Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Ralske at least stands by the songs on Joy 1967–1990, which might explain why Ivo places the album in his all-time 4AD top 10. Few might agree with such a vaulted opinion, but for all Jones’ audio polish, it was still a finely honed version of Ralske’s signature narcotic allure, with the occasional great pop melody. It gave 4AD and Columbia the chance to adopt the lead-single-album-pop-single strategy, starting with ‘Staring At The Sun’ (the B-side ‘Three Stars’ was another album cut), and following Joy 1967–1990, the album’s poppiest and best track ‘Special One’, the one most deserving of Jones’ diligence, and one of the finest singles that 4AD ever released. It didn’t even make the UK independent chart, though either Columbia’s muscle or 4AD’s American profile got ‘Special One’ to 14 on the Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.

  Or maybe it was the presence of Pixies’ Kim Deal, after Ralske had asked her to sing the chorus for ‘Special One’. ‘I thought, “Oh crap, I don’t want to sing on other people’s shit, I don’t even want to sing on Charles’s shit”,’ says Deal. ‘It was really awkward, but OK, I agreed.’

  Deal also agreed to appear in a video, which helped make ‘Special One’ one of the few 4AD promos to warrant repeat viewing. Ralske claims the video took all of 15 minutes to film. The pair sat side by side on bar stools, ‘like in those old country videos, where people look into each other’s eyes, super creepy!’ Deal says. As Ralske mimed as nonchalantly and twitchily as the camera would allow, Deal nodded away appreciatively, grinning all the way before she started to nuzzle Ralske. After she’d sung the first chorus, she waited patiently – even smoking a cigarette – for Ralske to finish his verse before she knocked him off his stool and took centre stage herself for the chorus coda. When Ralske eventually walked around to sit on Deal’s vacated stool, she smacked him across the face – all of this improvised.

  ‘It was either kiss or hit him, so obviously I was going to slap him!’ Deal says. ‘I’m sure I hit him harder than he was expecting.’

  Ralske was on more solid ground with the artwork, sending Oliver into rapture with Fifties ad cuttings. On the first UVS album, Oliver had blown up the image of a toothbrush and mimicked around it the embossed gaffer tape that held together the package Ralske had posted his images in. For the new album, Oliver isolated a drill, juxtaposed images of tyres, stars and the Virgin Mary for a slice of Warholian kitsch pop art. ‘They’re amongst the most original and sympathetic sleeves that v23 ever did,’ says Ivo. ‘It’s another example of sleeves that sit in the Victoria and Albert Museum.’

  Perhaps if Ralske had been happy with his album, he would have been a happier, more confident frontman. ‘I wasn’t into being a performer,’ he admits, which Ivo says wasn’t a problem: ‘If performing was considered, I wouldn’t have signed half the bands that I did.’ Ralske says he only grudgingly assembled a touring band after Joy … had been released, and cites the band for his feeling of losing 4AD’s support when he most needed it. ‘I know Ivo was very happy with the album, but it got very little promotion,’ he claims. ‘Someone at Rough Trade later told me that when we toured the UK, we were so awful that no one would give any more music a chance. That’s understandable. Pop music isn’t about second chances, it’s about delivering.’

  Two people who clearly believed in second chances were Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly, who had joined forces in the hope of escaping the shadow of their bands’ principal songwriters. The root of this unexpected union was a bonding on the Throwing Muses/Pixies tour of 1988, both as women (Deal being the only female Pixie) and partly as the clan that were playing rock by day and sometimes clubbing by night. It turns out that not every Muse preferred reading books to hi-jinks. It was a Boston nightclub where Deal and Donelly first hatched the plan, in a drunken conversation, ‘to write a disco song and make a lot of money,’ says Deal. This had gone as far as recording Donelly’s track ‘Rise’ in a disco fashion with Narcizo on drums, but Deal and Donelly’s schedules weren’t to coincide for another eighteen months. During that time, while Deal was caught up in dysfunctional Pixies business, Donelly became distracted, possibly because of the company she was keeping, she says, referring to her then boyfriend, 4AD promotions man Howard Gough.

  Donelly admits that they were ‘like oil and water’, but under the euphorial of Ecstasy – and presumably the music – something had blossomed; something that gave Donelly an outlet from the pressure cooker of Kristin Hersh’s emotional trauma. ‘Howard [Gough] was a handful,’ Donelly admits. ‘It was too crazy and chaotic for a real relationship, but he brought along this novelty element, the idea you were allowed to have dumb fun. It demystified the sanctity of the overall vibe. Kristin thought it was funny and fun for me too – until I weighed ninety pounds and needed vitamin shots in my ass! That’s when the fun ended.’

