by Martin Aston
‘Ivo made approving noises about The Glee Club,’ says O’Carroll. ‘He also enjoyed our brash, boozy and forthright nature, compared to some of the people he was used to dealing with. We enjoyed visiting him in Wandsworth and chatting about music.’
A plan was hatched to re-record the EP and add new songs, to turn it into a full-length album for 4AD. Hugh Jones was hired to produce, and The Glee Club found itself in the same predicament as Swallow – without due A&R care for what they wanted. ‘Hugh taught us a lot, but we preferred the less-is-more approach to how he overloaded the tracks,’ says O’Carroll. Jones helmed four tracks but The Glee Club wanted the EP’s producer Dick Meaney back. ‘Ivo was a bit doubtful,’ says O’Carroll, ‘but otherwise he was on board.’
But Ivo wasn’t on board enough to get behind the finished album. At times Mine mirrored The Sundays’ dreaminess, such as with ‘Remember A Day’, but other tracks sounded like the shriller Cranberries, without conjuring up the same hooks. ‘The Glee Club was another example of being disappointed,’ says Ivo. ‘We gave the album back to Setanta for the UK, which was embarrassing, but I was just being honest. 4AD released it in America because Robin thought it was worth a shot – he needed to feed the Warners machine, and we needed the £10,000 advance. But I recently bought the original mini-album and really enjoyed it. Joanne had such an amazing voice.’
4AD’s popularity and The Glee Club’s indie-pop blueprint ensured Mine was a college radio hit, but new demos didn’t persuade Ivo to prolong the relationship. O’Carroll also decided to start afresh, and moved to San Francisco. Loughman returned to Ireland, and neither have had a similar profile since.
Things might have been different for Loughman, however, had Ivo succeeded in getting the best out of her during a new bout of cover versions on his next musical collaboration. Having retired This Mortal Coil, the new working title was Blood, named after TMC’s final album. Ivo took Loughman to Blackwing to sing over arrangements that he’d recorded with Jon Turner at Palladium. Rough versions of Red House Painters’ ‘Take Me Out’ and American Music Club’s ‘Why Won’t You Stay?’ were recorded with Loughman, but they never even got around to recording a vocal for ‘Need Your Love So Bad’, a 1955 blues ballad that Ivo knew via the original Fleetwood Mac featuring another of Ivo’s most beloved guitarists, Peter Green.
‘Nothing gelled with Joanne,’ says Ivo. ‘Which had never happened to me with This Mortal Coil before. She was very shy, maybe even nervous around me. Once she’d had a couple of drinks, she did some fantastic singing, but I never did anything more with it. What was happening to me [his depression] was on its way up.’
The emotional detachment that underlined his relationship with The Glee Club was brought into sharp relief by the artist-serving A&R policy that 4AD usually stood for. Yet again, it featured a female singer. The number of women Ivo regularly created an environment free from alpha-male insensitivities for would have been notable in any industry. By the standards of the music industry, it was remarkable. By the end of his tenure at 4AD, Ivo had worked with twenty-six solo or band ventures that featured female singers and musicians, not many fewer than the label’s male contingent. But what Ivo achieved for Lisa Germano was also an act of mercy, rescuing her from major label hell.
Born in northern Indiana, Germano – like her namesake Gerrard – had grown up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood with a shared language in music, in her case, largely Irish and Italian brands of gypsy. Her Italian father was a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Germano says she appreciated ‘melodies and harmonies, mushy stuff like Carole King, Cat Stevens and James Taylor’. She adds that she wasn’t cool. ‘I’d mostly play piano and write operas and tragic stories, about princesses tortured by the bad queen. I’d lock myself in the closet and wait for the prince to save me.’
Playing violin, that staple of gypsy music, Germano had become a successful session musician, with a lengthy stint with American rocker John Cougar Mellencamp. Her self-recorded, self-released debut album On The Way Down From The Moon Palace, however, sounded nothing like Mellancamp’s adult-oriented sound, with hushed vocals and pristine, folky arrangements; it sounded as though she had a major label budget behind her. Capitol subsequently signed her, and A&R man Tim Devine put Canadian producer Malcolm Burn on the case to record new demos.
