by Martin Aston
Ian Masters says the video was shown on TV just the once. Not even MTV wanted this innocuous confectionery. Neither did Pale Saints’ profile pick up after they supported Pixies in Europe, ‘Just like Throwing Muses hadn’t when they’d played with R.E.M.,’ recalls Ivo. Commercially, as a whole, 4AD was slipping, and Ivo wasn’t likely to sign anything attached to a current trend. But could he find the next? ‘I hadn’t enjoyed the music of the here-and-now,’ he admits. ‘My attempts to work with bands that fitted in, like Spirea X, weren’t successful, artistically or commercially.’
Which made Heidi Berry’s arrival so timely: a voice and a style outside any recognisable trend, as far away from the here-and-now as possible, even if there was a connection between Berry and her patron at Creation Records, label boss Alan McGee.
Berry was another American, but living in London and making quintessentially British music. Born and raised in Boston, she had moved to London in the mid-Eighties when her French-Canadian mother remarried. She never went back, and currently lives in Brighton, where she teaches a Master’s degree in songwriting, though she says her first album in over ten years is now finished. Music was in her blood: her mother sang, and her father was good friends with music archivist Alan Lomax. ‘Making up songs was normal in our house,’ Berry recalls. ‘My older brother Mark showed me how when I was fourteen.’
It proved to be an essential lifeline. Berry says her family moved between towns and countries, so she’d found it impossible to put down roots. ‘I thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t be like everyone else. It made me withdrawn and depressed, and seeking some kind of beauty as an antidote to the sadness and rootlessness.’
Berry became engrossed in the singer-songwriters of the early Seventies, from confessional Americans Carole King, Laura Nyro and Tim Hardin to the British folk rock trinity of Sandy Denny, Nick Drake and John Martyn that had more clearly shaped her own sound; Berry recalls having an epiphany, while ‘incredibly stoned’, when she first heard Drake’s third album Pink Moon.
This Mortal Coil’s cover versions had rescued many important folk and country stylists of yesteryear, but such was the unsullied and particular mood of Denny and Drake that Ivo hadn’t attempted a cover. Both had died early – Drake was twenty-six when he took a presumed accidental overdose of tranquillisers (he left no suicide note) in 1974, while the former Fairport Convention singer Denny had died in 1978 following a brain haemorrhage. Drake had finally got the recognition he deserved through reissues and tribute albums, but no one had successfully melded Denny and Drake’s rich, heart-rending sound, until Berry. With her tremulous, pure style of singing, Ivo had returned to the source, the introspective font that had nourished and comforted through his formative years.
Berry didn’t even have the confidence to record. But while studying painting and printmaking, she’d confessed to boyfriend Pete Astor, the former singer/guitarist of Creation signings The Loft, now leading Elevation signings The Weather Prophets, that she had a stockpile of original songs. Berry had sung a selection for Astor: ‘He said I should record them, which scared the living daylights out of me, and I was still so scared that I put on my headphones the first day of recording and thought I’d gone blind! I told the engineer I wasn’t ready for anyone to hear it, but of course Pete told Alan McGee. I wish I’d waited, because my ideas outstripped my technical ability on those early records. Each cost about ten pence to make, and then we hoped for the best.’
After her mini-album debut Firefly and full-length Below The Waves, Berry felt she was languishing, and that she’d only been signed to Creation because Astor was McGee’s friend. Meeting Ivo was like being freed, she says. He had seen Berry, third on a bill to Lush and headliners Felt: ‘It was a bit like The Birthday Party at the Moonlight, where no one else was paying attention to the support,’ he remembers. ‘For me, it was almost like West Side Story, where Tony sees Maria across the room at the dance and everything goes dark except the spotlight. I watched Heidi, transfixed, and loving her Dusty [Springfield] hand movements. I didn’t call up Alan McGee, I called Heidi, as she’d already been dropped.’
Berry recalls first meeting Ivo at London’s Old Vic theatre. ‘He was suffering from a deep depression and he said he thought he had to get out of the country, go to America, to save himself. He was like this quiet grey cat, with English reserve, in an old man’s vintage second-hand tweed coat, but he just crackled. It was all underneath the surface, this amazing person inside, who I still couldn’t work out.’
