by Martin Aston
Perhaps if Ivo hadn’t got so close to Guthrie, there wouldn’t have been the same sense of betrayal. Maybe the most revealing opinion comes from Guthrie himself. ‘Being stubborn and spiteful are two of my hugest influences when making music,’ he admits, grinning at the same time.
Cocteau Twins kept up an exhausting schedule, away from business matters; after a run of three EPs and the acoustic interlude of Victorialand, they recorded a new EP and another album, albeit a more spontaneous side project that hadn’t required the same extended commitment as a band album.
The four-track EP fronted by ‘Love’s Easy Tears’ suggested the old force of nature from the Treasure era had been stored up and the dam had been breached. ‘“Love’s Easy Tears” is beyond belief,’ reckons Ivo. ‘I’m not sure what was going on in Robin’s head. All three tracks were fantastic but I found the sound impenetrable. The guitars were out of phase and seemed to compete with the likes of The Jesus and Mary Chain. They never again released anything that resembled it.’
‘That was about pushing the sonic envelope as far as we could go, louder and fatter,’ Guthrie says. ‘I’d found the button on the mixing desk marked “more” and I wanted to see if I could go there.’
Another possible reason for the outpouring of sound was another record, which had reactivated Cocteau Twin’ gentler side. Ivo had been contacted by Britain’s TV station Channel 4 about a series that would unite musicians from different genres. He says he suggested Cocteau Twins and that Simon Raymonde had in turn suggested the band approach Californian pianist Harold Budd – though Raymonde thinks Budd was Ivo’s idea. ‘Harold had made a beautiful record with Eno [The Pearl] and we thought it could be amazing with him,’ says Raymonde. ‘I’m not sure Robin agreed at the time.’
On the contrary, Guthrie says, who has since recorded several albums with the ambient-leaning Budd. The TV series never evolved but both parties still rendezvoused to record The Moon And The Melodies, released as Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser. ‘Harold was very like us,’ Raymonde recalls. ‘He arrived unprepared, we started playing together and then we pushed the record button.’
Budd told journalist Dave Sexton that he hadn’t heard of Cocteau Twins, but had contacted a friend in the music industry who told him he’d like them, and put a tape together for him. ‘And he was absolutely right. As musicians, I found them immensely interesting people to work with. And in spite of my inclination to work alone, it’s great to get into the studio with someone else and pick each other’s brains – very satisfying.’
‘Sea, Swallow Me’ – scored by Budd’s refracted piano sound, which did indeed sound as if it was emanating from underwater – even harked back to the imagery of ‘Song To The Siren’, and showed Elizabeth Fraser’s ability to conjure up a compelling melody was undiminished – the Cocteaus were sufficiently taken with the track to play it on tour later that year. ‘She Will Destroy You’ was another cool beauty, with Richie Thomas’s saxophone blowing mellifluously over the coda.‡ ‘It’s a lovely, lovely record,’ says Ivo. ‘It wasn’t the best work by either the band or Harold, but I was extremely happy to release it.’
Guthrie’s only regret was that The Moon And The Melodies wasn’t a true collaboration: ‘it was either Harold produced by us, or us with a bit of piano. Harold isn’t even on the last track – the album was too short and we had to write something new after he’d left. Sorry, man!’
After loving the Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In A Shallow Bay covers, Guthrie was back to his usual tetchy self with criticism of the band’s artwork. ‘Love’s Easy Tears’ wasn’t that different from the preceding EP, while Victorialand had been taken from the same session as Sunburst And Snowblind, so to call the former ‘much of a muchness’ and the latter ‘a beautiful photo but not much more’ wasn’t harsh. But to say The Moon And The Melodies was ‘ordinary … I never liked it’ just sounded bitter.
‘Robin would get intense and instead of embracing the positive, he’d go full tilt into rucks in the office, like with Vaughan, several times,’ Deborah Edgely recalls. ‘He seemed so frustrated. The angry man kept coming out.’
‘With any journalist, Robin would slag off 4AD and particularly Ivo,’ says Ray Conroy. ‘It was awful. He was coked out of his mind, and very aggressive. He really relished it too, sometimes staying up for three days. He turned into a nightmare.’
