Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  By following Donelly’s gut instinct, Slow Dust surprised both Belly and 4AD by topping the UK independent charts, a feat not even managed by the following single ‘Gepetto’ – the sparkling pop song that Kristin Hersh had rejected for the Muses. But the song shone much brighter than it might have midway through Muses’ The Real Ramona. The choice of producer for ‘Gepetto’ was revealing: Donelly had brought back Gil Norton. ‘I liked Tracy’s southern, swampy, cool sound, but he was too mellow for us,’ she recalls. ‘I wanted someone I knew and trusted, and the Belly songs that Gil produced were the ones I knew he’d treat in a poppy way, and I wanted to make a pop album.’

  Lush’s evolved direction and the advent of Belly injected a new openness and pop consciousness into 4AD, leading to more success in the UK. It was a strong contrast to the publicity-shy enigma that was His Name Is Alive, never playing live and preferring to exist within Warren Defever’s studio lair.

  4AD’s success with exporting Livonia and Home Is In Your Head had convinced Rykodisc to license both albums and release a promotional compilation drawn from both. Sings Man On The Silver Mountain And 8 Other Songs also tapped into the standalone EP The Dirt Eaters that 4AD released at home. Defever acted like a strategist, throwing out clues and red herrings: the EP’s title track was unlisted, the lead track was an unrecognisable recasting of ‘Man On The Silver Mountain’ written by hard rock guitar hero Ritchie Blackmore, and instead of promoting it with live shows, a promo video was made for the Ivo/Fryer remix of ‘Are We Still Married?’

  This last decision was actually down to the videomakers. Ivo had tracked down the Brothers Quay, Stephen and Timothy, identical American twins living in London, creators of eerie and wildly inventive stop-motion animations that resembled a Wallace and Gromit impression of Eraserhead. At the meeting, Ivo and Defever informed the twins that they could animate whichever EP track took their fancy. Defever’s memory of the afternoon is hilarious.

  ‘On the phone, they wouldn’t give out their address. Ivo drove us to where they described, where we found an antique bicycle that seemed to have been locked since the 1800s. We knocked and eventually a dishevelled and groggy man in homemade wooden glasses and no shirt answered. The other twin was still in the bed in the centre of the studio. That was a little weird. They’d finish each other’s sentences and stand very close to each other.’

  Ivo politely explained about 4AD and His Name Is Alive and gave them posters and CDs. ‘They quickly kicked us out saying they really weren’t interested in commercial rock videos,’ Defever continues. ‘It seemed like the worst meeting ever. Ivo was confident, however. The next day, they said they’d use our music for a short film and would we like to see the script or a treatment? Ivo said we trusted their artistic vision fully. The finished video, or film, was insane and beautiful.’

  The Quays were an inspired foil for Defever’s quixotic vision, and Ivo regards the collaborations (a second video would follow in 1993) as ‘the only absolutely essential music videos 4AD was ever involved in’, although he adds, ‘I’d have preferred never to have had videos but I wish we’d developed a relationship with a visual artist as valuable as the one with 4AD’s graphic team.’

  Videos commissioned by 4AD otherwise followed the predictable MTV aesthetic of fast cuts and thin narratives. They could be entertaining, but all too often lame, or in the case of The Wolfgang Press’s new standalone single ‘A Girl Like You’, a bit of each. The song itself was slinky and brooding, complete with female gospel voices supporting a sweetly sinister Mick Allen, who sounded like a man that no woman should trust. The video was tailored to the single’s mood by featuring a group of pouting women in tight skirts surrounding Mick Allen on a podium, which resembled both a parody of Robert Palmer’s iconic ‘Addicted To Love’ video and a poor sequel. And still the song didn’t get the band away.

  In the interim, The Wolfgang Press might have hoped that Queer would find its natural home in the US, but Ivo’s indecision over signing a deal meant the album would be released there a year after it had been released in the UK. It was the first 4AD record Warners could really get its teeth into, but the first sign of trouble was the label’s refusal to release 4AD’s version until every little audio sample had either been cleared or removed. This followed a precedent-setting court case that Warners had lost. Instantly, 4AD’s autonomy had been undermined.

