Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Since 1980, alternative music in Britain had evolved through post-punk, synth-pop and punk-funk to a more retro- and psychedelic-tinged – albeit still dog-eared and punk-minded – pop and rock. By the end of the Eighties, two distinct factions had developed: one was the dance-and-Ecstasy brigade that made its home in Manchester – or, ‘Madchester’, as the music weeklies christened it – after the Acid House revolution, with the valedictory anthems of The Stone Roses and the mutant funk of The Happy Mondays. The other was a much noisier concoction that followed in the slipstream of the latest alternative rock sensation, My Bloody Valentine, which had used Cocteau Twins and The Jesus and Mary Chain as a base for its own freakish experiments in sound on the landmark album Isn’t Anything.

  Given the influences, and a collective surrender to the tingling and blissful moods created by the heavy use of trippy effects, it made sense that Ivo might be interested in this particular sound. However, it wasn’t like him to be at all interested in any aspect of a ‘scene’ – for example, the sound of 1986 had had elements of the Sixties psychedelia he loved as a teenager, but he remembers the C86 crowd as ‘fey and jingly-jangly, not interesting nor original. And give me one good voice out of any of those people. Primal Scream made me angry during that period. They’d already copied The Byrds and then turned to The Rolling Stones.’

  It wasn’t until the following year of 1990 that this new coterie of Cocteaus- and Mary Chain-smitten bands were given a label – the music press settled on ‘shoegaze’, first coined in a Sounds review of the band Moose. Like goth, shoegaze was more of a criticism than a sound, based on the way that young musicians were relying so heavily on effects pedals at their feet that they were forced to gaze down instead of facing the audience. It helped disguise the fact that these bands were often lacking in arresting personalities, strong vocalists and brimming confidence. To use all the clichés that surrounded shoegaze, the sound was swirly, fuzzy, dreamy, narcotic, distorted and billowing – dreamy, escapist music played by breathy-voiced students who followed Ivo’s view of music as an interior landscape and not an articulated viewpoint. Shoegaze seemed almost in denial of the cultural or musical revolution happening around those bands.

  In the pile of demos that had landed on his desk in 1989, Ivo unearthed two bands that had a rippling, swimming approach. He especially liked the track ‘Sight Of You’ by Leeds-based trio Pale Saints, for its melodic and anthemic aspects. ‘The singer was fantastic too,’ he adds. As for Lush, he says, ‘Neither of the two singers had beautiful voices, but “Thoughtforms” and “Ethereal” were good enough for me to get in touch.’

  Coincidentally, Pale Saints and Lush were sharing a bill just a few days later, in the tiny backroom of The Falcon Pub in Camden Town. The entire 4AD office went along. ‘Neither band was very good,’ Ivo recalls. ‘They were still young, and both drummers had problems keeping time, which affected everyone’s performances. The singing wasn’t good either. But I still wanted to work with both. Everyone at 4AD thought I was crazy, but they had real potential. A lot of English bands at that time, like Slowdive and Ride, suggested that things could develop, that they were experimenting, taking influences from the Sixties but being just as experimental from one album to the next, like The Byrds had done.’

  Coming from the same scene, signing to 4AD at the same time and later going on tour together, Pale Saints and Lush became as entwined as Throwing Muses and Pixies in 4AD folklore. But the bands were to experience contrasting fortunes with their music, different levels of success, stress and eventually, catastrophe.

  Pale Saints beat Lush to a 4AD release by three weeks. By all accounts, the band’s founding singer and principal songwriter Ian Masters is another maverick character that prefers to communicate by email, citing the fact he lives in Japan as a good enough reason to communicate digitally – or at arm’s length.

  Masters has been in Japan for the last eleven years. ‘I got bored with England – London became incredibly predictable. So I decided to find out what it would be like to be a foreigner. I wasn’t intending to stay so long. It’s a more naturally psychedelic experience. I needed to shake things up. It worked. Japan is like an immature, obstinate teenager, but on balance, I prefer it here. The beer’s dull but the food’s incredible.’

