Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  ‘4AD and Factory were like mysterious art projects more than record labels,’ Robinson recalls. ‘I’d been working in a record store, and sometimes 4AD sleeves didn’t even have the band’s name, let alone pictures. You didn’t know what would be inside when you got it home. Even if you weren’t going to buy a record, you’d still like it. Those records were all over college radio, and all my friends listened to them.’

  Imperial f.f.r.r. was Unrest’s fourth album, ‘a cleaner and more focused record, with the humour more buried, than what came before,’ Robinson reckons. Former 4AD staffer Sheri Hood had recommended the album to Ivo, who fell in love with it during a lengthy drive in a hired convertible up Highway One between LA and San Francisco – even though he admits he was terrifying himself with thoughts of driving off the road and careering down the cliff and into the ocean. Vertigo had become another symptom of depression, meaning he could no longer walk across a bridge, take an escalator or even watch a concert from the balcony.

  The second release showed Ivo was not following any particular path with Guernica. Melbourne’s Underground Lovers was spearheaded by high-school friends Vincent Giarrusso and Glenn Bennie. Debut album Get To Notice was independently distributed by Shock, 4AD’s Australian distributor, and when Ivo was in Australia to meet Shock, he was handed a tape of the band’s new album Leaves Me Blind. By the time he was back in London, a one-off deal was on the table.

  Giarrusso: ‘All we knew is that Ivo liked the album and wanted to release it, and that’s all we wanted to know. The rest is just guff.’ Ivo would have agreed with that, but not with Giarrusso’s view of 4AD. ‘In our small bubble, it was a huge cult label, carefully curated, wanky but generally good. As poor musicians, we would often troll the Shock warehouse and take anything we could get from the 4AD racks. We loved Pixies, Cocteau Twins, M/A/R/R/S, The Birthday Party. The perception was of a stereotypical preciousness and seriousness, but the British [music] I really liked was the wacky, satirical side.’

  That included the Madchester sound, which according to Giarrusso was ‘uplifting, funny, working class’, using ‘rhythm loops, samples and repetition to drive the beat and support the song’. Not that Underground Lovers were cut from the same cloth as The Happy Mondays. Giarrusso, who now lectures in film and TV at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, says 4AD’s strategy ‘often reminded me of the idea of taste and cultural aspirations as a marker of socio-economic habitus, which inevitably led to questions of class division and exclusivity’. Which, couched in less semiotic terms, was similar to what Robin Guthrie thought – that 4AD were a bunch of middle-class snobs.

  Giarrusso also claims that one 4AD employee told him that Leaves Me Blind was ‘the most loved, played and sold the most of all Guernica releases. We never saw figures so it was only his word.’ Since it was on Guernica, Leaves Me Blind wasn’t followed up by another album, and 4AD video commissioner Cliff Walton says the band hoped it would lead to a 4AD deal. In fact, Underground Lovers never released another record in the UK.

  By Ivo’s reckoning, Guernica’s most popular album was the label’s third and last of 1992. By the sound of it, Dutch quartet Bettie Serveert was particularly taken by the American post-hardcore trio Dinosaur Jr and similarly molten US bands, but with a real dedication to songs, and the attractively smoky voice of Carol van Dijk to soften the blow. Growing up in the east of the Netherlands, Peter Visser had grooved to hard rock staples Deep Purple and Status Quo: ‘Punk rock never reached me,’ he claims, so he went looking for it instead.

  Visser says his first band De Artsen (in Dutch, The Doctors) was partly influenced by Joy Division, and when the band’s singer quit, Visser began a new band with drummer Berend Dubbe and the band’s sound technician, Carol van Dijk. New bassist Herman Bunskoeke made four, with Dubbe naming Bettie Serveert after a book (in English, Bettie Serves) written by Dutch tennis player Betty Stove. The band later wished they’d made a less flippant choice but the target audience in the US and the UK had no clue to the name’s origins.

  Bettie Serveert had split up after just one show, but reformed in 1990 and got a deal with the New York independent Matador for the US. Ivo had been sent the demos, and Guernica released the band’s debut album Palomine in the UK. Visser says the artwork – a simple shot of a toy dog – took 20 minutes to create, but it had something of v23’s style of investing everyday objects with a new significance. Palomine got great reviews, especially in the US, where Ivo recalls hordes of A&R men at the band’s first show outside of Europe. Yet he and Bettie Serveert, he says, ‘didn’t get on particularly well, and I didn’t particularly love them’. But Beggars Banquet did, and Bettie Serveert became the first band since Bauhaus to swap sides at Alma Road.

