Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Extractions was another glorious and indefinable excursion into Dif Juz-world, albeit through a sonic Guthrie filter. Thomas recalls the Curtis brothers didn’t like the guitar sound that they were given: ‘A syrupy, chorus reverb honey … like Cocteau Twins. David and Alan wanted to remix it, but Robin wouldn’t. He’d do things to the drums, and I’d say not to, but he would anyway. He acted like he was captain of this ship, though very persuasively! It was about control for Robin. He said, “I want to do the best for you”, and naïvely, I think he meant it. And we really did like him.’

  Guthrie: ‘I don’t think Dif Juz sounded too much like me, but it was the first time I’d worked with them, and I was in complete awe of them. Looking back, I do cringe a bit.’

  The friendship survived, and following the aforementioned Sadler’s Wells show in December 1984, Dif Juz joined Cocteau Twins for a full UK tour, including a climactic night at London’s prestigious classical showcase the Royal Festival Hall.

  ‘We called it the Art Shit tour,’ says Richie Thomas. ‘Everything was very beautifully done, with theatrical light effects and props. We’d drive up and down the motorway during the miners’ riots, England in revolution – I was working on a building site at the time! One minute, I was digging a deep trench for a sewage pipe and the next I was playing a theatre. Robin was in the dressing room saying, “Have you ever tried caviar?” He asked me to play sax on “Lorelei” before Liz started singing, and at the end of the tour, he gave me £200 [£550 by 2013 levels], which was unnecessary, but a lovely gesture.’

  Thomas also witnessed, at close quarters, how Elizabeth Fraser was a jumble of nerves. ‘She always found it very difficult to go out there and sing, and some days it looked like she was in torture, madly pulling at her fingers. But she always sang absolutely beautifully and she never had a bad night.’

  There was one drawback on the tour: Dead Can Dance bassist Scott Rodger had to step in to replace Gary Bromley in Dif Juz. ‘I’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was twenty-one, and I’d got ill, brought on by taking speed,’ Bromley admits. ‘The band stuck by me, but it was a continual battle, and I just had to muddle through.’

  Richie Thomas: ‘We were trying to learn new stuff and Gary couldn’t seem to remember anything. Dave would have to have long conversations with him. I was more light-hearted, with Alan stuck in the middle. But it wasn’t the same with Scott. The original four had been together since the start.’

  Gary Bromley: ‘It was good to hear I was missed, but I’d stopped enjoying it anyway. David was very strong-willed and had taken the leader role, and they’d all started to tell me what to do, which became a chore rather than the labour of love we’d experienced when we’d written our own parts from jamming. So I left the band for good.’

  Bromley was still a member for one extended, extraordinary session that Dif Juz recorded but Ivo rejected, and the tapes remain unreleased to this day, 4AD’s very own holy grail. Thomas had met reggae legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry through an ex-girlfriend; she had courageously invited Perry to stay at her mother’s house, and invited Thomas to meet the legendary certified space cadet.

  ‘There were about ten of us in this council house, and Lee came in, threw a bottle of nail varnish removal on the electric bar fire,’ says Thomas. ‘It made this massive flash of flame, high up and across the ceiling, and he shouted, “FIRE!” At one point, I slipped on a Dif Juz record, and Lee said he liked it. He exuded this barrier, which was a way of protecting himself, but he was fun to be around, and we hung out for couple of months.’

  Perry and Dif Juz soon agreed to record together. ‘We said we’d do one of his, then one of ours,’ Thomas recalls. ‘Lee started singing Bob Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn”, so we did that and called it “The Mighty Scratch”. But we ended up only doing three more tracks that we’d written. Lee thought we were a modern version of what he used to do, so he wrote words for our music, about the IMF [International Monetary Fund], McDonald’s and Stonehenge, just before the ban on walking over Stonehenge. It was really prophetic stuff.’

  The band considered the session some of their very best work, but Ivo asked Robin Guthrie to, in essence, rescue it, which included editing ‘The Mighty Scratch’ down from nine minutes. ‘This was despite Lee saying you couldn’t edit out one word of what he said because everything that came out of his mouth was intentional!’ says Ivo.

  The iron wills of Guthrie versus Perry resembled the immovable mountain meeting the irresistible force. ‘I’m mixing Lee fuckin’ Perry, so no pressure there!’ Guthrie recalls. ‘He sat around being intimidating and weird, laying little coins around so the lights would bounce off them. But he let me get on with it.’

