by Martin Aston
Ivo had also been putting the finishing touches to a third This Mortal Coil album that he’d assembled, piece by piece again, over the last five years. This project, so close to his heart, had never been a source of stress, more of an escape, a cathartic opportunity to turn pent-up emotion into beautiful art, on his own behalf and that of the 4AD followers of his crusade. More than before, Ivo had chosen to work with even fewer 4AD personnel and more of an outside cast of old friends, some new to the collective. ‘I only worked with people I felt very comfortable with,’ Ivo recalls. ‘The studio atmosphere, with one or two contributors at different times, was very relaxed. I don’t remember any tension, more adrenalin rushes from the beauty of a spontaneous idea or performance.’
Ivo had grown in confidence too, writing a handful of lyrics, melodies and instrumental passages, such as the Hendrix/Pink Floyd-influenced guitars of ‘Ruddy And Wretched’. The lyrics, understandably, mined the acid, bitter and sad, on the frontline of depression, and he named the album Blood. ‘In 1987 alone,’ Ivo admits, ‘my cat had died, my father had died, I’d fallen out with Colourbox, we’d released Pixies records and my relationship with Deb had fallen apart. Everything that was happening to me is on Blood.’
To articulate his state of mind, Ivo had drawn his lyrics from fragments he’d either read or overheard. ‘They weren’t autobiographical in the sense that they came from my brain to illustrate a period of my life,’ he contends. ‘But they expressed emotions that were really common to me. I’ve been depressed my whole life, so it’s all familiar, like the phrase, “I carry sadness around like so much small change in my pocket”. When people ask me how I felt about certain things, I’d reply, “Don’t ask me, I wasn’t there”. I didn’t feel present. I was doing everything to avoid the sadness that was continuing to grow.’
The outside world crept in too. The otherwise instrumental ‘Loose Joints’ sampled the voices of a mother and daughter from a clan of Puerto Rican junkies that Ivo had found in a documentary about struggling New York City families.
The only other family on Blood were the returning Rutkowski sisters Dee and Louise, unless you counted Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly, the only 4AD artists on the record. ‘It’s a testimony to how much I enjoyed the Rutkowski sisters,’ says Ivo, ‘because there weren’t many people I carried over from Filigree & Shadow. Louise and Dee were the heart and soul of Blood.’
‘All the music on Blood went straight to your soul, like being punched in the stomach, but in a good way,’ says Dee Rutkowski. ‘Creativity is a product of a diseased mind – when you’re not right in the head, that creative force is what keeps you right. If you’re not right, it comes back with a vengeance. I most enjoyed singing Ivo’s songs because of his words. They were extremely dark, which, as I got to know him, made sense. But he was so together and professional in the studio. If he was having a bad time, he wouldn’t let that get in the way.’
Louise Rutkowski: ‘It was all so effortless and enjoyable. We laughed a lot in the studio. But like comedians, we were dark in our private life.’
Of the five lyrics that Ivo had written, ‘D.D. And E.’ consisted of only one line: ‘Daylight, dreams and echoes.’ ‘Baby Ray Baby’ was two short statements – ‘I needed you/ I trusted you/ I wanted you’ and ‘but you’ll never, ever, change my mind’.
‘I was talking directly to Ray [Conroy] about how I felt about him during the “Pump Up The Volume” fiasco and how he was behaving,’ Ivo explains. ‘Ray was represented by the [sound of the] nonsense babbling baby.’
The remaining trio of lyrics were more fleshed out. ‘Bitter’ was an expanded version of ‘Acid, Bitter And Sad’ with a sample of Alison Limerick’s original vocal and Dee Rutkowski’s phased, ghostly addition, with Ivo’s friend Ikuko Kozu providing spoken word Japanese translation. It included the lines: ‘Now pardon me for trying/ Trying to tear apart/ And pardon me for lying/ It’s just easy, so easy, to start.’
Dee’s controlled, chilled sadness was equally suited to ‘Dreams Are Like Water’ (‘When you were a child/ Unhappiness took the place of dreams/ Dreams are like water/ Colourless and dangerous’) with a strangely contemporary beat that pre-dated trip-hop (it was based on tracks by London collective Soul II Soul). She also laid down the overlapping vocal parts for the album’s finale ‘(Nothing But) Blood’. The album’s last words resembled an elegy: ‘Now’s the time to draw the line/ It’s time to say goodbye.’
