by Martin Aston
Ivo: ‘Apparently Pixies had been turned down by every American label. Peculiarly for me, because I’d just sign what I wanted, I started playing the Pixies tape to others, asking what they thought. I really liked that 4AD had created a genre of its own, and I thought Pixies were, frankly, quite rock’n’roll. It took Deb saying, “Don’t be so bloody stupid, of course we have to get involved”. Howard, Vaughan, Simon, everyone liked the band, so I called Ken. Charles and I ended up working very closely together, and for the most part, very easily. I’d always credited Deb with having given me the kick up the backside to get involved but it seemed weird, and hurtful, when Charles later referred to me as, “the guy at the label didn’t even like Pixies”.’
‘If there’s a myth about Ivo not liking us, then I’m a victim of the myth,’ says Thompson. ‘It was hearsay from Ken because Ivo and I never discussed it. From our point, we didn’t care. And I don’t think there was anyone that cared as much about us at 4AD as Ivo.’
Ivo: ‘I love all of Pixies’ albums and I compiled the track listing for most of them, and I chose the A-sides and B-sides too. I thought that we worked together brilliantly, even if we weren’t ever the closest of friends.’
Ivo’s ideal plan was to release a mini-album, taking eight songs from the cassette, known as The Purple Tape after its coloured cover. Ivo wanted to call it Come On Pilgrim after a Thompson lyric (‘come on pilgrim, you know he loves you’, from ‘Elevate Me’), a phrase that Thompson had lifted from actor John Wayne. ‘It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim from one of my favourite books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,’ says Ivo. ‘And Charles agreed.’
Thompson: ‘It was an opportunity to be signed to an artsy-fartsy label with an odd name, what was there not to like? I remember seeing Vaughan’s artwork for our record, of this incredibly hairy man in sepia tones, which to my eye was straight out of a David Lynch movie. We didn’t know we wanted to be like this, but it was right, and I never questioned what Vaughan gave us after that. The day I saw the artwork, I quit my job at the warehouse of The Windsor Button Shop, to go on the road, where I’ve been ever since.’
The photograph of a man, facing away from the camera, his head bald but the top half of his body carpeted with thick hair, was a suitably arresting image for a record that felt like an uncanny surprise. It had been taken by English photographer Simon Larbalestier of a mutual friend, Sean Bolton: ‘Vaughan purchased a print at my degree show in the summer of 1987 and then persuaded the Pixies,’ Larbalestier recalls. ‘I was experimenting with themes of alienation and a sense of loss but in essence this image was evoked from reading The Temptation of St Antony by Gustave Flaubert. A lot’s changed in the years since but essentially my preoccupation with decay and texture is still there.’
Like French author Flaubert’s novel, Thompson’s lyrics embraced lust, death and decay, yet the music of Come On Pilgrim was not the usual textural stuff of vintage 4AD but a thrilling, rollicking charge, interspersed with gentler moments and seasoned with surf rock and Puerto Rican spice. Thompson’s often coruscating vocals were reputedly inspired by a Thai rock star who told him to ‘scream it like you hate that bitch’.
The first time Ivo actually met the band was when they opened for Throwing Muses in Hoboken, New Jersey, but as a trio because Kim Deal was attending a funeral in Ohio. ‘I’ll never forget Charles walking towards me to shake my hand, with a big smile, a lovely bloke,’ Ivo recalls. ‘Joey was a man of few words but he said, “Make me famous in the Philippines because I love Filipino girls!” None of them had any attitude.’
Deborah Edgely was at the same show. ‘Pixies were gobsmacking, even without Kim. I told Ivo, if you don’t pull your finger out, you’ll lose them, you need to offer them a proper contract. And he did in the end, thank God, or the whole shape of 4AD’s future would have been different.’
If purist Brendan Perry had had any say in the matter, 4AD would have remained the preserve of a rarefied commodity. ‘I wasn’t that keen on 4AD’s commercial side, like I couldn’t understand why Colourbox was on the label,’ he says. ‘Ivo played me Pixies’ demos and I didn’t get it. But obviously there was a lot more money around, and more acts got signed. Ivo was a rock to us but I could sense the whole promotional spin aspect of things was becoming more like a major label, like the way singles began to be hyped. 4AD’s expansion, and into America, brought it more into the corporate sphere. It didn’t impact on Lisa and I – we only saw it when we went to visit 4AD, to have lunch or a few beers across the road.’