Burn had trained as Daniel Lanois’ assistant, and he became Germano’s boyfriend. ‘Malcolm was a master manipulator,’ she claims. ‘He brought in some awesome players and we did way more [than demos], spending £75,000. It all sounded great, and I was in ecstasy. But Tim only really liked “You Make Me Want To Wear Dresses” because it could get played on radio, and Capitol could market the violin side of the music. Tim and I constantly fought about the track listing, and my manager sided with Tim. They all wanted to see sales.’
Germano’s exasperated and naïve response was, she says, ‘To think of the stupidest song I could do, that Capitol would like, so I recorded [Nancy Sinatra classic] “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. And they did like it! So that had to go on the album.’
Germano named the album Happiness with all the bitter irony she could muster, but another prince was on the way to save her. Ivo had read a review of … Moon Palace, and seen her photo. ‘Lisa was so attractive, and it sounded like an interesting record, so I’d bought it and primarily enjoyed the instrumentals. I later saw Lisa in concert and got talking to Tim Devine, who suggested 4AD release Happiness outside of America, like That Dog’s arrangement with Geffen. I agreed, but first I wanted a crack at some remixes.’
Germano had never heard of 4AD. ‘But I’d never heard of The Smiths either! I was still in John-Mellencamp-world. Ivo sent me a package of CDs, which blew me away: Pixies, Dead Can Dance, The Breeders, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, the artwork – it was so much more my world. This atmospheric, weird stuff was much more about music than hits.’
By the time Ivo and John Fryer had done their thing – ‘they took stuff out, looped other bits and added bits and pieces between songs’ – Germano had been dropped by Capitol. Two weeks after Happiness had been released in 1993, most of the label’s staff had been fired. She says Capitol’s new MD Gary Gersh said to her, “Not to beat about the bush, but I don’t like your record”. He offered to give it back to me to get out of the contract. Hurray!’
Ivo moved to sign Germano long-term. ‘On its own “The Darkest Night Of All” could guarantee Lisa my complete admiration and empathy,’ he gushes. Her 4AD debut, the Inconsiderate Bitch EP, included four Happiness remixes alongside ‘(Late Night) Dresses’ (a renamed version of ‘You Make Me Want To Wear Dresses’), remixed by Malcolm Burn. A re-tooled version of Happiness followed with a new sleeve design,† and new songs ‘Destroy The Flower’ and ‘The Earth’ replacing ‘Breathe Across Texas’ and the Sinatra cover. ‘Ivo had a strong vision,’ says Germano, ‘but he never acted like I had to do what he said. He knew my situation at Capitol, and worked with me.’
Germano started on a new album to be released in October 1994, just six months after Happiness. Free of compromise, the irony-free title of Geek The Girl fronted a record as haunted and harrowing as anything with Hersh’s name on it. ‘A psychopath’ sampled an actual 911 emergency call by a woman whose home had been invaded by her stalker (he subsequently raped her). ‘It was so devastatingly powerful that I almost didn’t include the tape, but this was how I felt, as I had a stalker who knew where I lived, and would call me, but the police couldn’t do anything until he actually came there,’ says Germano. ‘I’d lock myself in every night, with mace and a baseball bat.’
Other song titles on the album included ‘Sexy Little Girl Princess’ and ‘Cry Wolf’. The album’s sleeve notes explained that Geek The Girl was a concept album of sorts: ‘A girl who is confused about how to be sexual and cool in the world … and dreams of still loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life … ha ha ha, what a geek!’
Not since Kristin Hersh had an artis
t on 4AD delivered a bold feminist parable bordering on shock. ‘Lisa experienced some dark episodes in her life,’ says Ivo. ‘Such as being in a successful touring rock’n’roll band, and how women are treated in that situation.’
Germano: ‘I didn’t mean to make that kind of a record. You just go with what’s coming out of your psyche rather than writing music to sell. It definitely wasn’t the “pop” record 4AD was looking for. Maybe “pop” isn’t the right word, but they felt I had the ability to make more of the left-field hit record like Dead Can Dance or The Breeders.’
