by Martin Aston
There was, however, a concession to the preferences of MTV. Ivo says that Perry refused to make a video for ‘The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove’: ‘They still had the attitude that videos, and merchandising too, was obscene. Otherwise, they could have taken things to another level.’
Perry doesn’t recall a video (much as he didn’t remember Aion’s rejected artwork), but he did agree to one for the following single, ‘The Carnival Is Over’, since neither of the duo had to appear. The part-animated circus theme cost £100,000 and ‘was a no-brainer’ according to Perry. He also thinks the video was ‘a wonderful extension of the creative imagination of that piece’. If Perry is happy, who is to say the mish-mash of clichéd ethno-symbolic play-acting wasn’t the right choice? But just think what the Brothers Quay could have achieved.
Red House Painters’ chosen route to success was not by video but rather hypnotising people into submission. Ivo agreed to release the remainder of the mammoth recording session as an album, only six months after the last – it’s why this album was also called Red House Painters. ‘Ivo was like, “Great!”’ says Kozelek. ‘Any other label would have said no way.’
The cover – this time of a bridge – led fans to refer to the album as Bridge and its predecessor as Rollercoaster. Kozelek also initiated what was to become a sideline of cover versions with Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘I Am A Rock’ (inspired by the two months Kozelek spent, ‘hiding out in Tennessee, not talking to anyone, because I was so devastated about my life that I couldn’t write anything’) and the American national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. ‘It was the polar opposite of everything else that we, or anyone else, were doing,’ he claims.
There was no slacking-off at Alma Road, with three Guernica releases scheduled for the same November day. All stood apart from the other, and one was good enough to have earnt a 4AD release. Another came from a recognised source.
After leaving Pale Saints, Ian Masters had teamed up with Chris Trout in a duo they originally called The Long Lost, before settling on Spoonfed Hybrid. Trout was a former journalist who had once interviewed Masters and was playing bass in the Sheffield band AC Temple. ‘Chris was very creative, playful and peculiarly funny, with a constant stream of good ideas,’ says Masters, who still took creative control on an album that recalled a more pastoral Pale Saints, with none of AC Temple’s Sonic Youth-style aggression. Ivo enjoyed the self-titled album enough to release it, but only on Guernica. ‘Ivo didn’t like Chris’s voice, which he and I would argue about,’ Masters recalls, ‘but he offered us the one-off deal and we took it.’
Ivo agrees with Masters’ assessment, ‘but I still enjoyed Ian, and it was a good album. But a record had to be great or perfect to be on 4AD, so I wanted to let myself off the hook and not be so involved.’
The Brighton-based couple Kirsty Yates and Julian Tardo, who called themselves Insides, also found Ivo both an accommodating and frustrating figure. Once again, Ivo was drawn towards a domestic and creative couple, though Yates and Tardo have bucked the trend by still being together after twenty-five years. The pair had been two-thirds of Earwig with Dimitri Voulis – the trio had all met at Sussex University. ‘We were the weirdos that no one else wanted to talk to!’ Tardo recalls. ‘Dimitri was massively into Cocteau Twins and goth, and Kirsty would be blasting My Bloody Valentine, which I found a complete revelation as I’d grown up with heavy metal. I became obsessed with Pixies too but one of the great unexplored areas of music for me was soft, ambient rock music that had a fundamental crack in it.’
Earwig’s album Under My Skin I Am Laughing had transcended scratchy guitar roots for a slow, sombre and emotionally racked sound – a rare outbreak of UK sadcore. Earwig fan Tony Morley had played it to Ivo, who called Tardo ‘out of the blue, asking if we wanted to make an album. Yes! But it meant writing it really quickly, which took us two months’. After Voulis moved to Spain, Tardo took a risk and bought a sampler to replace their traditional instruments. ‘It was de rigueur in certain circles to get rid of guitars, which didn’t pay off live as venues couldn’t cope with new technology and we’d have do things like put the drum machine through a vocal PA, which sounded crap,’ he says. ‘But we wanted to do something different, which Ivo understood. The 13 Year Itch was the first time he’d heard what we were now doing, and he said, “That’s the best demo I’ve ever heard!”’
The night of The Breeders’ 13 Year Itch show, while loading Insides’ equipment, Tardo saw lines of Japanese kids outside. ‘Only then did I appreciate how much people were obsessed with 4AD,’ he says. Yates was equally amazed to see Kim Deal bouncing into their dressing room: ‘She said, “Let’s talk to these nice Insides people”.’