  Richie Thomas: ‘Robin’s talent includes his powers of persuasion, and he managed to get his way, and he did make things more concise and create a sense of space. What we did with Lee was still Dif Juz, but more guttural and raw, and Lee’s lyrics were very real. It didn’t fit the 4AD doctrine, which was much artier, prettier music, with lilies on the artwork, beautiful objects, quite precious. If Lee hadn’t been singing on it, I’m sure the session would have been released.’

  ‘I thought it was worth releasing,’ says Guthrie. ‘But Lee wasn’t as malleable as a young band gagging to be on 4AD. He wouldn’t have given a fuck. Ivo liked to control the situation.’

  Ivo’s comments concur with this claim: ‘I knew Lee would be a nightmare to deal with. The first time we met, he was spray-painting the walls, and intensely looking at the spray in the air. His eyes, when they paid attention, were like a very young child, trying to understand an adult for the first time. But ultimately, I didn’t think it was very good. I was a huge reggae fan, and Dif Juz, especially Gary and Richie, had dub aspirations. I would have loved to release a collaboration that actually worked. If I heard it now, perhaps I’d realise how wrong I was.’

  Perry subsequently asked Dif Juz to back him at a show at London’s Dingwalls. ‘Lee liked us because he didn’t want to just do the same thing again,’ says Thomas. ‘We never got paid for the show, but we didn’t want anything from him, he was someone we just loved.’

  The reggae element to 4AD would have to remain in Colourbox’s hands, the only exponents on the label beside The Wolfgang Press and Dif Juz to meaningfully tap any black music tradition. The problem was none of them showed the ability to nail a swinging groove. On top of this Colourbox suffered from songwriting block: it had been three years since debut single ‘Breakdown’, and they’d still not released an album or something that truly defined them. ‘It was a chore,’ Martyn Young admits. He says that Sixties (and Morrissey) idol Sandie Shaw had asked for a song, ‘but we declined because it would have been too hard to come up with something’.

  Ivo remained patient and indulgent; he liked the Young brothers and sensed their potential; Colourbox was also signed to a five-album deal so he had a vested interest. For the time being, the duo’s safest passage was another genre revamp, and at least the new single, ‘The Moon Is Blue’, was the band’s best yet, a slice of Fifties-slanted doo-wop, by way of Sixties northern soul, fronted by Lorita Grahame’s fulsome vocal and massed harmonies in support. ‘A good song with iffy lyrics,’ is Martyn Young’s conclusion, but it was infinitely preferable to the B-side cover of the Motown classic ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, that they’d first attempted for 1984’s second Kid Jensen radio session. At least Colourbox were now selling records, about 10 to 12,000 of every single, arguably aided by the 4AD roster surrounding the band, and ‘The Moon Is Blue’ made number 3 in the UK independent chart.

  A debut album finally materialised in May, though Colourbox (self-titled, like their EP) resembled a depletion of the store cupboard rather than a record proudly conceived as a unified statement. The ten tracks included ‘The Moon Is Blue’, ‘Say You’, ‘Punch’ and even ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. Of the two older tracks, ‘Just Give ’Em Whiskey’ was more a string of samples over a driving beat than a song, and ‘Sleepwalker�
� was a brief piano instrumental in search of a film soundtrack. This left four reasonably adept pop-funk songs.

  Ivo was disappointed enough with so much old material to demand that Colourbox give away a bonus EP with the first thousand copies of the album. Young duly assembled a similar random collection of edits, remixes and the vaguely new ‘Hipnition’, which ex-member Ian Robbins had written. The barrel-scraping was antithetical to the 4AD mark of quality, and Young knew it. ‘A lot of the album is unlistenable,’ he confesses.

  Cocteau Twins had no such problems, creatively agile and continuously recording. 4AD released two new EPs, Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In A Shallow Bay, two weeks apart, ‘to break the mould a bit,’ Robin Guthrie explains. Using a makeshift studio rented to them by musician/producer William Orbit, the Cocteaus benefited again from not thinking about having a chart hit or the clock ticking, and with no expectations of them from within band or label camp to record a follow-up to Treasure: ‘No outside influences at all, in fact,’ Guthrie asserts.

  The EPs were two halves of a whole, with matching covers – ‘like a brother and sister,’ says Guthrie. The sleeves from another Nigel Grierson paint/water experiment were of a piece, this time shot through layers of glass to lend the images a three-dimensional glow. They’re Guthrie’s favourite Cocteaus sleeves, and among his favourite Cocteaus records: ‘They’re fucking gorgeous,’ he grins.