Ivo: ‘Goodbye to who, I wonder? Cocteau Twins, Deborah, 4AD, life? Perhaps This Mortal Coil. We’d made three albums, which had always been my intention.’
John Fryer had remained Ivo’s cohort, with Jon Turner assembling the backing tracks for the new cover versions and Martin McCarrick and Gini Ball embellishing the sketches. Frazier Chorus singer Tim Freeman was marginally involved, lending vocal support to the Rutkowskis on a version of ‘I Come And Stand At Every Door’, The Byrds’ adaptation of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet’s heartbreaking poem about a child killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, now walking Earth in search of peace. Pieter Nooten was also present in spirit, having written ‘Several Times’ during the solo session that Ivo had produced before Michael Brook became involved.
Ivo remembers several vocal highlights. Caroline Crawley was the lead singer of Shelleyan Orphan, a duo that Ivo might have signed if Rough Trade hadn’t beaten him to it in 1986. Like a softer version of the Rutkowskis, Crawley had a controlled, even subdued approach that was the perfect conduit for Ivo’s repressed nature, as opposed to Lisa Gerrard’s liberation or Elizabeth Fraser. Yet like Fraser, Crawley had been crippled by a lack of self-confidence, and she had repeatedly turned down Ivo’s requests. ‘I could accept singing my own songs, but otherwise I felt like an imposter,’ she recalls. ‘Eventually, I got so fed up with Ivo asking, I agreed. After I sang a first take, he was like, that was it, off you go! It was a bit mean of Ivo, but I can see he was right. It felt uncomfortable for me but he could see the beauty and vulnerability in that, and he was very skilled at getting that out of people. I remember Ivo saying, “You’re so lucky, to be able to feel so much”.’
Ivo recalls that Crawley’s final version of ‘Late Night’ had left her shaking. ‘I asked what was wrong, and she said, “I just feel really good”,’ he told Melody Maker when Blood was released. ‘And to me, the thought of being able to do something as pure as sing, and make yourself feel that wonderful, is way beyond anything I could hope to possibly achieve in my life.’
Crawley became as involved as the Rutkowski sisters, fronting three Blood covers: Syd Barrett’s forlorn ‘Late Night’, the tender ‘Mr Somewhere’ (co-sung with Dee Rutkowski) by the Australian band The Apartments, and ‘Help Me Lift You Up’ by the uniquely affecting Canadian singer Mary Margaret O’Hara. Gordon Sharp, who had sung on It’ll End In Tears, says that Ivo had commissioned him to sing O’Hara’s exquisitely exposed original, ‘a more emotive version that Ivo wasn’t happy with, so he went with Caroline instead, which from my perspective sounded more detached’.
Crawley and Dee Rutkowski’s voices were sampled for the intro of Ivo/Fryer’s ‘The Lacemaker’, for which Martin McCarrick’s string arrangement was the saddest sound on an album of crushing melancholia.
Ivo had named the track after one of his favourite films, starring one of his favourite actresses, Isabelle Huppert. In her 1977 debut, based on Pascal Lainé’s novel La Dentellière, Huppert’s character Apple eventually falls into a catatonic depression living among other psychiatric patients. The Wikipedia entry for the book tellingly concludes, ‘Apple is surrounded with characters who believe they know how to express themselves, while Apple never succeeds in saying anything. Her silent suffering is the central light of the book.’
Another voice, Heidi Berry, who had just signed to 4AD, sang American country singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell’s ‘Till I Gain Control Again’, which Ivo knew from Emmylou Harris’ brilliant rendition. The pairing of Deal and Donelly – both underrated, charismatic vocalists �
� on the same track was another highlight. ‘You And Your Sister’ was an exquisite ballad written by Chris Bell, Alex Chilton’s creative foil in Big Star, who had died in a car crash in 1978, the same year the track had become the B-side of his debut solo single ‘I Am The Cosmos’ on – would you believe it? – the Car label.
Bell’s song was more intensely yearning than tragic, so the mood of the session wasn’t downbeat; a good thing too, as Donelly recalls that she and Deal couldn’t sing together because of their uncontrolled laughter, though listening to their version you’d swear that they’d been enslaved by the song. ‘Internally, I was thinking, what kind of shit have I got myself into?’ Deal recalls. ‘I like rock’n’roll but to me music is played, not sampled. I’d never even heard [the backing track] before I got to the studio. So I was very out of my comfort zone. But I really enjoyed it. The music was so perfect, and the song was so gorgeous, I choked up.’
