by Martin Aston
‘I gave them access to 4AD’s staff, warehouse space and distribution, but they got little guidance from me,’ he says. ‘Life was very busy and demanding and I later apologised to Paul and Richard, because I didn’t give them what Martin [Mills] had given me, someone to take on aspects of daily business, which was the last thing I was good at or wanted to do. Martin eventually took on that role for Too Pure as well.’
If 4AD’s trajectory was goin’ south, the label’s next release wasn’t going to change that, with the same communication breakdown that had marred his relationships with Spirea X, Swallow and The Glee Club.
Liquorice was formed by Jenny Toomey, a respected musician and activist on the Washington, DC punk scene. She’d sung in the children’s choir, absorbed her parents’ love of jazz and showtunes, ‘and the bad music you’d hear on the radio, like Foreigner’, none of which hinted at the political resolve that would determine her future. ‘I studied feminism and discovered it wasn’t an accident that I thought I couldn’t play music,’ she says, ‘and I immediately got into bands.’
To begin with, Toomey had joined forces with another former member of the children’s choir, Amy Pickering, in Fire Party, a pioneering all-women hardcore punk band. In 1990, Toomey had launched the independent label Simple Machines, run from a shared house in Arlington, Virginia with Kristin Thompson, who was also her bandmate in Tsunami. Toomey had also formed Grenadine with moonlighting Unrest member Mark Robinson. The pair had also briefly dated, though Ivo – who was still enjoying music at that point – says it was the women of Tsunami (rather than yet another creative couple) that had captivated him, much like That Dog had: ‘Jenny and Kristin’s voices, straining at the top of their range, gave me the chills.’
Toomey and Ivo first met at an annual event that Robinson was staging for DC’s indie fraternity. ‘Mark organised it like a wedding,’ Toomey recalls. ‘Bands would sit at different tables, and he’d hand gold records out, and we’d all sing a cappella versions of songs. Ivo came to at least a couple of them. The fact he was running a big label but was totally jazzed by this little weirdo event seemed cool to me.’
With Grenadine over by 1994 and Tsunami committed to its own Simple Machines label, Toomey responded to Ivo’s suggestion of an album with a suggestion of her own – an album of covers. Ivo wanted original songs, so Toomey suggested that she team up with Dan Littleton of New York trio Ida. Toomey recalls Robin Hurley – taking on Ivo’s traditional role of mentor – buying her music that they thought she should listen to: ‘I felt invested in, in a sweet and generous way. But Ivo was three steps removed for a lot of the time. He was like a mosquito that would come in real close, and then fade into the background.’
Warren Defever had produced Grenadine’s second album, Nopalitos, so Toomey and Littleton employed him to produce theirs. With His Name Is Alive’s regular drummer Trey Many joining up, Toomey christened the new trio Liquorice. She says they recorded twelve songs, ‘but Warren did about 87 mixes, four full C90 cassette tapes of all the same songs but named differently. People think the record is broken because of scratches through some songs, but that was Warren experimenting with technology.’
Another sign of Ivo’s altered perception was that in the past he’d often suggested releasing demos, yet Toomey says he told her the Liquorice album resembled demos, and that they should re-record the songs. ‘It was a challenge with Ivo,’ Toomey recalls. ‘We wrote “Blew It” about how he was driving us nuts [‘You won the prize for step back and revise and redo it/ And you wouldn’t sound so anaesthetised if you’d been through it/ But you blew it’]. He didn’t seem committed to us, or even interested, which was very frustrating. We had one hard conversation – he wasn’t much for words – about stepping away from people like me, Warren and Unrest, and I remember writing to him, saying, we’re the kind of people you should be betting on, because we’ll always make great music.’
Liquorice’s debut album Listening Cap was folkier and sparser than Tsunami’s sound, and free of straining female harmonies. (Toomey left her political fervour at home too; did artists sense Ivo’s avoidance of such leanings?) At least Ivo enjoyed the re-recorded version of the album: ‘It was a surprisingly acoustic and soft record, with a lovely, delicate atmosphere.’ But he didn’t ask for more. ‘It felt right as a one-off on 4AD. Years later, Jenny sent me a letter apologising for being very angry with me because we didn’t carry on. I don’t remember that anger.’
