, and as I prepared to help them record, Robin said, “Have you got some music, then?” He thought I wanted to write with them! But when Elizabeth went to get chips, I had this bass line I’d been working on, and Robin and I wrote what became “Millimillenary”. Robin was great like that, not at all “this is my band, my way”, and Elizabeth said it was one of the best things she’d heard. The day after Our Price sacked me over a stock issue, Robin said they were recording next week in Edinburgh, did I want to come?’

  At Palladium, Raymonde says he initially found the session, ‘daunting and strange, walking into an established group, and a couple at that. And do I just play bass, or suggest other things?’ He saw up close Robin and Liz’s intense relationship. ‘Head Over Heels had a spikiness but it’s a romantic record and they did love each other quite deeply then. Robin seemed worldly-wise to Liz, who was still super-shy and reserved, and Robin looked after her. The first few years were hard work but superb fun.’

  The new trio’s first session produced an EP, which, like This Mortal Coil’s single, had different lead tracks: the euphoric ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ and the brooding ‘The Spangle Maker’ fronted the seven- and twelve-inch versions respectively. Guthrie again claims that ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ was a response to Ivo’s request for something radio-friendly. ‘That’s rubbish,’ Ivo retorts. ‘Hadn’t they already written and released “Sugar Hiccup”? It was always my least favourite track on the EP but it was also the obvious A-side to a single.’

  Commercial aspirations versus purity of motive is always the potential flaw in any relationship between an artist and his or her conscience, and between a musician and record label; the post-punk and independent label movement was partly a response to the fact that most of the pioneering punk bands (Wire included) had signed to major labels, with indie options severely limited at the time. Guthrie was proud of his punk roots, and found this new world of opportunism a vexing experience.

  ‘We wanted to make “The Spangle Maker” the single, as a statement, but Ivo said he couldn’t use it and did we have other tracks?’ he recalls. ‘A twelve-inch and a seven-inch with different A-sides was the compromise. Ivo wanted a video too, for MTV – all the things we didn’t want. But that’s the way forward in business; you reach a certain level, and you have to feed it, to be in the game to win it. I can’t diss Ivo, but what he needed from us at that time was a hit, to get on Top of the Pops.’

  Guthrie also claims Ivo offered to remix ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ to make it more radio-friendly, by making the drums and the hi-hat louder. ‘I did, and I’ve regretted it since because it sounds out of balance,’ he adds. ‘But had I not done it, I feel Ivo could have turned his back on us and moved to the next band. That’s human nature. What I didn’t understand then was that everyone wants to make their mark on something, and to push people away was really alienating. If I’d had more people skills, I’d have embraced their ideas and then carried on and done exactly what I wanted, which I learnt to do much later on.’

  Ivo denies adding commercial pressure, but a video was made for ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ and a radio plugger hired to boost its visibility. All combined, the single became both Cocteau Twins’ and 4AD’s first independent chart topper, and for both the first national top 30 hit. The band was asked to appear on Top of the Pops, which they snubbed. ‘We were vehemently against it,’ says Guthrie. ‘The show had become terrible with balloons everywhere and audience noise over the songs.’

  At least John Peel remained on board. As Ivo recalls, ‘On air, he said he first heard “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops” when driving and he had to pull over to the roadside because it made him cry.’

  Deborah Edgely also cherishes the memory: she and Ivo had just bought a flat together, near to Wandsworth in neighbouring Balham. ‘We bought an art deco radio and the first thing we heard on it was “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”, and this was during the daytime.’

  But the track’s ubiquity was to spoil it for some. ‘I’ve heard “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops” too many times, it doesn’t give me chills anymore,’ says Ivo. ‘I liked “Spangle Maker” more, which is one of their best ever tracks.’ In Simon Raymonde’s view, ‘The EP was brilliant, but we played “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops” so many times, it turned into this silly pop single. Actually, it’s probably more the video. It’s so po-faced and hideous.’