  Guernica might come free of stress and expectation but the label could never really express Ivo’s true feelings about music. Unlike his newest signing to 4AD, which combined his core values – beauty, authenticity, emotion, a towering vocalist and an original spin on folk rock’s properties in the music’s inexorably slow, minimalist delivery.

  Red House Painters was described as slo-core, but also sadcore; singer Mark Kozelek sang of the inevitable damage that love – and youth – brought with unflinching realism. ‘Lost hope, tortured idealism, love madly unrequited – that sounds about right to me,’ Kozelek says. The band quickly became Ivo’s favourite 4AD artist of the era, and over time, has succeeded Cocteau Twins as his favourite ever signing. ‘Red House Painters was the peak of collaboration between the artist and the record label, with v23, all in harmony, to get the best creative results,’ Ivo says.

  Born in Massillon, Ohio, several state boundaries from the trend-influenced cosmopolitan centres on the east and west coasts, the band’s founding member Mark Kozelek was a classic rock fan, into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Heart and Peter Frampton. ‘Massillon was a football town, and the energy from the Massillon Tigers’ high-school football team was always in the air,’ Kozelek recalls. ‘I didn’t like football and so I went searching for something else, and I found a guitar.’

  By the age of ten, Kozelek had already found drugs and alcohol, and done a stint in teenage rehab. Now sober, he had channelled his energies into songwriting, though he’d eschewed the formula of classic rock for a very distinct alternative. ‘I’ve liked music that’s fast and hard, and I went through a stage of playing punk,’ he told me in 1992. ‘But I’ve otherwise enjoyed songs more than riffs, lyrical songs with acoustic guitars, which sound much better when it’s slow – anything else feels really forced. I’m a pretty slow-paced person. I keep to myself in lots of ways, and my songs come from spending time in my apartment and in bed.’

  His first band, God Forbid, was shortlived, and when Kozelek had his first relationship crisis, in 1986, he decided to relocate to Atlanta. An advert in the local paper found drummer Anthony Koutsos before the pair moved on to San Francisco. ‘Atlanta had jobs and a music scene, but it was very redneck,’ Kozelek recalls. ‘I had visited San Francisco in 1988 and I fell in love the moment I stepped on to Market Street.’

  In San Francisco, Kozelek worked as a hotel night clerk, adding bassist Jerry Vessel and guitarist Gorden Mack through more ads and taking a new band name from local painting crew The International League of Revolutionary House Painters. San Francisco already had one sadcore institution, American Music Club, but Kozelek stripped everything right to the bone, with his refusal to hide behind metaphors and his voice etched with the unmistakable mark of depression. Drummer Koutsos ignored any temptation to speed up the tempo even when RHP songs broke the ten-minute mark. Audiences needed patience, and some empathy with a desperate world view.

  After seeing American Music Club for the first time, Kozelek invited the band’s guitarist Vudi to watch his own band. Vudi brought along AMC’s singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel. Soon Kozelek began dating Eitzel’s friend, and before long Red House Painters opened for AMC. But in the age of grunge, only small audiences – and not yet one record label – had e
mbraced Kozelek’s particular brand of unhappy. Kozelek says he was, ‘getting tired of nobody knowing us, copying demos on a boombox’ but he’d given Eitzel some Red House Painters tapes and asked him to pass them on to interested parties.

  It was in a London hotel room in late 1991 that, during an interview, Eitzel gave me a Red House Painters cassette. It was 90 minutes long. As a piece of music, it was fantastic; given it was a demo, it was better than any other I’d heard. I copied it twice and sent a copy to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and another to Ivo.

  ‘I’d never had a 90-minute demo to listen to,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I’d drive from my flat in Clapham to Alma Road, and I’d stick the tape on and hear the first track, “24”, and then I’d arrive at the office. When I started again, I’d wind it back to the start and hear “24” again. So it went on. I now think “24” would have been enough for me to pick up the phone straight away, it’s such a knee-buckling song. But it took me weeks to hear the whole tape.’

