by Martin Aston
Shaped by Ivo and John Fryer’s mixes, His Name Is Alive’s 4AD album debut Livonia was a perfect marriage of Karin Oliver’s pure, precise tone, Defever’s feverish constructions and Ivo’s ‘golden ear’. Defever says, ‘He took these incoherent ramblings and musical jibber-jabber and fixed them up, polished them and helped put them in a place where people might be interested.’
Ivo was equally pleased. ‘Livonia and the second His Name Is Alive album sit just below This Mortal Coil in terms of how close I feel to them, because of how I could affect the way they sounded, what tracks to include and in which order. Warren was abnormally generous to let me do all of that.’
Ivo told Defever that Livonia would be a ‘sleeper’, in the style of Nooten and Brooks’ Sleeps With The Fishes. But 4AD exported more copies of Livonia than any other 4AD debut, ‘and without an American licensee,’ Ivo adds. ‘It’s an illustration of where 4AD was as a label, for which huge credit has to go to Sheri Hood who’d represented us in the States at college radio and retail for the previous four years. We’d been Label of the Year in the College Music Journal for years, and people continued to trust our releases because they were on 4AD.’
Defever only travelled to London to meet the 4AD team after Livonia had been released. He found the shaved heads the only weird or cultish thing about the office. ‘I sometimes stayed in the little apartment above the office, and at Ivo’s place,’ he says. ‘But if I’d been there a few days, someone would let me know I had to move on. Ivo seemed to need a lot of privacy and alone time. But whenever I was in London, he’d put money in my pocket and he’d take me to unbelievable concerts, like Philip Glass doing a live Koyaanisqatsi. We saw Indonesian gamelan, Slowdive, Lush.’
Few people were allowed inside Ivo’s private space, which showed how comfortable Ivo felt about Defever. At Ivo’s flat in Balham, Defever recalls, ‘A grapefruit-sized lump of hash by the bedside. Ivo caught me staring at this enormous shiny brown ball and admitted, “My music is drug inspired”. Later, he explained that all his decisions were made while super-high and the next day in the office, no matter how ridiculous they seemed when sober, he’d stick by them.’
Ivo finds Defever’s memory more amusing than accurate. ‘Warren is writing the way it felt for him. I’d never owned a piece of hash that size! But as to the final approval of a mix after smoking a joint, the track always later sounded as good as when I’d made that decision.’
Ivo’s kinship with Defever was starkly contrasted by his ongoing relationship with Charles Thompson, who was keeping his distance from most everyone at the label, and in the band. It turned out that Kim Deal had very nearly not been included on Pixies’ third album – was this why Thompson had been so supportive of her alternative career?
Deal had found she was the only Pixie left on the east coast, and after her (amicable) divorce from John Murphy, she found no reason to stay in Boston, and so moved back to Dayton, Ohio. She had enquired about the next round of band rehearsals, only, she says, to be told by Thompson, ‘“I don’t want you there”. I was so confused. There’d never been any talk about them wanting to do something different, or not wanting me in the band.’
It was another glaring example of the seemingly preferred strategy among 4AD associates of avoiding communication and confrontation. When Deborah Edgely heard from a panic-stricken Deal, she told the bassist to immediately get on a plane to LA. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me,’ Deal says. ‘Even Ken [Goes] had flown out there, so it had to be a big deal. I arrived to find a meeting in the lawyer’s office. I don’t think they said it was to fire me, but more to air stuff. They said that they hadn’t given me a warning, so they were going to give me another chance, and I just burst into tears. It didn’t matter if they were just or right, or how they went about it – all that mattered was they were in agreement, so it must be right. What assholes! Joey and David have since apologised.’
Deal’s surprise appearance ensured that any real confrontation would be avoided. SNAFU, in other words: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. ‘David Lee Roth once said, “Two words will ruin a band – band meeting”,’ says Santiago. ‘The problem was, we’d toured so much and so quickly after we formed that we never really gelled as a unit. We might go to a bar after practice but then we’d quickly move on. And we’d always brush stuff under the rug. Man, there was a lot of shit under that rug, and I thought it might explode one day.’
