by Martin Aston
Guthrie admits that he got carried away during this period, especially in the company of The Gun Club’s hellraising leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who was to die in 1996, aged thirty-seven, of a brain haemorrhage; he was also HIV positive and suffering from cirrhosis and chronic hepatitis. Guthrie wasn’t that kamikaze-minded, but the manic schedule he set himself was compounded not just by cocaine but Thunderbird wine, ‘the stuff that winos drink,’ he admits. ‘Cocteau Twins records were getting more beautiful and my lifestyle was getting more dangerous.’
One of the few 4AD bands that Guthrie didn’t have a hand in was Colourbox, who had Martyn Young in the role of studio savant. It had been a year since Colourbox’s debut album, and given Young’s confession about depression and anger issues, it’s easy to see him buried in his machine manuals and his reliance on samples, not wanting to play live, and struggling to find a way out of this vicious circle. A sliver of hope was bound up in not one new single, but two, released on the same day.
Granted, the first single was yet another cover, albeit a sterling version of Jamaican roots reggae singer Augustus Pablo’s ‘Baby I Love You So’, which Lorita Grahame was born to sing. The equally unadventurous B-side, ‘Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse/Shoot Out’, laid samples ripped from the 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West over reggae beats. The second single showed a spark of imagination. Young had composed a pumping instrumental based on a horn-style synth riff over massive drums that he envisaged would work well in a baseball arena. Football fan Vaughan Oliver suggested it could alternatively be used for the summer’s approaching global football tournament the FIFA World Cup being held in Mexico, and that Colourbox should submit the track to the BBC.
With a cover star of the era’s BBC football pundit Jimmy Hill in his younger, playing days, ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ was a joyful and strange addition to the 4AD catalogue, and reputedly came very close to being chosen by the BBC for its theme music. The B-side ‘Philip Glass’ was another instrumental, this time a dreamy interlude named after the New York minimalist composer who had inspired it. Without any sense of what the young brothers were creating, the two tracks were identifying the elements that would mould the whiter side of popular British dance music – samples, ambience, the diverse terrain between all factions of dance rhythm, even the concept of behind-the-scenes producers eschewing the idea of an identifiable ‘band’.
Emulating the success of ‘The Moon is Blue’, ‘Baby I Love You So’ and ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ reached the UK independent top 10 (4 and 6 respectively), and Martyn Young says he was feeling positive. ‘We started to feel more in control. We’d recorded at Palladium with Jon Turner who would only step in if you had a problem that needed fixing. It was a good atmosphere to learn in. Les McKeown was there too!’
John Fryer and Jon Turner’s role guiding the likes of Robin Guthrie and Martyn Young to take charge themselves can’t be underestimated, and even The Wolfgang Press accepted the idea that Fryer could be the answer after the controlling Robin Guthrie. Andrew Gray could already vouch for Fryer’s accommodating ways during In Camera sessions. ‘John was ideal,’ says Mark Cox. ‘He had technical knowledge, he was open to experimenting and I didn’t think he’d contradict us, which was ideal.’
The whole band agrees with Ivo’s view that the resulting album, Standing Up Straight, ‘was The Wolfgang Press shaping up to be what they became’. Namely a contemporary outfit plying a sharp post-punk-funk, bruised and theatrical in a similar vein to Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds (especially ‘Hammer The Halo’) with the dexterity of Talking Heads’ taut, crisp rhythm and some of the knife-edge friction from Rema/Mass days, such as the lengthy ‘Rotten’. ‘It wasn’t a sound that anyone else was making, so we had to make it ourselves,’ says Cox. ‘I thought what The Wolfgang Press were making was soul music, an expression from the heart.’
‘I Am The Crime’ was a fine example, a delirious ballad graced by backing vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, still granting favours to friends. Mick Allen saw how the relationship that drove Cocteau Twins was panning out. ‘Robin came along to that session, and to be frank, he was a bit of a bully with Liz. She was terribly uncomfortable, so lacking in confidence with her own ability, which was unbelievable. She’d do these incredible things and then she’d stop halfway and wouldn’t do any more. She said she couldn’t sing the second part that we’d asked her to do. Liz was pitch-perfect, and because my vocal wasn’t, maybe she found it difficult to put her vocal to mine.’
