by Martin Aston
For ‘Kangaroo’, which Ivo once likened to ‘a cross between The Velvet Underground and Syd Barrett on heroin’, he envisaged just Sharp backed by bass and cello, which Simon Raymonde would arrange, to accentuate the lyric’s desperation. ‘I know those songs should never be covered,’ Ivo acknowledges, ‘but they came out just mad and perfect, and completely different to the original, something of our own.’ Enough for ‘Kangaroo’ to be the lead single from the album, reaching number 2 on the UK independent singles chart in August.
The only task left was to name the album and choose the artwork. The title It’ll End In Tears had been percolating in Ivo’s brain since 1980, when Mass was visiting his new flat, and he’d taken them to the empty flat below to take some press photos. ‘I’m useless at that side of things, and I was throwing around confetti and stuff,’ Ivo recalls. ‘Danny and Gary started getting a bit physical, and Mick shook his head and said, “It’ll end in tears!”, which I mentally filed away.’
The image was also borrowed. Nigel Grierson had taken a black-and-white photo, out of focus, of a dark-haired woman named Yvette who he’d met through mutual friends. ‘She was very attractive with great features,’ Grierson says. ‘I was trying to create an intriguing image, influenced by the subconscious and scenes from [David Lynch’s] Eraserhead and [Luis Buñuel’s] Los Olvidados – eyes closed, hair pulled back.’
Yvette – she doesn’t disclose her surname – now goes by the name Pallas Citroen, and works as an artist: ‘I specialise in arty-serious sculpture, installation and film,’ she explains. ‘It’s hard to explain but it’s about surfaces and transparency and façades,’ which sounds suitably 23 Envelope. In 1983, she was taking her final school exams and eager for arty-serious collaboration. It didn’t necessitate much: ‘We went outside, Nigel pulled some branches down from a tree, waved them in front of the lights, and took the shots.’
One image had been offered to Modern English for Ricochet Days, but the band had turned it down: ‘Yvette was a friend of ours who lived in our house, and it was tricky with our girlfriends, who were suspicious of other girls on our covers,’ admits Mick Conroy. But Ivo saw something that resonated for This Mortal Coil, and took it for his own purposes.
Inovatively fusing a melancholic footprint of both pre-and post-punk eras, in October 1984 It’ll End In Tears followed Head Over Heels into the UK top 40, and settled down for an extended run in the independent charts. Ivo tried his luck again in America by licensing the album to Atlantic Records, encouraged by comments that ‘Song To The Siren’ would get used in a film. ‘Atlantic only sold eight thousand copies and deleted it after a year,’ he recalls. ‘Afterwards, I immediately sold three thousand copies on import.’
What every purchaser got was, most likely, an introduction to the likes of Tim Buckley, Alex Chilton and Roy Harper, the kind of artists that a post-punk generation had been programmed to consider the work of the enemy – hippies at best. Even most contributors to It’ll End In Tears didn’t know the originals that Ivo had plucked out from memory. ‘Coming from a classical background, I’d have considered all that stuff acoustic nonsense,’ McCarrick admits. ‘But Ivo wanted to keep these names alive, and he was chuffed when he got a credit on a Big Star compilation for doing just that.’
According to Sharp, ‘It was a brilliant education in this great British and American folk and country music that had got lost in the mist.’ Raymonde describes Ivo as, ‘A pied piper, with extraordinary taste, who opened me up to all sorts of things, like Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin and Scott Walker, which was strange because my dad had worked with Scott. It was movies with Ivo too. I remember him taking us to a double bill of Tarkovsky films.’
Ivo later told Melody Maker, ‘I was so pleased that six months after the first This Mortal Coil album, all of the covered songs were available again as either UK releases or US imports … the third Big Star album, the Tim Buckley retrospective.’
In the same interview, he also said, ‘I do feel that the strongest feeling from music comes from desperation. I think it’s all about intense feeling, and whether it’s about an intense high or an intense low doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt to embrace any extreme of feeling, rather than just carry on in some limbo.’