Pixies had settled into recording in Los Angeles with Gil Norton. If there was a time for Pixies to explode, it was now. After being on his solo tour, Thompson had far less prepared material than usual, and in addition, Santiago recalls, ‘Charles felt more pressure because Doolittle had been so popular. People wanted another goddamn “Monkey’s Gone To Heaven”.’
In a roundabout fashion, one of those people was Ivo. Thompson recalls playing him some new guitar riffs, and Ivo responding by asking, ‘Can you write some anthemic songs?’ Rather than be insulted, Thompson says, ‘I got a kick out of it. I don’t think Ivo was trying to get us to sell out; he just wanted us to capture the ear of the audience. He was good at not meddling and he trained me well because I’ve never accepted any meddling since from anyone. You’d hear other bands talk about how the label made them do this or that, but why let them? Tell them to fuck off, or tear up the contract.’
This was Ivo’s only attempt at A&R; the rest had to be left up to the producer. Santiago says that Gil Norton’s expertise was called on during the making of the album, meddling with only the best intentions: ‘Gil’s a great producer and arranger, but a great psychologist too. He knew the band’s psyche like no one else: the singer, the girl in the band, all that stuff. He’d say, “Let’s just make a record, please”.’
It was no surprise that Bossanova felt like a backwards step after Doolittle. Thompson admits that writing music and lyrics ‘sometimes five minutes before they were recorded’ wasn’t a way to guarantee brilliance, while Santiago says Pixies had only rehearsed for two weeks instead of the regular practices they had when they all lived in the same city. There was no new equivalent to ‘Monkey’s Gone To Heaven’ either, though ‘Velouria’ was conceivably another ‘Here Comes Your Man’. Bossanova included the first cover on a Pixies album: the instrumental ‘Cecilia Ann’ (originally by the Sixties California surf band The Surftones), which opened the album with an adrenalin burst prolonged by the following song, ‘Rock Music’. ‘Is She Weird’ and ‘The Happening’ helped make Bossanova one of the era’s most compelling, fiery rock records. But the likes of ‘Blown Away’ and ‘Hang Wire’ showed Thompson was now also writing by numbers.
Perhaps the whole band was tired of the rigmarole. Even the artwork – a Simon Larbalestier photo of a Saturn-like globe – was far less intriguing than previous Pixies artwork, though you could wonder which band member was represented by the four little drop-ins – a doll, a frog, a mole and a piece of barbed wire. The band’s real faces were in the CD booklet, but the beautiful portrait of that gorgeously grinning Kim Deal was a mere cover-up to those in the know. Once again, she had no lead vocal, and no writing credit.
Pixies would have had a profound impact on modern rock music, yet Doolittle only reached 98 in the Billboard chart, and Bossanova only reached 70. The two singles, ‘Velouria’ and the relatively average ‘Dig For Fire’, only reached 4 and 11 respectively on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. Dave Lovering thinks Elektra was to blame: ‘They dropped the ball as far as promotion went,’ he claims. ‘The A&R guy, Peter Lubin, had vision but not compared to 4AD. It was no hardship but we just didn’t catch on in America.’
An example of Charles Thompson’s vision was the unique, though prohibitively expensive video for ‘Dig For Fire’. In a pronounced satire of sexiness, the band were shown getting dressed in combinations of leather before being driven on motorbikes by Hells Angels to an empty football stadium (in the Netherlands) where they performed a live version of 77-second Bossanova cut ‘Alison’.
If Thompson didn’t appe
ar to respond productively to tension, Cocteau Twins certainly did, judging by how the trio responded to the continuing pressure of moving into a new studio and continuing to write while having Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser’s baby Lucy Belle on the scene. Like Ivo, Robin Guthrie appeared to be making creative decisions while high, and whatever state the guitarist was in hadn’t harmed his creativity. In early 1990, the band had moved from their Acton warehouse to leasing the first floor (and later, the whole studio) of a beautiful building owned by The Who’s Pete Townshend, overlooking the Thames by Richmond Lock.
‘It was like a rock star’s paradise, with a thousand-square-foot balcony,’ Simon Raymonde recalls. ‘The only problem was that it was seriously expensive. But we justified that by reckoning that we’d have paid the same with album advances if we were to use another studio.’