  Ivo telephoned Kozelek, who was in the bath when he took the call: ‘It was very surreal and caught me off guard,’ he recalls. ‘I knew nothing about 4AD, or the music business, although I recognised the name Cocteau Twins when he mentioned them. But I knew Ivo was for real. And, within the first ten seconds of the conversation, that we would release a record on 4AD.’

  ‘Ivo told me to go and meet Mark Kozelek,’ head of 4AD US Robin Hurley recalls. ‘That’s when you realise why people like Ivo are so special at what they do, because the music was lo-fi to say the least. But Ivo heard through the surface noise and the rambling to what was underneath.’

  ‘Mark had a self-deprecating sense of humour, and was self-obsessed, which is a compliment, because you’d have to be to make music like that,’ says Ivo. ‘It was absolutely beautiful and very sad and not like anything else at the time.’

  Ivo reckoned the demos were strong enough to release, but told Kozelek (as he had Charles Thompson) that he could re-record any songs for future release. Named after its longest track – nearly 11 minutes – Down Colorful Hill comprised just six songs (Ivo’s choices). Another lengthy epic, ‘Medicine Bottle’, very slowly dissected another failed relationship while ‘Michael’ paid painful tribute to a friend who had slid into the druggy delinquency that Kozelek had escaped, another epic. ‘Ivo’s choices were perfect,’ says Kozelek. ‘My only regret is that I remixed some of it, which came out too bright and glossy.’ At 43 minutes, Down Colorful Hill was longer than most albums, but it was still marketed as a mini-album.

  ‘Chris Bigg described Down Colorful Hill as making Lou Reed’s Berlin sound like a disco record,’ Vaughan Oliver recalls. ‘It really gets in there.’

  The role of v23 was crucial, with Simon Larbalestier’s photo of a bed draped in a lace bedspread, given a sepia wash to emphasise the image’s solitary power. Kozelek had rejected Vaughan Oliver’s first idea – a photo of a dead cow hanging by its hooves. Oliver had also baulked at Kozelek’s own choice: ‘We’d normally try to go with the flow of a band’s suggestion, if they have strong ideas,’ says Oliver. ‘But Mark’s idea was this flattened sunflower in horrible colours, which was so far from the music. I persuaded him that the sleeve should look like the music felt – melancholic, reflective, romantic and slightly desperate. The line, “We went into a big house/ And slept in a small bed” [‘Medicine Bottle’] was what clinched it for Mark. It’s one of the most complete images we ever did. The band was so close to my heart.’

  Signing Heidi Berry and Red House Painters suggested Ivo was returning to the singer-songwriter comfort of his formative years, while creating a mirror of his depressed soul, much like signing Spirea X and Swallow resembled an escapist, and ultimately pointless, attempt to engage with the here-and-now. If 4AD’s early years had been almost unrelentingly downbeat and the second wave, from Throwing Muses and Pixies to Lush, had broadened the spectrum, for all the new notes of grace and breathing space in Kozelek’s and Berry’s music, the mood was even darker than those so-called gothic days because the expression of despair was plainspoken for once.

  At the time, Ivo wouldn’t have been aware of any pattern of behaviour, sunk in depression and suddenly ending his two-year relationship with Ros Earls, who ran the management company 140db. ‘Mark Kozelek’s lyrics were so raw and real, emotionally unfettered and beautifully descriptive, which reflected my state of mind,’ he says. ‘The fact that Ros and I had split was a reflection of the confusion in my head. I was starting to get totally lost.

  ‘I’d seen a couple of therapists, for the first time in my life, both useless. I’d always had difficulty gaining access to happiness but now I was in a non-feeling state, interspersed with desperateness, of heightened sadness. Things felt out of control, and I had a responsibility to so many people, staff in two offices, people that I feel awful about because I didn’t engage with them – or anyone in the business. It was too scary to open myself up to the reality of who I was. I can only liken it to a war situation. The seasoned army marines wouldn’t talk to the new grunts, because they might be killed the next day. Why risk pain or hurt?’

  The latest 4AD ‘grunts’ were Cliff Walton and Colleen Maloney. Walton had been editing Promo News, ‘the only industry magazine dedicated to the pop video industry’, when he heard of a job at 4AD in video commissioning, with junior responsibilities in artist liaison. He’d also begun sifting through demo submissions, feeding a shortlist to Ivo: ‘He had very particular tastes, and almost everything was rejected,’ Walton says. From Ireland, Maloney had been working in regional press for the major-funded label Dedicated. Ivo would sporadically call her for guest tickets to see Spiritualized, and Maloney would reciprocate for requests to see Cocteau Twins and Throwing Muses.