One review described Berry’s voice as ‘an intimate, misty warble, which shifts from melancholy to desperation with heartbreaking ease’. Ivo’s task was to find the right producer for it: ‘Alan McGee didn’t know what a producer was,’ says Berry. ‘He also saw me in the vein of Suzanne Vega, who was having hits around then. He really didn’t know what I was about. But I felt understood, and nurtured, at 4AD. Ivo put me in touch with the right people.’
Berry and Ivo loved the mood of Scott Walker’s 1983 comeback album Climate Of Hunter, whose producer, Pete Walsh, was assigned Berry’s 4AD debut. The superlative session band included Berry’s brother Christopher, Martin McCarrick, bassist Laurence O’Keefe, jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill and House Of Love guitarist Terry Bickers, who all worked up ten originals plus an unusual and insightful cover of Hüsker Dü’s ‘Up In The Air’, which put into song her Creation experience (‘Poor bird flies up in the air, never getting anywhere/ And how much misery can one soul take?’).
The finished album Love was as finely rendered as v23’s cover of lilies against a textured backdrop and delicate calligraphy. There was no single before or after Love; no playing the game, just the artefact. ‘Love has the melancholy of a folk record that has had all its signposts removed, like a village in the war,’ Melody Maker observed. ‘Heidi was the perfect example of what 4AD was all about,’ says Ivo. ‘You love the music, you get on well with the artist, you collaborate well regarding a producer, and you make albums. We did release a single or two later on, but not from Love. Take away the singles and I felt great comfort and pride in what 4AD had grown into.’
If only Ivo had successfully added two more unique and stellar female singer-songwriters that he was desperate to sign, he could indeed have continued unknowingly mining the sound of the future. Who then knows what might have been? Ivo had been approached by the management of an unknown Swedish singer, Stina Nordenstam. Her debut album Memories Of A Colour was already finished, but Ivo was immediately transported by the delicately frosted melodies, bare-boned arrangements and a voice as beguiling and exotic as Liz Fraser’s, albeit in a much jazzier mode of expression, like a Swedish Billie Holiday. Scandinavian sirens are dime-a-dozen now, but in 1991 this was unexplored terrain.
Ivo offered to release the album, but after meeting Nordenstam, whose personality mirrored her beguiling, obsessive music, he changed his mind. ‘Alarm bells went off in my head and I came to realise that a working relationship with Stina was going to be complicated, and complex was not what I needed at that time. I don’t regret the decision, and I really liked everything she did for a long time, especially her second record And She Closed Her Eyes.’
Ivo had no choice in the loss of Polly Jean Harvey as, this time, he was too late on the case. The only artists he had signed from seeing them live were The Birthday Party and Heidi Berry, and nowadays, Ivo was attending increasingly fewer concerts. Generally, artists had to find him. The growing number of independent labels and competing majors meant more offers from rivals, especially those who’d eagerly hung out, wined and dined, and even shared drugs with the artist. Ivo was not Peter Kent.
Hailing from Yeovil in south-west England, Harvey had left the Bristol-based rockers Automatic Dlamini and was now fronting a taut, rough trio that had a bit of Pixies and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds about them, but a bluesy, sinewy brilliance that was purely PJ Harvey, as the band was called. One of her London shows had been promoted by Paul Cox, the co-founder with R
ichard Roberts of a new independent label, Too Pure.
Cox: ‘I was a typical record-buying indie kid, though I didn’t collect 4AD; it was known specifically for its house style and, for my tastes, too defined and not rock’n’roll enough. I was more Creation and Rough Trade. But Throwing Muses and Pixies were right up my street. It was still arty, but they swung. By 1990, 4AD was super-cool.’
By early 1991, Too Pure had released vinyl singles by British bands Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab, the compilation Now That’s Disgusting Music and PJ Harvey’s sensational debut single ‘Dress’. John Peel instantly rewarded her with a session while the music press reaction was unanimous.
By chance, Too Pure had approached Ivo about signing the London band Moonshake, who Cox and Roberts were managing and trying to find a more sympathetic home than, yet again, Creation. Ivo wasn’t keen but suggested Too Pure should release the band’s music themselves. Seeing a way to work with PJ Harvey, and feeling protective of this new, energetic label, he proposed buying into Too Pure. Harvey had also enjoyed Too Pure’s attitude, and her manager had requested the label commit to two singles and an album, ‘though,’ Cox recalls, ‘we had no money.’
