by Martin Aston
‘Charles could be right in your face, literally so, getting his point across, out of excitement or anger,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I’d always enjoyed the enthusiastic version but this was the first time he got very confrontational. He was really keen to release a double album, suggesting he’d probably never get the chance again. Instead of just telling me that that was important to him, he got incredibly defensive. [Thompson’s manager] Ken Goes was also peculiarly confrontational, probably because he wanted to impress Charles.
‘Maybe Charles, in his heart, knew the album didn’t deserve to be a double and he overcompensated in his effort to convince me or, as I’ve often wondered, this was a method to get me to drop him, as I had with Cocteau Twins. With Rick Rubin at American Recordings waiting in the wings, should Elektra not choose to pick up the remaining solo album option, it worked, as I left that studio thinking it was best not to work with Charles or Ken again.’
Whatever issues Thompson had, the end of Pixies hadn’t solved them, and the aftermath had probably made them worse. ‘Charles got most of the blame in the press for Pixies’ split, and his early albums got overlooked in the excitement to write about Kim, who was such a popular character,’ Ivo feels. ‘Charles resented that there was so much good will towards Kim and I’m sure it confused him that his solo records never sold anything like Pixies albums. But a solo Bono record would sell much less than U2. Compare the sales of Brendan and Lisa’s solo albums to Dead Can Dance albums.’
Thompson admits that The Breeders’ success had negatively impacted on his relationship with 4AD: ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have even realised it at the time, but I had lots of self-esteem issues floating around. After all, I was the big poo-bah, Pixies’ frontman and songwriter, with important things to say, so I felt I should have been treated with a lot of respect as a solo artist. Kim had a big hit single with The Breeders, bigger than Pixies, and good for her. But it made me feel like I wasn’t liked. It wasn’t like I wasn’t still trying to make creative progress, so it ruffled my feathers for sure.’
Thompson also concedes that the bond between Ivo and Kim Deal had been difficult to endure. ‘They had a yin-yang connection, which I now understand, because sometimes the male-female dynamic works better and male-male isn’t so good,’ he admits. ‘I find the idea of talking to a male therapist nauseating, for example. When I think of the women I get along with best, it’s not usually romantic. But otherwise, I don’t know why I wasn’t getting on with 4AD. But Ken wasn’t getting on with them either. Sometimes your representatives think they’re looking out for you when they’re burning bridges instead. It was all too touchy. Maybe between the aggressive style of Ken and my cockiness, it kept people at bay.’
At the time, Thompson claimed his reason for leaving 4AD was that Teenager Of The Year didn’t get enough promotion from the label. He dismisses that view today, ‘but 4AD had a beautiful thing going with Pixies and my solo thing wasn’t as beautiful,’ he says. ‘How could it be the same? Ivo tried to stay interested, and he flew over to hear what I was doing as I was spending lots of money, so they wanted to make sure I wasn’t completely off the rails.’
In any case, Thompson thinks that his contract with 4AD had already ended. ‘Ultimately, I didn’t live in the UK, so I decided to try my luck elsewhere,’ he concludes. ‘I wasn’t beholden to 4AD, and though I felt bad that I didn’t stay, I had to move on.’
More than Belly or The Wolfgang Press, the fallout from Ivo’s meeting with Thompson was the last straw for Ivo – according to his brother Perry: ‘The renown 4AD had achieved was partly down to the twin pillars of high artistry and commercial success that was Cocteau Twins and Pixies, and in both cases, the relationships with Ivo deteriorated pretty drastically. I think Ivo’s heart was broken, maybe more than a girlfriend could have broken it, where you feel you’ve given everything, and yet they will turn and stab you in the back for no apparent reason, so why the hell are you devoting yourself heart, body and soul, with no loyalty or appreciation? But life is seldom simple.’
Life certainly hadn’t turned out easy for Kim Deal in the wake of Last Splash. A strained touring schedule culminated in the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, fourth on the bill behind The Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys and George Clinton & The P-Funk All Stars. Deal felt that they needed a record to coincide with the festival, and responded to an album that had now sold 1.5 million copies with a vinyl-only ten-inch EP of bristling lo-fi, in case anyone had thought the band had forgotten its roots. Joining the atonal, thrashy title track of the Head To Toe EP, written by bassist Josephine Wiggs, and the appeasing presence of Last Splash single ‘Saints’ were covers of songs by lo-fi underdogs Guided By Voices (‘Shocker in Gloomtown’) and Sebadoh (‘Freed Pig’).