Tanya Donelly: ‘Kim sings it so beautifully, she makes it so sweet and sad and gorgeous. And there was something so nice about that lyric sung by a woman.’
Tribute was also paid to Byrds founder Gene Clark (‘With Tomorrow’), to Spirit (‘Nature’s Way’) and David Roback (Rain Parade’s ‘Carolyn’s Song’). There was also a version of ‘I Am The Cosmos’, sung by the sole male voice on Blood, the returning Dominic Appleton. Over two decades later, he still doesn’t enjoy his contribution, though he says, ‘Ivo said he liked that it was pedestrian.’ Nothing spoke louder about the way 4AD’s label owner preferred burying emotion instead of displaying it.
At 76 minutes, ebbing and flowing in the same style as Filigree & Shadow, Blood was another double album. The criticism that had greeted the length of the preceding double album didn’t affect Ivo’s judgement call. Nor the idea that the kind of music it featured was too interior, too removed from the more ragged and expressive forms of emotion, too shrouded in a glacial mood, like the eponymous blood had not only fatally spilt, but congealed.
Appleton, who had unreservedly loved This Mortal Coil’s first two albums, felt the same. ‘I loved “You And Your Sister”, the instrumentals and Caroline’s voice, but I felt that Ivo was going for purer singers rather than more interesting singers. I wasn’t surprised that it was the last This Mortal Coil album. It didn’t feel as good. It felt a bit past its sell-by date.’
Mark Cox also thinks that Blood suffered in comparison. ‘It got a bit serious for me. The melancholy was weighty, and though there were times when I could immerse myself in parts, This Mortal Coil had evolved away from where I was at.’
Ivo is also critical of the end result, though for different reasons. ‘I don’t like Blood as much as Filigree & Shadow, which for me exists out of time. Blood still feels like the most personal record I was ever involved with, but it doesn’t sound as natural. It suffered from some stiff programming because I was flirting with the rhythms of the day. For example, the Soul II Soul beat on the end of “Bitter” sounds pretty inappropriate now.’
Cox’s reference to a sell-by date inferred that music was only of its moment. Its Soul II Soul inspiration aside, Blood was out of sync with 1991’s cultural charge that was shaped by the euphoria of dance music, shoegaze and Nirvana’s new single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but being its antithesis only made This Mortal Coil all the better. It also stood for a measured comedown following the heightened drama of the preceding decade. The album’s hermetically sealed mood was undisputedly moving, a luminescent walk on the dark side that would come to life through headphones.
‘I do think music is an incredibly important tonic, more than anything,’ Ivo told Melody Maker. ‘And it’s incredibly relevant in a lot of people’s lives to go and stand at the front of a Swans gig and have your head blown off by the sheer volume … and for even larger quantities of people to go to a disco or club every night to dance. Equally, though, I think it’s important to disappear into music, and if that directs you to a degree of introspective meditation as well, I personally find that quite healthy.’
Against the odds, Blood received far better reviews than Filigree & Shadow. With C86, shoegaze and grunge, Sixties influences were a fact rather than the supposed embarrassment of old-fashioned taste. ‘I bought Melody Maker, expecting a slagging, and it was so completely the opposite that I screamed,’ recalls Caroline Crawley.
Blood was another milestone for Ivo, a reminder of how music could feel unspoilt, uncomplicated. Pixies records used to be like that too. The conflicting desire of Charles Thompson and Kim Deal wasn’t enough to derail the momentum of Pixies selling out auditoriums and there was a public appetite for more records. The trusted Gil Norton had overseen a new album, which again Thompson had prepared little for. ‘Charles said he liked the pressure,’ recalls Ivo. ‘But he was also under extra pressure to write different B-sides for different formats.’
Lyrically, Bossanova had explored Thompson’s sci-fi interests, which he carried over to the new Trompe Le Monde – translated, ‘Fool The World’. Was Pixies even the same band? One marked change was the hiring of Eric Drew Feldman, a former member of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band who Thompson had met on tour in Europe. Feldman’s provision of ‘keyboards and synthetics’ was a sign that Thompson was looking for textures to mirror sci-fi sound, or simply that he didn’t want just another Pixies album. He had already discussed a solo venture with Norton. ‘I wasn’t shouting it from the rooftops,’ Thompson says. ‘Even at the end, I was trying to put on a good face, that we were still a band.’ Albeit one again without a lead vocal or writing credit for Kim Deal.
