Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  The process took eighteen months: ‘It was extremely painful, hugely stressful and expensive,’ Mills recalls. Three months alone were spent in court as the case dragged on into 1990. Since it was an argument between shareholders of Beggars Banquet, the company could not fund the costs of either partner, so Mills was forced to fund his legal case from the 4AD side of the business, of which he was the principal shareholder, while Austin resorted to legal aid. To do that, Mills had to restructure 4AD’s shareholder agreement to allow the label to pay dividends to himself, and in the process, Ivo was made an equal partner in the label, which, says Mills, ‘was the right thing to do anyway’.

  If Mills had lost, it’s interesting to speculate about the impact on 4AD. But Austin lost the case, and had to declare bankruptcy. ‘We became sworn enemies, but Nick has since apologised,’ Mills concludes.

  The outcome was that Ivo was in a much stronger financial position, though daily business didn’t change; Mills had never interfered in the running of 4AD, and Ivo’s way of running a record label had created something much more recognisable than Beggars Banquet. There was the attention paid to every detail, from the big architectural stuff, such as the basement of the new office with its glass ceiling (planning laws meant the building couldn’t be built up, so they just dug down instead), down to the bespoke design of v23’s calendar. Oliver had always relished the free rein that came without having account for the wishes of artists that, at the very least, wanted their name, or the album title, on the front of their records. The calendar’s limited run of 5,000 copies quickly sold out, confirming that no other label put as much importance into the visuals, and that 4AD collectors had to have everything.

  After the watershed moment in 1967 with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by British pop art painter Peter Blake, record sleeve design blossomed. However, the Eighties had taken it to new heights; record sleeves became worthy of being framed, or becoming the subject of an exhibition. Thirteen years before Saville’s show at London’s Design Museum, Oliver was awarded an exhibition of 4AD design drawn from both the 23 Envelope and v23 periods, to be staged between 1 February and 11 March 1990 as an inauguration of a new gallery, the Espace Graslin in the French city of Nantes.

  4AD made it a bigger occasion, flying in Lush, Pale Saints and The Wolfgang Press to play shows alongside UK print, radio and TV media. Interviewed by BBC series SNUB TV, the first television show to showcase independent music (three series ran on BBC2), Oliver discussed his efforts to keep re-contextualising the work; for example, putting album covers inside baroque frames ‘to exaggerate their preciousness’. A feature in France’s national newspaper Le Monde certified the importance of the event, even if the writer’s tone was suspicious, or, as Oliver mimics, ‘this exhibition is all very well, but what is graphic design doing in an art gallery?’

  Oliver remembers it as, ‘one of the best experiences of my life’. But once more, the dazzled visuals hid upsetting undercurrents and the Nantes exhibition put an end to the friendship between 23 Envelope’s founders.

  After an uneasy truce through 1988 and 1989, Nigel Grierson says that he and Oliver had re-established friendly contact, but that was before Oliver mentioned the Nantes exhibition. ‘Vaughan said something like, “It’s nothing big, it’s in Nantes, not Paris”, playing it down,’ says Grierson. ‘It turned out to be very big, and he’d left me out. We were still collaborating in 1987, and, bearing in mind most exhibitions of this magnitude are planned two to three years in advance, it’s unthinkable there could be an exhibition just about Vaughan planned at that point, when all our work had been a partnership under the 23 Envelope banner. After all, no one knew who Vaughan Oliver was at that point. Of course, by the time the exhibition did happen, he could add a couple of years work with other people so that it didn’t look quite so obvious.’

  Grierson continues: ‘I was credited in the catalogue, but not on the exhibition walls, and he did every interview. I flew over, and on the night of the gig, Vaughan started crying on my shoulder, saying, “I’m aware of how much of this work is yours”, which was more salt in the wound. There was also no mention of me in any coverage back home. I called one TV programme, saying, “Didn’t you research this? You’re using my videos.” Someone must have called Vaughan, because he called me, and said, “It’s Vaughan. I’m sorry.” I hung up and we’ve never spoken since.’