Josephine Wiggs says that Head To Toe was a response to the difficulty of reproducing the layered sound of Last Splash on stage. But she also acknowledges that there was more to it: ‘Kim would have felt under a lot of pressure to carry on, and that the next album must be even bigger and better.’
Deal had also notably turned down a Levi’s ad campaign that wanted to use ‘Cannonball’. ‘Everyone knew that if Kim had agreed, The Breeders would have been huge,’ says Ivo. ‘“Cannonball” was the tune of 1993, but she wouldn’t be defined by it.’
The same week in June that 4AD released Head To Toe, Lush returned with its second album, Split. With former producer Robin Guthrie consigned to the past, discussions with manager Howard Gough about a replacement producer had raised the name of Bob Mould. The former Hüsker Dü guitarist told Spin magazine that he’d talked to one of the band – Emma Anderson – but had declined ‘because I kept picking the wrong girl’s songs … I had to get out before I broke up the band!’
Favouring Miki Berenyi’s material might well have been a fatal start for Mould, given the rivalry between her and Anderson, which added internal tension to go with the external pressure. But the two women were united in their view of their manager. Berenyi says Gough also suggested hard rock specialists Bob Rock, Rick Rubin and [Led Zeppelin’s] John Paul Jones. ‘Howard went nuts with his suggestions, all because he wanted us to break America.’
Eventually, Lush got its way by hiring Mike Hedges, who had worked with The Cure, Associates and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The recordings had gone well, Berenyi says, until Hedges insisted he had to mix the album at his home in rural France. ‘We ended up in the middle of nowhere, isolated, with no TV, and everyone homesick. Mike kept disappearing and, again, we were never assertive enough to ask why. Howard and Ivo began to vanish at the same time, and Tim Carr! The three people who were meant to guide us were gone.’
Lush’s theory was that Hedges was being badgered into spending time with his family, but either way, the mixes he turned in were universally disliked. Ivo told the band in his usual plain-speaking manner. ‘We ended up having a massive row,’ says Berenyi. ‘I said, “Where have you been? You can’t come in at the last minute and just say it’s shit”.’
Ivo: ‘I think Brandi had suggested I start the conversation by being very positive, as my approach was usually to just say what I felt, and I’d take for granted people knew what I liked about something so I could get to what I didn’t like. I praised certain songs, but it veered into me saying it needed remixing. Miki said, “It’s not your fucking record”, and I replied, “It’s my fucking record label, you better think about it”.
Gough further upset Lush by commissioning remixes from R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, another American, designed to raise Lush’s US profile. ‘Our opinion wasn’t asked, and we got railroaded into Scott, who was up his arse,’ Berenyi says. Lush’s choice, Alan Moulder, engineer and remixer to the likes of My Bloody Valentine and The Smashing Pumpkins, turned in the incisive mixes that were used on the album Split.
With Ivo preoccupied, the risky decision to release two new Lush singles on the same day was Tim Carr’s at Warners. It was an undeniable gimmick, but at least the band’s two distinct halves equally shone, from Berenyi�
�s buzzing ‘Hypocrite’ to Anderson’s lengthy, languid ‘Desire Lines’, which Ivo thinks is Lush’s best song, and Split his favourite Lush album.
The timing of Split wasn’t great. Gough’s ambitions had expanded to running his own label, Laurel, funded by the major label London; it kicked off in March 1994 with Tiny Monroe (who Gough also managed). Howard said he saw himself as an ‘Ivo figure’, claims Berenyi. ‘But he didn’t have Ivo’s taste – and when Howard started his own label, he wasn’t good at picking potentially successful bands, because he was far too swayed by what others thought.’
Laurel’s next signing proved Berenyi’s point. Menswear was the tragic, youthful wannabes of the new Britpop scene, riding on the coat-tails of far better and more successful bands Suede, Blur, Elastica and the new, brash kids in town, Oasis. Enough time had passed from even post-punk to see influences such as Wire alongside Seventies glam and Sixties pop, a brash and declamatory mix that was shifting the axis of the UK mainstream – as grunge had Stateside – further away from Ivo’s introverted model of progressive and folk roots. Even if he had cared, Ivo was too far from the Britpop epicentres of London and Manchester to have a chance of finding fresh bands, while the A&R feeding frenzy would have alienated him.