After one too many rows, Oliver had already handed over the Cocteaus to Nigel Grierson. ‘They developed more of an issue with Vaughan than me,’ says Grierson. ‘Robin didn’t like anything in boxes, and he kept going on about “Vaughan and his boxes”! And they had an issue with Ivo that I could never work out.’
With Grierson dictating events, the iridescent paint/water impressions had become predictable, and perhaps in recognition of change – or because Harold Budd’s presence necessitated it – Grierson’s cover for The Moon And The Melodies was a black-and-white photo of a hawthorn hedge: ‘a really intense abstraction,’ says Grierson, ‘almost Jackson Pollock-like, and twisted so that it looked like it was spiralling.’
Guthrie’s friends in Dif Juz were on the edge of their own spiral. The band’s Huremics and Vibrating Air EPs were remixed and reissued as the vinyl-only Out Of The Trees, with the unnecessary novelty of having Richie Thomas’s friend Hollis Chambers sing, in a jarringly soul-jazz style, over the dub-fractured ‘Heset’. The handsome pelicans on the cover – being 23 Envelope, no one was expecting trees – fulfilled their brief of masking the problems spilling over from Gary Bromley’s departure; Richie Thomas says he was also feeling the heat of Dave Curtis’s controlling manner, and that touring had adversely affected the guitarist’s health. ‘It was how we were living, touring around Europe, not eating and living well,’ Thomas recalls. ‘Dave was a bit older than us and it took its toll. He was on painkillers and he had to have an operation, after which he said he didn’t want to carry on.’
There was dissent in the air too with 4AD’s last record of 1986, another band-family feud, though 4AD was not involved. Xymox had survived the recording of Clan Of Xymox, but the dream come true of an association with 4AD was not enough to prevent the fragile relationships between Ronny Moorings and Anka Wolbert, and between Moorings and Pieter Nooten, from pulling the band apart.
Living in the Netherlands, with their only familial connection to 4AD being Dead Can Dance, and being the most peripheral members of the established clan, Wolbert says that Xymox felt very isolated. ‘4AD was a weird bunch, solitary, individual and hypersensitive. Maybe we were too. Maybe it was just the age. But we just kept to ourselves.’
The band had returned to Palladium in the summer, sidelining guitarist Frank Weyzig to only live performance, meaning one less ego to contain. Ivo had met Xymox at Palladium but felt he was no longer the right producer. ‘Their songs needed a lot of rearranging, which I couldn’t do, and I thought I was one cook too many.’
Talking of cooks, studio life didn’t denote glamour, and Moorings’ memory of Palladium includes the frugal catering by Jon Turner’s wife Anne: ‘chips, frozen peas and some sort of schnitzel, every day. And Jon habitually re-used tea-bags, and was now charging for a second cup of tea or coffee.’
A more serious source of tension was the aftermath of the explosion at Russia’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor three months earlier, as Scotland was in the pathway of the radioactive cloud that was floating westwards, throwing the memories of anti-nuclear protests in the Netherlands into sharp relief. But more immediately threatening was what Moorings calls, ‘the volatile situation in our own band’. He says, ‘The recordings were even more unpleasant than before.’
Whatever creative milestone the new recordings were setting was overshadowed by the cloud that settled over Xymox, with clashing testimonies as to the severity of the scenario. Moorings claims that Wolbert and Nooten fought over her lack of contribution while she still claimed an equal share of the band’s earnings. ‘Pieter belittled her input constantly in the stud
io. I was not too happy about that considering she was still my “partner”,’ Moorings writes.
Wolbert and Nooten deny this was ever the case. Wolbert had her first Xymox song on the album, with the potentially revealing title ‘Masquerade’, while Nooten wrote three outright – ‘Theme 1’, ‘Lorrentine’ and ‘After The Fall’ – and the music for the title track ‘Louise’, and ‘Backdoor’, for which Moorings wrote and sang the vocal melodies. He also wrote the remaining three songs. The trio collaborated on arrangements that Moorings says created, ‘terrible scenes and arguments, tears and a mish-mash of ideas’.