  Grierson says that an article about Oliver in 1991 used his Filigree & Shadow poster on the cover, with no reference to Grierson. ‘You’d think he’d be ten times warier after Nantes but it didn’t happen. I initially refused to be involved in a book [Visceral Pleasures by arts writer Rick Poyner], but Ivo and others said, “It can’t do any harm, set the record straight, make sure you get credit”. But why is the book about Vaughan and not 23 Envelope? I see it as insecurity on Vaughan’s side, but now he’s world-famous, hopefully he’s past that point now. Maybe he wanted a bigger share of the pie.’

  Unsurprisingly, Oliver has another view. ‘About fifteen per cent [a figure Grierson hotly disputes] of the [Nantes] show was our combined work. I’d invited Nigel to take part, and to contribute ideas, but he never came up with anything. I invited him to the show, and when he saw it, he said, “I didn’t know it was this big”. My problem was that the show had to open without captions on the sleeves, which was the curator’s fault. The bands were coming over to play, so we couldn’t delay it. Nigel was incredibly pissed off, but he wouldn’t take anything as an explanation. I thought I’d bent over backwards, to open the door to his influence on the show, to mediate and get us back together, because we used to get on so amazingly well. When Visceral Pleasures came out, our roles were identified, and he got the credits he wanted, which I thought would appease him.’ Visceral Pleasures was published in 2000, which meant Grierson was to stew for a decade, and even then, he still didn’t pick up the phone.

  ‘Of all the break-ups of intense working and personal relationships, and there were many, that between Vaughan and Nigel is the saddest for me,’ says Ivo. ‘They were like two peas in a pod, bouncing ideas off each other and, for a while anyway, seemingly devoid of ego in terms of job description. Whilst working with both of them, separately, on the This Mortal Coil remasters in 2011, I was constantly trying to provoke a softening, an understanding or simply forgiveness in either one of them. I came to realise that would never happen.’

  ‘Nigel was an inspiration to me,’ Oliver concludes. ‘He brought something wonderful and personable to the table, he had a fantastic eye, and we gave each other strength. We had an amazing time together, from school onwards. It was a real shame that we fell out over business.’

  ‘It’s difficult to work around what Vaughan did to me, his best friend and creative partner, something that has never been properly addressed until now,’ Grierson concludes. ‘But I don’t begrudge an ounce of his success. He deserves it all. It was obvious to me, even at the age of fifteen when we first met, that Vaughan had something quite exceptional.’

  As 23 Envelope dissolved, v23’s relationship prospered in the converted basement of 4AD’s new office. ‘We were driven,’ Oliver says. ‘The split with Nigel opened up so much as Chris [Bigg] and I worked together with all these different photographers, and had all these new ideas.’

  Bigg says he feels privileged to have worked at 4AD during what he remembers as a golden age. ‘It was all go,’ he recalls. ‘One weekend, we’d see Primal Scream live, My Bloody Valentine the next week, then Pixies, then off to The Wag Club to see Big Audio Dynamite … But then it changed, when people started going to weird places to get drugs at weird times of night, in tow with a few hangers-on.’

  Compared to the likes of Creation’s all-weekend parties, 4AD showed a modicum of restraint. But if the label’s music didn’t tap the revolution of dance after ‘Pump Up The Volume’ anymore than it did before, there was still a mood of celebration and inebriation – no one was exempt in the music industry. Lots of creative
work was undertaken in the art department, but according to eyewitnesses, it hosted its fair share of drugs, around Oliver’s plan chest, especially the ‘Fourth Drawer Down’, named after the 1981 compilation of Associates’ singles on Situation 2.

  ‘I love Associates but that’s poppycock,’ says Oliver. ‘I used to call it, “old artwork”. As in, ‘Do you want to come and see some old artwork?’ It was a framed Cocteau Twins poster, and you’d get a line [of cocaine] on that. For me, drugs got in the way of productivity and creativity, but when I look back at the drugs taken, it must have had some influence on the work, at least in a naïve way.’

  ‘The Cocteaus poster was in the fourth drawer down,’ Bigg recalls. ‘It did get a bit out of control at times. I thought it helped get you focused, because there was lots of work and stuff happening all at the same time. We had deadlines but Ivo made sure everything was right before it was ready to go.’

