Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  chapter 13 – 1989

  An Ultra Vivid Beautiful Noise

  (CAD901–JAD911)

  Hit-makers of the Sixties were expected to churn out albums every six months. By the Eighties, the speed of life wasn’t any less hectic, but studio-based schedules were replaced by global tours, video shoots and other promotional duties, filling gaps between recording sessions. No one was taking three years between albums, unless it was Pink Floyd.

  For example, there were only ten months between Throwing Muses’ House Tornado and the follow-up Hunkpapa. The album at least had the benefit of being released on a different day to Pixies’ own latest, which was also ready to go. After the joint offensive of the 1988 tour, the Muses needed to be appreciated as a unique entity rather than the more sensitive half of a sensational double act.

  Having re-employed Gary Smith as producer, the band had begun to further assert their independence with David Narcizo’s emerging interest in graphic design. The drummer’s chosen primitive motif on the album cover was inspired by the album’s title, Hunkpapa, named after the tribe of Native American chief Sitting Bull. Where Kristin Hersh felt The Fat Skier and House Tornado had been, ‘based on strength and subtlety’, she saw the new album as ‘more solid and spacious’.

  Ivo wasn’t overjoyed. ‘Hunkpapa was patchy,’ he says. ‘And it’s still hard to forgive Gary for slowing and smoothing out the language of “Mania”.’ The track was the Muses’ most frenzied episode yet, as if Pixies’ energy had driven Hersh to respond. Or maybe it was simply the mania of her increasing mood swings and fractured personal life.

  The band had found manager Ken Goes as exasperating as Sire, and he was now being assisted by Billy O’Connell, Seymour Stein’s former assistant, a firm Muses ally and also Hersh’s new boyfriend. Three-year-old Dylan’s father was fighting for custody, painting Hersh as an unfit mother, mentally fragile and a rock singer too, forever travelling, and writing lyrics, as Deborah Edgely saw them, ‘of spine-chilling madness’.

  Perhaps that explains Hersh’s need to shift towards a more accessible sound. She was convinced that her songs – which she was also convinced had minds of their own – were struggling to find acceptance. ‘I have songs The Bangles would die for but I try and stay away from straightforward writing as much as possible,’ Hersh told me when Hunkpapa was released. ‘But I don’t have anything against trying to make it easier for people to listen to us. It’s not a good thing to be seen trying to keep people out.’

  Hersh was only trying to protect her songs, as she would her children, against a culture that was willing to exploit them as well as her. It was an unenviable paradox that the more the alternative scene that had nurtured the Muses succeeded, the more it was coerced into competing with the mainstream it was trying to overturn, via promotion, marketing, video and the shift in formatting of singles, with two versions of a single and varying B-sides, to encourage more sales.

  ‘Sire would say, “Don’t take this as anything to do with your creativity, but …”,’ Hersh recalls. ‘We were starting to see some of our peers making stupid slips through the cracks, and Sire’s implicit and often explicit message was that we should dumb down our product, not to succeed, but just to continue working.’

  Throwing Muses’ new single was ‘Dizzy’, by no means a sell-out but it could have been a smash hit for The Bangles. Hersh felt grubby by association. ‘Ivo agreed that singles could be radio-friendly, and yet they didn’t have to be stupid, which wasn’t the opinion shared by anyone else in the record industry. For “Dizzy”, I took one of my father’s old songs, made it dumb and added a hook, some sex and PC crap and we just laughed, it was hilarious. But it backfired instantly because Sire liked it! 4AD played along so that we could carry on. But it was the beginning of the end for me. I started to give up around that time, and I think Ivo did too.’

  ‘Dizzy’ and even – bizarrely – its B-side ‘Santa Claus’ were taken from Hunkpapa, so to give it some cachet the single was issued on ten-inch with a gatefold sleeve and two live Town & Country recordings (‘Downtown’ and a correctly manic version of ‘Mania’).* ‘It was a potential crack at getting them on the radio,’ says Ivo. ‘But it didn’t work.’

  There would be no second single pulled from Hunkpapa. If 4AD had been truly mercenary, ‘Angel’ would have done the trick. Tanya Donelly could match Hersh for jigsaw-shaped melody, from ‘Green’ on the debut album to ‘River’ and ‘Giant’ on House Tornado, while Hunkpapa’s ‘Dragonhead’ sat comfortably among Hersh’s jagged rockery. But Donelly had begun to write with a more honed approach; The Bangles would have murdered to have the Sixties-girl-group swoon and bounce of Donelly’s ‘Angel’ at their disposal.

