Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  On the back of the cover, Oliver listed the acts that had passed through 4AD’s doors. Yet the compilation was only nine tracks long, and even then, two were from Dead Can Dance, one each from the diverging Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. Ivo was intent on keeping 4AD a select, boutique operation, with the core constituents being those affiliated to This Mortal Coil, a core family with Clan Of Xymox the overseas relations and Throwing Muses the new, adopted children. ‘In many ways, Lonely Is An Eyesore was a line in the sand, the end of an era, of relationships within 4AD, and graphically too,’ says Ivo.

  With an equal dislike of videos, or rather the growing necessity to have one attached in the competing marketplace, Ivo wanted a visual version of Lonely Is An Eyesore, ‘though not with the view to get it on TV,’ he says. ‘This was fucking art!’

  Two years earlier, Nigel Grierson had made the thirty-minute film Maelstrom for his postgraduate degree, a noir-styled depiction of what Grierson calls, ‘a relationship between a man and woman, seen through the murky subjectivity of the man’s memory. An internal reality’. The imagery struck an even better balance of ‘filigree’ and ‘shadow’ than Grierson’s most recent This Mortal Coil sleeve, with a suitably impressionistic soundtrack of Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Colin Newman and Duet Emmo (a musical alliance between Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis and Mute’s Daniel Miller). Maelstrom was part of the Six Nix Hix Pix season of promising young British filmmakers at London’s Institute of the Contemporary Arts the same week that it was shown at Dead Can Dance’s 1986 concert at The Town & Country Club – a 4AD carnival with The Wolfgang Press, Dif Juz and The Heavenly Bodies (an alliance between This Mortal Coil contributor Caroline Seaman and Dead Can Dance’s James Pinker and Scott Rodger) also on the bill. Ivo subsequently commissioned Grierson to make the Lonely Is An Eyesore video. The only limitations on Grierson’s brief were meant to be time and money; he had to farm out Throwing Muses’ video, as the band was in America, but some artists (he doesn’t name them) resisted the idea, as they had 23 Envelope’s efforts to freely interpret their music. Grierson’s treatments often involved grimy water in the style of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and grainy monochrome, creating a shrouded, solemn mood, rarely detouring from the 4AD vernacular.

  Ivo singles out Dif Juz’s ‘No Motion’ for two reasons: it’s his favourite ever Dif Juz track – ‘finally they captured themselves’ – and the video is the only known visual evidence of the band. ‘There’s one moment where Alan Curtis looks up and gives a deep sigh, he’s so bored,’ Ivo recalls. It’s also the most poignant Dif Juz track, as it was the last recording that the band ever released. Dave Curtis’s health had improved and so Ivo had funded some rehearsals, but the guitarist quickly backed out, hoping to record a solo album instead. Ivo still hoped that this effort would turn back into a Dif Juz record, but there was to be no album, band or solo.

  Ever since Steve Miller’s Sailor and Neil Young’s eponymous debut, Ivo had been fond of albums that set the scene with an instrumental. In retrospect, ‘No Motion’ would have been a suitably moving intro for the album, and the right scene-setter, but Ivo elected to start with Colourbox’s ‘Hot Doggie’, a red herring as far as the rest of the album was concerned, being yet another slim, punchy TV-style theme, littered with samples, from 2000 Motels and Star Trek to Supergirl and The Evil Dead. Grierson’s treatment thankfully eschewed water and sobriety for film samples spliced between the sight of the Young brothers driving a mock car in a fabricated, neon-drenched version of London’s Soho district, with a rare dose of camp on 4AD – cartoon gangsters, a close-up on a cleavage, messy kissing, terrible wigs.

  Cutting from ‘Hot Doggie’ to This Mortal Coil’s ‘Acid, Bitter And Sad’ was like swapping sugar for salt. Ivo’s first entirely self-composed track was partly an inspired case of plagiarism that improvised a haze of synths over a rhythm borrowed from Cocteau Twins’ ‘Musette And Drums’ and Colourbox’s ‘The Moon Is Blue’. Alison Limerick’s phased vocal briefly emerged towards the end with a desperately sad lyric: ‘The half-moon is aching, bitter and sad/ We are bare, we are stripped to the bone/ It’s out of our hands, a dream without a dream/ We are bare, always alone.’

