Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Hersh had good reason to celebrate as Sire had agreed to let her contract expire after University if they could have the rights to Hips And Makers, which hadn’t been covered by the Muses’ original deal. Of course, Sire didn’t make it easy. ‘I’d made Hips And Makers for no money, so I was immediately in the black,’ Hersh recalls. ‘But the day that we left Warners, they put my album into debt and I’ve never made another penny off it since. Warners know that I can’t afford to audit them.’

  But Hersh and Throwing Muses were now finally free from the yoke of Warners, and that was worth a lot. What Tanya Donelly would have given at that moment for some intra-band harmony, and some self-belief that the success she’d experienced around Belly’s Star was the right path to take.

  ‘I had freaked out one night when I was in LA, and Ivo had come to see me,’ she confesses. ‘We said to each other, what’s happened? Why can’t we handle it? I hated talking about myself in interviews. I didn’t even know how to represent myself. I didn’t understand why I had to do so many interviews either. The British press with the Muses had been so thoughtful, but schlepping from American radio station to station got to me. It felt like I had no ownership of myself, my art and my body.’

  ‘I remember that night very well,’ says Ivo. ‘I don’t often use the term, but our conversation got very dark. That night it felt like, in many ways, Tanya came to my rescue.’

  Which made the recording of the new Belly album at Nassau’s plush and expensive Compass Point studios, with veteran British producer Glyn Johns, seem like madness. The Bahamas was a glamorous jaunt for the rich, and Johns’ former clients included The Beatles, The Band, The Rolling Stones and The Eagles. Johns had also produced The Clash’s Combat Rock album but he still seemed a bizarre choice for Belly – unless it was done with Sire’s coercion, to initiate an inappropriate upgrade to make a proper rock star of Donelly, perhaps as the new Deborah Harry, Courtney Love or Stevie Nicks.

  ‘Glyn’s concept was to record us live, a simpler-is-better approach, which really appealed to us,’ Donelly recalls. ‘And we were Beatles devotees, so there was a historical appeal. We also got along extremely well and we liked his approach to the songs. Glyn needed to work outside the US for visa reasons, and we wanted someplace other than the UK. And Belly was a surfing beach bum band, after all! Recording in Nassau was much funkier and mellow than it sounds – we were not even aware of the island’s glam side while we were there.’

  After his hands-on steering of Star, Ivo’s condition meant he wasn’t involved this time, leaving Robin Hurley and Donelly’s manager Gary Smith to negotiate the terrain. But the true problem lay internally.

  ‘Band members were already not speaking,’ Donelly confesses. ‘That’s what an eighteen-month tour can do. I still had a civil relationship with Chris and Gail, but they weren’t talking to each other, and I wasn’t speaking to Tom even though we were a great songwriting team. And being brothers, Tom and Chris fought like crazy. And I was a horrible bandleader. I didn’t take the helm, and so the rudder was unmanned.

  ‘In Nassau,’ Donelly recalls, ‘it was a question of who could be in the studio together. The answer was nobody. It was quite a juggling act.’ But the real crime on King was Johns’ anodyne production. Ivo first listened to the album, and says that when Tanya’s voice came in, he couldn’t believe it had been mixed so high. ‘It was bonkers. After all, Glyn Johns had produced all those great early Steve Miller Band albums, including Sailor! It wasn’t the album Tanya was hoping for. I didn’t listen to it much after that.’

  Donelly: ‘For Ivo, not having a connection to the music he was imprinting was so antithetical to what 4AD was about. The connections we all felt had got colder and more clinical, because it was now about running a business.’

  Of the six B-sides shared between the album’s two singles ‘Now They’ll Sleep’ (good) and ‘Seal My Fate’ (not so good), the four produced at Boston’s trusted Apache Studio had the necessary fire that Johns had misplaced. The upgrade backfired as King’s sales also failed to match Star, though 350,000 in the US – and reaching number 6 in the UK national chart – showed that Belly had kept a dedicated fan base.