  The pressure to conform combined with the overdue need for a breakthrough ensured that The Wolfgang Press would continue down the road of formatting. At least this time they had the right tool: ‘Kansas’ might have been pulled from Bird Wood Cage but the insidiously taut and springy mood, hissed chorus and Andrew Gray’s guitar stabs lent a danceable, Stax-influenced mobility. The promo video was equally distinctive, with the band – and supporting characters such as Simon Harper – wearing JFK and Jackie O masks, careering around an isolated wooden shack. There was no toilet seat on the album cover, and the title ‘Kansas’ would have appealed, but mainstream American audiences might have been dumbfounded to see such cherished icons thrown into some kind of Lynchian universe.

  Mick Allen’s vocal was also still too dark for daytime radio. The confusion over what to do next was reflected in the next single being the slower, swampy ‘Raintime’, slightly re-tweaked from the Bird Wood Cage version, to no discernible point. Remixes for both singles were now adding to the growing overload of tracks aimed at the clubs. ‘We weren’t forced into them [remixes], but we didn’t like most of what came back,’ Allen admits. ‘It diluted a lot of what we did because the remixes were more about the remixers than about us.’

  Ivo felt just the same. Remixes also inflated budgets, which the band would have to recoup, and the originality of the music became of secondary importance. ‘Remixers didn’t care if there was nothing of the original piece as long as it could be a hit,’ he says. ‘I’m all in favour of collaboration, a different pair of ears to bring something new to the mix, literally. Though it was rare that anybody we hired improved the original version. But closing the barn door was also pointless; the horse had bolted.’

  An illustration of how hard it was for left-of-centre artists to compete in the UK singles chart, Pixies’ ‘Monkey’s Gone To Heaven’ only reached number 60, and disappeared from the top 100 after just three weeks, despite the band’s first promo video and three new B-sides on the twelve-inch. It was a proper single too, with a fantastic chorus hook, though like The Wolfgang Press, Pixies didn’t make enough concessions; the tempo was slow, the mood was bristling and the middle eight culminated in the line, ‘If man is five, and the devil is six, then God is seven!’ with Charles Thompson repeating the last part in his finest lung-busting manner.

  It was now taken for granted that 4AD singles would set up an album, and those with their expectations raised by ‘Monkey’s Gone To Heaven’ were not disappointed by Doolittle. Despite reservations over his polishing of ‘Gigantic’, Gil Norton had got the job of producing the album. Thompson says he liked how Doolittle turned out, though he’d also experienced a tussle with Norton as Throwing Muses had, ‘to keep things simple, and to keep to the same set of Pixies rules,’ he says. ‘Steve Albini was more, “Yeah, let’s make a record” as opposed to playing the songs for Gil for three weeks, eight hours a day, fine-tuning every niche and cranny. We got more into playing a groovy kind of rock as opposed to sounding hyper.’

  Albini wouldn’t have considered adding strings to ‘Monkey’s Gone To Heaven’ as Norton was driven to do, but Thompson’s new songs still sounded pretty hyper, as well as groovy, especially the opening salvo of ‘Debaser’, ‘Tame’ and ‘Wave Of Mutilation’. But ‘Here Comes Your Man’
finally made it on to record after being shelved the last time. Thompson admits he felt embarrassed about the track’s pop conceit, but he allowed it through because of Norton’s affection for the song: ‘I threw Gil a bone,’ he says.

  That a track both Pixies and Ivo weren’t particularly fond of became the band’s next single indicates that a white flag of creative surrender had been raised. Ivo admits 4AD was engaged in playing the game of a major label: ‘You release the lead single – what a horrible expression that is – then follow it with the album, which supposedly goes wallop! And then you follow with the radio-friendly single or a remix. But our track record of failing with hit singles remained intact.’

  Pixies’ new American licensees Elektra, another arm of the Warners conglomerate that had taken them on after 4AD had signed Pixies to a five-album deal, would have been subtly (or otherwise) pushing the band down a more commercial path. Ivo still A&R’d the band, and he again sequenced the track listing, with Thompson choosing the title Doolittle after a lyric in ‘Mr. Grieves’. His original title had been Whore, which would have had a divisive effect, but Thompson changed his mind. ‘I told everyone, I didn’t give a shit, Whore was the title,’ he explains. ‘But Vaughan changed the artwork and said he was going to use this monkey and halo, so I thought people would think I was some kind of anti-Catholic or getting into naughty-boy Catholic stuff. So I changed the title.’