One supporter of the change that the visceral Pixies represented was none other than Rudy Tambala: ‘Pixies had an edge, and 4AD turned into a proper record label, no longer stuck in Zen land,’ he says. ‘They hardened massively, and the music got tougher.’
As ever Ivo wasn’t thinking so conceptually, or commercially; he’d just discovered another band that didn’t fit any obvious category. And he was still pushing bands away if he didn’t feel the connection with the music, with Xymox becoming the latest band he let go despite their popularity.
Two Xymox-related records had been scheduled side by side: Sleeps With The Fishes was Pieter Nooten’s solo project that had turned into a collaboration with Canadian ambient maestro Michael Brook, and the Blind Hearts EP was by Xymox – Moorings had restored the original name after Nooten had again left the band, and that was enough for Ivo: ‘For me, Pieter was the heart of Xymox, and taking him out, they became much more like their influences. Pieter was more interested in classical music at that point.’
Moorings claims Nooten had chased Ivo about the demo that he’d given him, ‘moaning about touring, how unhappy he was, how he did not like to be in a band, the whole sob story’. Nooten’s memory is that Ivo asked if he had any solo material. ‘I said I had some basic, but still intimate, melancholic material. Apparently Ivo loved it because he asked if I wanted to record an album. I couldn’t believe my ears. But we were very apprehensive about how to approach it.’
Ivo had decided to produce the album at Blackwing: ‘But I realised I couldn’t bring anything fresh to it,’ he says. ‘We needed new blood.’ As an enormous fan of recent ambient work on the Editions EG label, Ivo thought of Canadian guitarist Michael Brook, whose pulsing ethno-ambient fusion Hybrid had featured Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Brook accepted the Nooten job, ‘and as things evolved, Michael’s input was so large, it became a joint record,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I was really enjoying [Brian’s brother] Roger Eno and Michael’s first albums, so I loved releasing something in that vein, combined with Pieter’s melodies.’
Three years older than Ivo, Brook had followed a similar musical trajectory, through psychedelia – he’d seen Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in concert – but admits that he’d bypassed punk and glam for an appreciation of synthesisers and Indian music, refining a musical palate.
Nooten: ‘Michael was the ultimate producer – calm, thoughtful, highly skilled and, above all, a brilliant guitarist. We shared the same approach to the material: subtle, sensitive, thoughtful, intimate and intense.’
‘Sleeps With The Fishes is an amazing record,’ Brook thinks. ‘It was a magic moment of ambient music but not ambient songs, with a rare mix of electronics and strings. It still sounds modern.’
Sleeps With The Fishes was an instrumental extension of the ambient-classical haunts of Nooten’s choicest Xymox contributions. ‘Equal Ways’ from Clan Of Xymox, and ‘After The Call’ and ‘Theme I’ (renamed ‘Clouds’) from Xymox’s Medusa were even re-recorded for the new record – beautiful, but with no noticeable improvement. However, with instrumentals floating in between, the alluring effect was of murky oceanic depths, a world of luminescent fauna living in unquiet slumber alongside all those bodies tipped overboard (Ivo suggested the album title). Nooten’s austere, tremulous vocal matched Dominic Appleton for aching sadness, icing an album that should be more widely celebrated for its underrated part in the vintage mid-Eighties 4AD period.
Ivo: ‘Among the forum world of 4AD followers, some people think it’s 4AD’s best record. I’d place it in the top ten. It’s absolutely beautiful. So is the sleeve, with Chris Bigg’s embossed calligraphy.’
Back in Xymox’s camp, Ronny Moorings wasn’t happy: ‘Pieter had defected. Again. But I understood Sleeps With The Fishes was closer to his heart. I wanted more driven songs like “A Day” and “Back Door” anyway.’
Moorings and Wolbert turned Blind Hearts into a more electronic Xymox, successfully so, as the EP topped the US import charts. But it was the tipping point for Ivo, although Xymox’s departure from 4AD was also triggered by the band’s new manager, Raymond Coffer.