  Removed from listening to music, making music and the business of music, Ivo had turned his attention to dogs after Brandi had suggested the couple own one. It turned out to be a great idea as it set Ivo off on a new journey that has since reshaped his life. It began with a Chinese Shar Pei, the only breed they could agree on, says Ivo. ‘We got a boy and a girl from a breeder in Oregon. They were notorious for their lack of social skills regarding fellow canines but they proved to be a delightful handful. I might not have been going into the office every day but I was going to the dog park with the more sociable young dogs whilst walking the Shar Peis.’

  At this point, Ivo decided to officially step down from running 4AD on a day-to-day basis. The board that had been nominally in charge was dissolved and Robin Hurley made president of 4AD worldwide. One of his first jobs was to tell Richard Hermitage he was no longer required. ‘It was a shock, but the job had changed hugely,’ Hermitage says. ‘There wasn’t room for two in that structure.’

  Simon Harper recalls how Hermitage would arrive each morning carrying a briefcase, and that the receptionists would refer to him as Doctor Hermitage. It had been a frustrating experience for Hermitage to begin with, as he had accepted a job, and an office atmosphere, filled with uncertainty. ‘The company had been running like a machine and we were financially very sound as the back catalogue was bringing in a fortune, but no significant signing was made while I was at 4AD,’ he recalls. ‘And we had a bloated staff count. It was easy to take people on when you’re making money.’

  ‘Richard was even-keeled and practical but in retrospect, employing him was a crazy decision,’ says Simon Harper. ‘It was like throwing someone into the extremely deep end of the swimming pool – are they drowning or waving? He had an impossible task to start with. Half the people at 4AD didn’t know Richard, and were scratching their heads as to why we’d employed someone that hadn’t any experience of working at a record company.’

  Colin Wallace: ‘Richard didn’t have a clue. He began making cutbacks but he drove an expensive company car, like one rule for him and one for everyone else. But it must have been very strange for him. And my own judgement at the time was clouded by frustration and anger, because I was still taking drugs, even though I’d wanted to quit.’

  In the two years that Wallace had been Ivo’s A&R wingman, Ivo hadn’t responded to one thing that he had sent him, and Wallace admits that he’d felt disillusioned by that, and with the general mood of the office. He was also experiencing a painful personal comedown. ‘One time, my girlfriend said, “It’s fucking boring doing drugs”. Another time, Chris Bigg took me aside and said, “Your skin is grey and you’re as thin as a rake, I’m really worried about you”. Both really resonated with me, so I just stopped, went cold turkey. I couldn’t go backstage for five years because of the association with cocaine.’

  Even the v23 department had also pulled back from the druggy excesses, though Richard Hermitage had already been privileged, like Jim Beattie of Spirea X, to witness a Vaughan Oliver/glass roof episode, ‘on a cold, wet, dark day, as if Vaughan had created himself as his own installation’. The design team was already under the cosh of a vastly increased workload of extra formats, marketing campaigns, and now had the demands of the new digital age to contend with. ‘Neither Vaughan nor Chris could use a computer,’ says Tim O’Donnell, a designer from New York who had written to v23 about a job and enclosed a handmade book of Samuel Beckett poems. It did the trick, and O’Donnell joined v23, but it would prove something of an education for the young American.

  ‘Vaughan might disappear for days, and then turn up in the morning with a tray of gin and tonics from the pub across the road,’ O’Donnell claims. ‘He was still brilliant, and work would still carry on. We still had passionate, hilarious times, and awful times too, with
people yelling … Vaughan was not your average employer. But it made the work better. He was constantly challenging everything but he would let us work, though we understood the work couldn’t be middle of the road. If Vaughan hated it, he’d let you know immediately, which resulted in stronger work.’

  Perhaps the new digital form was the underlying reason why many v23 sleeves of this era were beautifully decorative – a psychedelic array of textures, colours and shapes – but rarely mined the savage, permissive side of Oliver’s creative brain. He was certainly having a rough time. First came the reduced size of the CD format, leaving him less of a canvas on which to create. Then he was forced to accept that his hands-on skills were being eroded as record companies began to refuse artwork unless it was in digitised form.

  ‘The tools of my trade had been taken away from me – the parallel motion drawing board, the glue, the scalpel, the comma at the end of the scalpel, the sense of crafting,’ Oliver recalls. ‘I was used to sitting in front of black-and-white artwork imagining colours, and now printers would just run through twenty variations for the sake of it. It took me a while to stop resenting the change. I don’t want to talk retro, but those were halcyon days, for music and for graphic design.’

