by Martin Aston
A Passage In Time also marked the journey that Dead Can Dance had taken: eight years since leaving Australia, seven years since their album debut, or the six centuries between now and fourteenth-century Italian folk dances. There were two new tracks: Lisa Gerrard’s percussive incantation ‘Bird’ and Brendan Perry’s ‘Spirit’, which closed the album with a narrative that potentially marked his and Gerrard’s journey, from their curtailed romance – ‘I never thought it would be quite like this/ Living outside of mutual bliss’ – to their shared fight for survival: ‘I thought I’d found a reason to live, just like before when I was a child/ Only to find that dreams made of sand/ Would just fall apart and slip through my hands/ But the spirit of life keeps us strong/ And the spirit of life is the will to carry on.’
Ivo could have identified with Perry’s sentiment, with his relationship with Deborah Edgely and his dream of a record label challenged by both personal and professional circumstances. Where would he find the will to carry on? In the States, perhaps, as he’d confessed to Heidi Berry at their first meeting? Perhaps even Ivo, the quintessential English gentleman, needed the American dream. The decision to sign a licensing deal with Warner Bros was made between the Christmas and New Year period of 1991–92. So now he even had a reason to go.
* There was another Cocteaus/Lush connection, a one-off collaboration featuring Miki Berenyi, Chris Acland, Simon Raymonde and Moose members Kevin McKillop and Russell Yates. They named themselves The Lillies, after their favourite football team Tottenham Hotspur, nicknamed The Lilywhites after their all-white kit. The instrumental (with Berenyi’s coos and some samples of football commentary) was called ‘And David Seaman Won’t Be Very Happy About That …’ referring to the goalkeeper of the team’s London rivals Arsenal. It was released on a seven-inch flexidisc given away free with copies of The Spur fanzine.
chapter 16 – 1992
A Tiny Little Speck in a Brobdingnag World
(BAD2001–TAD2019)
‘In the end,’ American Recordings A&R Marc Geiger recalls, ‘Ivo said, “Love you and all your help, but I need to go direct to the Warners mothership”. I was crushed. But I understood. And anyway, American and Warners did split up years later.’
Warners victorious A&R Tim Carr recalls how his boss Lenny Waronker reacted to the 4AD deal. ‘I was also trying to sign [US alt rockers] Helmet, but they wanted a million dollars and Lenny said no. He also said, “You won’t mind in six months. What you should be really happy about is 4AD. That kind of thing happens once every ten years, they’re a cool and unique label, and you won’t find another one like it”.’
The licensing deal was for three years, after which point Warners had the option to extend it for two more years. This was to be celebrated with Lilliput, a promotional limited edition (3,000 copies) double CD in book-bound format that was given away to retail and media. Everything 4AD stood for existed in this singular, lavish artefact. As Ivo told me at the time, ‘There’s precious little originality, identity or experimentalism going on. It’s hard to find those people, so you have to grab them, but you have to have the means and ideals and reputation to secure them.’
Bar nudity and surreal shocks, everything v23 stood for was summed up by Lilliput – delicate, austere design, fine calligraphy and all the credits listed down the side of the sleeve under a clear plastic binding. The first CD was Ivo’s highlights from 4AD’s past, from Bauhaus’ ‘Dark Entries’ to Lush’s ‘Deluxe’. The second CD was an appetiser for the present featuring two tracks each from Pale Saints, The Wolfgang Press, Spirea X and the forthcoming album from Pieter Nooten’s former collaborator, guitarist Michael Brook. There were single tracks from Heidi Berry, His Name Is Alive and a new signing, Swallow.
The title Lilliput came from Irish novelist Jonathan Swift’s classic eighteenth-century satire Gulliver’s Travels (or to give it its full title, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships), whose titular shipwrecked hero was imprisoned by Lilliput’s race of miniature people. The analogy was clear: ‘4AD was a tiny little speck next to Warners,’ says Ivo. In terms of the deal, 4AD was smaller still since the label’s established names – Pixies, The Breeders, Lush and Throwing Muses – were already licensed elsewhere. ‘Looking back,’ says Ivo, ‘the train had already left the station. But logic said it was appropriate to use one label for licensing.’