  Thompson says this was not a corroboration of Steve Albini’s claim that the band would do anything for success. ‘To me, it’s a lot more fun to see what this guy will send us in the mail, like, “Oh, that’s what he did with the artwork!” like it’s somebody else’s album. Vaughan never represented us in a corny or bad way.’

  With its multiple oddball images in a ten-page booklet, Doolittle remains Vaughan Oliver’s favourite 4AD artwork: ‘For the power of music and graphic design combined. When that works, it’s fabulous.’

  If Pixies answered to Oliver, they didn’t answer to Elektra, Thompson told me in 1989. ‘Maybe after we sell some records, the pressure will be on, but they pretty much let us do what we want. It’s good for us because at least in America, 4AD has the Cocteau Twins kind of image, and we’re not. We aren’t too hip [in America]. They think we’re some stupid underground college band.’

  Even so, Elektra helped Doolittle (just) break the Billboard Hot 100 and both ‘Monkey’s Gone To Heaven’ and ‘Here Comes Your Man’ respectively reached numbers 5 and 3 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. The Pixies’ irresistible momentum seemed on course, and Doolittle wasn’t only a flagship for Pixies but 4AD as well. The band was a new wave in itself, broadening the idea of a 4AD sound and vision. Beyond the converted markets of North America and Europe, fan cults had continued to blossom in Japan and South America, as more records, media opportunities and the growth of alternative music further spread the word.

  In the Eighties, says Colombian writer José Enrique Plata Manjarrés, ‘4AD records were so scarce and expensive. We treated them as precious things. But one time, I saw a promo for a group called Pixies, with a cover with a little monkey on an orange background. It was interesting – a record called Doolittle, like the doctor who talked to animals. The guy in the shop said it had just come in. What’s more, it’s, “For-Ey-Dee”. I didn’t understand, and I was told it was the name of an amazing English label. The records were expensive but people bought them – Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, and some others the shop got in, but not so much because not everybody was into them. Cocteau Twins’ Blue Bell Knoll was first for me. It was like hearing an angel sing, and I’d got the bug. “For-Ey-Dee” made sense to me now.’

  Manjarrés continues, ‘4AD became soldered into my brain with each record, each one a piece in a puzzle that stood out as distinctive and completely original, a pure essence but an uncertain reality. There was no internet to guide me so I had to build my puzzle with the pieces as they came to me, without an image. The aural coherence of the label wasn’t based on the styles of the groups; it was more the work and efforts of exquisite taste. And it was Ivo who had it. But he wanted great design too, and in that way, the music entered through your eyes and the images got into your ears. That’s how I started to understand 4AD’s logic.’

  Of course, behind the ecstatic reception for everything 4AD released, disharmony could always undo the good work. The one thing that could derail the Pixies, to throw the band off that irresistible course, was the band itself.

  Deborah Edgely had managed to keep the news from the press, but it was no secret among the inner circle that Charles Thompson and Kim Deal had fallen out during the otherwise triumphant Pixies/Muses European tour. Edgely recalls the Pixies tour bus returning to London, where Charles’s girlfriend had turned up as a surprise, and the atmosphere being extremely frosty. There hadn’t been any defrosting by the time of Doolittle, and though ‘Gigantic’ was a Surfer Rosa highlight, Doolittle didn’t feature a single Deal lead vocal.

  Was Thompson simply jealous of his sidekick? Perhaps the problem was that Pixies’ most popular song was perceived as Deal’s own – the credit on Surfer Rosa said as much; Pixies superfan Kurt Cobain later said, ‘I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for Pixies, because “Gigantic” is the best Pixies song, and Kim wrote it.’ But it wasn’t really true: ‘I wrote the chords, suggested the title “Gigantic”, and Kim did the lyric and melody,’ says Thompson. ‘That’s my memory of it anyhow.’

  On Doolittle, Deal co-sang ‘Silver’ (and got a co-writing credit) and various backing vocals, and by making her song ‘Into The White’ the B-side to ‘Here Comes Your Man’, ‘Charles threw Kim a bone,’ says Ivo (something that Thompson was getting good at). But Doolittle otherwise sidelined her. For example, the album’s delightful oddity ‘La La I Love You’ sounded tailor-made for Deal’s voice but was instead sung by drummer Dave Lovering.