  This was probably not the case in semi-rural Potters Bar in the county of Hertfordshire where Masters was raised. However, the music he was exposed to growing up was incredible. Early on, he showed unusual musical tastes, being ‘obsessed’ with jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ and ‘bewildered’, he says, by the eerie electronic theme to the BBC TV sci-fi series Dr Who. With basic piano skills, he’d joined the school rock band but switched to guitar at the same time he saw American new wavers Blondie in 1976: ‘I knew then I’d need to go to live gigs until I died. The unexpected nature of a gig and the thought that something might go terribly wrong was too inviting. That extended into the time when Pale Saints started playing live. If things started to go badly, we’d just concentrate on having a good time. Whenever music has stopped being a pleasure, I’ve stepped away.’

  Masters had also immersed himself in Blondie’s more sophisticated NYC pals Television and their Sixties antecedents The Red Krayola and 13th Floor Elevators. Cocteau Twins’ first Peel session ‘blew my head off’, while seeing Dead Can Dance live ‘was a real Eureka moment … tears poured out of my body’. Masters was a late starter, only releasing his own music when he was twenty-five. He’d been studying at Birmingham University when he met the C86-era band Yeah Yeah Noh and followed them further north to their home town of Leeds in Yorkshire. The advert he placed in a local record shop unearthed two schoolmates, drummer Chris Cooper and guitarist Graeme Naysmith. With Masters switching to bass, the trio called themselves Pale Saints after a song by the Leeds duo Eyeless in Gaza. They began practising in a rehearsal space on a farm, only interrupted by the mooing of cows.

  Early Pale Saints demos had been included on three UK compilation albums, but Ivo never listened to compilations. It was the band’s third demo cassette that had reached him, with two of the three tracks re-recorded for the band’s debut EP Barging Into The Presence Of God. ‘Sight Of You’ was an angular, wiry version of the Paisley Underground sound over in America, while ‘She Rides The Waves’ drew from the same Byrds-slanted camp as Primal Scream and The Stone Roses. A third track, the slow and suspenseful ‘Mother Night’ produced by Gil Norton, was equally assured. The EP wasn’t brilliant, but it was hugely promising, and they already sounded fully formed.

  Lush, however, was anything but.

  In the Victorian house in north-west London that she shares with her partner Moose (formerly of the band that took his nickname) and their two children, Miki Berenyi has just cleared up lunch. Her ten-year-old daughter watches TV; her seven-year-old son is straining to play football. Minus her trademark luminous red hair of the Lush era, fans might struggle to recognise her, and that’s how she likes it. Nowadays, Berenyi works full-time as a magazine sub-editor. Moose keeps pressing her to do some recordings together but, she says, music must be all or nothing – so it’s been nothing since Lush ended, bar the very occasional guest vocal.

  Berenyi’s background is one of the most fascinating of all 4AD’s artists. Her Hungarian father had immigrated to London in 1956 and was working as a sports journalist when he met, and later married, model and actress Yasuko Nagazumi at 1964’s Tokyo Olympics. She subsequently landed a minor role in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice. They divorced when Berenyi was four, and when Nagazumi moved to the USA eight years later, Berenyi decided to stay behind, though her father’s poor parenting skills saw her camp out in her school’s music room one time when she was only fourteen.

  Ska and Abba – who wrote songs about divorcing couples – were her favourites until she met Emma Anderson at a north London school. Anderson was equally into Abba, but had latched on to the new wave bands on Top of the Pops, from The Teardrop Explodes to S
iouxsie and the Banshees. At thirteen, they’d bonded at a concert by pop upstarts Haircut 100, but their tastes spanned The Smiths and the resolutely goth Sisters of Mercy. ‘We’d go to gigs and share half a cider all night,’ says Berenyi.

  Across town, the pair would sell their fanzine, Alphabet Soup (tag line: ‘It may be shit but it’s only 5p’), which contained irreverent interviews; one was with Xmal Deutschland, on whom they modelled their glamorous look. They temporarily joined different bands, Anderson The Rover Girls and Berenyi The Bugs – that emphasised their differences. ‘Emma was artier than me, more NME and The Smiths,’ Berenyi recalls. ‘I was more into garage bands like The Milkshakes. But we were really geeky about record labels, so we’d both buy Factory and 4AD records. We played Throwing Muses’ The Fat Skier to death and saw the Muses and Pixies tour in 1988. We liked that they were overly cerebral, geeky and intense, not loud and rock’n’roll.’