Ivo’s words help towards explaining why It’ll End In Tears appears to have made a palpable impact on gay men in their impressionable teens, drawn by the strong female voices – Sharp as much as Fraser and Gerrard (the only ‘masculine’ singer being Robbie Grey) and the music’s dreamlike and frankly desperate mood. For example, Michigan-born singer-songwriter John Grant, whose 4AD crush in the Eighties would eventually lead his Colorado-based band The Czars to sign to Bella Union in 1999, recalls the days when his emerging sexuality was being outlawed by his strict religious upbringing in a particularly conservative corner of smalltown America. ‘My high-school friend Greg introduced me to It’ll End In Tears, and I was deeply in love with Greg, and terrified of being found out, so This Mortal Coil – and the Cocteaus and Dead Can Dance – gave me – they still do – the feeling of a most intense longing, sadness and confusion,’ Grant says. ‘“Not Me” was so dark and sexy, like black leather and understated cool. I even covered “Song To The Siren” years later. I didn’t even know half the words to those songs at the time. I just sang along to the parts that I knew, that I could apply to my own life. It sounds cheesy but they helped save me.’
The love of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) for This Mortal Coil didn’t stop at ‘Song To The Siren’. ‘My friends and I all found It’ll End In Tears weirdly hopeful and with an air of gentleness, humanity and spirituality that accompanied me through my adolescence,’ he recalls. ‘It was taking a risk by being poetic and using piano and cellos as well as lush, ambient Eno-esque sound. I didn’t realise they were cover versions until years later! When I moved to New York City in the early Nineties, all the punk drag queens who’d listened to This Mortal Coil in their teens were lip-synching to those songs in late night clubs.’
This appreciation wasn’t restricted to sexuality any more than gender. In the Nineties, Martin McCarrick recalls, ‘This dark-haired guy came over and said, “Are you Martin from This Mortal Coil?” It was Trent Reznor [of the electronic band Nine Inch Nails]. There’s an unusual collection of people touched by those records, but the music was so unusual at the time, just bare bones and voices, and minimal and ambient, before those terms were used commercially. There was something dreamlike that sucked you in, like in a film.’
Ivo: ‘The records that have affected me the strongest have created their own space, and taken me on a journey. And most of those albums, like Big Star’s Third or Lou Reed’s Berlin, exist in a less than happy atmosphere.’
At that point, Ivo hadn’t even figured out his depression, though John Fryer seemed to realise. ‘It was very morose music so we’d have to have been miserable, to make it work,’ he says. ‘It was just a period in our lives, in the music industry, and the world, that it worked out like that. We couldn’t have made It’ll End In Tears today.’
Any tendency to wallow in misery was outweighed by Ivo’s relationship with Deborah Edgely, the speed and range of 4AD business, and the exhilaration of achievement, not just with This Mortal Coil but those closest to his heart, such as Cocteau Twins. He could also see 4AD’s critics finally accept what he was trying to achieve, and a fan base that was buying every release. Cocteau Twins’ imminent third album, Treasure, was to extend the feeling, topping the UK independent charts and breaking the national top 30, to become 4AD’s highest selling album yet.
After the immaculate conception of Head Over Heels, the new album had a troubled delivery. It had begun with Ivo’s suggestion that Brian Eno produce the Cocteaus: ‘Liz and I thought it was a decent idea, Eno being one of the great producers of our time,’ recalls Simon Raymonde. ‘But when we met him, Robin was in one of his particularly antagonistic moods. Eno finished by saying, “You don’t need a producer, you know exactly how your music is
meant to sound like, you should do it yourself”. Robin was like, yup, told you so! He wasn’t ready to relinquish control of his baby, and he was probably right.’
Ivo: ‘Eno and this guy Danny sat on the carpet, and Eno said, “I’m really flattered that you’ve asked, but I’d never have had the courage to use the size of reverb that you used on Head Over Heels! You know what to do. But if you want a good engineer, work with Danny” – who turned out to be [engineer and future producer] Daniel Lanois. The band returned to Palladium, Robin produced the album, and it sounded fantastic.’
The band again began with no songs in hand, and snowbound in a particularly harsh winter. ‘The recording,’ says Raymonde, ‘was half enjoyable and half stressful, up to the last week booked when we didn’t think it was finished. We don’t work best under that pressure, but we knew our future was being determined by that record. I always hear Treasure as half-finished.’
