Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

The Young brothers began at Blackwing, with engineer John Fryer, to make programmed beats have the same swing as rare groove breaks. ‘This didn’t work with just straight drum beats,’ Young explains. ‘We also wanted things to be sample-based with a narrative, so we started using vocal snatches mainly influenced by James Brown. John had a new sampler, the Akai S900, loaded with samples that he flicked through as I played them on a keyboard, which is how we got the piano sound that crossfaded into a backwards snare. Once we had that, we knew we had a track.’ He was to call it ‘Pump Up The Volume’.

  When Tambala and Ayuli joined them at Blackwing, Young changed tack. ‘I suggested a slow instrumental that I thought would be good with melodic feedback. But they weren’t up for it. I found them very student-y and arrogant, in it for what they could get out of it. I always had to bite my tongue with them, which is why we started working on “Pump Up The Volume” without them. We only got A.R. Kane in to put down some guitar feedback to keep Ivo happy as it was supposed to be a collaboration.’

  Tambala: ‘There are so many stories about “Pump Up The Volume” and they’re all wrong! Mine too, probably. My memory is that we turned up with a four-track demo of our track, “Anitina”, and started messing around. We had an idea for a vocal, a drum machine groove, a twelve-string guitar and echo. It just needed a massive production. Martyn, however, had been seduced by the dark side and he came in with this ambient piano piece, which was dreadful new age shite. I told him that if he put that down, I’d cover it in layers of feedback. He went a bit moody and started working on our track. Martyn was really hot on drum programming, and he lifted our track into the dance area, with a big fat bass and loads of space and echo. It sounded like a smash hit, with all the elements of what was percolating on both the dance and indie scenes.’

  Once the studio version of ‘Anitina’ was finished, says Tambala, ‘Martyn wanted to do this dance track that they’d started. He was totally hyped up, so we started pissing around, playing that stupid bass line, which was spoofy and filmic more than funky or rocky. At one point, Alex and I were on the drum machine, and it all started to gel. At which point, Martyn suddenly didn’t want us there anymore, a complete turnaround. We didn’t care; we’d had a good laugh and got “Anitina” done. Then Martyn’s mates turned up, this used car salesman guy that turned out to be Dave Dorrell, and his mate, CJ Mackintosh, who brought out his records and started scratching them, and then he was pushed to one side as well. But the backbone of that track was nothing without CJ. He lifted the whole track off the floor.’

  One of Dorrell’s records had unearthed an Eric B. & Rakim sample (from ‘I Know You Got Soul’) with the phrase ‘pump up the volume’, which Mackintosh’s scratching laid neatly into the track. Young also concedes that A.R. Kane did get ‘unique and unusual sounds out of their Roland space echo unit, which worked well with the James Brown samples’. Whatever the level of each contribution, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, and fulfilled a potential more than Colourbox’s own tracks.

  As Howard Gough got to work servicing the first round of white label test pressings of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ to the clubs, 4AD released Dead Can Dance’s third album. Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard had also seen the creative benefits of personal tension; Ivo could tell from meetings with the duo that their personal relationship wasn’t built to last, though they’d gone ahead and dispensed with other musicians after realising they could record everything themselves using programming and synthesised sound. Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun was even split into separate sides: Perry’s tracks on side one, Gerrard’s on side two.

  The duo may have been living in a depressed part of London but when they looked out the window, they saw Europe. The new album reflected the pair’s latest obsessions with nineteenth-century romantic classical music and French symbolist poetry; for example, the title ‘Anywhere Out Of The World’ was borrowed from Charles Baudelaire. Gerrard had been as spellbound as everyone else by the Bulgarian choir and had the raw talent to train herself to sing in the same open-throated style. ‘We’d heard and seen and read such an exotic and extraordinary weight of treasure that crossed all boundaries, and we realised that we had the right to do the same,’ she says. Perry adds, ‘I also wanted to reclaim ceremonial music from the special preserve of religious music’, as if this was a normal activity.

  The duo’s Euro-centricity was being rewarded by growing audiences across the continent, whereas Perry says Dead Can Dance’s UK concerts might only draw a handful of people outside of London. They seemed ready to move on again, like The Birthday Party, seeking new inspiration and not tied to Britain by sentiment or roots. They also found London’s dense concentration of media stifling, as well as the labelling that came with it. ‘When we worked on “Dawn Of The Iconoclast”,’ Gerrard recalls, ‘Brendan said to me, “I really want this piece to break the image that people have of us, this gothic punk stereotype that has no value”.’