  For whatever reason, Oliver had underperformed for Red House Painters, with another solitary photo (of a windmill this time) in a sepia wash – an echo of the repeating textures of Cocteau Twins covers. Perhaps this was the point, to reflect the way the band’s music had become so familiar, with Kozelek seemingly unable to move on either musically or lyrically.

  He admits that their third album, Ocean Beach, ‘had taken for ever to complete’ – only Robin Hurley’s intervention had encouraged Kozelek to put him out of his misery and accept it was finished. At 54 minutes (over an hour on double ten-inch vinyl, due to a bonus cover of ‘Long Distance Runaround’ by Kozelek’s favourite prog rock behemoths Yes), the album was another lengthy consolidation, although admittedly it was still a fine record, especially the opening, meditative instrumental ‘Cabazon’, piano ballad ‘Shadows’ and the epic finale ‘Drop’.

  Yet even with Red House Painters, Ivo also felt something wasn’t quite right. ‘There were some things that, a year earlier, I’d have had the strength and ability to voice, to persuade Mark to alter. Like a crazy guitar solo [on ‘Over My Head’] that just fizzled out. There’s some gorgeous stuff there, and I’d probably feel more positive about it all now, but I was disappointed at the time.’

  This sense of disappointment was to increase when lead guitarist Gorden Mack left the band. Kozelek’s more restricted skills were now centre stage, at which point he expanded the guitar solos as part of a shift towards classic/progressive rock that indicated progress. Nothing Kozelek now did sat well with Ivo. Red House Painters was one of the very few bands he’d see live, ‘but everything had become long and drawn out, and turned into comedy hour with Mark always talking,’ he recalls. ‘And his next lot of demos featured covers of Genesis and Wings songs that struck me as silly, with longer guitar solos. It all influenced my decision not to work with them again.’

  Ivo’s willingness to part ways with even Kozelek after the heights of their union showed his usual courage in putting a stop to something that he had lost touch with, but also that Ivo felt estranged from even his current favourite 4AD artists. Indeed, an 11-minute cover of Wings’ ‘Silly Love Songs’ was not the band that he had first fallen for.

  ‘Ivo had been my main contact and he was always there for me,’ Kozelek recalls, ‘but then I got word that Ivo wasn’t happy. When he finally made contact, there was a hostility that wasn’t like Ivo. It was the first time I was being told what to do, to lose the guitar solos and lose a few songs. It wasn’t the 4AD I’d signed to and I suppose I wasn’t the same artist anymore.’

  Kozelek offered to buy himself out of the deal, which would cost £30,000. To his shock, Ivo agreed. ‘I was in a state of disbelief, but I knew it was time to move on, and I felt confident that I could repay them,’ Kozelek says. ‘I didn’t have the romantic connections associated with the label that other artists did. I felt confident I’d have a career with or without 4AD. I wanted to sing and play guitar and didn’t care much about whose logo was on the record. I loved Black Sabbath, but who cared what label they were on?’

  After Island had released Red House Painters’ Songs For A Blue Guitar in 1996, Kozelek received a postcard from Ivo: ‘It said, “beautiful record, Mark!”’*

  Ivo: ‘It was the right decision at the time to let them go, but in hindsight, it was probably the stupidest decision I made at 4AD – though hardly the worst decision 4AD ever took. I should have let them release Songs For A Blue Guitar on 4AD. But it was all falling apart for me.’

  Ivo still had Heidi Berry and Lisa Germano to nurture, and he added eco-wood dweller Kendra Smith, another example of the folk rock stable that he was building, putting the music well before any idea of building careers, in the same manner as the Guernica venture. Even so, it was a bold move on Ivo’s part: Smith was another artist that had been around for a while, rather than a new name that might spark any kind of breakthrough.

  Smith didn’t respond to email requests for this book, and perhaps she still lives without such mod cons as electricity. But by 1995, she had forsaken the ‘off-the-grid community lifestyle’ for a band and a mini-album under the name The Guild Of Temporal Adventurers. Enjoying its hazy, acid-folky style, Ivo had asked Hurley (who knew Smith from the Opal days at Rough Trade) if he could set up a meeting with Smith. It took place at a road lay-by.