  Robin Guthrie: ‘I don’t mind it now but people dwelt on it so much at the time because it got us a wider audience.’ When Cocteau Twins played Channel 4’s music TV show The Tube, they pointedly played Head Over Heels tracks ‘Musette And Drums’ and ‘From The Flagstones’ instead.

  Xmal Deutschland was also navigating the art of compromise. They’d experienced another line-up change, with Manuela Zwingmann replaced by Peter Bellendir, ‘a much more professional drummer, which made a huge difference,’ recalls Anja Huwe. ‘Peter said we needed to move on as a band. Manuela [Rickers] was improving, and I tried as well. We knew more about writing songs; before the second album, verse-chorus was an unknown language, but we found it could be a fascinating language too.’

  Language was a prickly issue with Xmal Deutschland, singing in German to audiences that expected to hear English. The band named its new album Toscin, after a storm bell: ‘Better that than calling it Toxic, so that people will look and listen,’ says Huwe. ‘If journalists understood it wrong, we’d stop talking to them. Those were the times!’

  The most problematic language breakdown for Xmal proved to be with Ivo. Tocsin, produced by Mick Glossop, was more forceful and gleaming than Fetisch; the re-recorded ‘Incubus Succubus’ had shown the way. But the band’s advance in song construction didn’t make enough difference, and Huwe recalls Ivo’s disappointment. ‘But then he wasn’t an open person, who explained himself,’ she says. ‘He didn’t really say why he didn’t like it. I think Ivo saw us a certain way, like the new Wire, and he didn’t like the direction we were going in. It did feel like a family at 4AD, for some time, but you don’t fit anymore when you have your own ideas. Other companies wanted to sign us, so we separated.’

  Which faces more closely fit the 4AD community was confirmed by Ivo’s unwavering support for The Wolfgang Press. The trio were allowed to control their artwork, such as for their new three-track EP Scarecrow, which came with a garishly coloured illustration of the titl
e character that resembled a child’s drawing even more than Brendan Perry’s recent offering for Dead Can Dance, and setting the image on its side to create a more expressionist image didn’t compensate. Fortunately, the music was more adult, showing the benefit of accepting an outside producer for the first time: Robin Guthrie.

  Mark Cox explained that the band and Guthrie had bonded in an unusual manner, not via shared musical ideals but during the time that Mark Cox and girlfriend Shirley stopped their car to offer Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser a lift: ‘Shirley had drunk too much, so they had to stop the car so she could be sick, and Robin said he could relate to that! We all got on, and had mutual respect, Robin for our creative force and us for his ability and technical possibilities. He trod the eggshell line between not changing our ideas and organising them, which we hadn’t tried before. He knew about drum machines, which we didn’t. He got us counting bars, whereas before we’d been a bit jazzy.’

  The seven-minute ‘Ecstasy’ – a smouldering ballad marked by a wandering mariachi trumpet – and the more rhythmically staccato ‘Deserve’ explored this new balance between experimenting and convention. ‘We began to gel as a band,’ Mick Allen claims, but the closing cover of ‘Respect’, the Stax soul classic perennially associated with Aretha Franklin, showed execution could fall short of ambition. Colourbox provided the programming, and Liz Fraser, with Mark Cox’s support, sang the ‘just a little bit’ refrain. As Allen admits, ‘Our version was too rigid. I should have been thrashier, heavy, more tribal. It was almost comical by the end.’

  Collaborations between The Wolfgang Press, Cocteau Twins and Colourbox members were put to better use in the 4AD family gathering that was This Mortal Coil’s debut album. Ivo had also called on Robbie Grey, Manuela Rickers and Cindy Sharp. Two prominent guests outside the 4AD family were cellist Martin McCarrick and his sister, violinist Gina Ball, both members of former Soft Cell singer Marc Almond’s backing band the Mambas. But the crucial cohort was John Fryer. ‘He’s still the only person I’ve ever made music in front of,’ Ivo says.