She is talking less about Ivo than Robin Hurley, who was busy managing Warners’ expectations. Though he thought Geek The Girl ‘was amazing’, he also feels it shouldn’t have been her second 4AD album. Ivo, however, is ‘totally proud of the album’. He’d even suggested releasing Germano’s demos as the finished record, to preserve it ‘rough and raw’.
Germano might have seen Ivo as a prince. Yet by the time Geek The Girl was released, and getting very favourable reviews, ‘that’s when Ivo was pulling away and feeling unwell, and he wasn’t there for me,’ she says. ‘He told me later that he couldn’t listen to any music at all.’
The mantra of ‘New wife, new country, fresh start’ had not been enough for Ivo to stave off a now crushing depression exacerbated by new bouts of insomnia. Regular therapy wasn’t solving the issue, and Ivo admits to self-medicating in response. In April, it was a case of a full-blown nervous breakdown. ‘One night, I started hearing voices. I’d find myself in the shower at 4am, crying my eyes out. Finally, after another five months, on my fortieth birthday, I decided to try anti-depressants for the first time. That was the only drug I could handle. As a psychiatrist had suggested to me months earlier, it was like, “raising the basement”. But, sadly, I remained derailed from 4AD. I was now at least aware of where the tracks were but still unable to get back on, and uncertain if I even wanted to.’
Ivo had been keeping daily contact with the London office. ‘I’d get to the office at 10am, which was 2am in LA, and we’d run through everything that Ivo wanted carried out,’ says Richard Hermitage. ‘At 6pm, which was 10am in LA and Ivo had got up, I’d report back. This lasted until about April. And from where I stood, Ivo went missing. No one told me where he was because no one seemed to know.’
Hermitage says it was at least a week before he heard that Ivo was unwell. A four-man board of Hermitage, Hurley, Harper and Martin Mills convened to make decisions while Hurley took over Ivo’s daily transatlantic calls, an arrangement that Hermitage says, ‘lasted a long time’.
Ivo began to retreat from the LA office, as he had with Warners, for the comfort and security of his home and his wife Brandi. Feeling he should be honest about a worsening condition that isolated him from work and contact, Ivo faxed a letter of explanation and revelation to the London office. He ended it by asking anyone who had any questions to go ahead. ‘But not a single person did,’ he recalls. ‘I’m sure it scared the living daylights out of everyone. I’ve since learned they were anxious that London would become the satellite to the LA office, and if I’d remained healthy, that probably wouldn’t have happened. If I’d managed to sign bands and things had worked well through the Warners system, and that had grown, and everyone had been in love and making money … But it went the polar opposite way.’
Ivo plugged the time by attempting to learn the latest Cubase computer music software. ‘I remember letting the manual instructions drop out of my fingers and crying because it was like Greek to me! I’d never learnt how to engineer a record. I was hopeless!’ He still managed two instrumental sketches, one of which Ivo feels chimed with Portishead’s debut album Dummy that Colin Wallace had sent him: ‘It was the space and the sound, except Portishead’s was like a polished, finished, vocal version of what I’d done. I can’t remember what else Colin sent me, but there nothing I wanted to sign.’
Hurley: ‘It’s no coincidence that 4AD’s flight downwards started with Ivo’s withdrawal. He was the one fighting for no remixes, videos or singles, but as head of the American 4AD looking at a bigger view of the world, I was being persuaded, or even doing it willingly, to follow what the industry was doing, hoping it would lead to a new dawn and success to match Pixies, Breeders, Dead Can Dance and Belly. I really believed we could turn it around.’
Hurley’s problem was two offices, a combined staff of fourteen people and no idea what was really happening to the label’s totemic leader. LA, the heart of the entertainment industry and the epicentre of ego, where success was the most prized commodity, was not the city in which to have a nervous breakdown, triggered by all that it stood for. ‘You know what it’s like when you watch a band on TV, really going for it, with the sound muted?’ says Ivo. ‘It looks ridiculous and doesn’t make any sense. That’s what I felt about the music business.’
‘By the time Ivo got to America, he was enjoying the nightlife, drinking like an Englishman,’ Tim Carr recalls. ‘He let his hair down, even though he still had a monk’s crewcut! But he and I went through the same kind of thing, addiction problems, so I was hiding out on my days off, as he did.’‡
Ivo recalls a conversation with Miki Berenyi back in London. ‘When I told her I was moving to Los Angeles, her response was, “LA, what on earth for? It’s so fucking shallow.” I assured her that shallow was something I was actually looking forward to. Of course, she was right. Having loved the place for over fifteen years, I found that almost as soon as I bought a house we weren’t a match made in heaven. LA spat me out.’