4AD had reached a peak, with Cocteau Twins, The Wolfgang Press, Colourbox and Dead Can Dance all making progress, the return of Dif Juz, the immediate impression made by Xymox, This Mortal Coil’s imminent second album and the shock addition of Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares. ‘At that point, 4AD was relatively safe and straightforward,’ recalls Deborah Edgely. ‘Cocteau Twins was great, the centre of everything, the most demanding emotionally, but life was good. And then Throwing Muses walked in.’
There is no better example of Ivo’s method of curating a label based on nothing more than gut instinct than the Rhode Island band, Throwing Muses, 4AD’s first American signing. In 1985, The Smiths’ uniquely slanted update of Sixties pop mores had swept over the UK, and for all Morrissey’s quintessentially English guise, Sire Records in the US had its most popular UK import since Modern English. In Britain, a back-to-basics movement had gelled behind them and the similarly Sixties-indebted The Jesus and Mary Chain, around a phalanx of guitars, pop melody and new independent labels such as Creation, Pink, Fire and Ron Johnson. These strands were woven together in a movement christened C86 after the cassette of the same name compiled by the NME and released on Rough Trade in the summer of 1986. In the States, R.E.M. – a repository of Sixties and roots influences – had similarly spawned a mini-movement, such as the LA-based Paisley Underground scene of Sixties rock renegades.
Released in August 1986, two months after C86, Throwing Muses didn’t resemble a single sound, band or faction associated with either scene.
November 1986: Time was up for my interview with the band, as they had to travel from west to north London in order to soundcheck at The Town & Country Club, where they were supporting Cocteau Twins that night. In order to keep talking, I drove Throwing Muses singer Kristin Hersh there. Kristin sat in the back, holding the tape recorder, next to her, her boyfriend Andrew was holding their nine-month-old son Dylan. It wasn’t your average interview, and Hersh wasn’t your average interviewee.
Not yet twenty years old, Hersh was not just a mother but a Philosophy and Psychology graduate, and the rhythm guitarist and principal songwriter of an album that, three months earlier, had received the best reviews of any 4AD album to date. For example: ‘The finest debut album of the eighties … a very beautiful, contorted mystery’ (Melody Maker); ‘This album is one you’ve got to listen to about a hundred times before singalong comfort sets in, simply because it’s so unpredictable. The beauty is that you can listen to it a thousand times. Easily’ (NME).
Sounds reviewer Chris Roberts claimed Throwing Muses was the most promising American debut album since Patti Smith’s Horses, adding, ‘I despair that I live in a city where this music does not come out of taps.’ He also compared the music to ‘a thousand pea-green seahorses floating past your window, upwards’. It was that kind of album, uncannily haunting and jarring, a whole new strain of ‘other otherness’.
Twenty-six years on from that first interview, Hersh connects via Skype from her home in Newport, Rhode Island that she shares with her husband/manager Billy O’Connell and their three boys. Her extraordinary tale is partly encapsulated in her 2010 autobiography Paradoxical Undressing (retitled Rat Girl for North America: ‘the publishers thought Paradoxical Undressing was too many syllables for the American audience,’ says O’Connell), named after a medical condition where sufferers of hypothermia start to undress as if they’re too hot. Why does someone who feels overwhelmed by the world put herself in the spotlight b
y writing and singing songs, and playing them on stage? Hersh felt she had no choice. As a teenager, she was knocked off her bicycle by a car, and suffered a double concussion: one bizarre side effect was she began to hear music in her head that she says forced itself to be written down, otherwise the unbearable tension made her feel suicidal. So it had been through three decades.
Hersh’s restless spirit has doubtless contributed to her family’s nomadic lifestyle. Home is currently split between New Orleans, where O’Connell has been teaching, and during those stifling southern summers, back to Newport on the east coast. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Hersh was raised on a commune on Aquidneck Island off the Rhode Island coast. Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly, who became Hersh’s stepsister after Kristin’s mother moved in with Tanya’s father when the girls were eleven, lived there too.