  Surely this could only harm the band’s brilliant chemistry. ‘When you think about great teams, the creative spark is almost doubled as they bounce ideas off each other,’ says Edgely. ‘Kim brought charm, melody and sex appeal to Pixies and she was emotive, honest and open, and so easy to get along with. Charles was more the type to stand in your face, not shouting or being intimidating, but brusque and talking loudly. It was hard to know where he was coming from. He could be adorable too, but the way Kim stood on stage, grinning from ear to ear, she almost became the reason you smiled at them. You just warmed to her. Her harmonies with Charles were the dynamic duo that just worked.’

  As Edgely says, you can’t be in a band and be on your own, which is what she believes happened to Charles. ‘He had found touring tedious. He didn’t like to fly, so he’d take the [cruise ship] QEII when he could, or he’d drive across Europe with his wife, while the others were in the van. The magic and the glory of Pixies wore off relatively quickly for Charles and the rift evolved. I don’t know, maybe it was because Kim was a girl. It was tough on her. Kim is a creative cookie, and she wanted her voice.’

  Santiago agrees. ‘Kim was headstrong and wanted to include her own songs, to explore her own world,’ he explains. ‘I think Charles saw it as the band made pizzas, not cookies. We were even going to fire Kim, after a gig in Frankfurt, where we found her hanging out in her hotel room, with no intention of playing. But our lawyer convinced us to try and work it out, to give her a warning. I’d blocked that incident out of my head – it was too heavy for me. Kim couldn’t believe I’d be party to it but I told her that she didn’t seem happy, so why hang around? In the end, she realised it was Charles’s bag, and that he was the singer. But they kinda stopped talking after that.’

  Ivo recalls he’d met up with Pixies the last time they’d come to London, and instead of the traditional get-together meal, ‘Charles and I got into my car, where he played me demos of Doolittle, clearly agitated about Kim, and defensive about his apparent decision to use Kim less, and the parts that she contributed. I’m sure Gil encouraged Charles to let Kim sing lead on something but it didn’t end
up happening. But Doolittle turned out quite good, didn’t it?’

  A provocative member of the touring party christened Pixies’ 1989 US tour, ‘The Fuck or Fight Tour’, after which Thompson moved house to Los Angeles. Santiago and Lovering were soon to follow, leaving Deal alone back east, and wondering what would happen next. A pattern was emerging: another male-female dynamic under 4AD’s aegis – another fall-out.

  What a relief it must have been for Ivo to work with one singular talent such as Kurt Ralske. Still, at this stage of 4AD’s development, there were tough decisions to take. Ivo was pondering how to get the best out of his artists; budgets (boosted by licensing deals) and expectations (and managers) dictated that it was hard to produce them himself, or to offer the John Fryer/Jon Turner option. And having tasted chart success, the temptation was to see if an Ultra Vivid Scene album could be a hit. Ivo tried for a hit single first by having Ralske re-record ‘Mercy Seat’. ‘It deserved to be isolated from the album, and it was preferable to re-record it. But it was the first time Kurt had worked in a proper studio with an engineer, and I didn’t like it. It was too clean and lacked Kurt’s basic, distorted guitar.’

  Returning to basics, Ralske quickly followed it with ‘Something To Eat’, a free seven-inch single recorded in a trial session with young, unproven British engineer Ed Buller (who’d go on to produce Pulp and Suede). For the second UVS album, Ivo put forward Hugh Jones, the producer’s first 4AD commission since Modern English’s Ricochet Days in 1984. It was a beguiling choice. Ralske didn’t like being controlled or care much about success; Jones was a fastidious producer who liked helping reorganise songs to expand their appeal.

  Ralske nevertheless took Ivo’s advice, and while he and Jones settled down to recording at London’s Protocol Studios, Ivo was contemplating the fact that, incredibly, he had not signed a British artist since Colourbox in 1982. He’d tried with The Sundays, of course, and the provenance of a signing was immaterial to him, but Ivo felt swayed by his co-workers. ‘The 4AD staff wanted to get their teeth into something, to be involved with bands here, who could hang out in the office. Cocteau Twins had drifted away, Dead Can Dance never hung out to begin with, so the mood was, let’s get involved with someone that we can follow all the way through, that we don’t have to always wait for them to tour.’