  ‘Howard was totally smitten with Tanya,’ recalls Miki Berenyi, ‘but being a coke-addicted meathead, he fucked it all up.’

  While the fun lasted, Donelly had been sharing it with Pixies’ rhythm section and occasionally David Narcizo. By the time she’d reconnected with Deal, the conceptual jape of a disco collaboration had worn thin. But Donelly’s commitment didn’t waver: ‘Kim was one of my heroes and an incredible songwriter and I wanted to see if I could do something else besides the Muses.’

  The opportunity arose when Charles Thompson announced he was going on a solo tour. ‘I thought that we were a band, and I didn’t get the solo thing,’ says Deal. ‘So I thought I’d do something solo too. I told Tanya to come over and write some songs.’ Deal says she suggested each write one side of songs, which Donelly doesn’t recall. What they do agree on was that neither planned to quit their main band. ‘That would have been disrespectful,’ says Deal, ‘even though I knew Tanya did want to start her own band.’

  Ivo recalls that he loved the demo that the pair recorded with American violinist Carrie Bradley, which had a country music flavour. He responded with an offer to fund an album. ‘I wanted to encourage Kim to reveal to the world that she could make simply beautiful music,’ he says.

  The band name The Breeders could have been some sly feminist statement along the lines of The Baby Machines, but it was actually an in-joke between Kim and sister Kelley, being homosexual slang for heterosexuals: ‘That they saw a straight couple’s goods as disgusting was so funny to me!’ says Kim. ‘Later, the meaning became more layered, like one man saying to another, “He’s a breeder, too bad”.’

  The Breeders needed a rhythm section as Deal wanted to play some guitar – it was easier to combine with singing on stage, she says. For the bass, she called on Josephine Wiggs of The Perfect Disaster, a British equivalent to the Paisley Underground sound that had supported Pixies in London. ‘She was musically intelligent, self-deprecating, and easy on the eye,’ says Deal. In return, Wiggs found Deal complex and entertaining company.

  ‘I was in Frankfurt when Pixies were playing in 1989, and we got to hang out,’ Wiggs recalls. ‘We sat in the railway station next to the venue, where Kim insisted there was enough clearance between the train and platform to dangle her knees over, which didn’t seem a good idea! She was hilarious on that level, a risk-taker, who liked to live in the moment. At 3am, everyone else had left and she had no Deutschmarks for a taxi, and no other way to get back to the hotel, which was out at the airport! My friend had to pay for her.’

  Deal had wanted twin sister Kelley to play drums, but she couldn’t get leave from her current job (as a program analyst), so Steve Albini – Deal’s choice of producer for his no-nonsense approach to analogue sound – had brought along Britt Walford, a member of the Louisville, Kentucky band Slint, whose Albini-engineered debut album Tweez had mastered a slow, stark sound at total odds with the fast, FX ear-bashing of alternative rock. As the only male Breeder, Walford insisted that he adopt a pseudonym, settling on Shannon Doughton when Deal rejected his original suggestion of Mike Hunt. Walford was a very different, minimalist drummer to the likes of Dave Lovering, and with Albini stressing liv
e performances and quick takes, the album only took two weeks to record at Palladium. It didn’t sound like a country music record for one moment.

  The title ‘Oh!’ suggested something upbeat but the track was more Slint-like in its funereal pace and barren arrangement, with a stark drum tattoo, Carrie Bradley’s lonesome violin, Deal’s surprisingly raw, cracked vocal. There was clearly much more to Deal than the ‘cookies’ that Joey Santiago had described, something more savoury, something more vulnerable behind the wide grin.

  The album turned out to be Deal’s deal. She sang and wrote all the songs, with the idea that Donelly would take over when a second Breeders album got made. The sole Deal/Donelly co-write ‘Only In 3’s’ didn’t break with the record’s stripped, wired dynamic; seven of the twelve songs were closer to two minutes than three, some were mercurial ballads and others had angular Hersh-style twists. On the surface, ‘Hellbound’, ‘Limehouse’ and ‘Opened’ mirrored Pixies’ bouncy momentum (the closing ‘Metal Man’ had similar melodic parts to Doolittle cut ‘Cactus’), but under Albini’s watchful eye, there were no busy rock heroics; Ivo’s suggestion to cover ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ resulted in one of the most inventive Beatles covers in years.