  It’s unlikely that Ivo would have chosen ‘Acid, Bitter And Sad’ as This Mortal Coil’s next single. Besides ‘Hot Doggie’, ‘Fish’ and Clan Of Xymox’s synth-rocking ‘Muscoviet Musquito’, Lonely Is An Eyesore failed to fulfil Ivo’s original remit of potential singles, from The Wolfgang Press’s slow-burning ‘Cut The Tree’ to Brendan Perry’s lengthy, Philip Glass-esque instrumental ‘The Protagonist’. Lisa Gerrard wasn’t involved until Ivo suggested a remixed version of ‘Frontier’ from the first Dead Can Dance album, diluting the concept of imagined singles even further.

  Next to Perry and Gerrard’s protracted approach to recording, Cocteau Twins were much more adept at creating new bespoke pieces, providing the new and exquisite ‘Crushed’, an extension of the relaxed Echoes In A Shallow Bay sound. The track was to be the trio’s sole recording in 1987; after an intense five years, they were taking a breather while Robin Guthrie assembled a proper home studio, housed in a warehouse in Acton, aided at the start by the technically proficient Young brothers – for the Colourbox boys, any distraction from writing and recording a song was preferable.

  Mention Lonely Is An Eyesore to Guthrie and his response is typical: ‘I’ve never had a royalty statement for that album,’ he claims, ‘which is interesting.’ Guthrie also says he never received one of the hundred limited edition versions, a wooden (American beech) box designed by Vaughan Oliver to house vinyl, CD, cassette and video versions plus a booklet and two art prints by Terry Dowling: ‘All this by little 4AD,’ says Oliver, whose commitment to design was second to none. (One of them can be found in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection, evidence of 4AD’s place in British design). Guthrie takes pleasure in recounting that Martyn Young – who was sent a box set – turned his into a cat litter tray. ‘I saw it round his house!’ Guthrie smirks. ‘But then Martyn is a very obtuse character.’

  Like the V&A, Melody Maker treated Lonely Is An Eyesore as a landmark, honouring the occasion by putting 4AD on its cover and profiling every artist on the compilation. Press coverage might not always have been favourable, but at this point 4AD was guaranteed blanket coverage. TV and radio were another matter; Ivo decided, after Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares and the specialist dance coverage given to Colourbox and The Wolfgang Press, that he needed to look at getting broader media coverage with more than the piecemeal freelance plugging that he’d previously commissioned.

  For the post of running 4AD’s TV and radio promotions, Ray Conroy suggested his friend Howard Gough, another Colchester lad who had been working at Island Records. Colourbox’s songwriting was signed to Island’s in-house publishers Blue Mountain, so Gough had already worked on ‘Baby I Love You So’ and ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’. He could bring experience, and contacts, gained from working for a major label, to change the perception of 4AD’s esoteric appeal. ‘Radio 1 would need to know there was a possibility a single could be a hit, and that the machinery was in place for that to happen,’ says Deborah Edgely. Gough was to bring much more: energy, chaos, distress.

  According to Conroy, Gough is currently living back at his parents’ house, without a working email account or mobile phone, which doesn’t paint an encouraging picture. The only feedback from requests for an interview – via Conroy – are that Gough reckons he has nothing interesting to say. And this from a man who reputedly never stopped for breath.

  ‘Howard was a motormouth,’ says Brendan Perry. ‘But not in a good way. He was a coked-up train run amok, full of braggadocio. He didn’t even need coke. His arrival felt like things were changing at 4AD.’

  Ivo: ‘I can understand why Brendan might say that. Howard was an extraordinary character, a really positive person who loved to party. No one could ever say he and I had much in common or operated with a shared vision, but he did an e
normous amount to raise the profile of most of our bands. I wanted to unify 4AD’s representation on the radio, and that Gough did that really well. And he was great at taking care of visiting bands. He could make them feel special, and he was the go-to person to fix stuff. He could get anything done. I remember Howard once parted the crowd leading into the Glastonbury festival, like Moses and the Red Sea, so that Throwing Muses’ van, which had broken down earlier, could get through.’

  There was an instant clash of personalities between Gough and 4AD’s resident party animal, Vaughan Oliver. ‘We had absolutely no connection, besides taking drugs,’ says Oliver. ‘I think Ivo brought Howard in to shake things up, because he had such a different mindset. He was going to take us somewhere else. Whenever we talked about music, he’d say, “Yeah, this band sold this many units.” What the fuck was he doing at 4AD?’