  ‘Sampling was now called theft rather than “having fun with sound”,’ recalls Mark Cox.‡ Hadn’t anyone at 4AD been paying attention since ‘Pump Up The Volume’, five years earlier? Warners released a re-tweaked Queer alongside a twelve-inch single of remixes, three of ‘A Girl Like You’ and one each of ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’ and Queer’s ‘Louis XIV’. For Canada, the latter two were replaced by a remix of Queer’s ‘Angel’ by Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode/Yazoo/Erasure). Welcome to the machine.

  The 4AD that wasn’t thinking of budgets, formats, remixes and pop videos returned with an album by ambient guitarist Michael Brook. Having stayed in touch with Ivo since his Pieter Nooten collaboration Sleep With The Fishes, Brook had asked for advice on the track selection for a new album funded by Brian Eno’s label Opal. Ivo had left off some tracks and assembled a running order, ‘which Michael agreed transformed the record,’ Ivo says. His suggestion to also release the album excited Brooks: ‘4AD had a wider, rockier audience than Opal, and a unique commitment to visuals and quality. I liked that Ivo followed his instincts for things that he just liked.’

  Once Opal had agreed, 4AD launched Cobalt Blue at London Zoo’s aquarium at the end of May, where Brooks played a live set. ‘It was in a lovely setting, surrounded by moray eels, but also noisy, fucking music journalists,’ says Ivo. ‘We recorded it and in many ways, it’s better than Cobalt Blue.’ The limited edition Live At The Aquarium was released at the end of June (and soon packaged with Cobalt Blue on a double CD). The studio album was a rhythmic, blues-inflected version of Eno-esque ambience (the man himself was credited with ‘structural rearrangements’) and a lovely oasis of calm in 4AD’s otherwise state of agitation.

  That sense of a straightforward, co-operative alliance was to be quickly undone by the band first unveiled on the Lilliput compilation – Swallow. The duo of Louise Trehy and Mike Mason brought complications, frustrations and heartbreak. Marc Geiger was right: Ivo did seem to be following a pattern of dysfunctional couples.

  Swallow had surfaced via a demo that ticked several boxes: personal and professional male/female partnership, female singer, beautiful noise. Trehy now lives in Aberystwyth, Wales where she teaches Art History at the local university, though she has recently posted online her first recordings in nineteen years. Born in Dublin, Trehy went through various pop crushes – The Beatles, Kate Bush, Blondie, Sugarcubes ‘and most 4AD bands’. By 1988, she was living in London – ‘Dublin was a provincial shithole when I was growing up’ – with then-boyfriend Keith Cullen, who was running the independent label Setanta. One of his early signings was the Bunnymen-influenced Into Paradise, whose touring keyboardist was Mike Mason. ‘I’d told Keith I wanted a go at singing, and he shoved Mike and me together,’ says Trehy.

  Still based in his home city of Oxford, Mason was also a Beatles fan before shifting allegiance to David Bowie. Music was just a hobby, as he worked as a fine art photographer before making promo videos and running light shows for bands such as Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, until he joined Into Paradise and then met Trehy. ‘After doing some music, we ran off together,’ Mason recalls. ‘On the off-chance, we sent a tape to 4AD, not expecting anything would happen. But very quickly Ivo called, saying he loved it. When we met, he said, could we make an album now? Yes, of course. We then had to write a lot more songs!’

  ‘Swallow fitted in with the times,’ says Ivo. ‘They weren’t extraordinarily original, but Mike was very talented and Louise’s vocals were OK.’ If that didn’t sound like a vote of confidence, Trehy wasn’t unreservedly positive about 4AD either. ‘It was a very interesting, slick o
peration, in newly designed offices, and quite pretentious. Though we were pretentious too! But we knew some music journalists and their feeling was 4AD was old hat, and that up-and-coming labels were more interesting. But I liked the fact that Ivo just wanted good records and wasn’t out to make money quickly. His one concern was that we [sounded] shoegaze, but he thought we were different enough to stand on our own.’

  The problem was that Swallow’s beauty/noise aesthetic depended on great songs, which they had to write quickly, and yet they had no experience to speak of. Like Spirea X, Swallow seemed like a rushed judgement on Ivo’s part, and the problem wasn’t fixed by the default addition of John Fryer. He had recently gone freelance after being denied a share in Blackwing by studio owner Eric Radcliffe, and so he and Swallow had driven to Palladium studios in Scotland. ‘On the way,’ Trehy recalls, ‘Mike asked John if he’d had any thoughts on our songs, and he replied that he hadn’t yet listened to anything. That really pissed me off. It was my first time in a studio and I had no confidence. I didn’t play an instrument, and I had to trust what John said, including his line, “everything will be all right in the mix”.’