Insides followed Spoonfed Hybrid into Palladium Studios, and the resulting album Euphoria was softer, more fluid and disarming than any Earwig record. Ivo loved it, enough to see it released on 4AD in America, though Tardo and Yates never heard this from Ivo; he was out of reach in LA. Tardo recalls that they’d feared Euphoria was too smooth, not the out-there album that Ivo had hoped they’d deliver. ‘It’s probably a universal feeling between band and label, when you worry and second-guess people. We had champions at 4AD, but Ivo wasn’t around to push things further, so everything dissipated almost immediately.’
4AD’s London office suggested Insides go on tour. ‘We agreed to tour with Slowdive, but not with ridiculous noisy bands, because we were done with that,’ says Tardo. ‘We started to make an animated film, but the money wasn’t there. [American film director] Hal Hartley said he liked us and might use something in a film – 4AD at least had connections. But it didn’t happen. And Ivo was absolutely against using music in ads.’
Guernica’s equivalent of a one-night stand may have fulfilled Ivo’s needs but it left the artists uncertain about the next move; Unrest had shifted over to 4AD, so could Insides? ‘I didn’t have a burning ambition to be a 4AD band but we did want to find a home,’ says Yates. ‘Other labels were asking why Ivo didn’t want us, because the album had done well, critically speaking. But Ivo had said 4AD’s roster was full and that he couldn’t devote enough time to us.’
No helpful answer was forthcoming until Tardo says their manager finally heard, ‘absolutely, for certain, that we and 4AD wouldn’t be working together again’. Yet Ivo was to change his mind. Feeling less than euphoric, the band launched Euphoria with a show at London’s Borderline, composing a 38-minute piece of music to act as the support band. ‘It was a single, gorgeous instrumental that they called “Clear Skin”,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I wanted them to record it but I had to stand by my principles of no two releases on Guernica. I said we’d release it on 4AD, and that would be it. They agreed, but they should have told me to fuck off.’
Yates: ‘Ivo said that two albums on Guernica would be confusing, so what about a Japanese-only release? It was like he was thinking out loud. One time, he said, “I can’t let myself think about it”.’
For Guernica’s third album of the year, Ivo was in danger of over-thinking; he even offered to manage LA trio That Dog, which, he says, shows how lost he was. ‘Management was the last thing on earth I should ever have considered doing,’ he says, ‘and I withdrew the offer before they could take it seriously. But I was trying to find some meaning, a new direction, and stuff to fall in love with, so the offer also illustrates how much I fell in love with them.’
At the end of 1992, Ivo had been given a That Dog cassette by 4AD LA promotions man Mark Brown. ‘I loved it, and wanted to sign them to 4AD,’ Ivo recalls. ‘But I discovered they’d signed to Geffen two weeks earlier.’ He also discovered that That Dog’s principal singer-songwriter was Anna Waronker, daughter of Warners boss Lenny. Anna had taken note of her father’s productions, such as Randy Newman’s Sail Away – ‘records with a harmonic sensibility and direct lyrics, as if he was speaking to you, and that stuck with me,’ she says. She began to write songs after a break-up and formed a band with her friend Rachel Haden, another strong singer who was happy
to learn bass guitar. Rachel’s violin-playing sister Petra wanted to join, and could sing too, giving That Dog the gift of triple harmonies, which they put to fresh, naïve folk rock with an extra kick. None of the girls had yet turned twenty.
Waronker preferred songwriting to performing, but Rachel Haden convinced her to add drummer Tony Maxwell, with the third Haden triplet, cello-playing Tanya, an auxiliary stage member. It was the five-piece That Dog that Ivo saw play live: ‘They had this combination of rackety Throwing Muses-esque guitar balanced by slower songs, and three gorgeous voices working together. I adored them.’
That Dog adored 4AD right back. Rachel Haden idolised Cocteau Twins and Kristin Hersh: ‘She sang about feeling crazy, and that’s how I felt. I loved the bands that rocked out on 4AD, like Lush and Pixies.’
Pixies had been Anna Waronker’s gateway to 4AD: ‘They spoke to me the way that Randy Newman did when I was younger. It was their directness, simplicity and untraditional chord changes. And there was Kim Deal! There weren’t many women in rock who could sing and have it be pretty without being delicate and too commercial.’