  ‘It worked between us because we were both depressed motherfuckers at the time, and he trusted me in the studio,’ says Fryer. ‘We got along from day one. We were in the same headspace and he knew that if he put new bands in the studio with me, he’d get a good album out of it.’

  Ivo had initially drawn up a shortlist of songs to cover, and invited people to the studio, like a film director conducting auditions and feeding the actors their lines. ‘When I was younger, I had a guitar and all the time in the world, but I had never tried to write songs or play, I wasn’t meant to do that.’ he says. ‘I’d seen Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis create sound, and here’s me, I can’t play anything but I can change how a sound sits in a track, and how a song can grow. But I needed source material to manipulate it. I didn’t want to impose myself on bands’ records, so I created a situation that technology afforded me. I loved being responsible for a piece of music, to embellish or improve it. From ears to heart to head to mouth, and back to the ears – that’s magic.’

  Ivo says he only let Fryer become involved in This Mortal Coil ‘to disguise the fact I didn’t know what I was doing!’ Of their relationship, he says, ‘It’s astonishing that John and I didn’t become close friends given how much time we spent together, but we did develop this incredible dialogue that mostly involved facial expressions. And he never rolled his eyes when I asked him to mic up a kettle. He wasn’t one of those jaundiced, bored engineer types.’

  The pair would bastardise the recordings. ‘Ivo would say, I want the vocal to sound like it’s coming through a waterfall, and I’d try to create it,’ says Fryer. ‘Every track was an aural movie. It was all about the feeling that we could drag out of the music.’

  In Mark Cox’s mind, ‘Ivo had a sound in his head that nobody else was making, so he had to make it for himself.’ Ivo’s response: ‘That suggests I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was hoping to do.’

  None of This Mortal Coil’s collective players recalls specific instructions. ‘I don’t remember, but Ivo says I was lying back on the floor playing guitar chords while he messed around with a space echo unit,’ says Martyn Young. ‘He wanted to see what we’d come up with.’

  Simon Raymonde: ‘Ivo might use an adjective or two, like, “This should be melancholic, slow and dark”, or, “This is almost right but it needs to be less perfect”. He’d lead you down the right path but leave room so that you weren’t following something parrot-fashion.’

  Ivo drew on the palate of sound that had made the most impression on him over time: Steve Miller and Randy California’s spacey guitars, Martin Hannett’s drum sound, the huge reverb of Guthrie and also Frankie Goes to Hollywood producer Trevor Horn, the collage mentality of The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money. ‘But This Mortal Coil sounds the way it does because of the ideas everyone brought along,’ Ivo contends.

  Martin McCarrick thinks Ivo is being too humble. ‘I know some excellent musicians who lack natural raw talent, but Ivo, who couldn’t play, had it. He could manipulate sounds with effects, and he knew what he wanted, like vocals that sounded like memories of songs from long ago. Some of the music still sounds quite insane – baby cries, birdsong over foghorns, beautiful strings, and then a dog barking … it was dreamlike and surreal.’

  Ivo told Melody Maker that the effect he had wanted was ‘the beauty of despair’, and cited Lou Reed’s ‘desperate’ Berlin as a benchmark to aim for. ‘Somehow,’ he said, ‘when you’re depressed, and listen to it and it sounds right, it almost helps if that’s possible.’

  Two songs that were more chilling than depressed came from Dead Can Dance after Ivo had allowed the project to morph by freeing the duo to record original pieces. ‘Lisa was invited to sing a cover, but she didn’t like that idea so she stuck her neck out and asked if she could do an original,’ recalls Brendan Perry. ‘That became two tracks, which Ivo really liked. Lisa asked me to help, and Ivo gave us total free range. He and John re-worked the treatment on “Waves Become Wings” but they left “Dreams Made Flesh” intact.’