Neither Wolbert nor Nooten recall such drama. ‘I think I’d remember,’ says Wolbert. ‘It was a typical second album. It took a long time to get together, it’s darker, there were no club hits, but we got better at songwriting. Ronny was trying to be more commercial but he was also afraid to go commercial.’
Moorings claims that Ivo was unhappy with what Xymox had recorded at Palladium, and had asked the band to keep recording. Ivo doesn’t recall this, but what is agreed is that Xymox returned to Blackwing to mix the album with John Fryer. Moorings also claims that he’d recorded new parts on his own, to which Nooten had agreed, ‘because Pieter was already working on his solo project … That might explain the little input he gave to Xymox in those days.’
Wolbert insists that Moorings was never in the studio without her (unless he went behind her back), so was this trauma all Moorings’ invention, to create the idea that only he was working towards the final goal? The move to assume full control of Xymox seemed clear from his admission that he now wanted the band to be called Clan Of Xymox, ‘like on the artwork of the first album. I had read the book Clan Of The Cave Bear and I liked the ring of “Clan Of”. When I saw it in print, it made sense: I was Mr Xymox and the Clan was the rest.’§
The album, Medusa, was eventually completed to everyone’s satisfaction. ‘Sometimes the most difficult album is also the most interesting one,’ Moorings concludes. For some, it was a better record than Clan Of Xymox: despite its painful genesis, it sounded rounded and atmospheric, nailing a particular European melancholy, all faded grandeur and downtrodden fortune.
Nooten: ‘People still tell me Medusa is a masterpiece, combining ambient and early gothic electronica.’
The album’s standout, Nooten’s ‘After The Call’, came decked in woodwind, timpani (kettledrums) and a choir, bearing an uncanny resemblance to both Breathless and various Factory label bands, especially Belgium’s The Names, in the old Joy Division manner. Moorings’ ‘Back Door’ mined a similar mood, haughty and, yes, gothic. Crossing Kraftwerk with OMD and Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, Wolbert’s ‘Masquerade’ was an elegant ballad with her bass high in the mix and scored with strings, but even when the track momentarily sped up and a sequencer was added, it was much less obviously indebted to The Cure and New Order.
If anything, it shared more common ground with early Dead Can Dance records and with This Mortal Coil’s moods; there was a more pronounced sadness to the new album, with which to seduce Ivo. In reality, however, Ivo admits, ‘I didn’t connect with Medusa the same way as I had with the first album.’ The UK coverage was very positive for the rebranded Clan Of Xymox: ‘An overriding achievement … every track sounds like the finale to a brooding epic overture … in their prime passages, they brush with a sexy breathlessness,’ ventured Sounds.
The Xymox experience had been a tumultuous end to a frankly tumultuous year for 4AD – extraordinary music, unpleasant fall-outs, divisive press reactions, and even an astonishing piece of fortune: Ivo and Deborah had been forced to cancel a holiday to the Maldives after Filigree & Shadow had been released in September because they felt things were still too busy. During the plane’s stopover in Sri Lanka, the flight that they would have taken was subsequently blown up by the separatist militant organisation the Tamil Tigers.
The demands of running a label saw Ivo continue to keep a firm hand on most aspects of the business. ‘I saw different sides to Ivo,’ Vaughan Oliver recalls. ‘How could one man pick up the phone to a band to talk about artistic direction, then talk to a producer, and then to a distributor, saying, “Where are my fucking records, and why aren’t you selling any?” He juggled it all.’
As 4AD grew in size and profile, Oliver could see that aspects of this dream opportunity – as Ivo once said, ‘I take music very seriously’ – had begun to wear him down. ‘We had one conversation where Ivo said he was jealous of me, because I didn’t have the business and political sides to deal with. I could just be creative. I didn’t get it at the time, because I thought he was happy with what he was doing.’
It was late December before Ivo and Deborah flew to the Maldives, accompanied this time by Vaughan and his girlfriend Ginny – but not, on this holiday, by Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser; manic work schedules on both sides had separated the two couples’ orbits, reducing the chance for consolidating friendships. With what was to come in 1987 – from epic highs to miserable lows – the holidaying couples would value the chance to snatch some moments of peace.