Townshend had named the studio Eel Pie after the nearby islet that could be seen from the balcony, though the Cocteaus re-christened it September Sound, after the month that Lucy Belle had been born in 1989. In their new plush surrounds, a new album had been started, whose sound was clearly influenced by the joy and release felt by the couple at having their first child, but Simon Raymonde recalls that it wasn’t all sweetness and light given the effect Guthrie’s continued drug-taking was having. Fraser named the album Heaven Or Las Vegas, a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice. ‘It was a great, very symbolic title,’ says Guthrie.
‘I think the act of giving birth and becoming a woman, of having her daughter, can be heard in Liz’s vocals and lyrics,’ says Raymonde. ‘There was salvation in there too, in terms of helping save her relationship with Robin, the joy of bringing a baby into the world that they could love. It did give them a new lease of life, and it gave the album an energy and vibrancy. But my dad had passed away very soon after Lucy was born: I wrote the piano part to “Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires” the day after he died, so writing songs about birth, and also death, gave the record a darker side that I hear in songs like “Cherry Coloured Funk” and “Fotzepolitic”. It was an inspirational time to be in the studio, and an absolute joy to make that album, but Robin deteriorated afterwards. Maybe being a father was a responsibility he found hard to handle. But, of course, we never talked about it.’
‘Robin was very good at hiding his insecurities,’ says his old Grangemouth pal Colin Wallace, who knew Guthrie well enough to judge. ‘He was doing more and more drugs when Lucy came along. I remember one time, he wouldn’t come home from the studio, and Elizabeth had to send a taxi, even though Robin was 500 yards from the house.’
Guthrie admits he had become paranoid: ‘I got security cameras fitted so I could sit all night watching to see who was coming in and out of the building. I was so fucking high, I wouldn’t even let Simon in the studio. That’s coke for you. I played half the bass on that album, though Simon brought an awful lot in terms of melody and piano, and he expanded what we were doing musically.’
Raymonde remembers ‘a wild old time, a legendary session’ with Echo & The Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch in regular attendance due to recording his first solo album Candleland at September Sound (Guthrie wasn’t producing, but Elizabeth Fraser guested on the title track). ‘We were hanging out with some of the greatest British music hedonists,’ says Wallace. ‘Pete Wylie, Mal from Cabaret Voltaire, Jim Thirlwell, Shane MacGowan. A lot of people came and went.’
Raymonde: ‘Robin was taking several grams of coke a day. It was all he lived for. Liz was looking after Lucy Belle. It was very hard being part of the band at that point. It affected the relationship with my wife too. I felt torn, between my own marriage and this other relationship. I didn’t want to abandon either. But in hindsight, I spent too much time trying to heal the band.’
Guthrie: ‘I was in a very dark place. I didn’t party with cocaine; I was a drug addict and I was slowly killing myself. Things got progressively worse from Victorialand onwards. I was in a successful band, touring around the world and, on paper, I should have been happy. But I was tormented by this need. Years later, after I’d gone to rehab, I worked out what was making me so self-destructive, and working myself into the ground. I felt I had been fucked over, and whose fault was that [at the time]? Ivo. So I’d use more drugs, which would make things worse. It was a vicious circle.’
That Guthrie could subconsciously heap all the blame for his deterioration on Ivo showed how the relationship had plummeted. But then Guthrie was estranged from everyone. Raymonde says he was a relative outsider since managing to stem his own daily drug-taking. ‘I didn’t like what I’d become, miserable and depressed about things, and all the arguments,’ he says. ‘That affected our relationship, because those who keep taking drugs, like Robin, feel they’re being judged by you not doing them.’
It seems impossible that an album as magical and timeless as Heaven Or Las Vegas transcended all the strife. Fraser’s luscious, dreamy hooks even came with odd articulated words – a baby had freed her from her self-imposed interior prison of what could be regarded as a baby language in itself. On record anyway, Cocteau Twins was united, even healed, by the experience. In August, the album had been followed, rather than preceded, by its most obvious, upbeat track, the ecstatic ‘Iceblink Luck’. Heaven Or Las Vegas followed in September.