‘Ivo wasn’t trying to keep us,’ Anka Wolbert recalls, ‘and Ray kept saying we should tour America, where we’d had the most success, and to sign with a major label.’ Xymox would follow Xmal Deutschland to the Polygram major conglomerate and so close 4AD’s chapter on European signings.*
There was one more conclusion to the year: the twelve-inch 87 Anthology, a fifteen-track CD compiled for Japan, which summarised a cataclysmic twelve months, for better and worse. There were also the promising growth spurts of the Big Sex and Chains Changed EPs, but all of the A- and B-sides of the ‘Pump Up The Volume’, ‘Lollita’ and ‘Sloppy Heart’ singles represented premature dead ends for 4AD and relationships within the label. Not that it mattered; 1987 was not a year that would end in tears. 4AD was in a very healthy position, and by releasing so many of its albums on CD (Ivo the audiophile had loved the crackle-free format) and adding hard-to-find singles and EPs, the label was selling more copies and encouraging new consumers to investigate the back catalogue.
Lonely Is An Eyesore had also become the first import album to top the Rockpool college radio chart in the US; one week, it was supported by Dead Can Dance’s In The Realm Of A Dying Sun at number 2 and A.R. Kane’s Lollita EP at number 3. The immediate future would be driven by a bunch of mischievous little elves, and one increasingly green-eyed monster.
* Just as Moorings and Wolbert couldn’t sever their emotional bond, so Nooten couldn’t let go either, returning for the band’s third album Twisted Shadows. ‘Pieter smelt major wages,’ says Mooring, ‘but I let him back.’ In another twist, the album’s third single, ‘Imagination’, written and sung by Wolbert, became Xymox’s biggest hit, making the Billboard Hot 100 and MTV’s playlist. But she lasted one more album and left in 1991 after a violent confrontation with Moorings following the label’s suggestion that she sing half the songs on the next album. ‘I got a lot of energy out of being on stage,’ Wolbert shrugs. ‘Ronny loved it too. It’s a shame he didn’t allow anyone else to stand next to him.’
chapter 11
To Suggest is to Create; to Describe is to Destroy
‘Lonely Is An Eyesore was a watershed moment,’ Vaughan Oliver recalls, ‘putting to bed everything we’d done so far, and into the Victoria and Albert Museum in a wooden box.’
Whereas Ivo had to negotiate the potentially delicate terrain of signing bands, and even negotiations with managers, studios, producers, engineers and contracts, the 4AD art department didn’t have to be waylaid in quite the same way. In the main, Oliver’s role as 4AD in-house designer – to maintain a consistency of design approach, and to counter what he felt were lapses of judgement on behalf of the artist – had Ivo’s full support. If Dead Can Dance, The Wolfgang Press and now Throwing Muses were proving resistant to 23 Envelope originating ideas for the bands to (hopefully) approve, Oliver mostly enjoyed the freedom to interpret the sound of 4AD in whatever way he felt appropriate. As his only true peer, Peter Saville, once said about his similarly close relationship with Factory Records, ‘I had a freedom that was unprecedented in communications design. We lived out an ideal, without business calling the shots. It was a phenomenon.’
‘It’s true there were no record company demands,’ says Oliver. ‘Though I was working with all the artists’ desires; I took everything on board. That was the whole concept of the independent movement: that everything was in the hands of the musicians, and you had to respond to their requirements rather than the record company’s. I was just trying to give them creative direction, to show them something else. You want to do something different. Not just another record sleeve.’
For Oliver, the root of inspiration had to be music, ‘or the work is worthless,’ he says. ‘And in terms of reflecting music, texture has always been there for me. You can see music as textures, colours, ideas, or the words that pop out at you.’
He cites his ‘breakthrough moment’ as the crumpled tissue of Modern English’s After The Snow in 1983, which launched a series of groundbreaking images and ideas. These included use of his own photos, from the copulating horses of Colourbox to the Lynchian aura of ‘Song To The Siren’ that he had captured by camera on a cross-country trip of America. He would also use found images, such as an evocative, discarded ‘Make Ready’ print found on the floor of a Japanese printer’s studio, with multiple images pressed on top of each other to test the correct weight of ink for the final version, to match Colourbox’s sample-based sound.