The Cure’s Robert Smith would disagree with that verdict, since he admitted he’d become obsessed with Treasure. ‘[It was] the most romantic sound I’d ever heard,’ he said when interviewed for the documentary Beautiful Noise, and confessed he’d played the album while getting dressed on his wedding day. ‘It always intrigued me how they made it sound so effortless,’ he concluded.
Many Cocteaus fans that consider Treasure is the band’s finest album would agree, but not Guthrie. ‘I feel the early stuff we did with Simon was fumbly and only a stepping stone on the way to something. Treasure has a great atmosphere but it’s a bit devoid of content because we ran out of time. And it sounds so 1984, what with the drums and the DX7 [synth], instead of sounding timeless. That’s the drum sound that made Tears For Fears famous!’
Elizabeth Fraser was also feeling the clock ticking. ‘I got a call from Robin: “You gotta come up and help, Liz has got no words, she’s completely dried up”,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I went up and sat with her, with a dictionary, and wrote some fourth-form poetry – I wasn’t seriously suggesting lyrics but I tried to kickstart it. But it was so awful and inappropriate and not what she wanted. There, for the first time, Liz started using words more phonetically than lyrically.’
Guthrie: ‘Liz was never comfortable with being judged on what she’d done. The more she got comments like, “the voice of God” [coined by reviews editor Steve Sutherland for Melody Maker], the less confidence she had in what she was writing. I agree that no one had a voice like her, but it built such huge expectations. So she started to disguise what she wrote, or split the words up in the wrong places. But Liz should have realised that people loved it. She couldn’t let the good in.’
But then neither could Guthrie, who can’t enjoy the numerous rapturous episodes such as ‘Pandora’, ‘Donimo’ and ‘Ivo’ – the last formerly titled ‘Peep-Bo’ but renamed in tribute to her mentor and friend. If the production and drum sound does date Treasure, it can’t nullify the vocal overlaps, breathless tone and hypnotic flow of ‘Lorelei’, the uncanny madrigal ‘Beatrix’ or the tour de force ‘Persephone’.
And Guthrie also couldn’t see the beauty of 23 Envelope’s striking image for Treasure, a dressed mannequin shrouded in lace that mirrored the intricate layers of the music. This came after the use of Gertrude Käsebier’s 1904 photograph The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal) for The Spangle Maker EP, with its aura of unknown and wondrous forces given a more precious and retro feel when set against a backdrop of combed marbled paper. ‘They pushed the packaging in a Pre-Raphaelite art direction, all flowery, arty-farty and poncy, but thankfully no fish this time!’ says Guthrie. ‘The album cover also cost a fortune. Special dresses had to be hired, from a plush shop in Richmond, whose owner’s husband happened to be Martin Mills.’
Vaughan Oliver: ‘It was a chiaroscuro effect, light and dark, with attention to detail on the typography. But boiled down, it’s a bloody mannequin with a few bits of lace around it! I liked that the subject matter of Treasure was so banal but you could create something special from it. It went with the music, not against it. That’s why 4AD was so outside the times, so un-post-modern. We were romantic and poetic.’
Guthrie clearly kept his feelings of dissatisfaction from Ivo, whose memory of this time is one of harmony. The camaraderie of the times had seen artists guest on one another’s record, sharing tour managers, holidays and even, in the case of Modern English and Colourbox, a house. In July, three couples – Ivo and Deborah, Guthrie and Fraser, and Cox and girlfriend Shirley – had even flown to the Greek island of Corfu for a two-week holiday together. One particular memory abides for Ivo, of driving to the airport, ‘bonkers in love’ with Deborah, listening to The Wolfgang Press’s EP Scarecrow that Guthrie had produced the previous week. ‘Everything intermingled,’ Ivo recalls. ‘Creativity and friendship. Everything was positive at that time.’
But as Modern English knew, success can bring its own problems. Though all three Cocteau Twins had contributed to It’ll End In Tears, Guthrie was nursing some grievances that would seep into his friendship with Ivo, complicated for Ivo by the fact he was the guitarist’s friend, mentor and financial provider.