  The question was instantly answered by a release that would make the best of Gough’s motivation and bravado, and test the foundations of this music-centric label forced into competition with the majors. Gough’s first 4AD assignment involved Colourbox, 4AD’s newest signing A.R. Kane, and a collaboration that tilted 4AD off its axis and into a thrilling and uncertain present.

  A.R. Kane had been formed by two east London school friends, who took their initials from their first names Alex (Ayuli) and Rudy (Tambala). With bassist Russell Smith as the silent partner in the relationship, the trio timed it well: their swirl of guitar FX chimed perfectly with the tenor of the times, as bands such as Dinosaur Jr and the emerging My Bloody Valentine signalled a further shift from social and political engagement into the realm of beautiful noise.

  ‘We borrowed from rock and soul and jazz and blues,’ Tambala explained when I first met him in 1987, citing jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’s fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew as the band’s benchmark. Today, Tambala lives in the old Roman town of St Albans north of London, a semi-rural contrast to A.R. Kane’s urban roots, while Ayuli has lived on the west coast of America since the early Nineties. The pair no longer talk, not even when the band’s Complete Singles Collection was released in 2012. Everything the pair touched seemed destined to implode. ‘We weren’t on 4AD for long,’ says Tambala. ‘We were extremely disruptive everywhere we went.’

  A.R. Kane’s debut single ‘When You’re Sad’ had been the second release on One Little Indian, an independent label formed by Flux of Pink Indians, an anarcho-punk band associated with punk rock’s continually committed agitators Crass. Iceland’s Sugarcubes, fronted by the inimitable Björk, was soon to follow, showing A&R supremo Derek Birkett was casting the net wide.

  At the time, says Tambala, ‘4AD was our favourite label, esoteric and out there. Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil records were like pieces of God; you put them delicately on the turntable, and you felt God touching you! We were really into that ethereal world, being from east London, and trying to escape from the shit. But neither of us had a clue how to approach a record label.’

  They had only made contact with One Little Indian after Tambala had been introduced to Derek Shulman, a former member of the progressive band Gentle Giant who had been producing Sugarcubes. Birkett came to see A.R. Kane rehearse: ‘He said, “You’re fucking shit, let’s do a record together!”’ Tambala laughs. ‘That was Derek’s way of talking, like a hard man.’

  A.R. Kane’s debut single ‘When You’re Sad’ had been favoured by the music press, who saw an angle in that Tambala and Ayuli were black, and had labelled the band ‘the black Jesus and Mary Chain’ (even though bassist Smith was white). Ivo was equally a fan of the single, which he considers better than anything they recorded for 4AD. They had contacted Ivo after growing increasingly frustrated with Birkett delaying a follow-up – most likely he was distracted by Sugarcubes’ impending debut single ‘Birthday’, which was to be received by the music press as another piece of God. ‘It was funny,’ says Tambala, ‘because Derek had told us, “You’ll do a few songs with me, but eventually you’ll go to 4AD”.’

  A.R. Kane duly sent Ivo a demo of ‘Lollita’: ‘He loved it and suggested we record a single and asked who we wanted to produce it. Can we have that bloke from Cocteau Twins? Yeah, he’d love to, Ivo replied. It was like a dream come true.’

  Ivo already knew Ayuli, from his job as the copywriter responsible for the Thompsons Holidays advert that had used a version of ‘Song To The Siren’, sung by Louise Rutkowski after Ivo and Cocteau Twins had vetoed This Mortal Coil’s version. But One Little Indian didn’t share the dream – Ivo had wrongly assumed that A.R. Kane had told Birkett of their imminent move.

  ‘Derek and his crew marched down to 4AD’s office for a confrontation with Ivo and the 4AD gang,’ says Tambala. ‘Imagine a room full of middle-class skinheads; 4AD’s effete skinheads and One Little Indian’s anarcho-punk skinheads! I wish I’d been there. Eventually, I hear it fizzled out and Derek’s lot went off. We thought it was great that they were fighting over us.’

  Ivo didn’t agree. ‘He loved the demo but he didn’t love us,’ says Tambala.

  ‘It’s true, I didn’t enjoy them,’ Ivo recalls.

  Tambala: ‘It was a culture clash between us and 4AD and we made Ivo a little nervous and edgy. 4AD believed their own press to an extent; it was all very beautiful and precious, everyone wore black and had their heads shaved. You’d call it Zen, but it wasn’t the rough-and-tumble Kerouac Zen of living the money, but the aesthetic, bourgeois idea – that everything must be very carefully done, that we’re all sensitive individuals.’