Oliver was especially keen on the technical process becoming art in its own right. For example, the crumpled black texture of Xmal Deutschland’s Fetisch saw Oliver, as he describes, ‘abusing the camera in the darkroom, fucking up the process, with underexposures and old chemicals’. He enjoyed placing the common mistakes at the edges of artwork into the centre. ‘My love affair with the PMT machine started there,’ he says. The process of Photo Mechanical Transfer involved using a large and unwieldly camera to enlarge and reduce typesetting in scale, in the days of chemical fumes and the heat of the lens before Apple Macs and Photoshop became the tools of the design trade. ‘It was the idea of abusing a controlled system, something that you’re not supposed to do. To not know where you’re going, but to create mistakes and to enjoy them, like feedback on a guitar.’
Oliver’s PMT affair continued through Modern English’s ‘Someone’s Calling’ and Lonely Is An Eyesore, where he showed a small section of his PMT baseboard, the scalpel scratches providing the texture alongside carefully selected typefaces, some invented by Oliver, and later by Chris Bigg. Sometimes Oliver would put song titles and/or lyrics on the front cover, such as Xmal’s Qual or Modern English’s Gathering Dust EP, so, he explains, ‘typography becomes the subject matter. The information becomes the illustration and text becomes image.’
Oliver occasionally returned to other points of fascination, such as the male nude, as seen in Gathering Dust, which featured a skeletally thin torso. Similarly, in Nature Mortes – Still Lives, Oliver says the anatomical image of two wrestling men was intended to isolate the image’s homoerotic potential, years before such imagery entered the mainstream.
The designer would often go to unexpected places, such as the cast of his own head used for Clan Of Xymox’s Medusa – pre-dating British artist Marc Quinn’s blood-filled heads – or the unsettling postures of ‘Life In The Gladhouse’ taken from an encyclopaedia that Oliver felt suggested the in-patients of an asylum (‘Gladhouse’/‘madhouse’). ‘There are two ways of re-appropriating images,’ he contends. ‘If you just take an image that’s recognisable for its beauty, then what are you really doing? For me, Peter Saville would re-appropriate old Futurist designs, and put them on New Order sleeves, which is too easy. Post-modernism is not my thing, which I railed against at the time. It was a new kind of awkward beauty that I didn’t subscribe to. But put an image in a new context, one which you were never meant to look at from that point of view, is when it’s valid. That’s what my work was about.’
Oliver’s work also took inspiration from filmmakers David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky, a fevered dream of ‘relics and remnants and memories and mementos, things that evoked other things, that touched people,’ says Oliver. ‘There is some art that confirms your aesthetic, or thought, or view of the world, and some art that takes you somewhere totally new.’
Searching for
clues to Oliver’s game plan, he says one key moment was in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. ‘I’m not a great one for plot; it’s more moments. In Mirror, a doctor walks across a field of long grass, to speak to a woman, who is missing her husband. She had two kids, both with shaved heads. It’s all very gentle and lovely. But something has happened between them [the adults], and as he walks back across the field to leave, he looks back at her, and over his shoulder out to the field, the grass between them is flattened by the wind. Forget CGI; how did that happen? It was pure visual poetry.’
David Lynch’s Eraserhead made the same kind of startling impression. ‘It was daring, this constant industrial soundtrack, the desolation, but the humour too. Like a moment in a film, such as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout; a girl dives naked into water – how beautiful is that? It’s very hard to find that point again, like you did in your formative years, like when I first read Samuel Beckett or saw Blue Velvet – can that happen again? To find something new, which touches your central core, that confirms your inner meaning, and another strand that says, what the hell is going on there?’
That might well have been the reaction of an artist on 4AD seeing the finished sleeve for the first time. Though Oliver denies this was the case, more than one artist claimed he feigned collaboration, and then conveniently ignored their wishes in the pursuit of better art and design. For example, Xmal Deutschland wanted a black wash of raven feathers for Tocsin; instead, Oliver gave them a purple wash of pigeon feathers. ‘You’d discuss with Vaughan and when it was done, it’s different to what was agreed!’ says Anja Huwe. ‘That was Vaughan. But he was great, and unique.’
Oliver denies that he ever got entirely his own way. ‘Nothing was forced on anyone. Everything had to be approved by the band,’ he maintains. ‘Working independently wasn’t my role, but I was in a position to show them other stuff that we hadn’t talked about. With Tocsin, for example, I was trying to evoke the stormy sea, so whether it was ravens or pigeons didn’t matter. But we always tried to create something fresh that was unique to the artist rather than use an already generated image. So where do you get ravens from? Instead, Nigel shot these amazing photographs of pigeons.’