  Ivo kept his distance from the excess, especially as he was steering clear of getting friendly with the artists for fear of repeating the sapping experience with M/A/R/R/S and Cocteau Twins. His reticence reinforced his shyness, and to late arrivals such as Miki Berenyi, he cut an enigmatic figure. ‘I didn’t really know what to make of Ivo,’ she says. ‘People in the music industry had this large-and-in-charge attitude, to show they were as much a rock star as any band, but not Ivo. He was quite proper. On odd occasions when he’d swear, it was almost jarring, like hearing the Queen swear! He was very avuncular, as others have said, like there was something elderly and doting about him. But that sense of control was part of his character.’

  It seemed fitting that 4AD’s first release of the decade was named The Comforts Of Madness. Pale Saints’ debut album matched Ultra Vivid Scene for fashioning new dreams out of psychedelia that the album’s two producers exploited in their own particular style. ‘Gil Norton was always excited and aspirational,’ says Ian Masters. ‘John Fryer was playful and open, more of a super-imaginative engineer. He was up for anything, like, “How about using this tape loop of dogs shagging?”’

  At guitarist Graeme Naysmith’s suggestion, the album included a cover of ‘Fell From The Sun’, written by David Roback, the lynchpin of Paisley Underground contenders The Rain Parade, for his new outfit Opal. The Comforts Of Madness even ran as one continuous piece of music, with instrumental links based on stage improvisations to plug the gaps between songs when there was barely any audience applause.

  The album title seemed a good bet for one of v23’s most virtuoso covers, but Pale Saints wanted to be involved from the start. After American artist Cindy Sherman refused permission for use of her image, the band settled on a photo by Sarah Tucker, one of the Bournemouth University students that v23 was mentoring. The cat lying among flower petals, rendered in green and red, was marginally psychedelic, but far too decorative and soft, and it’s one of Vaughan Oliver’s least favourite 4AD sleeves.

  Lush was much more accommodating. Oliver had loved photographer Jim Friedman’s diffused colour Polaroids but didn’t feel they were appropriate for a 4AD cover until the band’s six-track debut Scar. ‘Jim reminded me of [American painter] Mark Rothko, all blurred colour and long songs of sound,’ Oliver explains. ‘Talking to Lush, I saw walls and waves of colour. Jim’s work almost became Japanese pictograms, like images in a shape that has meaning.’

  For all the band’s musical and visual swirls, Lush was not part of any psychedelic renaissance; the band’s vice was alcoholic, not pharmaceutical, and they were more prone to saucy humour than semi-mystical bravado – the run-out grooves on the vinyl version of Scar read, ‘Fanny tits delight’ and ‘I’ll still fondle you’. And the first cover version the band had recorded was Abba’s ‘Hey Hey Helen’. It was one of three tracks recorded for a Peel session. Sadly, Peel’s patronage lacked the impact it had once had; he’d lost his Thursday night slot as early as 1984, and instead of broadcasting three nights a week (he had never done Fridays), Peel’s show was moved to the weekend in 1990, starting an hour later than usual, so that he’d finish at 2am. In many cases, people were either out having fun – or asleep. The old post-punk order that had launched 4AD had effectively disappeared.

  The same could be said for Cocteau Twins’ original sound, even if Robin Guthrie hadn’t retired his effects pedals. He’d even turned into an indie-pop producer for Lush’s studio version of ‘Hey Hey Helen’ after picking out the band as his favourite of all the shoegaze kids following in his footsteps. Emma Anderson had sent Guthrie an early demo, and he, like Ivo, could hear so much potential. ‘The performances were bad and the guitars were out of tune, but I could hear songs, harmonies, melodies, and I wanted to get my hands on them,’ he recalls. ‘Ivo knew I’d expressed an interest, but he’d used John Fryer for Scar.’

  Fryer had been a logical choice at the onset of Lush’s career, but Guthrie was the means to lift them higher. Ivo was understandably wary of involving Guthrie in more 4AD business and tried to put the band off. ‘Ivo was very diplomatic and didn’t say why he thought using Robin was a bad idea,’ says Berenyi. ‘Maybe he thought we’d be the wide-eyed innocents and Robin would take the piss and be a pain to manage. Maybe he thought we’d sound like the Cocteaus, which became one of the main criticisms we had afterwards. But we were incredibly flattered that Robin was interested.’