  ‘Dawn Of The Iconoclast’ opened the ‘Lisa’ side by torching the idea of stereotypes, with an opening rally of horns, Gerrard’s Bulgarian-style incantation, swelling strings and timpani. On ‘The Summoning Of The Muse’, Gerrard’s voice overlapped in madrigal form, framed by church bells. This was not even of the same planet as Batcave goth staples Sex Gang Children, sounding more like the film soundtracks of epic European cinema. Perry’s side hit a similar mood. ‘Anywhere Out Of The World’ and ‘In The Wake Of Adversity’ joined the dots between Scott Walker’s lonely voyages and the mood of the Ingmar Bergman films that had so inspired him. For all the separation of the two sides, the album formed a magnificent whole.

  Throwing Muses had also persisted with dogged intuition, searching for a producer that could capture the band as they really were. This led to Mark van Hecke, who had produced the first two Violent Femmes albums, and a new mini-album. The Fat Skier also had two distinct sides: playing at 33rpm, six new tracks (including a re-recorded ‘And A She-Wolf After The War’ from The Doghouse Cassette) sounded lean, stripped back; playing at 45rpm on the flip, the debut album’s ‘Soul Soldier’ pointlessly bookended with ambient noises, from percussion to Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly in a park with a gurgling baby Dylan.

  The re-recorded track was not the band obeying intuition but the influence of Throwing Muses’ new American label, Sire. Label boss Seymour Stein wasn’t only interested in British bands: he clearly wanted American bands on British labels. Someone at Sire, or parent company Warner Brothers – no one can recall who – had singled out ‘Soul Soldier’ as a possible route to success. The additions were a bizarre way of refreshing it for fans that already owned it. It felt like a forced move, and Van Hecke’s production didn’t feel right either. ‘Mark erred on the other side of what we were shooting for,’ says David Narcizo. ‘We were disappointed because we expected the sound to get bigger. I preferred it to the first album, but Ivo wasn’t too happy.’

  Ivo: ‘I can’t help it, I like reverb and texture. I thought The Fat Skier sounded horrible and I probably only listened to it a handful of times. But things were beyond my control by then, because Sire had taken over the A&R. I really, really tried to persuade [manager] Ken Goes that it might be great for Sire to sign the band for America, but to let us represent them for the rest of the world and so not condemn them to the Warners system in Europe. But Sire had given the band money and we hadn’t, so we ended up with Throwing Muses only for Britain.’

  On paper, Sire was a valid option. It wasn’t uncommon for American bands to sign to a major label; the size of the country meant that US independents struggled to fulfil the needs of the larger alternative bands such as R.E.M. (the band’s record label IRS was an independent distributed by a major) and Hüsker Dü (Warners); even Sonic Youth would go the same way with Geffen. And Throwing Muses wouldn’t have fitted in with the punk/hardcore-minded indies such as SST, Touch and Go, Homestead and Dischord.

  Money was also the motivation behind the conflicting factions as 4AD got ready to
release ‘Pump Up The Volume’. After the white label got an emphatically positive reaction, the collaboration had needed a name, so Tambala suggested M/A/R/R/S, after the first name initials of the five principal members – Martyn, Alex, Rudy, Russell, Steven. Tambala’s reasoning was that ‘Even though Steven was never there, he was part of Colourbox and therefore M/A/R/R/S’. This implied a meeting of equals, but given what the Youngs thought of A.R. Kane’s limited contribution to ‘Pump Up The Volume’, which they could see had commercial legs, this was not the case. Sensing they could have publishing on both A- and B-sides, Ray Conroy informed Ivo that Colourbox wanted the current B-side, ‘Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance)’, removed, to be replaced by a new Colourbox B-side. Ivo wouldn’t agree, ‘for two reasons. One, to honour the original idea of the collaboration. If A.R. Kane hadn’t appeared, we’d probably still be waiting for Martyn to go into the studio. Second, I had no idea how long it would take Martyn to come up with a new B-side. Ray would have known that. I had to stick to the original plan.’

  Deborah Edgely: ‘I was on a train with Martyn, who was really angry about this marriage with A.R. Kane. From his perspective, “Pump Up The Volume” was nothing to do with Alex and Rudy, they’d just made the B-side, and he didn’t want it on his record. Something Ivo had instigated for all the right reasons had become something else. If he’d stood back and thought about what was happening, perhaps he could have done something different, like release the tracks separately.’