Ivo had been equally infatuated with Harvey: ‘Polly was such an interesting guitar player, the songs had so much space, the distorted bass had such power, the drummer was fantastic and was a great backing vocalist. But I’d learnt from my experience with A.R. Kane and One Little Indian, so I talked to Too Pure about what they were trying to do and about me getting involved. I encouraged Polly to stay with Too Pure, and I really liked Stereolab and aspects of Moonshake. The idea was to give Too Pure more muscle.’
Cox: ‘Either Ivo saw something in us, just starting out, and wanted to help, or he only wanted to get involved with Polly. He said, “Try everything to make sure you do as much as you can with Polly, because special artists like her don’t come along often”. I shrugged that off at the time but he was right.’
Ivo subsequently bought a third of Too Pure to get the label going, and so they could afford PJ Harvey. A limited version of the trio’s debut album Dry was packaged with the original demos, which was Ivo’s idea. But for all Ivo’s input and reputation, Harvey still signed to Island Records after the release of the album. ‘Polly had stuck with Too Pure for the first album, against her manager’s wishes as he’d been totally swayed by Island,’ says Cox. ‘They’d acted really underhand to prise Polly out of our hands, to the point of mentioning a Too Pure label deal, which was never in the picture.’
Instead, they got Ivo, a much more suitable and hands-off partner. ‘We’d only just started Too Pure, so that was hard,’ says Cox. ‘But in the short period that we’d got to know Ivo, there was no one else in the music industry that I’d have trusted to do such a deal. He came across as so honest, and he had so much experience, so we were convinced to take the step up. He left us to it but he was there to answer questions, and we’d play him stuff and value his opinion.’
At the time, Ivo was also busy advising Warren Defever for the second His Name Is Alive album. Home Is In Your Head – a title that perfectly captured Defever’s – and Ivo’s – Music-For-Interiors mindset. The album followed the same pattern as Livonia, Ivo remixing a slew of tracks (twenty-three in total, none listed in the artwork) of ethereal and eccentric dream-song with Karin Oliver out front, though Defever had this time supplied finished pieces instead of sketches. ‘I just took the bits I liked,’ Ivo recalls, ‘things that might ramble or disintegrate. One piece was only forty seconds long. But I didn’t think there was anything I could do that would upset Warren. He’d dismantle his own songs anyway. He was the least precious individual about his own music that I’d ever met.’
Defever was also sharing credits, with Karin Oliver on ‘The Well’, while ‘Tempe’, a rare acoustic reverie among all the twitchy experiments, was written by guitarist Jymn Auge. Song titles such as ‘My Feathers Needed Cleaning’ and ‘Beautiful And Pointless’ were a rare sign of playfulness in the 4AD canon. The closing ‘Dreams Are Of The Body’ provided the balance with a mood right out of the This Mortal Coil songbook.
Ivo listened to the rough mixes that he and John Fryer had made of Home Is In Your Head as he settled in a new, two-level basement flat on Clapham Common. ‘I’d bought it for the height of the ceilings, but I was feeling really insecure, thinking why on earth had I bought it? The ceilings made me feel so small, I feared that, spiritually, I would never fill the place, which had nothing in it but the stereo, CDs, clothes and a sofa. Late at night, I’d listen to the mixes of Warren’s stuff there, very quietly, because I didn’t yet know my neighbours, allowing the ticking of my own alarm clock to mingle with those sampled on the mixes. I love that record. It’s such an unpredictable, yet fluid, musical journey.’
The chance to work with Defever was such a contrast to the nightmare of Robin Guthrie, but despite everything that had gone on, Ivo didn’t stop him from reuniting with Lush to produce the band’s debut album.*
Since the release of the Gala compilation, Lush had been touring almost constantly, especially in Japan and America where Sweetness And Light had reached the heady heights of the Billboard Modern Rock top three. As well as a very supportive producer, they had acquired a manager – Howard Gough, the man who had tried his best to dissuade Ivo from signing Lush.
‘Howard had been worn down by the fact we were making good records,’ says Emma Anderson. ‘And once he’d got to know us, we’d gotten along well and he’d reached the stage where he wanted to leave 4AD and manage us. Maybe he was unhappy there, or he was bored of plugging, or he could see an opportunity. When people get a sniff of America, they just see dollar signs.’