  Berenyi says that Guthrie had singled out an unrecorded Lush song, ‘Deluxe’: ‘Robin said he could do great things with it. We said we were crap but he said not to worry. We needed that, because we couldn’t have dealt with a producer rolling their eyes and tutting. It was almost like we were so grateful that anything sounded fine that we didn’t want to express an opinion, because we could so easily be shot down.’

  Lush’s first Guthrie recording to emerge was the Mad Love EP, which sounded bolder and brighter than Scar (contrast the two versions of ‘Thoughtforms’). Guthrie was spot on about the cascading ‘Deluxe’, and neither ‘Downer’ nor ‘Leaves Me Cold’ revealed them as a band with self-esteem issues to rival the producer’s. But Berenyi says that Lush was always insecure about their abilities, and that the instant press attention had increased the pressure. ‘We were on the cover of Melody Maker six months after we formed, which became a nightmare because we weren’t prepared – we’d only played about four gigs. We didn’t even have a long enough set to be able to headline. And we were awful live, so we were forced to become good in public.’

  Since The Falcon Pub show, Lush and Pale Saints had only shared a stage twice – Leeds in November 1989 and Norwich in March 1990. It made sense to use 4AD’s profile to co-promote both bands, so a co-headline tour in the UK and Europe began in the Netherlands in March. The bands alternated the top slot each night, but from the start it was clear the two bands didn’t share a bond as Throwing Muses and Pixies had, especially the two lead singers.

  Berenyi recalls an unspoken rivalry: ‘They [Pale Saints] didn’t like the fact we’d got more press, and we were threatened by the fact they could play their instruments and could show us up, even if they didn’t have much charisma. It got narky over who was headlining which cities. It was still good fun, but Ian was sneery and I couldn’t bear him. I know I could be annoying when I got drunk, but on the last night in Brussels, he kept making nasty comments. Finally, I said, “You really don’t like me, do you?” and he slapped me around the face! I was so shocked, I didn’t respond, and he just smiled and walked off. In those times, there were so many people you could row and fall out with.’

  ‘Ian Masters, or Master Masters as I used to call him, was incredibly intelligent in a wonderfully dysfunctional way,’ recalls Simon Harper. ‘He used to send really long postcards from tours, all written in back-to-front writing so you had to read them in a mirror, which, of course, was his whole point – to annoy.’

  Chalk up one more confrontation that was never resolved. It was as if 4AD, from its avuncular leader to the Cocteaus and on down to the new breed, sought out artists whose creative imaginations ran in d
irect proportion to their inability to express their emotions in any other way, feeding all that buried tension into the music.

  Kurt Ralske’s reaction to his new Ultra Vivid Scene album sprang from the exact same source. Even though he valued control and independence, he had allowed Ivo’s choice of producer, Hugh Jones, to pursue his usual dedicated effort to make the music as palatable as possible. Years after the fact, during which he remained silent, Ralske feels that the situation had served 4AD’s interest more than his own.

  ‘I adore Ivo and am eternally grateful to him,’ he starts off, ‘but it all came at the moment when 4AD had had huge success, this feeling of, I can do anything, including taking me, this very shy kid from New York City, and pushing him over the top. Hugh was wonderful, so I blame myself for allowing a record to be completed that had nothing to do with my vision, sonics, structure and tone. To me, it sounds slick, English and complacent, which was so far from my concept of music that had a slightly dangerous, uncomfortable edge. And it was very slowly, painstakingly made. But decisions get made, and when the money runs out, the album’s finished and being released. I haven’t listened to it once since it was finished.’

  Ralske’s album title, Joy 1967–1990, was intended to read like a tombstone. Regarding his disillusionment, he recalls someone at 4AD suggesting he shouldn’t bring it up with Ivo because it wouldn’t do anyone any good. ‘So,’ he says, ‘I bit the bullet.’

  ‘Kurt must have done some fine acting, because it’s difficult to hide displeasure with your producer over such a long, intense period of time,’ Ivo feels. ‘I remember Kurt being incredibly complimentary about Hugh, but maybe that was more about his work ethic than the end result. I remember thinking Kurt was extremely happy with it. The album proved not to be very commercial-sounding anyway! But it sounded commercial to Columbia’s ears.’