  Tambala: ‘If they’d removed “Anitina”, we’d have sued. We were brought in to fire Martyn up, and it totally worked. “Hot Doggie” compared to “Pump Up The Volume” is a shambles! Martyn didn’t have that street element in his music, so where do you think it came from? Sorry to be corny, but it came from the street. We were East End boys and West End clubbers. We mixed up every element that we’d heard and you can hear that mash-up spirit in “Pump Up The Volume”. That’s what Ivo picked up on, the naïve, aggressive feel. If you hear Martyn’s ambient track that he wanted us to work on, you’d understand.’

  The elephants in the room were Dorrell and Mackintosh: given how the pair influenced the sound of ‘Pump Up The Volume’, they, and not A.R. Kane, were arguably the sound of the street. Even so, Young now agrees with Ivo’s reasoning. ‘We may not have done “Pump Up The Volume” without A.R. Kane. We might have missed the boat, even if we’d done “Pump Up The Volume” eventually.’

  The track was an irresistible slice of what had been christened ‘hip-house’, a blend of house’s sleek mobility and hip-hop’s rougher energy, chock full of sample hooks (James Brown, Tom Browne, Pressure Drop, Trouble Funk, the list goes on), but little noticeable guitar. ‘Anitina’ was a mind-bending treat for anyone expecting more of the A-side’s dance/club purity, with a spacey mood swirled with guitar haze over a shifting palate of programmed drums that was beyond A.R. Kane’s abilities at that point. If anything could be called a true collaboration, it was here.

  Young’s next step was to return to the studio to improve the mix. Ivo refused to pay for it so Colourbox paid to use Cocteau Twins’ studio; the resulting version became the first ‘Pump Up The Volume’, released on white label, explains Young, ‘so that DJs wouldn’t prejudge a record on 4AD, which was Howard Gough’s good idea. I’m not sure if it would have taken off otherwise.’

  Though 4AD had nothing to be ashamed of, this was a pragmatic decision; dance DJs valued authenticity and 4AD’s ‘white’ and solemn image would detract from the music. Ivo was content to let Conroy and Gough take control: ‘It was a way to get a buzz going in clubs, and in the process of that, things just exploded. I’m sure both Ray and Howard, like the rest of us, made it up as they went along, but it went like clockwork.’

  The timing was perfect. Dance music pouring out of American clubs was predominantly house and techno but with the funk-based rare groove as part of the stew. 4AD, bastion of hyper-ethereal borderline-goth, was about to reap the benefit. ‘Dance and 1987 was like 1977 and punk rock, the start of something completely new, for 4AD as well,’ recalls Conroy. ‘Deborah and I were in New York for the [annual music industry conference] New Music Seminar, and we handed out copies of “Pump Up The Volume” and people went bonkers. We thought it was going to be huge. And that’s when it all went wrong.’

  ‘Everything was fine and dandy as the record started to take off, but we got totally sidelined,’ says Tambala. ‘No one mentioned us in interviews, which I don’t accept as decent behaviour. I’d read about Dave and CJ and the Youngs being M/A/R/R/S, though Alex and I were there through the drum programming, the bass sounds and the samples as a team. M/A/R/R/S should have had equal footing on both sides.’

  But the decision had been taken that Tambala and Ayuli were no longer part of the makeshift M/A/R/R/S. The first interview, in Sounds, had included them, but not the interviews in Melody Maker and NME, where Dorrell – an NME contributor himself – took centre stage alongside the publicity-shy Young brothers. The press shots followed suit. Tambala also points out that when Supersonic – commercial channel ITV’s equivalent to the BBC’s Top of the Pops – gave ‘Pump Up The Volume’ a slot, Ayuli recommended some dancers for the visual presentation, ‘but then they all fucked off and did the show without us!’ he says. ‘And there’s CJ and Dave representing us! After we’d helped them organise it. That was a turning point. I loved 4AD up till then, but they changed radically. It went legal. But as they say, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.’