Much like the next fantasy-human race that Gulliver encountered, the giants of Brobdingnag, Warners was an institution that carried a lot of expectation. But Ivo lived in hope. The last image in the booklet of the Lilliput compilation was of a sleeping baby, a tiny Lilliputian figure but also the symbol of what could grow. It would take four months for the deal to take effect, by which point 4AD had charged into 1992 with Lush. Three years since Ivo had watched their faltering show at The Falcon, dotted with a mini-album, four EPs and one three-track single, the band finally released its debut album. Spooky came wrapped in one of Jim Friedman’s Polaroid ’scapes, of luminescent deep sea creatures overrun with a swarm of Lush logos and scratched lines that scarred the aquamarine beauty.
Musically, Lush had aimed for a similar blend of colour, shape and tension. As singles, ‘Nothing Natural’ and ‘For Love’ – and the reappearance of Black Spring’s madrigal-style ‘Monochrome’ – took their expected place alongside an elated ‘Superblast’, the wistful Sixties strain of ‘Untogether’. At 48 minutes, the album was at least two tracks too long, and it felt like repetition had set in: ‘Spooky suffered from what was traditionally referred to as the sophomore slump,’ Ivo thinks. ‘Lush had already released an album’s worth of material in the form of Gala, so it wasn’t their strongest material. And I don’t think Robin [Guthrie] was well by this point.’
Yet at heart, Spooky was a pop record, and it topped the UK independent chart and reached number 7 on the national charts – a gratifying sign of affirmation for everyone involved. ‘Some of the songs suffered,’ Emma Anderson says, ‘but it’s got this bubblegum pop feel that I really like.’ Berenyi is less sure: ‘Some bits were great, but the album needed a firmer grasp.’ Was it Guthrie, or Ivo that she was referring to?
Despite his worsening condition during the making of the album, Guthrie had boosted Lush’s confidence while his space rock coda on ‘Laura’ showed his sonic trickery could be exemplary. But given the band were idolising ingénues, it was inevitable that the press would again accuse Guthrie of forcing his own sound on an artist. ‘Absolutely not,’ he responds on this occasion. Ivo’s view was, ‘Why hire Robin if you don’t want that sound?’
Spooky’s opening passage – the intro to ‘Stray’ – was exactly like an excerpt from Blue Bell Knoll, but after it the album is much more Lush, a more rocking version of ethereal bliss, something fast and using two intertwined lead guitars. However, sections of the press, usually looking for a stick with which to beat shoegazers, weren’t finished there. A more stinging criticism of the band came from a friend of Anderson’s, Melody Maker assistant editor Everett True. ‘He slagged off Spooky, saying we were Robin’s puppets, and that riot grrrl bands were the real feminists,’ she says. ‘Years later, he told me he regretted writing that.’
4AD’s contribution to the visibility and advancement of women was evidently no longer enough in itself; writers like True demanded some kind of political awareness – a familiar critique of 4AD through the years. The fact that True’s housemates happened to be Huggy Bear, the UK’s most prominent feminist punk band under the riot grrrl banner, might have egged him on. Colleen Maloney, who joined 4AD’s press office in early 1992, says that Lush weren’t the only 4AD artists harangued for the same apparent crime of being determinedly non-partisan. ‘Bands and writers desperately tried to bring Kristin Hersh and Kim Deal into the riot grrrl ranks and shunned Tanya Donelly because she wore make-up and wrote pop songs, but to me they were all from the same family,’ says Maloney. ‘Kim sometimes got the same treatme
nt. And people would try to create friction between Kristin and Tanya when it didn’t exist.’
Berenyi thinks that Lush’s girl-around-town tag did them no favours. Select magazine’s first feature on the band had the headline, ‘Drinks £151.28’, referring to the evening’s bar tab while the text below threw in the reference ‘glamour-afflicted hellbabes’. Such were the hard-fought and often-suspect indie music wars – a similar bar tab for a bunch of men would have gone unreported. Colleen Maloney: ‘Lush was so immersed in that scene, hanging out at venues in Camden like The Underworld, and they got really well known, which can cause problems. It’s good to have some distance and mystery, plus the band took everything that was written about them too seriously. But they got lots of press, and good press, and they had a very strong dynamic, with two very strong and articulate women. They gave as good as they got.’