  After a six-month absence starting at the end of 1990, Deborah Edgely had returned to replace John Best as 4AD press officer, initially working from home before gamely resuming her role in the office. But over time, working in such close proximity to her ex became intolerable and Edgely decided she had to leave 4AD. Before she accepted the post of head of press at Island Records, she had mulled over Kim Deal’s offer to manage The Breeders. ‘We got along really well, and after Ivo left, Kim would still visit and stay over at the house,’ Edgely recalls. ‘I loved The Breeders, but how could I go in the next day to 4AD as their manager? Part of me also knew it would be a real can of worms with Kim and Kelley.’

  4AD offered Maloney the press officer’s job. ‘I told Ivo I was inexperienced; that I was only twenty-two and did he think I could do this? He said yes. Deb was meant to stay for a month to teach me the ropes, but on the first day, you could cut the mood with a knife, and the next day, she said she wasn’t coming back. The mood lifted, and I cracked on.’ Maloney’s first job was to get acquainted with Belly and Ultra Vivid Scene’s forthcoming albums, but Red House Painters struck her as being ‘how things should move on at 4AD. I was gobsmacked by how beautiful their album was.’

  Maloney was also entranced by what she calls the ‘office bat phone’ behind Ivo’s desk. ‘The only people who had the number were bands and managers, so you’d pick it up with a sense of excitement because it might be Charles, or Kristin. I got thrown in the deep end but all the artists were smart and thoughtful. Ivo was surprised that I worked more than I needed to, staying late and working over weekends. But I was young, and I didn’t have emotional ties with 4AD. I was part of the new breed.’

  A third new grunt was Tony Morley, Maloney’s new assistant. He’d written for a student publication in Leeds, and loved 4AD. ‘I was in the right place at the right time,’ he says. ‘Bauhaus and Modern English were before my time, so it was 4AD’s second flowering that I loved, but that included The Wolfgang Press and His Name Is Alive. I’ve heard people say 4AD was slightly more style over content but it was all integrated to me. The artwork drew you further into this world, but in a slightly elusive way, presenting you with a different way of looking at something. Only major labels were doing what 4AD did, printing inner sle
eves, embossing and trying out different inks and typography.’

  At Alma Road, Morley sat by the frosted glass, he says, ‘to avoid the random freaks that would knock on the door to see the offices’. 4AD fans could be unswervingly loyal, and despite Louise Trehy’s suggestion that 4AD’s time had passed, Maloney says, ‘people still paid a lot of attention to 4AD’. But she also saw how the press would always search for new thrills and stories. Comparative under-achievers like Pale Saints and Ultra Vivid Scene struggled to maintain a press profile, and with Kurt Ralske his case wasn’t helped by having taken two and a half years to release a third album.

  ‘I had to make sure I got what I wanted this time,’ says Ralske. ‘I’d hit bottom with the process being so tightly controlled before, and I’d stopped growing. Before, I’d thought my insistence on total control was based on weakness and not strength, but I decided that if I selected the right people to work with, I could make the music stronger.’

  Rev was co-produced by Fred Maher, who had done a sterling job on shaping New York, Lou Reed’s best album in a decade. Maher brought in bassist Jack Daley and drummer Julius Klepacz to raise Ralske’s game, and aligned with his superb and underrated guitar work ‘The Portion Of Delight’ and the ten-minute ‘Blood And Thunder’ demonstrated they were a formidable trio. Ralske says Rev is his strongest album, and his most underrated. ‘It was slightly inconsistent but the record I wanted to make. But I felt Rev wasn’t listened to properly, because of the timing. A lot had changed on the scene, and Ivo had probably given up on us. He said he was very happy with Rev but I felt very little support from 4AD. To me, they were now going through the motions.’

  Ivo’s memory says otherwise. ‘I saw the trio play live at Maxwell’s. I saw maybe two people from Columbia there, so I called the label the next day and said, “You have to get everyone involved, they’re phenomenal, kickstart something!” That was another example of 4AD being wooed and seduced by a licensee that then did nothing. Columbia didn’t even come up with bad ideas.’