  Ivo says he didn’t ask Gerrard to sing a cover until 1985, but states that he had heard tracks that, ‘weren’t suitable for Dead Can Dance. I was giving her an outlet’. He also denies Cindy Sharp’s claim that he was initially asked for three Cindytalk original tracks to accompany three apiece from Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, with the remaining tracks to be cover versions. ‘Ivo specifically asked for one of our earliest tracks “Everybody Is Christ”,’ Sharp elaborates. ‘It’s a fairly searing and dark piece, but I said no because it was in line to open our own first album. It’s utterly unlike what This Mortal Coil became. Ivo was flying blind, and slowly everything took shape.’

  In the process of recording, more originals were fashioned by Ivo and Fryer out of the raw material. Sharp added vocals and lyrics to ‘A Single Wish’ whose melody came from an instrumental idea of Colourbox’s Steve Young, and of the three instrumentals, Simon Raymonde’s ‘Barramundi’ featured his own guitar and synth plus Gerrard’s accordion. ‘The Last Ray’ had Ivo stabbing rudimentary keyboards to Raymonde and Guthrie’s sombre arrangement, while Cox and Steven Young combined for a muddy swirl that Ivo named ‘Fyt’: ‘It stood for “Fuck You Too” because it was the first piece of music I’d ever assembled, this little moron who couldn’t play anything.’

  A Montreal Gazette review later made reference to the album’s atmosphere: ‘phantasmagorical, inchoate and machine-tooled all at the same time’. But This Mortal Coil will always be remembered for the direct, often unadorned versions of the cover songs. Two came from 4AD’s own catalogue: Rema-Rema’s ‘Fond Affections’ was squeezed of all its drama by a tremulous Sharp vocal, and a taut arrangement of Colin Newman’s ‘Not Me’ – the album’s sole rocker – was sung by Robbie Grey with a dream team of Robin Guthrie and Xmal Deustchland’s Manuela Rickers on guitar.

  This left four covers, from the songs-that-sa
ved-my-life compartment of Ivo’s mind, to form the centrepiece of the record. ‘Song To The Siren’ was included, and Fraser also sang ‘Another Day’, an exquisitely aching ballad written by folk rock renegade Roy Harper. Fraser’s version sounded perfect, but she disagreed. ‘The Cocteaus were a strange bunch,’ Raymonde sighs. ‘We never liked anything much after we recorded it. But “Another Day” is absolutely beautiful, and Roy Harper thought so too.’

  It turns out that Ivo didn’t unreservedly love Fraser’s take on ‘Another Day’, but he blames himself. He’d encouraged the singer to get more confidence by seeing voice coach Tona de Brett: ‘All Elizabeth practised was scales, but that night in the studio when Cocteau Twins were recording “Pepper Tree” [the third track on ‘The Spangle Maker’ twelve-inch], I heard the new, higher Elizabeth voice, the start of her not pushing and straining from the throat. I considered taking out the Kate Bush-isms in “Another Day” but decided against it.’

  That left two truly anguished ballads from Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers. The album had been recorded in 1974, unreleased until 1978, and by 1984 was only worshipped by the few. The Memphis-based rockers were long forgotten and its lynchpin Alex Chilton was recovering from a self-destructive decade of alcohol and sedatives. ‘He must have been in a very dark and despairing frame of mind and shit … I’m moved by that in music,’ Ivo was quoted in a press release for the album.

  Depressed motherfuckers certainly could have a field day. The more wretched of the songs, ‘Holocaust’, was sung by Howard Deveto, with a mixture of iciness and exhaustion at odds with the rest of the vocal performances. Ivo not only admired the former Magazine (and Buzzcocks) vocalist but had met the post-punk figurehead after Devoto had married his friend. ‘I knew the name Big Star, but not their music,’ says Devoto. ‘But I’d loved the version of “Song To The Siren”, which sold me on the idea of singing “Holocaust”.’†