Still, Berenyi felt, ‘4AD liked to have a mystique around their bands that we lacked.’ Ivo dismisses her observation. ‘Miki forgets that I’d been around Vaughan, Howard and Robin for years. The mystique of our artists was always in the music and enhanced by the packaging. It’s interesting that, having been initially drawn to the music, virtually everyone who came to 4AD was pretty shy, which can be interpreted as mysterious or arrogant. Miki herself was extremely shy around me most of the time.’
By comparison, Pale Saints had that layer of intrigue, being based in Leeds outside of London’s media menagerie, with Ian Masters as reticent as Lush were gregarious. Given his indefensible slap of Berenyi on the bands’ shared tour of 1990, Masters had some sort of unsocial, awkward streak. While Lush was prepared to slog it out on tour, Masters says he disliked the rigour, and could only be on board if it was fun. Clearly that would soon end, given that Pale Saints’ first album with former Lush member Meriel Barham was also Masters’ last.
Produced by Hugh Jones, In Ribbons wasn’t at all short on quality or surprise.* Like Lush, Pale Saints could straddle dream-pop and a more muscular clamour, such as ‘Throwing Back The Apple’, which seemed only released as a single after the album in the hope more people might actually know who the band was. But it wasn’t a tailor-made single, outstripped in swarthy melody and mood by the B-side cover of ‘Blue Flower’, a Velvets-inspired ballad by the Seventies Brit-art-rock trio Slapp Happy.†
Ivo says he was very happy with the album; it wasn’t a sophomore slump by any means. But neither was it any tangible leap forward, and Masters must have sensed this. Beside the finest, most luscious Pale Saints track yet, ‘Hunted’, he sounded most inspired and comfortable in the virtual solo surrounds of two waiflike ballads, ‘Shell’ and ‘Hair Shoes’, and the similar skeletal ‘Neverending’.
‘I left almost entirely due to musical boredom,’ Masters confesses. ‘I almost left before In Ribbons was finished but working with Hugh Jones was calming and it wasn’t hard to stick it out. But after we finished the album, Graeme and Chris wanted to go in a more conventional rock direction, which didn’t interest me. I knew I couldn’t stay and remain happy.’
That the first release under the new Warners deal was a band that had lost its key member was not an auspicious start. ‘There was resentment on both sides, as it left the band in the lurch,’ recalls 4AD’s most recent staff recruit Cliff Walton. But Ivo didn’t panic: ‘I was never upset when groups stopped or were unhappy if someone left. Anyway, Meriel was an alternate songwriter. And Graeme was a rare example of a British musician who got better at his instrument.’
As Pale Saints stumbled, Lush strode on. Manager Howard Gough had secured the band the opening slot on the second annual Lollapalooza festival tour that kicked off in July 1992, followed by thirty-seven more dates across the States. ‘We were very grateful that someone thought we were good enough to manage us, and he was persuasive and very good at networking,’ says Miki Berenyi. ‘He buddied up to [Lollapalooza’s] Perry Farrell, and to Warners, who all thought Howard was great.’
Lush fanatic and festival organiser Marc Geiger might have had something to do with the booking too. The band had the honour of appearing on the main stage, albeit bottom of the bill, beneath the fast-rising Pearl Jam, with the bill ascending to the headlining Red Hot Chili Peppers. Lush also had a new bass player: Phil King had played with a handful of guitar bands (several associated with Creation) and had been working as a picture researcher for NME when he got a call to replace Steve Rippon, who left to devote himself to writing fiction.
Lollapalooza was a very timely invention, providing a kind of travelling circus for America’s newest musical youth-quake, led by Nirvana. The Pixies had been instrumental in establishing that scenario, but Pixies were not about to reap the benefits. At the end of February, the band had opened for U2 on the first leg of the Irish band’s Zoo TV stadium tour playing the thirty dates, to, according to Marc Geiger, ‘really try and break them’. It seemed a strange way to heal a fractured band. Worse was to come when Kim Deal’s boyfriend, Spin writer Jim Greer, wrote a feature about the tour, claiming that Pixies had been badly treated. Word came through to 4AD via Pixies manager Ken Goes that a furious Charles Thompson had unilaterally decided that Pixies was finished.