  A.R. Kane weren’t impressed: ‘We thought, this is fucking bullshit, we’re not buying into it! You have to take the piss out of that stuff. Alex would say, “Ivo, you look really hip. The last time I saw you, you were wearing pixie boots with your trousers tucked in.” I guess he [Ivo] wasn’t pleased to be called on his pretensions. At the same time, they were really nice and unthreatening people.’

  The twelve-inch Lollita EP, comprising the title track ‘Sado-Masochism Is A Must’ and ‘Butterfly Collector’, was audacious and thrilling, especially the middle eight of ‘Sado-Masochism Is A Must’, with Ayuli hollering, ‘and this hurts and that hurts and this hurts and that hurts’, the staccato guitar/drum slash resembling a knife or the impact of a punch. This was duly illustrated by the artwork, of a naked girl – borderline-underage in homage to the controversial novel Lolita by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov – holding a knife behind her back, which the band had commissioned from the emerging (and now world-famous) photographer Juergen Teller.

  Producer Robin Guthrie played his part by amplifying the trio’s violent, bruising take on dream-pop, his finest hour outside of Cocteau Twins. He was probably revelling in working with a band that he knew were mocking his pet peeve, 4AD. ‘The way Robin and Liz would talk about Ivo was unbelievable,’ Tambala recalls. ‘But Robin could also be incredibly warm and magnanimous. He let us use his guitars and effects; we could even borrow them. But then he could flip into darkness at the drop of a pin, the most cynical bastard around. Working with Robin was a trip! He was extremely exacting, and harsh, like, “What’s the fuck’s that shit? Do it again.” But to go from a scrappy first single to something good enough for 4AD, you needed someone like Robin.’

  Tambala says he identified with Guthrie’s working-class mentality and his view of 4AD. ‘Neither Robin or us had time for all that effete stuff about 4AD. It was all about making good music. So there was that edge between us and 4AD, but that kind of relationship should be edgy. They’re exploiting you, in the sense of, “We’ll make money out of what you create, we will take a big cut and give you some back, and without us, you don’t exist”. As much as you need them, you hate them, so you try to tear them down.’

  As the newest outsiders to the 4AD clan, A.R. Kane had a perspective on how Cocteau Twins and the label were perceived. ‘When we played in Europe,’ Tambala says, ‘fans appeared to love Ivo more than Cocteau Twins, as if Ivo was some god. I think he liked to play that Svengali role; not Ivo W
atts-Russell, just Ivo. The Cocteaus even wrote a song called “Ivo”. You kept seeing his name on 4AD’s record sleeves, like Manfred Eicher on [European jazz label] ECM. Like, who’s this guy, who seems to be touching all of this amazing stuff and making it happen? I could imagine there might be a lot of envy around that.’

  Justifiably proud of ‘Lollita’, A.R. Kane wanted to show the breadth of their tastes and ambition, informing Ivo that they wanted to make a dance track. ‘We’d been clubbing since we were about twelve, and we knew [On-U Sound label head/producer] Adrian Sherwood, who was an East End boy like us,’ says Tambala. ‘He’d show us what he was doing with samplers, and he was working with the Sugarhill label guys, Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc, the world’s best rhythm section at the time, so we asked Ivo if we could work with them too. His reaction was, “I don’t really like that lot, this is what I’d like you to do, Colourbox haven’t worked for two years, I want to get them out of retirement and re-energise them, you’ve both got eclectic tastes”. Who were we to say no to God? We were massively grateful to be in the studio, and on what we thought was the best indie label.’

  Ivo: ‘Some would argue, as with Robin, you knew what you were getting with Adrian Sherwood, meaning his white man dub. I thought it would be more interesting to work with Martyn Young, who liked the idea of following a suggestion instead of having to come up with a new track.’

  Young hadn’t heard of A.R. Kane but accepted the challenge. He also had the root of a new track after meeting British DJ/journalist Dave Dorrell, who had taken Young clubbing on London’s rare groove scene, a fusion scene of old jazz, funk and disco. Dorrell also gave Young bootlegs of rare groove breaks by the likes of Double Dee and Steinski. But the new track didn’t just flow; this being Colourbox, it had to be expertly measured.