At work, only Hurley was a confidant, but even he didn’t know the full extent of Ivo’s breakdown. ‘He’d disappear for a while, and then call, asking to meet,’ says Hurley. ‘So we’d go for a walk, like in the Zen garden in Pacific Palisades. He’d say that he was scared and uncertain, but, really, I had no idea what was going on. Brandi was equally confused, this relatively young girl who’d married him, and he’d literally gone off the rails. She wasn’t equipped to deal with it either. I’d let Simon Harper and Martin know some of what was going on. We all wanted to let Ivo sort through his demons, and then come back as the person we’d known.’
Ivo: ‘Robin was just incredible. To paraphrase Mark Kozelek, he didn’t judge, criticise or make demands, and he had my back. I was letting so many people down but his quiet, solid support, on a personal level, helped me to at least survive. So many people would’ve just got the hell out of there but I seriously doubt it crossed his mind.’
For all Hurley’s support, he couldn’t give 4AD A&R direction. Richard Hermitage says he had signed ‘great acts, but as an agent’ and had to accept that wasn’t his role at 4AD. Colin Wallace, Hermitage says, ‘got where Ivo was at, but Colin wasn’t Ivo’.
With releases on the schedule, Ivo’s absence was only felt by employees and artists used to his avuncular presence, from Germano to That Dog. ‘Ivo just vanished,’ says Rachel Haden. Anna Waronker adds, ‘We were a lot younger than Ivo, but he treated us as equals, and though I don’t recall him laying out all his woes, he did say he was disillusioned, and coming out to America had only added disappointment. After he met Brandi, he began to retreat.’
In between Lisa Germano’s Inconsiderate Bitch and Happiness, Red House Painters had released the Shock Me EP in the UK. After the clearing exercise of the last two albums, this was the first of a new batch, headed by an electric and an acoustic version of the EP’s title track, written by Kozelek’s teenage hard rock faves Kiss, revamped with the singer’s trademark exhaustion. A new album was in the process of being recorded but Kozelek admits he was struggling again in the producer’s role. On top of his indecision – which you might expect from his personality – ‘I had horrible fits of insomnia that delayed things for months,’ he says. ‘I thought the sound of my voice was too nasally and some tracks took for ever to complete.’
Charles Thompson had had no such doubts, and had fired through another session. Apart from the fourteen-track Bossanova, every album that Tho
mpson had worked on after Surfer Rosa had been fifteen tracks long, showing Thompson’s propensity for a speedy turnover of ideas. This time, he’d recorded twenty-two tracks, enough for a double album, inside which a superb single album was screaming to emerge.
Eric Drew Feldman, Nick Vincent and Al Clay had all returned for the session, with Joey Santiago one of three lead guitarists, giving tracks such as ‘The Hostess With The Mostest’ the same cut and thrust as Pixies. The lead single ‘Headache’ preceded the album Teenager Of The Year, which was as eclectic and sprawling as The Clash’s London Calling, from the joyful zip of ‘Big Red’ and the Beefheart-ian ‘Two Reelers’ to the fond Beatlesy vibe of ‘Vanishing Spies’ and reggaefied ‘Fiddle Riddle’, with more fascinating but underwhelming examples of roots music.
Ivo considers Teenager Of The Year ‘patchy’, but reviews were largely positive: ‘Black adopts a slightly less sprawling sound but maintains his penchant for turbulent, eclectic pop’ (Entertainment Weekly). ‘Black has loosened up, hunkered down and put together a killer Senior Variety Show … a happy sprawl of an album that holds together even as it offers some wild contrasts’ (NME).
Given that the Frank Black solo debut hadn’t sold as much as Pixies records, was it a good idea to follow it with a double album? It would have been difficult to dissuade Thompson when Red House Painters had been granted the privilege. The discussion at the LA studio owned by Eurythmic Dave Stewart was another unpleasant confrontation.