The news didn’t leak out, and it seems the other Pixies were similarly in the dark: likewise the band’s US licensee, Elektra Records. Ivo and Robin Hurley were later summoned to a meeting with Elektra boss Bob Krasnow who demanded Ivo renegotiate a longer deal with Pixies or he’d go directly to the band. ‘Having broken Sugarcubes and The Cure in America,’ says Ivo, ‘Elektra was supposedly the label of choice and Krasnow wasn’t happy that Geffen could be stealing that crown with Nirvana, so he was determined to get more Pixies. At some point, the word “Nirvana” passed my lips, and I only found out later that Krasnow had had the opportunity to sign them and hadn’t. But he exploded, screaming that Nirvana could have been produced by a doughnut and they’d still have sold millions. It’s one of my very few regrets that I didn’t just walk out. The problem was that Robin and I already knew Pixies were going to call it a day.’
Ironically, Ivo didn’t even think Elektra had done a good job. ‘It seemed the right label to license Pixies at the time, as they’d had some great successes, just as Sire had been the most appropriate major label to license to in 1982. But Elektra didn’t have the same success with our bands. Getting involved with 4AD was clearly the kiss of death.’
As Pixies simmered with even more unresolved tension, Kim Deal decided to reconvene The Breeders. While on a UK tour with Pixies in late 1991, Josephine Wiggs had received a call from Deal, saying she had a song she wanted to demo called ‘Do You Love Me Now?’, written by the Deal twins during their truckstop-gigging days. The pair recorded it at Wiggs’ home in Brighton and hired Spacemen 3’s Jon Mattock to add drums. Months later, the original Breeders plus one met in New York to record three more new songs. Despite being a relative novice on guitar, Kim’s twin sister Kelley was set to replace Donelly, who was busy with her own solo plans, yet the latter turned up anyway, making it the one record with five Breeders.
Playing what Wiggs calls ‘stream-of-consciousness guitar playing’, Donelly’s contributions lifted the tracks. But the sensual, prowling nature of ‘Do You Love Me Now?’ indicated The Breeders would survive without her. The closing cover of The Who’s ‘So Sad About Us’ on the resulting five-track EP Safari could conceivably have referred to Pixies, but the truth was, Kim Deal was simply smitten with Who bassist John Entwistle.
As Deal had found her feet because of Charles Thompson’s solo tour, so Donelly had been freed by Kristin Hersh’s need for change. ‘Leaving [the Muses] was really sad, but I was in danger of losing my sense of self to something that had run out of control and that nobody involved had any control over,’ says Donelly. ‘Kristin and I were too tired and numb, which was dangerous, but we got over it the second I quit.’
Donelly’s songs originally bound for the second Breeders album gave birth instead to Belly, ‘a womanly word, a lovely and an ugly word,’ Donelly
suggests. ‘Belly means a lot of things to a lot of people.’
Before this new band formed, Donelly had recorded an album of demos that Ivo became familiar with driving through the desert east of LA after meeting Warners. ‘Tanya wasn’t saying, “I have a band, here we go”,’ he recalls. ‘She’d simply recorded herself with an electric guitar. I loved it and said she should make a record.’
Sire had acknowledged that Warners in Europe would never work in Throwing Muses’ favour and had handed back the territory to 4AD – Belly followed this arrangement. Ivo subsequently stepped back into the A&R role. ‘He was my sounding board, my comrade in arms,’ says Donelly. ‘His belief in me was incredible.’
Ivo suggested that Donelly try out a first-time producer in Tracy Chisholm, an engineer that he’d discovered via the Pixies-influenced Los Angeles band Carnival Art. Donelly assembled a team for the session, including Kim Deal (Donelly thinks she’s on ‘Feed The Tree’) and Leslie Langston. But Belly’s first permanent bassist was Fred Abong, who had also chosen to leave Throwing Muses along with Donelly. Belly’s third and fourth permanent members were brothers: guitarist Thomas and drummer Chris Gorman, Donelly’s childhood friends from Newport who’d cut their teeth in the hardcore punk band Verbal Assault.
The interesting aspect of Belly’s Slow Dust EP wasn’t the four tracks of tenderly skewed rockers and ballads but the lack of obvious hits that Donelly supposedly craved. ‘As far as songwriting goes, I’m more attracted to straightforward, universal songs,’ she says. ‘But for me, it’s less The Go-Go’s or girl groups and more Big Star and Neil Young. And I like intricate guitars.’