  Mason: ‘As soon as we started recording, John gave it this enormous sound, which we’d never intended. But he was the professional who knew best, and he’d worked with Cocteau Twins, and knew all the tricks.’ Mason says Ivo had requested more bass, ‘but we’d never intended to have bass. It was a dream to be on this cool label that we’d grown up with, so you didn’t want to piss them off, but Louise struggled and got very hurt. We both were. Our dream got pulled away from us.’

  Ivo: ‘Louise wasn’t the strongest vocalist on the planet, and I did everything I could, to the point of rudeness, to suggest what she could do differently.’ He even hired Caroline Crawley to assist Trehy re-record her vocals after Swallow had returned to London. ‘I felt like that awful record company man, sending what they’d done back and back, and I realised I shouldn’t have got involved in the first place.’

  Trehy: ‘We felt our demos had been immature, but Ivo signed us on the basis of them, and he picked the songs he really liked. So to go to, “You’ve lost it, that’s your fault” was awful, especially since I agreed. I knew I wasn’t great, and 4AD had these brilliant female singers, but I got narked at Ivo and we fell out.’

  This was written up in a music press article when Trehy was asked why Ivo had signed Swallow. ‘I think I said it just appealed to his ego. He went nuts and said he didn’t want to work with me again. I was gobby then, and I still can be, but I think I was more pissed off with myself than anything. Looking back, Ivo tried his best, and it wasn’t his fault it didn’t work out.’

  Swallow’s album Blow can be viewed as one of the more underrated contributions to shoegaze, but it left no lasting trail of brilliance. Ivo says he still likes the album, but surely his truer feelings are reflected in 4AD’s release of the instrumental version Blowback only months later. Trehy says she knew Ivo had also suggested Mason carry on with another singer and that it went downhill from there: ‘Mike wanted to be a pop star and he resented me clinging on.’§

  With Swallow and 4AD parting ways, another of the new Lilliput offerings was to prematurely stall. Spirea X had yet to release another record after Fireblade Skies, which Jim Beattie puts down to his stubborn resistance to advice (shades of fellow Scot Robin Guthrie) and Ivo’s odd behaviour. ‘He wanted us to sound more like “Spirea Rising”, and have Judith singing,’ Beattie recalls. ‘I hated singing but if Ivo suggested something, I’d go the other way, because I hadn’t asked for it. So I left Judith off our new demos. I admit there were lots of drugs involved at the time. Another thing was, Ivo told our manager that the music that had influenced me wasn’t the obvious stuff, which I imagined to be a good thing! But Ivo wanted us to be more obvious. How do you do that? I think that was part of the stress he was under.’

  Beattie recalls Ivo giving him, ‘strange records, lots by German bands, but darker-sounding than krautrock’. He continues, ‘Deborah told us that he was going into this awfully dark art phase, like bondage photography by Helmut Newton [Ivo thinks Beattie means Joel-Peter Witkin, who preferred staged tableaux of society outcasts, including amputees and transsexuals: ‘I bought Witkins’ work around that time. I wasn’t a big Newton fan – too smooth’]. Ivo kept talking about how he couldn’t take Cocteau Twins to the next level, and that’s why they’d left. He’d taken it badly, and you could see the strain. But as far as Cocteau Twins went, at least Ivo had put his money into 4AD. He wasn’t living it up in Cannes. And he didn’t drop many bands. But he dropped us.’

  With Michael Brook heading off to make records for the Real World label, that left only The Wolfgang Press, Heidi Berry and His Name Is Alive among the Lilliput hopefuls. It was a curator’s triptych in the traditional 4AD mould, but how Warners must have secretly wanted a Pixies or a Lush, or any band that could match Throwing Muses’ dramatic impact.

  Not that Kristin Hersh had ever wanted to play ball with Warners, to the point of packing up completely, but she had decided – or her songs had decided for her – that she could carry on and had recorded a new Throwing Muses album with Dave Narcizo. In the process, Hersh declares, ‘We became a band that didn’t give a fuck. We were starting over, in a better place.’