  Anderson is also a mother (her daughter is nearly three) and is about to leave London for the south coast. ‘I was the 4AD obsessive,’ she says. ‘Factory, too, though less so. I really related to 4AD’s artwork – it had such strong imagery. I’d buy records without hearing them, like the Natures Mortes compilation and Rema-Rema. And I loved Throwing Muses. But Miki and I were both goths. We wore black lipstick and blusher, which didn’t look as good on me as I was chubbier, and had wavy hair.’

  Anderson and Berenyi finally joined forces in Baby Machines, which they named in the same spirit that was driving the emerging feminist punk movement riot grrrl. Their new name of Lush made a point too: ‘It was used in a derogatory way to describe a drunken woman, so we wanted to champion it,’ says Berenyi. But Lush’s lyrics turned out to be more introvert, with airy-fairy titles such as ‘Thoughtforms’, ‘Babytalk’ and ‘Scarlet’, the tracks that made up the demo that Ivo had heard.

  ‘To call Baby Machines riot grrl is to dignify it with an insight and direction we didn’t really have,’ says Berenyi. ‘“He’s A Bastard” was a song about an ex – “He’s a bastard, can’t you see, he’s not good enough for you”, and “Female Hybrid” – “Boys look at me, hybrid queen, on page three”. Just garbage! We later realised that it wasn’t just a case of writing something – anything – so we could do a gig, but that the quality of the songs also depended on writing to the band’s strengths, and the more oblique lyrics were part of that. “Scarlet” was still about why boys like slutty girls, and “Etheriel” was still about a break-up of sorts, but there were extra levels of meaning. The sounds of the words were as important as what was being said, and that made them a lot more enjoyable to play as well as listen to.’

  Neither Berenyi nor Anderson intended to sing. Meriel Barham, Berenyi’s friend at North London Polytechnic, was Lush’s original vocalist, with a rhythm section of two fellow students – the inexperienced bassist Steve Rippon and drummer Chris Acland, who had played in various punk bands in the Lake District region, which was nearer to Scotland than London. ‘Chris turned out to be a very good drummer, but the turning point was Emma writing “Thoughtforms”,’ says Berenyi. ‘I knew I had to get my arse in gear and practise more.’

  Another turning point was Barham’s sacking, for a lack of commitment; ‘Etheriel’ was named in her wake. ‘My experience of Lush was in its early, thrashy days, which was great fun among mates, and much more Emma and Miki’s project than something that I was as focused on, so I understood our different standpoints,’ says Barham.

  When auditions for a new singer turned out to be ‘a disaster’, Berenyi reluctantly took over. ‘I totally did not want to sing – I never did think I could. But it was a needs-must scenario.’

  Anderson had taken responsibility for posting demos out and booking gigs. Geoff Travis at Rough Trade had also liked Lush’s tape, but like Derek Birkett had done with A.R. Kane, told the band he thought 4AD was a more natural fit, if Ivo was interested. Howard Gough in 4AD promotions had tried to persuade Ivo otherwise. ‘Howard had seen us live, when we were shambolic, and said we were shit,’ Anderson recalls. ‘But Ivo said he couldn’t dismiss the songs and wanted John Fryer to record some more demos.’ One condition of Ivo funding it was that Berenyi and Anderson take singing lessons from Tona de Brett, the same coach Elizabeth Fraser had studied with. ‘I think it was to placate Howard, who was obsessed with the idea we were crap,’ says Anderson.

  Miki Berenyi: ‘Hand on heart, what Ivo could find in that live mess was beyond me. And John Fryer had to organise everything because we were very timid.’

  Ivo says Fryer worked his magic, ‘because no one, Lush included, had any idea they could sound that powerful’. Instead of just re-recording the same three songs from the demo, Ivo suggested Lush record three more with Fryer and release it as a six-track EP. Scar followed Pale Saints’ debut to become 4AD’s last release of the decade.