  But the first writ came from an unlikely source. When ‘Pump Up The Volume’ first charted, Martyn Young had done a remix that helped the single climb ever-higher, into the UK top 10, but at a price. ‘The furore over stealing other people’s records had begun, so there was a definite sense of wanting to push the envelope,’ says Young. Pete Waterman, one third of Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW), the savvy factory-line pop producers behind the restricted talents of Kylie Minogue, Bananarama and Rick Astley, had remixed Sybil’s ‘My Love Is Guaranteed’, replacing the original backing track with M/A/R/R/S’s own and throwing in the same ‘pump up the volume’ Eric B. sample.

  ‘They’ve sampled us, let’s sample them,’ was Young’s motivation. The problem was, Young told Record Mirror that he had ‘bunged’ SAW’s track ‘all over our track’.

  Waterman disingenuously claimed to Q magazine that his name was on the Sybil label credits by mistake, ‘… only last week Stock Aitken Waterman were credited on six records we had nothing to do with.’ SAW’s next move was to take out an injunction on ‘Pump Up The Volume’ for not seeking permission – it didn’t seem to matter that Sybil and cohorts hadn’t sought M/A/R/R/S’s permission to sample them. The truth was, SAW’s action was more about putting a spanner in the works and preventing M/A/R/R/S from potentially knocking Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ from the top of the UK singles chart.

  SAW’s considerable wealth meant they could sue M/A/R/R/S for copyright infringement, but M/A/R/R/S and 4AD’s limited resources ensured that they couldn’t respond in kind. ‘We had problems with 4AD, A.R. Kane and Stock Aitken Waterman and it felt like we were talking to our lawyers every day,’ says Young. ‘We had no money anyway, but Steven and I were in the firing line for every infringement. The legal position in those days concerning sampling was very unclear and if everyone had sued, we might have owed money every time our track was sold or played.’

  As quickly as they’d slapped it on, SAW withdrew the injunction; Waterman claimed that he’d discovered the ‘Road Block’ sample was only on the twelve-inch of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ and he didn’t want to harm the sales of the seven-inch. Even so, says Young, ‘We agreed to pay their [SAW’s] choice of charity thousands of pounds and had to settle a big lawyer’s bill.’

  SAW’s injunction had put the brakes on ‘Pump Up The Volume’, but it couldn’t stop the momentum. ‘The demand rose as the chart placing did and there were four of us packing vinyl all day long at the warehouse,’ recalls Ray Conroy.
‘“Pump Up The Volume” was at number 2 for two weeks, stuck behind Rick Astley, including the week where we agreed we wouldn’t distribute more copies and we’d take off the offending sample.’

  But ‘Pump Up The Volume’ did manage to climb one more place. From a band devoid of ‘pop’ personality, that wouldn’t play live or even regularly release records, 4AD had its first number 1 single, the first such British house track to reach the pinnacle, where it stayed for two weeks. It was also the first number 1 for independent distributors The Cartel. The single went on to sell three million copies worldwide, all on vinyl, and became the year’s best-selling twelve-inch in America after being licensed by Island Records subsidiary 4th & B’way.

  ‘I’m very proud to say 4AD never ran out of stock, though we couldn’t press it fast enough,’ says Ivo. But the residue of the dissent from all sides had soured the occasion, despite it being the biggest record that 4AD might ever have. Ivo recalls The Cartel’s London team based at Rough Trade turning up at Alma Road with the most enormous bottle of champagne he’d ever seen. ‘I embarrassingly joined them for five minutes,’ he remembers, ‘but I not only didn’t feel comfortable around a lot of people, I didn’t feel like celebrating.’

  Justice was served when Eric B. & Rakim’s publishers Blue Mountain Music took SAW to court over its sampling ‘theft’ of the M/A/R/R/S track. No one even got an advance from 4th & B’way as the US label behind the Eric B. & Rakim track had only given permission to use the sample if it didn’t have to pay up front for ‘Pump Up The Volume’. But the damage had been done, and the repercussions were considerable.

  First, Ray Conroy had decided to sever his ties with 4AD. ‘I’d work at 4AD all day and then Ivo and I would have a very bad meeting,’ he recalls. ‘This went on for weeks. Finally we’d had enough and it was best that I left. At the end of the day, with indie record labels, it’s thievery in terms of the contracts they give out, and I share Robin Guthrie’s view on that. They tie you up for ever, and don’t pay you properly. And the money they made out of it funded the next five years for 4AD. Martin [Mills] wasn’t helpful – they still can’t find the original contract that was signed. We liked Ivo and thought he was our friend, so it felt like a big betrayal.’