by Martin Aston
That Thompson felt less important to Ivo would have made Robin Guthrie smile: the more importance an artist felt seemed to mean a bigger ego to be dashed. Thompson also admits that he too had drug issues, albeit of a softer variety than Guthrie’s habit. ‘I was smoking too much marijuana, and not being clear-headed I’d get wound up by stupid stuff I’d never get wound up by now. I must have been frustrating to deal with.’
Even if Ivo had acted like a career advisor, Thompson thinks it would have been fruitless. ‘It didn’t seem like we were doing anything wrong at the time. Up until Bossanova, people were slapping us on the back and saying Pixies was the greatest thing ever. That had levelled out but enough people were still saying it, so you kept on believing it. The person who had the best chance to slow us down was Gil [Norton], but I was cocky and full of energy, and wanting to learn, to throw ideas down, to write in the studio. Gil would have been trying to let me do my thing.’
Ivo’s first port of call when he left the UK for the States that year was San Francisco. There, he visited The Breeders during the new album’s closing session with Mark Freegard, who had engineered the Safari EP and progressed to co-producer. Kelley Deal was now a permanent fixture in the band, having quit her job as a technical analyst when denied more leave; and with Britt Walford choosing to stay focused on Slint, Deal had snapped up Jim Macpherson, the drummer of the Dayton band The Raging Mantras. He had regularly posted flyers through Deal’s letterbox until she turned up to see one of their shows. Macpherson was a different proposition to Walford: ‘Jim was extremely powerful, but also sensitive, which was a very interesting combination,’ says Josephine Wiggs.
Driven harder by Macpherson, The Breeders started to resemble a different band to the one that had made Pod, especially armed with the new version of ‘Grungae’, which was now called ‘Cannonball’. It also had a new deeper, rippling bass intro. For inspiration, Deal singles out the basslines of Mick Allen, especially the Queer cut ‘Louis 14th’: ‘warm and oozing, up and down the fretboard,’ says Deal. The actual finished part was down to a mistake: Wiggs had played the last note flat but everybody decided it was better for it.
Freegard recalls the first time he heard Kim’s newest batch of songs: ‘She was playing them down the phone, her guitar perched on her knee, saying, “Kelley, play the lead guitar I taught you” as I made notes.’ But this impromptu approach was drastically altered in the studio, as a three-week booking turned into four long months with Kim painstakingly building a new sound, full of overdubs and treatments.
‘All of a sudden, independent music had become a tag word, a philosophy,’ Deal explains. ‘There had been this college music network across the country, in the early days of R.E.M., and then Pixies, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth. We’re all going overseas, and someone sees this young community that marketing people can reach, so there’s sponsorship and advertising dollars, and you’ve got this thing called Alternative Music, a tag word that I was told market research had shown piqued the interest of readers from the age of fifteen to thirty-two.
‘Nirvana just blew it all up. Grunge was in Vogue magazine, and bands were signing to majors who were creating indie labels for them. The whole phenomenon was cynical and strange to me, so to have our album sound so produced was a reactionary move. But on “Cannonball”, I’m screaming the last line, and we’re manipulating my voice all the way. It sounded great, but it wasn’t a template for radio.’
‘It was an exhausting recording because things were so unpredictable,’ says Freegard. ‘For “Flipside”, for example, Kim wanted it to sound like a bad cassette. The project became one big edit, but no computer in sight. Kim wouldn’t have it. It was exhausting and stressful for everyone, but mostly Kim, because of expectations, from management, label and herself. It took its toll.’
The shed-load of pot that Kim was consuming might have made the sessions a lot of fun, but would have only added to the trial. Freegard discovered pieces of burnt silver foil in the lounge area, suggesting harder drugs were also being consumed, but any such use was kept hidden from the other members. The sessions continued in San Francisco, where the band stayed on houseboats as the last pieces of the musical puzzle were slotted into place.