Having once tried to dissuade Lush over Guthrie, so Ivo tried with Gough. ‘Ivo again didn’t come out and say why we shouldn’t go with Howard,’ says Miki Berenyi. ‘Perhaps he should have.’
Gough had the swagger and ambition to go it alone, and after leaving 4AD in 1991, had gone into management with his friend Ray Conroy, who was already managing Moose and their fellow shoegazers Chapterhouse. Gough’s first move on Lush’s behalf was typically confident, embarking on talks with various major labels about a long-term contract¸ which would give Lush – and Gough – greater financial benefits. Gough had no sense of loyalty to 4AD, but the band did. ‘A major could have dropped us after one album, and we already felt a rapport with 4AD,’ Anderson explains. ‘Ivo stuck with his bands. He wasn’t swayed by our records being slagged off or if they’d only sold five hundred copies.’
Beside a decent publishing deal with his former colleagues at Blue Mountain, Gough was able to negotiate a bigger advance with 4AD than Ivo would usually offer. ‘Howard had worked at 4AD so he knew how much he could push for,’ says Berenyi. ‘Ivo said, “Aren’t you lot greedy?” which was a bit rich. We only had enough to put ourselves on a hundred pounds a week. And as I told him, he was getting his money straight back by licensing Lush to Warners – which was money that we never saw.’
Lush and Guthrie started recording at September Sound. ‘Robin loved the band and liked our songs,’ says Anderson. ‘He just wasn’t in a state to do a good job.’
Berenyi: ‘The recording started fine but dragged on and on. Robin would go on bloody great benders, doing drugs with all sorts who’d turn up at the studio. You’d get [Echo & The Bunnymen singer] Ian McCulloch sitting in the kitchen, completely non-communicative. We might not see Robin for four days and then he’d turn up and say, “Don’t worry, stop moaning, come on, plug in”. Then he’d want to record all night but we were knackered. We felt we had to stick up for Robin, so we’d paper over the fact he was AWOL instead of complaining to Ivo.’
Unsurprisingly, Guthrie has another view. ‘It was one of the hardest records I produced because the girls’ ideas were so far ahead of their capabilities. For example, singing in tune. And they were all high as kites too! [Since Berenyi hardly ever took drugs, this wasn’t the case.] And Howard – need I say more? I wo
n’t take any shit about that album. I worked my ass off to get what I believed those people were capable of and I delivered.’
The new EP Black Spring previewed two album tracks, the pure-pop ‘Nothing Natural’ and the languid ‘Monochrome’, which rewarded the faith that Ivo and Guthrie had first shown. Like Pale Saints’ ‘Kinky Love’, the EP’s cover [Beach Boy] Dennis Wilson’s ‘Fallin’ In Love’ coated a pretty tune in lush layers of gentle vocals and flange guitar. Lush kept up the momentum with a second EP, For Love, that 4AD released on the last day of 1991. The title track was again neat, springy and poppy, and made the UK top 40 at 35. It wasn’t high enough to get BBC’s Top of the Pops calling, but ‘For Love’ was 4AD’s first certifiable hit single in an age. The EP’s other tracks – a reverential reading of Wire’s luscious ‘Outdoor Miner’ and the brief ambient-blurry ‘Astronaut’ – were more proof of a growing stature; as he says, Guthrie had actually delivered.
Two other 4AD releases that autumn had celebrated the stature of past triumphs – a Cocteau Twins box set (which appeared to have no title – the band’s own website calls it The Box Set), comprising all their EPs and singles on nine individual CDs, from Lullabies to ‘Iceblink Luck’, with a bonus EP of rarities including Lonely Is An Eyesore’s ‘Crushed’. The crimson box only featured a tiny insignia and the band’s name in unassuming capitals – no artwork, no logo, no fuss.
With the Warners licensing deal still not signed, Dead Can Dance’s first compilation A Passage In Time had been assembled for another independent, Rykodisc. For the first time, Brendan Perry allowed v23 to design the sleeve: ‘It was Brendan’s picture, of a moth wing,’ says Chris Bigg, ‘but I’d got his confidence by then, and the logo and text were more considered.’