Best friends as well as step-siblings, the girls had each been given a guitar by their respective fathers, and both had been converted by punk and new wave: Donelly by New York’s CBGBs scene, Hersh by the diverse clout of Los Angeles’ X, Athens’ R.E.M. and Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes. Donelly recalls some British music had also filtered through, such as London’s all-female post-punks The Raincoats, whose raw, jerky folk influences – alongside X’s pungent declarations, fronted by the untamed, poetic female singer Exene Cervenka – provided the building blocks of Throwing Muses’ uniquely fevered sound. ‘It still seemed novel that women played instruments, so we were bolstered by their example,’ says Donelly. ‘But anything you love gets into your blood.’
‘We initially sounded like other people,’ Hersh recalls. ‘There was no magic yet. That fell into place after I got hit by a car and everything turned strange.’
Throwing Muses’ identity was as much shaped by the military-trained style of drummer David Narcizo, who still resides in Newport where he runs the graphic design agency Lakuna, Inc with his wife Misi. His parents were friends of Hersh’s and Donelly’s family; thus he knew Kristin and Tanya, and had a similar musical outlook. ‘Punk,’ he says, ‘made me want to throw away everything I’d been listening to, but I had no aspirations to join a band. I’d never played a drum kit until I joined Throwing Muses.’
Forming in 1981, the band had originally called itself The Muses, an all-female four of Hersh, Donelly, bassist Elaine Adamedes and drummer Becca Blumen. Narcizo was in a rehearsal room, practising for an all-State marching band audition, when he heard a piano playing next door. ‘It captured my attention, and I discovered it was Kristin. I was intrigued that they had a band, because they were such interesting people. They had a drummer but Kristin called to say they’d lost her and they had a session booked, could I play? I borrowed a kit, but the owner had lent the cymbals to someone else, so that was a statement by accident. After about a year, all the songs started pouring in. Tons, every day.’
As Hersh wrote in Paradoxical Undressing: ‘All the strangeness seemed to find a sound body and Throwing Muses imitated that. Every day I wonder if I ever wanted that to happen, I don’t like strangeness, but I’m attracted to it in art.’
Narcizo: ‘When Kristin brought in “Hate My Way”, I remember thinking, holy shit! How did you do that? It taught me the value of sticking with something and the reward can be huge. One song, “Cowboy”, had a million parts in about five minutes. Leslie [the band’s new bassist] would say, “We can’t catch up, slow down!”’
Leslie Langston had been discovered working in a drugstore-cum-delicatessen after Adamedes’ departure. Langston was a bit of a legend around town, having played bass guitar in punk, funk, reggae, hardcore and Portuguese polka bands, plus an orchestra. ‘We were surprised Leslie said yes,’ Narcizo recalls. ‘It was like she came from another world, an adult world. She was more of a technician than us, but she was really excited by what she could sink her teeth into.’
The band had taken the name Throwing Muses as they were no longer an all-female band, and while still at high school, had released a five-track seven-inch EP on their own Blowing Fuses label, led by the track ‘Stand Up’. The local university campus at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) quickly adopted them and Hersh and Donelly were interviewed for the school newspaper, ‘by these two Amazonian sisters, or lovers, I wasn’t sure!’ Hersh laughs. ‘They asked if we’d heard Cocteau Twins and they said, “This is the label you need to be on, talk to 4AD”.’
Donelly and Hersh hadn’t heard of Cocteau Twins. ‘But we discovered they were all over RISD,’ says Donelly. ‘I’d never heard anything like them. It was like … heaven music. I’m sure Elizabeth found any “voice of God” comments annoying but it was true! And the band stood out so starkly. So did Dead Can Dance. And of course, “I Melt With You” had been everywhere.’
After being courted by Gary Smith, who ran Fort Apache studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he produced ten tracks that were turned into The Doghouse Cassette, which the band’s new manager, former lawyer Ken Goes, sent to 4AD.
Ivo played the cassette in his car. ‘I’d got stuck in traffic, and I listened to it three or four times in a row. It was an odd experience. There was something so exciting about it, which reminded me in a way of The Birthday Party – the energy, the lyrics. But I wasn’t looking to get involved with anything else. I always felt we were too busy and not giving enough attention to every individual record. Ken said he’d only had one other response, from Stiff.’