In other words, as Rachel Haden says, ‘4AD was our dream label.’ But Waronker admits That Dog had been too disorganised to post out demos: ‘4AD was the only label that hadn’t contacted us. And Geffen’s roster was great.’ But knowing of Ivo’s interest, Geffen A&R man Tony Berg thought it would be useful, Ivo says, ‘if That Dog had indie cred outside of America. They weren’t an obvious band to break in America, so they needed all the help they could get.’
After the band’s self-titled album was released on Guernica, Ivo brought That Dog to the UK, to play shows and record a Peel session. ‘Given the parameters of Guernica, it worked,’ Ivo reckons. That Dog reciprocated demonstrative affection. ‘He was smart and safe and respectful,’ says Waronker. ‘We let him into our inner sanctum, and we didn’t even let in Tony Berg.’
That Dog’s album was well received, and Guernica felt like an ongoing success; sure it had had teething problems, but it served a purpose. The three albums brought the curtain down on another tumultuous year, a time of massive upheaval, unexpected successes, failures and frustrations, and uncertain futures.
In November, Dead Can Dance had made a video much more suited to the duo’s image: a simple, recorded concert with a crack team of session players for just 150 invited guests at The Mayfair Theater in Santa Monica, California. It was a rare chance for Lisa Gerrard, living in Australia, to catch up with her old friend Ivo. ‘Artists could fall to pieces,’ she says, ‘but he was expected to be the person who kept everything together, to be grounded and sensible, which was a huge pressure after a while.’
But the other half of Dead Can Dance saw a happier side to Ivo. Ivo recalls he and Brendan Perry had taken a drive, listening to a version of Perry’s solo performance of ‘American Dreaming’: ‘I’m in love with an American girl …’
Ivo: ‘You see, Brendan was in love with an American girl, Francesca, same as I was with Brandi. Nineteen ninety-three was a pretty good year for me. Brandi and I got married on New Year’s Eve; Simon Harper, Martyn Young and his three-year-old daughter were the witnesses.’
Young’s daughter, like the Lilliput baby, were unwitting emblems of new hope at the end of a year that saw Ivo strike out to save his life at its beginning. ‘As he says, “New wife, new country, fresh start”. The 13 Year Itch, scratched.
* Artwork for Pale Saints’ ‘Throwing Back The Apple’ and Frank Black’s ‘Hang On To Your Ego’ had featured the artists, following other occasional instances through the years – but always on singles. When it came to albums, it was only when the artist made that choice, such as The Wolfgang Press on Queer. Vaughan Oliver had never willingly done so until Mouth By Mouth.
† There was a surprise guest on each of the five 13 Year Itch nights, such as Babacar – with Caroline Crawley on vocals, her then boyfriend Boris Williams (the drummer of The Cure), guitarist Rob Steen and bassist Roberto Soave of the band Presence, who had also counted founding Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst in its line-up. It turned out to be the only show for this gothic-slanted super-group, and Babacar only released one EP, Midsummer, in 1993 and a self-titled album in 1998.
chapter 18 – 1994
All Virgos are Mad, Some More than Others
(BAD4001–BAD4018)
Ivo made his move permanent by buying a house in LA in February 1994. In order to feed him demos, and assist with artist liaison, Colin Wallace was promoted from 4AD’s warehouse to A&R. ‘Ivo knew I was passionate about music as I was always listening to new things,’ says Wallace. Yet Ivo called the post ‘negative A&R’, meaning the job entailed sending Ivo any demos that stood out, but to otherwise return the rest with a courteous covering letter, and to log the information in a book. ‘I didn’t see it as negative A&R,’ Wallace maintains, ‘but Ivo warned me that he wouldn’t like anything, and he was true to his word for years.’*
Ivo also hired a new general manager after he’d failed to persuade Simon Harper to accept the role. ‘I’d already drifted too far from what I really enjoyed,’ Ivo says, ‘dealing with all international licensees, artists and managers, to much more paperwork and business affairs meetings, coupled with managing the increasing frustration and overall bullshit of people in the office. I was burning out.’