* The first public performance of Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares was as the soundtrack to the all-female dance troupe The Cholmondeleys for their support slot to Dead Can Dance at London’s prestigious Barbican arts centre. The troupe’s founder Lea Anderson was the singer of the band Temporary Title, who had been considered for one of the first Axis releases. One composer that Anderson commissioned to score her dance pieces was her boyfriend at the time, Drostan Madden, who would later produce tracks by a momentarily-reformed In Camera and also The Wolfgang Press.
† When 4AD trailed the This Mortal Coil box set via a brief video posted on YouTube, Ivo was frustrated to discover that the soundtrack chosen was the instrumental ‘At First, And Then’, written by former Dead Can Dance collaborator Peter Ulrich. ‘It was given to me by Peter, and so it was the only piece on Filigree & Shadow that I didn’t commission, write or play on! I was told it was the only piece that fit the trailer.’
‡ ‘Ooze Out And Away, Onehow’, the instrumental finale on The Moon And The Melodies, got its title from a lyrical phrase in the Head Over Heels cut ‘My Love Paramour’, while the title of one of Budd’s contributions, ‘Bloody And Blunt’, came from the same album’s ‘The Tinderbox (Of A Heart)’. ‘Melody Gongs’, another Budd composition, reappeared on his 1986 album Lovely Thunder under the title of ‘Flower Knife Shadows’.
§ Moorings was at least willing to play a subservient role to Vaughan Oliver, who chose to out himself on the cover of Medusa – with a plaster cast of his head, based on the mythological Greek character of Medusa who could turn people to stone turned to stone herself. Nigel Grierson recalls that he took the head, in a bag, to various locations for filming; one was a wood outside London in East Grinstead, where he later heard that a headless body had been found in a plastic bag …
chapter 10 – 1987
Chains Changed
(BAD701–BAD711)
M/A/R/R/S was the best and worst thing that ever happened to 4AD.
(Simon Harper)
In the Maldives, 4AD’s four holidaymakers had shaved their heads. It was Vaughan’s idea: ‘I enjoyed the idea of a pretty face with a shaved head, so I used to shave my girlfriends’ hair.’ Ivo and Deborah joined in, and Ivo and Vaughan both kept a shaved head or a close crop for the next twenty years. ‘They created a look for the label,’ claimed an ever-cynical Robin Guthrie. ‘They wanted the same celebrity as the bands.’
Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses was typically less judgemental. ‘My strongest memory of visiting the 4AD office was the shaved heads. And that their tea was like cocaine.’
Throwing Muses’ Chains Changed EP instigated 4AD’s 1987 offensive with the same dizzy charge as the band’s debut album, especially the manic rockabilly slant of ‘Snail Head’ and the flat-out charge of ‘Cry Baby Cry’. The EP was a faultless mirror of the band’s capabilities – and never to be repeated, as Gil Norton would never again
get his hands on the Muses.
Also rather fond of a shaved head, The Wolfgang Press was on its own persistent path of evolution. The four-track EP Big Sex accentuated four facets of the modern dance: pop (‘The Great Leveller’), tribal (‘The Wedding’), mantra (‘That Heat’) and funk (‘God’s Number’), which put it closer to the elements of the Talking Heads’ Remain In Light model, with guest backing vocalist Ruby James adding soulful lustre to the feeling of liberation.
Another reason why Ivo had been unable to take time off was a project that was finally coming to fruition, providing all the proof needed that the toil was worthwhile. Ivo hated the idea of compilations, of tracks conceived for one purpose being re-packaged for another, so instead of raiding the back catalogue as most every major or indie did, he had issued instructions to every 4AD artist ‘to record one song that they’d be happy to release as their next single. Or a single on 4AD terms.’ The way he saw it, ‘A purpose-made compilation was a celebration of what the label was doing at that time.’
A Hersh lyric, from Throwing Muses’ typically-pulsating contribution ‘Fish’, lent the album its beguiling title: Lonely Is An Eyesore. ‘I knew it would confuse people, unless you heard it in the context of the song,’ says Ivo. ‘I was also thinking of Gene Clark’s line in “Life’s Greatest Fool”: “… too much loneliness makes you grow old”.’