After flying on to LA, Ivo rented an apartment for a month, where he recalls listening to Dead Can Dance’s forthcoming album Into The Labyrinth for the first time. After that, he planned to spend ten days in LA, at his brother’s place or a hotel, and ten days back in London, and repeat. In theory, Ivo could work anywhere in the northern hemisphere and still give the LA office a figurehead, even if his core strengths didn’t run to meet-and-greet duties. And he was hardly zooming down to gigs. Live shows of non-4AD artists were largely confined to the likes of San Diego’s blues rockers The Paladins: ‘It was a relief to see something that made me feel good and I didn’t have to give a “professional” opinion afterwards,’ he says.
Colleen Maloney: ‘There was also a lot of readjustment for the London office to make. Ivo didn’t go off the radar and it didn’t seem weird that he’d be working from LA, but it was weird for artists who’d had a long-term relationship with him. They’d have gone from getting Ivo on the bat phone to reaching someone else who couldn’t provide that kind of assistance.’
Eight weeks after the news of Pixies’ split, Charles Thompson had the chance to emulate Donelly’s break for freedom. While news of Pixies’ split had yet to be announced, he’d recorded a solo album with Eric Drew Feldman, re-engaged as his musical wingman and now producer in place of Gil Norton. Thompson nevertheless re-employed Norton’s engineering assistant Al Clay, but Feldman was able to put necessary daylight between Pixies past and solo present. So did Thompson’s new alias – inverting Black Francis to become Frank Black.
Thompson had also re-engaged Joey Santiago (credited with ‘additional guitar’), one of three guests alongside the core trio of Thompson, Feldman and drummer Nick Vincent. Like Star, Frank Black made good use of the CD format by including fifteen tracks, stylistically spanning the short, punchy flair of latterday Pixies albums with broader and often sprightlier fare; with chugging saxophones, ‘Fu Manchu’ was more Electric Light Orchestra than Pixies. A similar surprise was Thompson’s cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the sole survivor of a proposed covers album that Thompson had nixed in favour of his own songs. That Thompson was smitten by his new home city was clear by the album’s opener ‘Los Angeles’, which adapted Pixies’ bristling energy with distinctly grungy guitars. The point was gleefully driven home by the hair-metal band miming in the song’s video.
Frank Black might have been a liberating experience but it was also a perplexing record. Thompson knew it would be judged, and typically unfairly, by a music press lamenting the end of Pixies. And not surprisingly, the Thompson/Feldman/ Vincent trinity didn’t have the same gelled personality as his old band. ‘Hang On To Your Ego’ was also a strange choice for a first single, as if none of Thompson’s originals warranted the job. Hard-headed independence ensured Ivo had had no A&R input; he says he approved of the record without feeling any particular love for it. Relations between them ‘were fine’ says Ivo, adding, ‘but maybe Charles had reasons, as I had, for not wanting to stay close.’
If Thompson had increasingly raised Ivo’s anxiety levels, Warren Defever continued to be a paragon of harmony and co-operation. But since Defever had upgraded his studio and His Name Is Alive’s approach (including using three singers besides His Name Is Alive staple Karin Oliver), many new songs for the band’s third album were more concise and approachable, and he didn’t require Ivo’s remixing input. Ivo was still asked to compile the track listing, drawn from two albums that Defever had supplied, though he hadn’t explained that one of them had been written by His Name Is Alive guitarist Melissa Elliot under the band alias The Dirt Eaters. Defever convinced Elliot to allow three of her songs on the finished album, which helped as Ivo felt that neither of the two albums was strong enough in its own right.