The job – with the grand title of Chief Executive Officer – went to Richard Hermitage, the manager of Pale Saints, with Robin Hurley made general manager in LA. Hermitage had put in eleven years as a concert booking agent before switching to artist management with synth-pop survivors The Human League. He’d heard that ‘4AD’s exciting new act, Pale Saints’ needed a manager, and was invited to meet the label. ‘Practically every staff member turned up, which was very unusual in terms of taking a band on,’ says Hermitage. He soon built a shoegazing roster of Pale Saints, Slowdive and The Boo Radleys.
Of all the labels that Hermitage had had to deal with, he says, ‘4AD had an intelligence and sensitivity towards the artist that I didn’t encounter elsewhere, a shared vision. And Red House Painters was the greatest thing I’d heard for ages. Years later, Mark [Kozelek] asked me to manage him, and I refused, saying that if he fired me, I’d never be able to listen to his music again!’
The first record released under Hermitage’s charge was one of 4AD’S finest – as visionary and unexpected as the first Throwing Muses album. Outside of her remit of Muses duties, Kristin Hersh had recorded some acoustic songs, as a token of love for Billy O’Connell, after they’d gotten married. ‘I thought we had an understanding that he was my husband, but he saw it differently, that he was my manager, and he sent them to my business manager, who gave them in turn to [R.E.M. singer] Michael Stipe,’ says Hersh. ‘Between all them, this decision was made to release these demos. It was like someone walking into your house and publishing your diary.’
Hersh agreed to let the tracks go public, but, she says, ‘only if I could [also] make a record on purpose’. She also agreed to postpone the release of a new Throwing Muses album that was being recorded in New Orleans to make way for her solo album, which she simultaneously recorded in Portsmouth on the east coast. For her own record, Hersh would only be accompanied by cellist Jane Scarpantoni and an inspired choice of producer: Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitar sidekick and learned journalist and garage rock archivist.
‘Lenny had wanted to work with the Muses for years,’ Hersh recalls. ‘He came to our shows, and sent us postcards, when we were still kids. I wanted to use him as a computer program for pop, or the average listener, to see why people thought I was so strange. I used him as an ear, to sit in the control room so I didn’t have to break any performance spell.’
The album ended up with an additional guest. Hersh had called Michael Stipe to discuss her problems recording the cello for what turned into the album’s lead single ‘Your Ghost’. As the pair chatted, she heard the solution – Stipe’s own voice, as a chorus echo to her own. ‘I promised Michael it wouldn’t
be a big deal, or a single, and even if “Your Ghost” was a single, there wouldn’t be a video, and it wouldn’t get played on the radio – and it became the biggest song I’d ever had! He agreed to make the video, and we had fun.’
Hersh still had her reservations over recording her vocals: ‘None of my band training had taught me how to record this gravelly, wobbly instrument that I couldn’t control. It was like trying to record a horse.’ Yet her voice, stripped of extraneous detail, conveyed the honesty of her trials and tribulations. The performances on ‘Sundrops’ and ‘Me And My Charms’ were edgier but ‘Your Ghost’ was typical of the album’s softer entry into Hersh’s world. ‘Luminous, alluring and slightly menacing,’ said Rolling Stone. ‘One of the best records we ever released,’ says Ivo.
Something about Hips And Makers struck a nerve and the album entered the national UK charts at number 7, considerably higher than any preceding Muses record. ‘From Victorialand onward,’ says Ivo, ‘4AD got really good chart positions in the first week of release, which spoke of the fan loyalty towards a lot of our artists.’
To prolong the album’s shelf life, 4AD staffer Chris Staley suggested scoring four songs with a string quartet (arranged by Martin McCarrick) and double bass, and adding another four tracks. The Strings EP that followed three months after Hips And Makers is a lovely document, but the real beauty of Hersh’s solo performance was the solitude around her vocal.
But it wouldn’t be the story of 4AD in the Nineties without a frustrating lapse following a life-affirming success, or vice versa. Ivo had discovered The Swinging Swine through the band’s Nick Drake cover version ‘Voice From The Mountain’. From Galway in the west of Ireland, the band’s folk-influenced jangle preceded the similarly and significantly more successful Cranberries: guitarist/violinist Hugh O’Carroll says that Ivo had found the band ‘too straight-up folky’ at the time. O’Carroll and singer Joanne Loughman must have felt the same, as they split off to start The Glee Club and emulate their influences – Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Siouxsie and the Banshees – and releasing a self-titled EP through Setanta.