Next to Oasis, Berenyi says, ‘shoegazing was that soft, southern shite’. Split was well named, as reviews were both positive and negative. ‘One said we were irrelevant because we just sang about fluffy clouds,’ says Berenyi. ‘Fucking hell! How much darker could the lyrics be?’ Anderson says subjects under discussion included child abuse, abandonment, neglect and, on ‘When I Die’, the death of her father. NME recognised the content but said it needed more heavyweight music. ‘We shouldn’t have paid attention,’ says Berenyi. ‘But it felt personal, that people wanted to crucify us – and shoegazing.’
The fact that neither ‘Desire Lines’ nor ‘Hypocrite’ reached the UK top 50 might have been down to each single halving the chance of the other, but Split’s chart placing of 19 – twelve lower than Spooky – confirmed that audiences had already transferred allegiances to Britpop. Fortunately, the US wasn’t judging Lush by the same trend-based criteria, but Warners decided against releasing either single, preferring that the band keep touring. Having only played two shows in 1993, they would play sixty-four shows by the end of 1994, over half of them in America. ‘The Cranberries and The Sundays, even Belly, had sold lots of records, and Howard thought Lush could be the next female-fronted band to suddenly sell a million,’ says Anderson. ‘Calm down, I said, it won’t happen. Or just let it happen naturally.’
On tour in Europe, Lush began to experience Richard Hermitage’s budgetary controls in the wake of Ivo’s breakdown, one of which was reducing overheads. ‘It was a fucking nightmare,’ says Berenyi. ‘We didn’t have a hotel for the first week, just the tour bus, so we’d have to find change at 7am just to use the toilet at a station, and to wash in the sink. Richard asked if we needed a soundman on tour. I’ll tell you what – no, and we can ask someone in the audience if they know the songs so we don’t need to sing either! That was more of Ivo backing away, saying, “Richard deals with everything now …” But Richard was an idiot. And Howard was nowhere to be seen either.’
At least Lush had a profile in America as well as Europe, more so than their peers Pale Saints. Without Ian Masters, the band was a more generic and less absorbing entity, though Ivo says ‘Henry’ (named after the Polish composer Henryk Górecki) is his favourite Pale Saints track, written by the band’s new singer and songwriter Meriel Barham. Her influence happened to make the band’s new EP Fine Friend and its third album Slow Buildings sound more like Lush – at ten slowly evolving minutes, ‘Henry’ was Pale Saints’ equivalent to the latter’s ‘Desire Lines’. The arrival of new bassist Colleen Brown also meant that Pale Saints shared Lush’s boy/girl split.
Sessions with Mark Freegard – chosen because of his Breeders sessions – hadn’t worked out, so Ivo had rehired Hugh Jones. He was a sensible choice, but Ivo’s suggestion that Barham write new lyrics to the melody of ‘Poison In The Airwaves’ – the B-side of a 1981 single by the obscure Scottish band Persian Rugs – was frankly bizarre. ‘This was post-This Mortal Coil,’ says Ivo, ‘and I was flinging off ideas for covers to people, but not getting involved in the outcome.’
This had turned into the title track of Fine Friend, a very pretty slice of what Miki Berenyi calls ‘soft southern shite’. Barham told 4AD fanatic Jeff Keibel in 2002 that she did ‘Fine Friend’ out of a sense of obligation. ‘Ivo gave us a lot of freedom and never really pressured us … but I didn’t really like the result.’
To have a stranger’s melody provide the base of what would become your band’s lead single was an undermining gesture to say the least. Barham could conceivably have given Pale Saints a profile to match Lush, but after a European and American tour and a cover of ‘Jersey Girl’ for the Tom Waits tribute album Step Right Up, she left the band, which eventually split up in 1996. ‘I didn’t really enjoy the last year of Pale Saints,’ she told Keibel.
One of Pale Saints’ last shows was in September during a California version of The 13 Year Itch. Ivo called the week-long event All Virgos Are Mad after his and Vaughan Oliver’s star sign. Ivo was well enough to attend the first shows, but his rally had come too late to choose tracks for the accompanying compilation. In his place, without the proper planning, Chris Staley had been forced to assemble the CD from 4AD’s back catalogue. There was just one unreleased offering – His Name Is Alive’s tinny pop collage ‘Library Girl’ – and a barely noticeable remix of Pale Saints’ ‘Fine Friend’.