  Deal denies she felt liberated by the experience. ‘I didn’t think, Charles won’t let me shine, now this spirit’s come over me, I’ve been given a chance to sing my songs, like TV Moment of the Week. All I cared about was it sounding good. And I didn’t know how the songs would go. One moment, I thought it sounded awesome, the next minute not.’

  A surprise studio guest was Mick Allen, who had spent a reputedly riotous night at Manchester’s Hacienda club with the Boston brigade and later added murmured backing vocals to ‘Oh!’ Deal liked Allen, from his bass lines to his bolshie character. ‘Mick had a big fucking mouth,’ she says, meaning it as a compliment. ‘He’d talk trash constantly and destroy everyone in front of him, but not in a mean way, more very funny, all snotty with disdain.’

  Pod – the album’s title inspired by a painting Deal had seen in Boston – ‘and it’s a good word’ – was given one of Vaughan Oliver’s most memorably surreal images with the aforementioned belt of dead eels attached to his underpants. Albini considered the album one of his best sessions, and John Peel was smitten enough to allow The Breeders special dispensation to record a session at Palladium rather than the BBC’s west London studio. Kurt Cobain was such a fan that, according to his posthumously published journal, Pod and Surfer Rosa were in his top three favourite albums, just below Iggy and The Stooges’ Raw Power. In 1992, he raved to Melody Maker about the main reasons he liked the band and Pod as being, ‘for the songs, and the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric’.

  Pixies didn’t sell that many singles but they did albums, and Pod reached 22 in the national UK chart. Santiago says that the other Pixies supported Deal all the way: ‘Especially Charles.’

  Deal subsequently recorded a new Pixies album, though Ivo wisely kept the two records apart to avoid any conflict of press duties and reduce the number of unavoidable comparisons. Ivo also kept the two albums separate in terms of licensing, thinking that Pod was more suited to an independent label. He managed to persuade Elektra of this thought, and licensed Pod to Rough Trade America.

  Pod was released at the end of May, to be followed six weeks later by Pixies’ single and the band’s third album a month after that. Two releases acted as convenient buttresses in between, one from another of 4AD’s circle of distressed male-female relationships.

  Despite being two hot-headed individuals who made music and toured together, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard had continued with Dead Can Dance after moving to different countries. Gerrard was in Barcelona where she had taken her first film role, in Spanish director Agustí Villaronga’s fantasy El Niño de la Luna, for which Dead Can Dance had written the soundtrack. Perry had reconnected with his family’s ancestry by moving to rural Ireland, where he had rented a six-bedroom house and bedded in a home studio. Two vocals arrangements, ‘The Arrival And The Reunion’ and ‘The End Of Words’, had been completed at John Rivers’ studio in the Midlands, with guest singer David Navarro Sust adding Gregorian choral support, but the rest of Aion made up the first Dead Can Dance album to be recorded outside of the UK.

  At twelve tracks and just 36 minutes, Aion was a precise and focused adventure. Such was the speed at which the duo was evolving that Gerrard had already bypassed the Bulgarian influence, and Perry was less intent on ceremonial settings than mining folk music of the very distant past. There were hallmarks of the band’s own past with Perry’s ‘Black Sun’ and Gerrard’s ‘The Promised Womb’, but ‘Radharc’ had Middle Eastern strings and much of the album reflected their new locations. ‘Saltarello’ and ‘Song Of The Sybil’ were respective covers of a fourteenth-century Italian instrumental and a sixteenth-century Catalan ballad, while Perry sang ‘Fortune Presents Gifts Not According To The Book’ with lyrics by seventeenth-century baroque poet Luis de Góngora. That Gerrard sang the traditional Gaelic ballad ‘As The Bell Rings The Maypole Spins’ showed that each of the pair was willing to cross into the other’s spiritual comfort zone.

  To complete the historical mood, the cover of Aion was a small section of the triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights by sixteenth-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It was taken from the earth section, flanked by representations of Eden and hell. If Perry and Gerrard sang separately, Dead Can Dance was still a shared voyage, and Perry’s chosen image was the ‘flower’ of a plant in the shape of a transparent bubble. The naked couple inside, says Perry, ‘reminded me of myself and Lisa transported back to the past in a kind of alchemical, alembic time machine’.