He suggests that Toomey’s reaction derived from the fact she ran her own label. ‘People think they’ll get loads more exposure with a label like 4AD. It was no different to Geffen thinking that That Dog would be established with indie cred from being licensed to us. Those days seemed over.’†
Ivo didn’t need to guide, reassure or even be present for Lisa Gerrard’s first solo album. The Mirror Pool had been recorded at home in Gippsland, partly with the Melbourne-based Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra. Two tracks had been conceived during Dead Can Dance sessions: ‘Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow’ was one of the peak performances of Gerrard’s career, sounding both serene and anguished, and the traditional ‘Persian Love Song’ first appeared on the duo’s live album Toward The Within. The orchestrations were one facet of a more classical outlook: ‘Largo’ was the opening aria from Handel’s opera Serse, and ‘The Rite’ came from a libretto Gerrard had written for a 1991 production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The cinematic score of ‘La Bas: Song Of The Drowned’ and a more ceremonial ‘Gloradin’ were featured in director Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat, initiating an association with Hollywood that still thrives.
In the early days, Gerrard may have given the impression of being a fragile flower, but Dead Can Dance’s continuing commitment and autonomy showed the same fearlessness that had led her into Melbourne’s roughest pubs. Gerrard could see how Ivo was now the fragile one that needed support. ‘Looking back, there were little clues,’ she says. ‘Ivo once sent me a few books on self-help that were not the kind of things I’d read, so why was he sending them? I didn’t ask. Eventually, I saw he was burnt out. He had to be a sociopath all those years, the host for the 4AD party that never stopped. It came with the job, but it wasn’t his nature.’
‘Sanvean’ was released as a single and rewarded with one of the few 4AD videos that would deserve a space on a compilation; it was directed by former 23 Envelope partner Nigel Grierson, and showed again his Tarkovsky/Stalker influences, all refracted sunlight, shadow and water. He’d turned to directing music videos and adverts after a feeling of disconnect from record covers. ‘It [designing artwork] wasn’t as much fun as when Vaughan and I did it,’ he says. ‘We had played off each other so well, as a team.’‡
By autumn of 1995, the mood around 4AD had turned dark, like its figurehead, a comedown after the peak success of 1993. But so had the mood across the music formerly known as ‘alternative’. Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, alongside other cases of heroin addiction, felt like a curtain coming down on grunge; on the rise was the punishing industrial electro of Nine Inch Nails – whose 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine had been partly produced by John Fryer – and the goth theatre of Reznor’s protégé Marilyn Manson, a more extreme version of Peter Murphy and Bauhaus’ patented ‘dark glam’.
Looking back, Pixies was a total aberration for 4AD; Ivo wasn’t remotely interested in the rock scene that followed in the band’s wake, and none of 4AD’s successes with Belly or The Breeders appeared to gve him any lasting pleasure. In Ivo’s sunken and isolated state, he’d assembled a modest roster that happened to chime with the nascent Americana movement, and given the nature of preconception, core 4AD collectors were thrown by this, while equally committed fans of roots music thought of 4AD as a fountain of alternative rock. This wasn’t to change even with 4AD’s most striking additions in years.
The San Francisco-based quartet Tarnation was spearheaded by Paula Frazer, whose vocal style originated from the western side of country music, the sound of the lonesome pra
irie and Roy Orbison, and a perfect conduit for songs about crushed love. Raised in the hamlet of Sautee Nacoochee in Georgia’s Smoky Mountains, Frazer had sung in her minister father’s church choir. Her mother – who would say, ‘What in tarnation?’ rather than swear – taught Frazer piano and guitar, and introduced her to the best of America’s music traditions – gospel, jazz, Fifties crooners and country, especially superstars Patsy Cline and George Jones.
Frazer was fourteen when the family moved to Eureka Springs, a Christian community nestled among the Ozarks mountains of Arkansas. But when Frazer struck out alone, to San Francisco, she tried her hand at punk rock, or what she called ‘the moany, dirgier side of punk’, in local bands such as Frightwig. This was goth by any other name. Frazer was rescued by joining Savina, a women’s choir that specialised in Bulgarian choral music. Tarnation, born in late 1992, bottled a haunting blend of Appalachian and Balkan folk. ‘I was always drawn to music of the imagination and landscape, such as [Italian composer Ennio] Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks,’ she says. ‘So it fell into place for me to write that music myself.’
Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares had led Frazer to 4AD, and on to This Mortal Coil, ‘which,’ she says, ‘reminded me of choral music.’ Mark Kozelek had alerted 4AD’s LA office to Tarnation’s debut album I’ll Give You Something To Cry About released in 1993 by the tiny indie Nuf Sed. The label was run by the band’s original lap steel guitarist Brandon Kearney, though the album had been recorded with guitarist Lincoln Allen, bassist Michelle Cernuto and drummer Matt Sullivan.
Ivo had immediately responded: ‘Paula had an extraordinary, ancient-sounding, country voice, from a time before Emmylou, with a real edge to it. “Game Of Broken Hearts” was especially stunning.’ Ivo’s favourite track had been recorded by Frazer, alone at home, with an old microphone.
His preferred strategy for Tarnation’s 4AD debut was to cherry-pick seven songs from the album and have the band record new material that fitted his choices – as expected, the band’s maudlin side, for example ‘Big O Motel’, ‘Do You Fancy Me’ and ‘The Well’, abandoning the uptempo or overtly Nashville-influenced material. With its twisted roots and gothic aura, Gentle Creatures was 4AD’s first release to blend Ivo’s love of Seventies country rock with classic Eighties 4AD, infused with the fumes of the Californian desert where he felt most at home.
In a role that Ivo might have adopted in the days when he felt engaged with his artists, Warren Defever remixed Tarnation’s old tracks and oversaw the new recordings, giving Frazer’s voice the necessary range of stark, haunting and blissful. ‘Warren was great, like a mad professor,’ she recalls. ‘We had similar aesthetics, recording with interesting microphones and wire recorders from the Thirties, and using different rooms, like a garage.’
With Listening Cap, The Mirror Pool and Gentle Creatures, the quality and quantity of 4AD’s schedule had gone north again. Next was Air Miami’s debut album Me Me Me. The name was new but it was the same creative force as Unrest, namely Mark Robinson and Bridget Cross. Robinson had laid the Unrest name to bed six months after the release of Perfect Teeth: ‘It was all the major label-type work we were doing,’ he says. ‘Constant interviews, travelling too much, no manager or a proper tour bus, performing at the distribution warehouse or in a boardroom … we got antsy.’
Drummer Phil Krauth had decided to record his own songs, and had been replaced by Gabriel Stout, which was enough for Robinson to strike up a new band name, honouring the Miami location where Me Me Me was recorded – the same studio where the Bee Gees had made Saturday Night Fever – ‘all silly decisions made by me that Ivo went along with,’ says Robinson. He and Cross ensured the album continued in Unrest’s vein of superior guitar-pop, though Robinson rightly suggests that ‘the songs were more succinct, shorter and pop-oriented’.
Two tracks, ‘I Hate Milk’ and a remixed ‘Afternoon Train’ formed half of a following EP that Ivo perversely insisted should be titled Fuck You, Tiger. Robinson willingly agreed, as it appealed to his sense of humour; Me Me Me was Air Miami’s only album. ‘I think Bridget and I both waited for the other to schedule a rehearsal, which never happened – I guess we lost interest,’ says Robinson. ‘The last Air Miami shows had Phil Krauth back on drums, so it was an Unrest reunion of sorts.’
Robinson persisted with the Teen-Beat label, as a labour of love, but was to concentrate on his new creative vocation of graphic design. Ivo couldn’t be as flexible. 4AD was a much larger and unwieldy operation than Teen-Beat, with offices, staff, contracts … Had he sold 4AD at this juncture, he would have been financially secure, but it would have taken a much bolder decision than Ivo was capable of making. The decision behind the label’s next signing also lacked the necessary clarity. Scheer wasn’t even Ivo’s discovery, but Colin Wallace’s, and Ivo’s permission wasn’t even linked to a true belief in the band’s music.
From County Derry in Northern Ireland, Scheer had been formed by vocalist Audrey Gallagher, guitarist Neal Calderwood and bassist Peter Fleming who all met at university. After co-guitarist Paddy Leyden and drummer Joe Bates joined, the band released the single ‘Wish You Were Dead’ and EP Psychobabble on the local indie label SON. Calderwood loved Cocteau Twins, and Scheer had a delicate side, but Gallagher loved her hard rock and metal, acts like Thin Lizzy, AC/DC and Pantera, so, she says, ‘I pushed for the heavier side of things.’
Wallace was smitten by Gallagher’s voice and the band’s musical clout. ‘It was completely different from 4AD, but people in the office liked Scheer too. And bizarrely, Ivo kinda liked them, or Audrey’s voice, or he thought it could do something. And they were great live.’