In theory, this was a cardinal sin in Ivo’s eyes, but it was no time for adhering to principles. In fact, Ivo had had the idea of releasing compilations, ‘not by 4AD artists, but just music I loved. I remember one tape had Miles Davis, Dan Hicks, Fever Tree, Throbbing Gristle, diverse, eclectic stuff. It was a light-bulb moment, and probably my first manic episode. I was charging around, making up C90 cassettes that I gave to Robin [Hurley] and Simon [Harper], but they got steered away from the idea. The tapes ended up being used during the All Virgos Are Mad shows, over the PA.’
Warren Defever was master of ceremonies again for the larger shows at the Troubadour, with more intimate affairs taking place at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. All Virgos Are Mad was timed to coincide with a prestigious exhibition of v23 artwork at the Pacific Design Center in LA. Vaughan Oliver gave his show a separate title: This Rimy River (subtitled Vaughan Oliver and v23 Graphic Works, 1988–94 [peep]), named after a line in a poem written by his then partner Victoria Mitchell. Oliver says the limited edition of the accompanying book is his favourite ever piece of work. ‘There were seventy-two words in the poem, I put one on each page, I then took scraps from the waste bin and used those images to print over the regular edition, so you’d have had to buy that to be able to read it,’ he explains. ‘It was a perverse thing to do, like running over your favourite child. It took three months and burned out two assistants. The printing cost £16,000. Which other independent record company would finance that?’
Oliver’s artwork for the All Virgos Are Mad compilation visualised a similar state of madness by turning the song titles into anagrams (‘Effin Diner’ for ‘Fine Friend, ‘I Sing Duff’ for ‘Diffusing’, ‘Rude Lob Drama’ for ‘Bold Marauder’, etc), while the photograph of a woman’s face was covered not in what appeared to be scratches, but in physical slashes that had been carefully re-stitched by hand. ‘It was to take something beautiful and slowly destroy it, which was a theme through a number of our sleeves,’ says Oliver. The reverse image ladled on the irony with the image of a bowl of cherries.
The LA Times paid suitable homage in a feature by journalist Lorraine Ali. ‘Some of the most valuable rock’n’roll over the years has been served up by small, independent labels, but few of these indie labels have been as identifiable – aurally and visually – as 4AD. Over the past fourteen years, the London-bred company has coupled spiritu
al, dark and surreal music with its own style of abstract album art and presented it all with handmade care.’
‘Creativity is a gift,’ Lisa Germano told Ali. ‘But when most labels try to market this gift and make hits, strangely enough, creativity is the very thing that gets destroyed. For me, 4AD’s greatest quality is that they promote creativity and uniqueness.’
Ivo was quoted as saying he was both sceptical and appreciative of the respect his label has garnered. ‘On the one hand,’ he said, ‘it’s frustrating when people refer to a 4AD sound – is it the Pixies or is it Dead Can Dance? But on the other hand, when people describe something as “4AD-esque” I find it quite flattering, though I’m not sure what it means. It’s like they’ve created a genre that doesn’t exist.’
Ivo used the opportunity to again intermingle the UK and US factions; Lisa Germano, Red House Painters, Brendan Perry, Pale Saints, Kristin Hersh, His Name Is Alive, Heidi Berry and Michael Brook all played … though not The Breeders, who were on Lollapalooza duty. There were a handful of surprises too – Ian Masters and Warren Defever playing as a duo, a solo show by Lisa Gerrard. Also playing was Air Miami, the successor to Unrest with new drummer Gabriel Stout. The Wolfgang Press had a surprise guest – Tom Jones, who Ivo curtly viewed as an unnecessary injection of ‘light entertainment’.
Jones’ presence would come to light when The Wolfgang Press’s new album was released in 1995. The other unexpected appearance was Kendra Smith. David Roback’s former partner in Opal had been living, frugally and remotely, in a cabin in the northern California woods since 1988, and though she had released a mini-album (Kendra Smith Presents The Guild of Temporal Adventurers) in 1992 through the tiny LA label Fiasco, signing to 4AD was a much bigger deal. Both Smith and Air Miami had recorded tracks for the All Virgos Are Mad compilation, and were recording albums for 4AD on one-off contracts – hardly the way Warners wanted Ivo to proceed. ‘Warners needed me to sign things that would sell and be loved,’ he says. ‘But I wasn’t hearing much I liked, let alone good choices, that would be workable in that environment.’