Fortunately Trompe Le Monde restored Pixies’ upward trajectory on record, starting with v23’s surrealistic shock for the cover, embedding sheep’s eyeballs in bulbous white material alongside an inspired new band logo. Vaughan Oliver had assistance not just from Chris Bigg but new boy Paul McMenamin, a former graphic design student at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic where Oliver had lectured. The album’s lead single ‘Planet Of Sound’ was perfect, snorting and snarling with Joey Santiago’s expert slide guitar. This was not the sound of a band willing to be led by its nose ring to the nearest point of crossover. Much to Marc Geiger’s annoyance.
‘I was very close to Pixies, who I represented when I worked at [booking agency] Triad, when I heard they were going with “Planet of Sound”,’ says Geiger. ‘I thought their breakthrough smash for America would be “U Mass”, so I told Elektra it was a huge mistake, I can’t believe you’re going to fuck over my band. They said, “You’re the agent, stay in your box”, which is the main reason I had left Triad and joined American and gone for that 4AD deal. “Velouria” hadn’t been the best single off Bossanova either, and commercially both were disasters. I couldn’t accept this horrible set of choices for this brilliant band.’
As with all Pixies singles and album track listings, ‘Planet Of Sound’ had been Ivo’s choice. ‘My intention was, Here we fuckin’ go! You think things have got a bit soft on Bossanova? Stick this in your pipe! It was my favourite track on Trompe Le Monde and I was really pleased that Charles agreed to make it a single, as he graciously did all my choices, because they seemed right at the time.’
‘U-Mass’ was even passed over for the second single for ‘Alec Eiffel’, a middling album track and a baffling choice. ‘My choices proved to be pretty poor because Pixies didn’t break through with any single in any form,’ Ivo shrugs. ‘But after Pixies, you had Nirvana. The times had evolved.’
Ivo and Thompson agreed on the subject of singles and track listings, but they only remained work colleagues. ‘The final day in the studio,’ says Ivo, ‘I’d done the running order for Trompe Le Monde, which everyone had loved, and only Charles was there with Gil. Rather than join us for the usual celebratory album wrap supper, Charles said, “I’m not coming, I’m going to put the songs in alphabetical order and see what it sounds like”. Fair enough. None of the other band members or anyone from 4AD had even come to the studio. It was indicative of how sour things were all around.’
Marc Geiger: ‘By all accounts, Pixies had issues that they couldn’t resolve. I called Ivo once and said, “What the hell is with you? Signing all these groups, the guy and the girl in the lead roles, who have romantic problems, all this baggage, all driven by these maniacal songwriters. What were you doing, following a pattern?”’
Lush and Pale Saints had brought no baggage, only promise, though not yet the brilliance to emulate the successes of 4AD’s top tier. Pale Saints were intelligent, elegant, melodic, interesting, as the Japanese-only compilation Mrs Dolphin amply proved. But even with Meriel Barham on vocals, the new EP Flesh Balloon wasn’t the sound of a band grasping for new heights, or even a great single in its own right. The lush, lengthy ‘Hunted’ led the way, moving between languid verses and euphoric passages of guitar, but it could have come from the band’s debut EP. But showing some marketing ‘vision’, the band’s Nancy Sinatra cover ‘Kinky Love’ was chosen to front the seven-inch version. ‘With me banging on about playing the game and commercial choices,’ says Ivo, ‘and my interest in people recording covers, you’d think I’d given Pale Saints something to do, but “Kinky Love” was the band’s own choice.’
‘We were never prolific,’ Ian Masters says, ‘so working on other people’s songs helped relieve those tensions and give us something constructive to do.’ The gentle, daydreamy ardour of ‘Kinky Love’ was out of kilter with everything else Pale Saints had done; with Barham on lead vocals, they suddenly resembled Lush. Getting Barham to sing the suggestive lyrics, Masters admits, meant that was ‘a bit of sexual harassment going on. But Meriel accepted it fairly quickly.’
This being alternative rock, where a seizure of sexiness or lust had been confused with sexism and exploitation, the band’s ‘Kinky Love’ became the music equivalent of a teenage diary. Shoegazing, as well as the more chart-bothering Madchester sound, were equally afraid of stating desire, from lust to the reality of relationships – druggy bliss replaced sensuality and shapeless baggy clothes hid the body; the video to ‘Kinky Love’ had the band sitting on a four-poster bed inside some psychedelic garden, giggling away and playing with toys, as if this is all a bed was good for. Only, among 4AD’s cerebral lot, Charles Thompson was willing to unleash emotions, sex among them, and he’d gone all sci-fi.