  The duo had even considered changing the band name. Narcizo recalls one suggestion was Khuli Loach, ‘a type of fish, but Billy [O’Connell] talked us out of it!’ The old name wasn’t dishonest; wasn’t Throwing Muses Hersh and Narcizo, as Ivo had said? With Fred Abong joining Belly, former Muses bassist Leslie Langston helped out, and the Red Heaven album unveiled the concept of Throwing Muses as a dynamic power trio – a template that remains to this day, with Bernard Georges joining as permanent bassist as soon as the album was recorded. ‘That was the band I had been looking for,’ Hersh admits. ‘I liked the strength of a trio. And I liked not giving a fuck!’

  Ivo was again the band’s A&R, but he left them alone to produce their own album, which was handed over after completion. The ebullient mood of Red Heaven was clear from the lead single ‘Firepile’ but it was the B-side’s pummelling take on Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Manic Depression’ that truly rang in the changes. Another B-side, a revamp of the Chains Changed track ‘Snail Head’, drove the point home – faster, heavier, looser. Four months later, 4AD released The Curse, a whole live album of old and current songs; chains not so much changed as snapped.

  The album’s opening track ‘Furious’ was well named too, and the blistering feel of ‘Dio’ was reinforced by the guest vocals of ex-Hüsker Dü guitarist/singer Bob Mould. Hersh’s gentler side was framed by ‘Pearl’ and ‘Summer Street’ and the bonus limited edition of her solo show at New Jersey club Maxwell’s. ‘I don’t think anyone tried very hard to sell Red Heaven,’ says Hersh, ‘but we were happy because we were kids again.’

  Ivo had been thinking along the same lines. As an antidote to all the fuss, he conceived of a project – a new label, in fact – that would mirror the label’s original one-off ideals. It would be like a system-restore setting on a computer. ‘I was sick of being calculating with our releases, of working with people because it was essential that we sold records,’ Ivo explains. ‘I wanted to get away from something that was becoming a predictable formula, which would prevent us from having just a successful record, and that just built careers – that’s not what I was good at as an A&R person. That’s not what I was good at. So no first single, tour, video, and strictly one-off releases.’

  This had to be the first time a record label discouraged the possibility of growth. ‘When 4AD started, a record was made, given a catalogue number and released,’ Ivo continues. ‘What happened after that, whether it sold five copies or a million, was irrelevant.’

  Ivo named the label Guernica, after Pablo Picasso’s painting of 1937, created in response to the bombing of a village in northern Spain by German forces during the Spanish civil war. ‘I remember being really affected by the paint
ing at school. The picture was clearly not painted for decorating rooms; it was an offensive and defensive instrument of war against the enemy.’

  The plan also included a free seven-inch single with each vinyl version of a Guernica album, to firmly put the emphasis on music. Ivo also sought out another design team, The Senate, ‘so it wasn’t 4AD-esque’.

  Lined up for August, the debut Guernica release, Imperial f.f.r.r. by the US trio Unrest, was so strong it seemed Ivo’s A&R instinct had been reborn.Unrest was a particularly imaginative, sharp and playful guitar-pop trio from Washington, DC. Today, the band’s singer-songwriter-guitarist Mark Robinson still retains the same quirky instincts. For paid work, he designs book jackets for publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt while still running his independent label Teen-Beat. He also sings in the a cappella group Cotton Candy, who specialise in Fifties and Sixties commercial jingles, as well as the Unrest-like trio Flin Flon.

  Robinson’s musical youth had been marked by classic Seventies rock, from Queen to Elton John, but punk and post-punk had wiped that slate clean; while his classmates were playing Van Halen and Rush covers, Unrest was being named after a song by Seventies Brit-art rockers Henry Cow. Robinson and future Unrest drummer Phil Krauth were among his school friends in Arlington, Virginia, a bunch of whom started a label in 1984 to release their school band rehearsals. He’d subsequently started Teen-Beat at college in Boston, where he had met future Unrest bassist Bridget Cross.

  Teen-Beat was modelled on 4AD and Factory, creating beautiful artefacts with distinct artwork. For example, Robinson pressed only 1,040 copies of their unofficially self-titled 1987 debut album, each with a hand-decorated cover. Since each one was different, each copy had its own title. Catalogue numbers were even given to the label’s Christmas cards. Teen-Beat had also licensed In Camera’s CD compilation 13 (Lucky For Some) that 4AD had just released.¶