Guthrie prefers Head Over Heels and Victorialand, ‘for emotional reasons’, but he knows why fan forums think Heaven Or Las Vegas is Cocteau Twins’ finest hour. ‘I was showing off, to people who’d written us off as some unintelligible, ethereal and weird art rock. And it was evolution. A lot fell into place, like our relationship with Simon had matured, and we’d got better at recording. I know drugs made it slower to make, but Heaven Or Las Vegas was made despite the drugs.’
Not only does Ivo say it’s his favourite Cocteaus album, but his all-time 4AD album – ‘by a long shot,’ he says. ‘It’s a perfect record.’ And yet what personal memories come attached with it. It would be the last Cocteaus album on 4AD after Ivo kicked them off the label in October.
By which time, he was also no longer in a relationship with Deborah Edgely.
Ivo: ‘In 1979, I had been given the opportunity to start a record label. A decade later, I was running a record company and I’d always hated record companies. I might have been good at certain aspects of it but I found it really hard, and the pressure was building. An earlier collapse, or a breakdown, was probably prevented because of splitting up with Deb. I very quickly fell in love with someone else, which saved me through this crazy period.’
Like Ivo, Edgely is understandably wary of discussing the end of a six-year relationship, not just romantically but the effect on her working life too, having shared with Ivo, on a daily basis, the highs of friendships and music, and equally united when it came to handling the lows when it was necessary. But enough time has passed, and Edgely is now comfortably settled with her partner and their two sons.
She admits that children had been ‘the fundamental flaw’ – she wanted them, Ivo didn’t – and being together 24 hours meant no release. ‘It was too painful to get out but too painful to stay, and I dragged things on far longer than I should have,’ she recalls. ‘When it did end, it felt so catatonic and raw that I had a breakdown and went home to my parents for six months.’
Ivo had hidden his depressive tendencies from his closest ally, and though Edgely finds it hard to blame the mental condition rather than the man, she acknowledges his troubles with a degree of equanimity. ‘He had to be tough and deal with those people annoyed or frustrated by his responses, but he wouldn’t waver once he’d made a decision,’ she says. ‘And he was being pulled in all different directions. It took its toll, but not just on him. He never gave much out of himself – a lot of bands probably didn’t know him at all, because he didn’t let them in. But from what I knew of his background, he was prone to an insular, self-obsessed world due to his family, all the reasons he’s ended up the person he is.’
Guthri
e and Fraser were equally in a daily bind, even more so after having a child. ‘We were very much an entity, but it was a very personally disruptive relationship, working and living together, like two concentric circles,’ says Guthrie. ‘But that’s another story.’
Under all sorts of stress, Guthrie’s behaviour had reached breaking point. ‘Robin would go AWOL a lot of the time,’ recalls Simon Harper. ‘When he was clean, he was the nicest guy, with a fantastic, friendly twinkle in his eye. When he was using [drugs], he was a pain in the arse for everyone. Heaven Or Las Vegas was a fantastic record, one of their most colourful, and commercial, but once they’d given birth to it and they had to do the promotion and all that entails, that’s when it fell apart.’
One witness to Guthrie’s mood swings was journalist John Best, who had forged a working friendship with Ivo. ‘I used to be in thrall to 4AD,’ Best admits. ‘All the main indie labels in the UK had a very strong and different aesthetic, dominated by one well-educated, early-to-middle-aged man, but 4AD had a particularly original and hermitically watertight aesthetic that became the template for many imitators, and 23 Envelope had clearly thought about everything. Ivo was a decade older than me, and into pre-punk stuff that I knew nothing about. This Mortal Coil was like an education, with Pixies bringing something completely different, which 4AD managed to bring into the fold very effectively.’
In January 1990, Best had changed tack and started his own PR company, Best In Press. Ivo hired him to run 4AD’s press department while Edgely was away. Once on board, he started dating, and living with, Miki Berenyi of Lush (the band’s drummer Chris Acland was their flatmate). Best also spent time with Pixies after Bossanova was released. ‘I didn’t see any rows but I didn’t see any warmth either,’ he recalls. Then there was Ivo’s apparent lack of warmth. ‘He could be so undiplomatic when it came to artists, but he was very straight up, and it was useful for both sides if someone did speak their mind. I learnt from Ivo not to be mealy-mouthed around people.’