  Scar wasn’t a groundbreaking statement, with Berenyi’s tentative vocals slathered in effects, but it was a suitably sparkling testament to new beginnings and ethereal melody, with a more pop sensibility than Pale Saints. The press reaction to Scar was positive, likewise to the image, with Anderson’s jet-black hair contrasting with Berenyi’s scarlet rinse. Interviews revealed that Lush weren’t shy, shoegazey types, and indeed they liked to celebrate the alcoholic connotations of their name. The band also had strong connections to the music press; Anderson had previously worked as an assistant to former Creation PR Jeff Barrett, ‘so at least people had heard of us,’ says Berenyi.

  But familiarity brought the risk of contempt. ‘Our interviews were all about Tottenham [football club], red hair and drinking, which jarred with 4AD’s image,’ Berenyi recalls. ‘Ivo didn’t give a shit, but it did feel like people were saying we were on the wrong label. No, we were on the right label. Otherwise, we’d have been written off as a bunch of alcoholic chancers. I hated having to tell journalists what the songs meant, so being on 4AD made people concentrate on our music, to take the music seriously without us having to.’

  Lush and Pale Saints were young, didn’t bring history and baggage, and they were British: if unconvinced by the new signings, most of the staff were on side. And 4AD had the chance to further shed the solemn, arty and dark image. In return, the label’s new charges viewed them with affection and amusement.

  ‘Ivo was kind and patient and I did rather hang on his every word,’ says Berenyi. ‘So when things went wrong, if he didn’t agree with a decision or was revealed to not be doing absolutely everything for your benefit, there was that similar wail of injustice that spoilt teenage kids have about their parents. But he never made me feel silly or naïve. He was funny, too, and not at all sombre and serious. Chris used to call him Uncle Ivo and would do a rather fussy, owlish impersonation of him! He’d do impressions of all of them. Simon Harper was the boarding school house master and Debbie was Alice in Wonderland.’

  This eccentric parade of fairytale-like characters were about to have a brand new and heavily designed modernist office to work in. The building next door – ‘a very run down convent,’ Ivo says – to 17–19 Alma Road had been bought, and was being revamped by Deborah Edgely’s friend and architect Sandra Douglas at Ben Kelly Design (the company that had overseen Factory’s Hacienda club in Manchester). ‘That’s where the M/A/R/R/S money went,’ says Ivo.

  Staff numbers were now in double figures. With Lush and Pale Saints combined, and combined again with Throwing Muses and Pixies, it was a very different 4AD that closed the Eighties compared to the 4AD that had started the decade with such modest hopes. 1990: forward.

  * A manufacturing fault meant that the sleeve to Throwing Muses single ‘Dizzy’ didn’t close properly, but awkwardly sat open. Ivo: ‘We covered our arses by highlighting it in a slogan in the adverts as a “self-opening ten inch single”!’

  chapter 14 – 1990

  Heaven, Las Vegas and Bust

  (CAD0002–CAD0017)

  It wasn’t an ideal way to celebrate the transition from one decade to the next. Over the
Christmas period, while 4AD’s outlook appeared seamless and positive, the label’s future was under threat.

  During the Eighties, Beggars Banquet co-founder Nick Austin had taken a different A&R path to his business partner Martin Mills. In 1985, Austin had launched the Coda label, a new Beggars subsidiary mostly dedicated to New Age music, the bland and commercial version of the ambient minimalism associated with Brian Eno and Michael Brook. This was the influence of Austin’s new wife, former folk-rock singer-songwriter Claire Hamill, who was now busy creating overlapping layers of chanting voices in the fashion of Irish MOR starlet Enya. Coda peppered its New Age brief with jazzier and world-musical tones, such as Incantation’s Panpipes Of The Andes, one of 1987’s biggest hit albums.

  ‘I couldn’t say no to Nick, because that’s what he wanted to do,’ says Mills. ‘But we were uncomfortable bedfellows. We were still friends and business partners, but he was becoming isolated in his own company. So we decided to split it in two.’

  Mills’ half was worth more than Austin’s, and the pair had agreed a split of assets to ensure things were equal. The legislation that allows a company to de-merge (without paying tax during that period) took a year to come through, by which time Austin had bankrolled the New Age music channel Landscape TV and spent the majority of his share. ‘Nick then decided our agreed deal was unfair,’ says Mills. ‘I had to sue to force him to commit to our agreement.’