  Simon Raymonde agrees: ‘They’re really beautiful and really undervalued.’ The reason for the latter, Ivo suggests, was the absence of an obvious lead track that reviewers and radio could grab hold of, which didn’t make for a cohesive album. ‘But I’m extremely fond of both records and I agree with Robin that they’re the best Cocteaus sleeves.’

  The consensus of fans and critics is that neither rank among the band’s all-time greats. Perhaps releasing both as one mini-album would have made more impact. In retrospect, Tiny Dynamine sounds slighter than its clearly underrated counterpart; ‘Pale Clouded White’ and ‘Eggs And Their Shells’ deserve a place on any Cocteaus compilation. Both titles sprang from Fraser’s latest encyclopaedic raid, on butterflies and moths (also see ‘Great Spangled Fritillary’ and ‘Melonella’). A modern-day treat is to read online lyric sites attempting to articulate Fraser’s glossolalia. Try singing along with the chorus of ‘Sultitan Itan’ from Tiny Dynamine: ‘sultiapollanella-nella cossus cossus abillatoeya stroemella …’ Yet Guthrie insists that Fraser always sang discernible lyrics. ‘How else do you think I could double-track Liz’s vocals?’ he asks.

  Between the release of Aikea-Guinea and the twin EPs, the Cocteaus had played five shows in America, including the Newport Music Hall in Ohio’s college town Columbus, as a favour to Tim Anstaett, whose fanzine The Offense (renamed The Offense Newsletter) had been so supportive to 4AD since its simultaneous launch in 1980. The show had a proper sense of occasion, as if royalty was visiting, and in one sense, Guthrie and Fraser resembled the king and queen of this mysterious new world across the water. Anstaett’s latest issue had the cover headline ‘Cocteaus Fever’, and local TV station WBNS had run a story where the excited reporter talked up, ‘one of Britain’s number one bands … who will be influencing mainstream rock’n’roll music for years to come’.

  The WBNS coverage extended to a live report from the venue, where Cocteaus fans, hair primped and teased to match the finery of their outfits, gathered, they said, ‘from hundreds of miles away’ to pay homage to their bashful idols.

  Between Cocteau Twins’ Aikea-Guinea and the release of the twin EPs, Dead Can Dance had been finishing their second album, intent on proving that they could overcome the relative disappointment of the debut album. Brendan Perry says those songs had arrived with him and Lisa Gerrard on the plane, pretty much formed in their minds: ‘Now we had to find our musical vision.’

  Choosing to record as a duo instead of a band, Perry and Gerrard’s guiding principle was that rock’n’roll had begun to exhaust itself, recycling rather than reinventing, and refusing to acknowledge, says Perry, ‘that all musical forms are basic hybrids or fusions by nature. And that the essence or attitude within the form itself must progress.’

  These were lofty ideals, conceived in a lofty flat fourteen floors up from the ground, as the couple consumed the records they borrowed from a nearby library. ‘I became obsessed with classical music,’ Perry admits. ‘But baroque music, Gregorian chants and film music too.’

  Gerrard: ‘I saw John Barry and Nino Rota influences immediately turn up in Brendan’s arrangements and choice of instrumentation, like the cimbalom [hammered dulcimer]. We’d gone shopping with the first advance from 4AD, and bought a sequencer and a Mirage [sampler] so Brendan could access all these keyboard sounds.’

  Abandoning John Fryer and Blackwing, the pair worked with producer John Rivers (who had made a mark by producing the suitably precious guitar mavericks Felt) at his studio in the Midlands. ‘John was to Brendan what Jon Turner had been to Robin,’ says Ivo, namely someone supporting, rather than leading, the chance to learn the ropes. Perry never again needed an outside producer.

  The leap that Dead Can Dance made matched that of Cocteau Twins from Garlands to Head Over Heels, beginning with the startling opener ‘De Profundis (Out Of The Depths Of Sorrow)’ on a startling album called, a little less startlingly, Spleen And Ideal. Gerrard’s voice cut through the massed choral drift like a galleon emerging through the fog, in a way that Scott Walker used to do in the Sixties, except Gerrard was singing what sounded like Latin but was actually her own language, Fraser-style. ‘Enigma Of The Absolute’ was Perry’s chance to shine, in the kind of time-suspended drama that fancifully repositioned Scott Walker to the eighteenth century. The lyrics were more Homer than rock’n’roll: ‘Through darkened doors, her aspect veiled with indecision/ Gazing out to sea, she craved lucidity.’