Warners would have appreciated Defever’s new fluid approach to sound and structure: ‘Proudly eclectic, reflective, and obscure – hell, arty – Warren DeFever’s concession to rock normality is mood music for more moods than you’ll first believe are there, including plenty of sex for the polymorphously inclined,’ Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice. Warners would also have appreciated Defever’s handsome face on the cover – ‘just to be different,’ says Vaughan Oliver, adding, ‘But you don’t do a portrait by draping fairy lights all over. And that was Warren’s favourite bedspread in the background.’*
If only Warners could encourage Defever to leave the cosseted womb of his studio for the stage. Where the major label did force his hand was to insist he copyright-clear the multiple samples, or delete them. So the voicemail, left by accident by a woman asking to be taken to ‘an insane-um asylum’, which Defever had added to ‘Jack Rabbits’ was cut, and the illegal taping of Native American chanting on ‘The Homesick Waltz’. ‘We used to refer to [the Warners edition] as the “raped and dismembered” version,’ says Defever. However, Warners hadn’t noticed that ‘Lord Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace’ was composed of samples from Prince’s Under The Cherry Moon soundtrack (or so Defever thinks, though Wikipedia claims it was ‘Can’t Go Wrong Without You’ that was composed via samples, from Prince’s Purple Rain). Neither source can be trusted …
Like Defever, Ivo was a homebody and isolationist at heart, and he soon came to regret his new transatlantic lifestyle, which compounded a dislike of travelling, and made even worse by daily 2am conference calls to London when he was away. It soon became the worst of both worlds. ‘In LA, I didn’t feel I had found my place whatsoever in the office, and very quickly, I felt I was losing focus whenever I was in London. And when I wasn’t in London, someone still needed to take care of things. Briefly, it had started to make sense, but then came the big meeting at Warners about The Wolfgang Press.’
It had been almost two years since the UK release of Queer, but backed by the major’s promotions, ‘A Girl Like You’ had indeed found a place on American radio, and after twelve years of resistance, The Wolfgang Press had itself a nominal hit – a heady number 2 on Billboard’s Modern Rock (Alternative Songs) chart. But that didn’t mean an automatic crossover; Warners needed to expand the budget to pull out the stops for a national hit.
Ivo: ‘For the first time, I joined Robin at Warners for a big meeting where the future of The Wolfgang Press was to be decided. I expected certain individuals to rally around 4AD and “A Girl Like You”, but no, they decided that they would just let the song run its course. Almost ten years to the day, Modern English had been getting airplay in America with “I Melt With You” and Sire had decided not to open their cheque book and take it to top 40 radio, and here it was happening again.’
Warners head of services Steven Baker was at that meeting. He had begun as an A&R scout for Warners and enjoyed a long association with Beggars Banquet that had begun even before 4AD had started, and he’d been around when ‘I Melt With You’ had received a humungous amount of airplay but hadn’t reached the US top 50. ‘The segregation of radio formats and the charts, such as rock, pop and country and western meant that a new wave song like “I Melt With You” would not have been worked by Warners’ pop department, but by alternative promotions and marketing,’ Baker explains. ‘British groups were almost thought of like coming from another planet, and not even New Order or Depeche Mode had pop singles.’
Baker also explains that a label of Warners’ size had to prioritise releases. ‘Ivo would have viewed his releases in the A and B tiers, but you’d have to take into account how many records we’d released that month, across jazz, rock, pop and alternative, so it could have been the F or G tier to Warners. But I can sympathise with Ivo’s state of mind. He experienced what others had at major labels. Records slipped through the cracks that shouldn’t have.’
Ivo: ‘It dawned on me incredibly quickly that we’d made a massive mistake to commit everything to one label, because here was a single track breaking out and Warners wasn’t prepared to get behind it. I felt they weren’t on our side.’
Ivo had already told Tanya Donelly that ‘playing the game’ was the beginning of the end for him, so why was Warners’ lack of game-playing such a disappointment? Ivo was upset enough not to return to the Warners office for years – a self-protective measure, but a potentially devastating blow to both 4AD’s and Ivo’s supposed bright future. But with an independent record label forming an alliance with a major record company, how did Ivo expect that it would work out?
Tim Carr, however, feels there was an element of retribution to the event, and that Ivo has unwittingly undermined his own efforts. ‘Lenny [Waronker] and Mo [Ostin] never said it, but I know that they were upset by Guernica, because they thought they had had Ivo’s complete attention.’ Not that Warners was giving up on 4AD soon, he says: ‘Everyone there loved Robin Hurley, and every single 4AD act had a champion at college radio and alternative radio,’ says Carr.