  Aion’s cover was also the first time that Perry had relented his artistic autonomy. Despite his claims that Dead Can Dance would rather leave 4AD than surrender total artistic control, Ivo says that he rejected outright Gerrard’s primitive pencil drawing of an angel. Perry says he can’t remember the image, or that, as Ivo recalls, he was furious. ‘I’d have been embarrassed for that [drawing] to exist on any record,’ Ivo says. ‘Probably within a day, they’d picked the Bosch image.’

  Artwork had been the only hiccup in the relationship between Dead Can Dance and 4AD; otherwise it had been a total and unified joy. But Ivo’s next signing was the label’s most co-operative venture of them all, offering Vaughan Oliver complete freedom, and Ivo the chance to take a creative role beyond This Mortal Coil, within the context of a similarly cinemascopic sound.

  Warren Defever was born to Canadian parents in Livonia, a small suburb of Detroit, Michigan. His grandfather was a musician who had taught Defever and his brothers not only guitar but bass, slide guitar, banjo, accordion, saxophone and fiddle. The Defevers had subsequently worked up a repertoire of polkas, waltzes, country and western and Fifties pop, to which Warren added Fifties rock’n’roll and rockabilly. ‘And then I heard punk rock. WOW.’

  Defever also chooses to communicate by email. Much like Ian Masters and his backwards-written postcards, Defever would often send haikus. Taking the name of His Name Is Alive, his music was similarly infused with both darkly ruminative and distinctly playful trails. As a teenager, he recalls a litany of lonesome yet comforting voices that would float, like apparitions, from his radio, the kind of anguished beauty that had bewitched David Lynch, such as Roy Orbison and Bobby Vinton, whose crooned ‘Blue Velvet’ had given Lynch the title of his film.

  Over the years, Defever writes, he has specialised in what he describes as a kind of interior music. ‘I used to listen to music primarily with headphones because my father worked nights and would often sleep during the day,’ he explains. ‘I wasn’t going to parties or school dances, so things developed on a very personal level. I think I probably got into “weird sounds” from that. Eyes closed, headphones on – anything can happen.’

  His Name Is Alive’s interior world of electro-acoustic, digi-organic fusions was topped with exactly the same k
ind of towering female vocal that Ivo had used on Filigree & Shadow. Unsurprisingly, 4AD had been a strong influence on Defever. He was fifteen when he bought Cocteau Twins’ Aikea-Guinea just because of the cover: ‘But it sounded so good, so different from anything I’d heard before. I tracked down The Pink Opaque and other 4AD records. They were so mysterious and weird, as were the covers. Instead of telling a story, they were vague enough that the listener could fill in the blanks with their own experiences, thoughts and feelings.’ He singles out Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, Sleeps With The Fishes and ‘Song To The Siren’. ‘Twenty-five years later, they still seem just as important, inspirational, bewildering and mystifying.’

  His Name Is Alive’s very first tracks were recorded with vocalist Karin Oliver, released on a cassette that Defever sold locally and also posted to 4AD under the hand-scrawled title ‘I Had Sex With God’. In contrast to the usual demos Ivo received, this was a bolt out of the blue. ‘I enjoyed the simplicity, and the prettiness of Karin’s voice offset against some crazy guitar playing,’ Ivo recalls. ‘It was very rough and done quickly.’

  Once again, Ivo contacted its maker to say that he’d enjoyed the tape, but wasn’t looking to get involved. ‘Then a week later, another version of all the songs turned up. Warren did that for a third time! Each time he remixed them, the structure became more abstract until he finally went too far. Eventually I asked if I could mix it myself. I thought I could make it sound better, to stop this deconstruction.’

  Defever blames his obsessive behaviour on circumstances. ‘Karin lived in Ypsilanti, about 40 minutes’ drive away, and she didn’t have a car, so it was a big deal to get her over. I’d rather work on the same song than write new ones, just so I could hear her sing.’

  Defever says no specific contract was discussed with Ivo in advance, adding, ‘other than being gently reassured that if I was uncomfortable with anything, I could pull out’. He says it seemed like a dream come true, especially as Defever’s only previous experience had been with an American label: ‘[Their] every interaction devolved into shady dealings and outright deceit. It was also very promising to work with a label [4AD] that I enjoyed and respected.’