It was 4AD’s fortune to have discovered Cocteau Twins first, and its misfortune that the band with the most unique talent was also the most difficult to contend with. Guthrie’s punk rock principles made him an inflexible and oppositional force to be reckoned with: ‘Robin was an antagonistic kind of chap, very opinionated, with a very strong vision of his band,’ says Simon Raymonde. ‘He liked to take a stand, often to put people on the back foot. But he did believe in most of what he was saying, and nine times out of ten, he was right.’
Guthrie admits he had chronically low self-esteem that would flare up when he felt a lack of recognition, especially regarding a fair financial deal commensurate with what he felt he was worth. Another bone of contention with 4AD had been over contracts. Guthrie, who knew nothing about them as a naïve punk rocker, feels he was misled when Cocteau Twins signed a contract for Garlands. ‘We asked, “Should we take it to a lawyer?” and I was told, “No, it’s standard”, and we listened to them. The contract we signed for Head Over Heels was the first time we got any money, £50 a week each.’
Contracts highlight another marked difference between 4AD and Ivo’s label peers at Mute, Factory and Rough Trade (whose founder Geoff Travis ran the company as a co-operative, and had almost gone out of business in 1982) who offered deals on a 50–50 profit split between label and artist. Martin Mills, who was in charge of business rather than Ivo, was a more old-fashioned profiteer who had worked in the civil service and run retail and promotions businesses. According to Fredric Dannen’s 1990 book Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, music business lawyer Don Engel said that standard artist contracts through the Seventies were, ‘the most onerous, impossible, unfair’. Nothing had changed by the Eighties, especially given the restricted budgets of independent labels. Mills employed the services of media and entertainment lawyers Harbottle & Lewis to establish the standard contract that Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Situation 2 would issue.
‘I think it’s unfair for Martin to take all of the blame for the contracts,’ says Ivo. ‘I’d been keen to work on a 50–50 basis from the start because it seemed more transparent, though Martin didn’t agree. He did, however, point out one myth of the appeal of such a deal, which was overseas royalties. On a 50–50 deal, an artist would earn 50 per cent of a royalty rate as low as 12 per cent, which is less than they would earn on a direct percentage royalty rate. In my defence, I did constantly try to improve the basic royalty rate on a one-off contract and would often ask James Wylie at Harbottle if our contracts were fair. He assured me that they were better rates than most record companies and that I was paying the right level of session fees.
‘That said,’ he continues, ‘I understand why, in order to survive, the scales are tipped in a record company’s favour. But even if we’d worked on a 50–50 basis, that wouldn’t have stopped Robin’s complaining. Nothing was ever good
enough. But we all put up with that side of him because he was also such a sweet and generous man and we realised that sort of insecurity just went with the creative territory.’
But Guthrie’s big bone of contention was the very nature of creative territory, and he remains furious that he was initially paid a £250 session fee for ‘Song To The Siren’, and hadn’t been rewarded for the income – and boosted reputation – that had come 4AD’s way as a result.
Guthrie: ‘Initially, we treated “Song To The Siren” as one of our own, and I’m very proud of it. Liz’s vocal was extraordinary, and it was all so simple and flawlessly executed. And I did more stuff for It’ll End In Tears, as a favour to a mentor and a mate. At that point, I’d have done anything for Ivo. But I shouldn’t have been paid as a session musician, because that record wouldn’t have existed without us. Liz and I gave it that sound. We were starting to stand up and grow up and have our own ideas, and I wanted to take credit for what was ours. There were big incomes on records like It’ll End In Tears and make no mistake, the money coming into This Mortal Coil wasn’t shared. And that’s wrong because it’s exploitation under the guise of art. Imagine if I did a show with my band, and I get £10,000 and I give the band £25. You just don’t do that.’
Ivo maintains that he and Guthrie did talk after the recording of ‘Song To The Siren’, and says that ‘Robin insisted that he didn’t want to be paid anything, but that I had to promise to pay Liz royalties, which I did.’
Simon Raymonde: ‘Our fault was that we didn’t ask [for royalties] at the time. For all Ivo’s amazing A&R and creativity, he wasn’t brilliant at business. But rather than talk about it, which as a band, we never did, we retreated to lick our wounds. I’m sure Ivo did what he felt was right at the time. My irritation is with Martin Mills, who sorted out the contracts.’