Mick Allen recalls hearing of ‘money being pumped into Goo Goo Dolls’, American pop-punks with younger, trendier and more malleable looks than the gnarly, maverick Wolfgang Press. And was Warners truly comfortable promoting an album named Queer? Tim Carr says that was less an issue than the fact ‘A Girl Like You’ might have been a natural hit in the UK, but in the world of Nirvana, it wasn’t on US radio. ‘And it would take six months to make something happen with a song like “A Girl Like You”,’ he explains. ‘How willing would The Wolfgang Press have been to tour America outside of the primary markets like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, San Francisco and Minneapolis? Even Pale Saints might have broken America if they’d been more willing to tour. Only Lush was prepared to do the work.’
Ivo had interpreted Warners’ actions as the latest in a line of major labels ‘wining and dining you, and then once they’d licensed your band, acting like they were waiting for something to happen first. My thoughts were, it’s clear what 4AD does, who we sign and how we go about things; there’s value in the music but also the logo, the graphics and the presentation, so please give us bigger exposure than we’ve had on import. But things almost diminished because our hipper supporters at college radio switched to another label because we’d lost that indie credibility by signing with a major. I was proud enough to think it a worthwhile risk for Warners to take, but I was wrong.’
Marc Geiger puts things into perspective, explaining that Ivo’s pure ideals were impractical in the American marketplace: ‘When you don’t need to make your bands big, and you can let them be, there’s no measurement of whether anything works or not, there’s just great music. Ivo fostered the organic aesthetic of people coming to music instead of hitting you over the head with it. But in America, you needed to amp it up, because things had become more about promotion-driven marketing.
‘As Ivo will tell you,’ Geiger continues, ‘I had been the most potent marketing force [in America] for bands like The Wolfgang Press, because I made them show up here by booking them shows, because otherwise you were left with a beautiful cover, or something you had read in the NME. Bands wanted success but they didn’t want to know the ingredients, they wanted to hide. We’d jokingly refer to “the seven date
mega-tour”. Artists wouldn’t have their pictures taken, and would only do one interview. Nobody to this day knows the name of The Wolfgang Press singer, or Kurt Ralske, artists who’d look down their nose at others wondering why they had more success. If you had great art and marketing, you could do it. Pixies could have been a stadium band but two bad single choices in a row, after they were ready to break, didn’t help.’
Geiger also believes that things started to go backwards for indie music when it got polluted. ‘Lollapalooza was powerful and well-timed,’ he says, ‘but it opened the floodgates to imitators who competed in the market, a mini-artistic perfect storm where Third Eye Blind were considered a cool band. Bands needed management to survive, and The Wolfgang Press didn’t have any early on. Ivo preferred things that way, because it was more organic, but it hurt The Wolfgang Press, because you needed that commitment, hard work and focus in order to succeed in this marketplace.’
Actually, The Wolfgang Press did have management, and their choice was a problem for Ivo. ‘Trent Reznor [of Nine Inch Nails] had pointed his manager John Malm in our direction,’ says Mick Allen. ‘He was aware of 4AD, and liked us. But he said he couldn’t handle things in the UK, so we went for Ros Earls.’
Ivo was still in a relationship with Earls, whose management company 140db handled producers rather than artists. ‘Ros knew people and was able to make things happen, like organising an American tour for us, which felt very positive,’ says Allen. ‘But once she and Ivo became an official item, she said she had to choose. It was almost like an ultimatum from Ivo.’
‘I definitely didn’t enjoy Ros suddenly representing them,’ Ivo says. ‘Our relationship had been a beautiful oasis away from 4AD, though we obviously had a lot in common.’
At least Warners couldn’t influence and shape 4AD’s schedule. Ivo released a box set of This Mortal Coil’s three albums, with a fourth CD covering as many of the original songs that TMC had covered as he could fit and get the rights for. It was a generous and expensive gesture due to the royalties that 4AD had to pay to the sixteen songwriters over twenty-one songs. But respect, and royalties, were paid, and purchasers of the box set had the chance to share what had originally inspired Ivo.