Ivo called and left a message for Hersh: her flatmate wrote down, ‘IVO called’, and she didn’t know any IVO: did it stand for the International Voting Organisation? But he called back. ‘I was confused,’ says Hersh. ‘I thought the only help that record labels offered was signing bands! But Ivo and I would talk about everything but the music industry, which was easy because that didn’t interest either of us. We’d discuss rose diseases, interesting animals, crazy shit that we saw. He was essentially a child in a man’s body and I was still a child. We were both quirky people that didn’t need many other quirky people around, so we got along great.’
Deborah Edgely: ‘I was in the car when Ivo played the tape, and I’d never heard anything like it, just spine-chilling. To me, we could have the most fantastic band that ever walked the planet after The Birthday Party, and Ivo so did not want to sign them! Was it commitment? Finance? That they were American? Too complicated? There were lots of reasons, but we kept talking about them.’
Eventually, Ivo capitulated. ‘The music was hard and aggressive but the more you lived with it, the more their beauty came through. But my main caution was that 4AD didn’t have guaranteed American distribution and I was concerned we wouldn’t do them justice. If I’d actually got on a plane to meet the band, I’m sure the offer would have been made a lot more quickly, because I’m still not sure how such incredibly original talent existed in four such smart, young and super-nice people.
‘There was also something quite different about American musicians back then. They really took what they did very seriously, constantly rehearsing and improving. I’d not experienced that much before as so many of the bands I’d worked with had pretty much made things up in the studio and only rehearsed when they were about to tour.’
Ivo was also captivated by Throwing Muses’ conspicuous gender. Since the masculine clamour of Bauhaus, In Camera and Matt Johnson’s Burning Blue Soul in 4AD’s formative days, the label had transitioned to a more feminine and androgynous spirit, but shot through with a tenacious streak (no wonder gay men were drawn to 4AD). Ivo wasn’t gay, just mesmerised by women – their presence, shape, energy and sound. No other A&R man or woman, before or since, has given so much opportunity to female artists.
‘It wasn’t just about the number of women on 4AD,’ says The Catalogue editor Brenda Kelly, ‘but the female voice. You never thought, “Oh, 4AD, all those chicks”, because it wasn’t about being pop stars or even their personalities, but about the music. And Kristin Hersh made total sense on 4AD. There was something wide-eyed and extraordinary about her, something emotional and visceral, some
thing basic and yet complex.’
Hersh was hugely relieved when Ivo changed his mind. ‘We were about to sign some shitty deal with an American company, but the 4AD deal was so exquisitely fair compared to that. Ivo was a real hero. He’d still call me and talk for hours, in long, beautiful circles, which I loved. He was just like me, except he could talk. Music was the only language in which I was fluent.’
Hersh’s language problem emerged when it came to negotiating the recording of Throwing Muses’ debut album. As a purist, she beat Ivo hands down: Hersh wanted nothing that came between the material and the listener. Her yardstick was the first Violent Femmes album, ‘a raw, attractive piece of work that didn’t insult the material,’ Hersh says. ‘I only wanted that we become professional without being ruined, to stay raw without being unlistenable. That was a way of saying leave us alone, but clearly our craziness needed to be reined in.’
Having felt exposed by his technical and instrumental lack, Ivo had begun to count himself out of the producer’s role. For something as complex and unusual as Throwing Muses, he turned to Gil Norton, who’d partially helmed Echo & The Bunnymen’s baroque masterpiece Ocean Rain. The Muses trusted Ivo’s judgement, but the fastidious Norton proved a challenge, especially as Hersh was putting forward new songs, such as ‘Delicate Cutters’, an unnerving acoustic portrayal of self-harm. Plus she was pregnant. Hormones raged.
Ivo: ‘Kristin was just nineteen when she gave birth to, and lived through, these songs, and Gil had to guide her. Colin Newman once told me that the most important thing a producer can do is know when to make a cup of tea. But most producers feel that they have to change things, and that’s why they’re hired. But I still think Throwing Muses’ album is true to the arrangements on the demos.’
‘Throwing Muses always had an art school angle, which we always tried to deflect, but 4AD embraced it,’ claims Narcizo. ‘And because of This Mortal Coil, Ivo had a greater affection for production. But we genuinely still felt that 4AD got what we did, which drew us closer to the label.’