  Ivo: ‘I got directions to drive from Eureka, way up at the top of northern California, to a particular road stop, opposite a wood cabin motel where I would be staying. Kendra arrived and drove me deep into the woods where she and her boyfriend had built a couple of small structures. We spent a few hours together talking more about life off the grid than music, but by the end of the night, she’d agreed to make an album.’

  4AD’s press release for Five Ways Of Disappearing quoted Smith as saying, ‘I can deal directly with 4AD without the usual labyrinth of intermediaries and suits.’ She described her way of life as: ‘Primitive … it can be physically and “psychically” demanding. But it’s satisfying to me. There are many opportunities to study nature and conduct scientific experiments. I know enough of humans already.’

  Smith’s interest in music had been rekindled by a love of playing the pump organ, the rich, droning hum of which was all over her album. ‘I had intentionally stopped keeping up with new sounds on the “outside”, and knew 4AD mainly by reputation, so I was pleased when I enjoyed the tapes that Ivo sent me,’ the press release had continued. ‘Meanwhile, I’m still listening to Syd [Barrett], Can, Faust, Eno and a good amount of Middle and Near Eastern music. Certain melodies and frequencies attract me, but I find them here and there and not entirely in commercially produced music. It’s pretty obvious the artform has been vampirised, and its social and spiritual functions altered bizarrely by narcissism and greed.’

  The title Five Ways Of Disappearing suited both Smith and Ivo’s reticent nature, with drowsy lo-fi drones, a knit of violin, Turkish drums, Indian harmonium and fuzz guitar coloured by Smith’s deep, sleepy voice and pump organ (which appeared on v23’s cover artwork, alongside a cross section of a redwood tree). It was a little jauntier than both Opal and Temporal Adventurers records, as if life had been treating Smith better. ‘In Your Head’ was a sweet mid-tempo pop song and ‘Maggots’ more of a whimsical ditty. Ivo had wanted more of Smith’s sadder disposition, and as with Red House Painters’ Ocean Beach, felt let down.

  ‘It was unusual for 4AD to work with someone that we’d admired from a distance,’ he says. ‘“Aurelia” has always reminded me of Kevin Ayers and the cover of [Richard and Mimi Farina’s] “Bold Marauder” was fantastic. But it didn’t flow as well as the Temporal Adventurers record and I could have done without tracks like “Maggots”. But I’m glad we managed to get Kendra back into the studio on
e more time, before she went back to the woods. She probably thought, Why did I bother to do that? Robin [Hurley] might have liked to carry on, but I didn’t encourage it.’

  There would be no 4AD release for almost two months, a worrying precedent for a label maintaining two offices and a demanding Warners licence deal. The drop in A&R activity after Ivo’s breakdown had begun to show. A new project in the vein of This Mortal Coil that could have filled the gap, and given the media an angle, also failed to fire. ‘I think Ivo realised it was too big for him,’ says Lisa Germano.

  Ivo had conceived of a series of ten-inch singles to unite a 4AD artist with a cover of his choosing. The first to be recorded was Slowdive’s ‘Dagger’ with Brendan Perry producing Heidi Berry’s cover, but Ivo didn’t enjoy the result. Inexplicably, he also didn’t like the luminous version of Neil Young’s ‘Round And Round’ by Germano and her chosen backing band, Arizona’s Giant Sand, whose lynchpin Howe Gelb conjured something of Young’s sun-baked sound. Germano and Giant Sand believed in it, however, and they eventually released an album, Slush, under the mantle of OP8, on Thirsty Ear. ‘They screwed us over as we never saw any money,’ Germano recalls. ‘At least Ivo had given us the money to start it, and people tell us they love the record.’

  4AD staffer Chris Staley, who was co-ordinating the project for Ivo, says a video compilation also never came to fruition. Staley himself had left London for LA, for the same reason as Ivo, to try and resolve his depression. With Staley staying on the production side of the label, Ivo still single-handedly kept charge of A&R. But to his ears, nothing sounded good enough. Guernica had ended, Red House Painters wasn’t coming back, and Ivo also felt that he hadn’t been fulfilling his side of the deal with Paul Cox and Richard Roberts at Too Pure.