  Nothing quite like this classically infused solemnity and vaulted ambition was to be heard elsewhere for at least a decade, in the instrumental era of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Stars of the Lid. For the time being, Dead Can Dance was operating in a field of one, which the album cover to Spleen And Ideal made plain, ramping up the enigma with a figure in a hooded red cape holding a cut-out white star in front of a huge, half-demolished building. It looked like a still from a Tarkovsky film, shot in some forgotten corner of Estonia. In fact, it was staged by photographer Colin Grey, in Salford on the outskirts of Manchester’s city centre, outside an old dock warehouse that explosives had failed to bring down. The white star in the outstretched hand of a mysterious hooded figure was a piece of rubbish discarded on the ground.

  The striking image, in saturated colour, was perfect for Dead Can Dance’s newfound poise and ambition; the butterfly emerged, in saturated colour and spectacle, from its cocoon. And they were bound to leave some behind, people such as Robin Guthrie. ‘They were no longer the same people we knew,’ Guthrie says. ‘They turned from normal to cerebral people quoting Sartre in interviews.’

  On the contrary, believes Simon Harper, who was to join 4AD’s international department in 1987: ‘Lisa Gerrard is one of the funniest, most un-pretentious people I’ve ever met.’

  Dead Can Dance continued to reinforce 4AD’s identity as a repository for sensitive, rarefied, idealistic and introverted souls, their music lacking in the kind of humour, playfulness or cultural comment that provided other entry points to artists on the likes of Factory, Mute and Rough Trade. ‘There was a sense of self-importance about 4AD and artists that some would have hated, and some would have loved,’ says Deborah Edgely. ‘Some people hated bands on principle because they didn’t like the label, which was hard to deal with. But the band was most important; if you didn’t represent them fairly, and treat them individually, you might as well not bother.’

  Ivo naturally, ‘didn’t give a damn’ if anyone found Dead Can Dance pompous, pretentious or aloof. ‘They were absolutely brilliant, and I was so proud to represent them. Everything released on the label was extremely important to
me but Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil was the shape of 4AD for me, as it proved to be for many others. They were as good and as important as all the music that had influenced me as a child and that had led me to this place of running a label.’

  The year 1985 ended with two band compilations, which showed Guthrie’s continuing impact on 4AD. Under his watch, The Wolfgang Press had beaten a path away from their impenetrable past, and the majority of the last three EPs Scarecrow, Water and Sweatbox made up The Legendary Wolfgang Press And Other Tall Stories. The second was Cocteau Twins’ own collection, The Pink Opaque, their first album to be released in America, specially compiled for the independent label Relativity, and the first 4AD album to be pressed in the new Compact Disc format.

  True to form, Robin Guthrie had been unhappy about how the American market hadn’t been open to Cocteau Twins sooner. ‘Ivo had the opportunity to license us quite early on but instead he made a lot of money exporting us, until The Pink Opaque. We just picked the songs that we played live; the album is a set list.’

  According to Beggars Banquet’s Martin Mills, ‘Licensing was the only way to survive long-term, by picking up big advances from American labels for long-term contracts. For example, A&M paid a £75,000 advance for Bauhaus, and Sire paid £60,000 for Modern English. They were huge amounts at the time, and you ran your business on those advances. Beggars had over ten licensing deals going at any one time.’

  ‘I’d love to know what my opportunities to license Cocteau Twins were,’ Ivo responds. His experience with A&M and Colourbox hadn’t endeared him to major labels, and his reticence beforehand was due to safeguarding quality – ‘I didn’t enjoy working with licensees who all expressed an opinion and wanted to influence the records that we were making,’ he says.

  The second issue, according to Ivo, was even more problematic. ‘One questionable aspect about signing to 4AD at the time was that your [band’s] record wouldn’t be available domestically in America, because I wasn’t signing bands long-term, and most American licensees wanted at least a five-year contract on the table,’ Ivo explains. ‘American indie labels weren’t a serious option for licensing as they couldn’t offer an advance, but we thought it was worth experimenting with Relativity. In the meantime, the exports had helped 4AD create a mystique and loyalty from the fans. The real glory years for me were those years, when everything 4AD did was sought after, and got a very good reputation.’