Ivo had hired Wallace to be an A&R filter rather than source, but admits, ‘I knew Colin was disillusioned, so I needed to say yes to something. There was also again growing concern and despondency in the UK office that the focus was all on America. I did like Scheer’s first records and Audrey’s voice, but I mostly liked an acoustic demo. And I really enjoyed a semi-acoustic gig they did in New York.’
Perhaps it was more than the voice, but the look and the presence that had seduced Ivo. ‘Audrey was a short, red-headed Northern Irish girl, completely at odds with her voice, which had that 4AD siren thing going on,’ says Cliff Walton. ‘She could make you weak at the knees.’
The next night, Ivo saw Scheer perform, in all their heavy, amplified glory, so he knew what he was taking on. It was like a repeat of Swallow or Spirea X – a shift towards the ‘here and now’ of grunge. Once he had given the nod, Scheer began recording with Head, who’d done such a sterling job producing PJ Harvey’s debut album Dry. But neither the band’s Schism EP nor the promo version of ‘Demon’ were even worthy of the enticing description ‘a turbo-charged Sundays’, as one reviewer suggested. ‘An Irish version of former Guernica signing Bettie Serveert’ seemed more accurate.
Scheer wasn’t an outright anomaly at 4AD – Pixies and The Breeders had rocked out just as hard; it was simply that Scheer’s crunching power chords and grunge appeal had never been heard on a 4AD album. The collective view of the early adopters of internet fan forums was that the band represented a kind of betrayal. ‘Despite the signing of bands like Tarnation and the loss of Red House Painters, [4AD] has never raised quite as many eyebrows as when they recently signed this not-so-shoegazing Irish rock band,’ wrote Lee Graham Bridges at the online site WestNet. ‘The event has been seen by many 4AD fans as, at best, quite a change in the way the label does business.’
Richard Hermitage, who was still at 4AD when Scheer were signed, admits not all of 4AD London supported Wallace. ‘They were a mistake, with nothing to commend them,’ he says. ‘4AD was in a very good situation since anything it signed would get immediate media attention, so confronting people by signing a band like Scheer wasn’t helpful to the label.’
The band knew it wasn’t popular with the 4AD cognoscenti. ‘Ivo took a bit of a bashing in an interview, which he countered by saying he hadn’t intentional
ly set out to create a brand, he was just signing music he liked,’ says Neal Calderwood. ‘It seemed people were fans of 4AD and not necessarily the bands. We plodded on anyway.’
It was thought Scheer might more easily fulfil the expectations of 4AD’s licensing deal. On his first visit to Warners since 1993, Ivo joined Robin Hurley to sell Scheer to the licensees. ‘Though Scheer was out of place on 4AD, Ivo sang the group’s praises to Warners,’ Hurley recalls. ‘Since grunge was still ever-present, with a bit of luck with radio, a band like Scheer could connect.’
It had been a testing time for Warners, with internal problems that dwarfed anything 4AD was experiencing. ‘We’d been ripped apart by the corporate heads,’ recalls Tim Carr, and even Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin had been ousted, leaving by the end of 1994 after a public conflict with Warner Music Group chairman Robert Morgado, who made Steven Baker the new president of the record company. Waronker ended up heading the A&R part of David Geffen’s new label DreamWorks; he took Tim Carr with him. ‘Ivo would have felt that I might be let go, but he’d always have Lenny and Mo,’ says Carr. ‘I’d worked at Capitol where the same guy that had signed The Beatles was still running it – you always felt you had stability. But all of that was ripped away from every single major label.’
4AD’s biggest supporter at Warners had gone, as well as the head honcho who had sanctioned the deal, and though only Dead Can Dance had made a decent return on the major’s investment, Steven Baker nevertheless picked up the option for a further two years, to take the deal through to the end of 1997.
‘Ivo had a singular sensibility, like a colour,’ Baker feels. ‘Even Warners had a sensibility, which had become fractured since the days when it was a very LA-sounding folk rock label. But it was surviving because it had so many different parts, and 4AD was one of them. Warners was interested in individuals, like Tom Silverman at [rap label] Tommy Boy, who hadn’t been hot for a while but Mo thought he was worth taking a shot on, and it turned out to be a great deal. Ivo fit into that category. Sometimes it’s not the label, it’s the individual, and 4AD as Ivo’s brainchild was unique.’