by Martin Aston
Baker explains that few labels were so individually looked after as 4AD: ‘Another was Daniel Miller at Mute, who would also moonlight as an artist, and he bought into a sound early on. By comparison, Tony Wilson at Factory was more mercenary about what he could sell. We renewed the deal with 4AD because Robin Hurley was smart and we still believed in Ivo as a signer of artists. Dead Can Dance was doing well, and knowing Belly, The Breeders and Lush, there was always potential for something wonderful to happen. We were lucky to be involved with Ivo and it made sense to consolidate the deal.’
The sensibility that Baker had defined was Ivo’s ability to read the signs of the times. 4AD’s mini-wave of Americana expanded to include a band that were almost tailor-made to give his love of west coast country rock a very English makeover, with an air of retreat and isolation.
Mojave 3 had risen from the ashes of Slowdive, paragons of shoegaze with a particularly billowing, symphonic style. They were also one of only two bands defined as shoegaze to have a male/female core (the other being the more overtly electronic duo Curve) in Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell. Halstead was Slowdive’s main songwriter and guitarist, but Goswell sang a lot of the lead vocals. The pair had been friends since primary school in Reading, and lovers from the age of eighteen until twenty-two. A self-confessed ‘ex-goth’, Goswell was a 4AD and Smiths fan while Halstead preferred the noisier end of things, such as My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Both had been signed by Creation, so it made sense that Slowdive would be too.
As Heidi Berry had already discovered, Creation’s support could evaporate quickly, especially once Britpop and Creation’s flagship band Oasis had taken over. Goswell says the band’s confidence had been dented by a press backlash; Richey Edwards of the politicically-charged Manic Street Preachers had labelled Slowdive ‘worse than Hitler’ – a great soundbite but the same blunt criticism that Melody Maker’s Everett True had levelled at Lush.
Ivo had adored the ethereal and progressive airs of Slowdive’s early EPs: ‘They were mournful and really pretty. They took the shimmering guitar approach that Robin Guthrie had possibly invented to a new level.’ He’d been less fond of the band’s albums, even the electro-ambient beauty Pygmalion. This was Neil Halstead’s reaction to Creation’s demand for a more commercial record, turning the other way instead towards his love of Talk Talk, electronics and Ecstasy. Creation subsequently dropped Slowdive, and, ‘sick of music and the industry’, Halstead went off travelling. On his return, he turned to acoustic music, he says, as a way back into enjoying music again. ‘I also started to broaden my listening, into song-based country like Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt.’
Halstead’s new songs were less Nashvillian country rock and more bucolic Britain in a Nick Drake vein. Halstead soon moved to the wild coast of Cornwall, at the south-west tip of the country, well out of reach of the music industry, where he took up surfing. A demo made with the help of Goswell and Slowdive drummer Ian McCutcheon reached Ivo via the band’s manager Sheri Hood, who had also been representing Ultra Vivid Scene.
The demo tape had Slowdive’s name on it, and Ivo recalls he had left it on the kitchen counter for a couple of weeks. ‘I thought, if they’d been dropped and 4AD wasn’t having a blazing success with anything, what could we do that Creation couldn’t? But once I played the tape, I instantly adored it.’
‘We were amazed that Ivo loved it, and that we’d jumped from one great label to another,’ says Goswell. ‘But we were tentative about how the 4AD office would take to us, because of our history. We imagined they’d think, What do we do with this lot? And I sensed their hesitancy when we met them. But Ivo had faith in us when no one else did.’
Ivo recalls Martin Mills later telling him about a huge resistance in the UK office towards this ex-Creation band: ‘The staff needed something more vibrant. But the album was a consistently beautiful, sad record – some melodies even reminded me of Pearls Before Swine. Better than all that Britpop nonsense. No, not nonsense, but Britpop was for young people.’
‘I remember being envious of all the excitement around Oasis taking off,’ 4AD press officer Colleen Maloney recalls. ‘The biggest music movement in the world was happening on our doorstep, but Ivo’s signings reflected what was going on in his head.’
Warners president Steven Baker also had some reservations. ‘Red House Painters and Mojave 3 were good examples of Ivo being ahead of his time; you hear so much stuff today that’s reminiscent of those bands,’ he says. ‘But at the time, unfortunately I’d have been listening for a hit rather than the quality of the music, which is the worst way of listening. But radio is the most constrictive format possible; it only wants what’s already a hit. Not even Blur and Oasis were revered in America.’
The management at 4AD were also aware that neither Ivo nor Colin Wallace, given his post-drug sobriety, were sufficiently driven to find an artist at grass roots level, by seeing them in their most formative stages, to network among other artists rather than await the demo alongside every other A&R person. There might not have been a business plan on the table but it had been decided to spend another salary for an injection of fresh ears.
Lewis Jamieson had replaced Colin Wallace as 4AD’s warehouse manager, and followed his predecessor into A&R – it had even been Wallace’s suggestion, which had secured Robin Hurley’s support. From Lytham St Annes on the Lancashire coast, Jamieson had graduated in English and taken a Master’s degree in media and communication studies, only to be distracted by music and clubbing. After moving to London to be closer to the action, he had sold advertising space to earn money. When his friend and DJ companion Tony Morley mentioned a vacancy in the warehouse when Wallace had been promoted to ‘negative’ A&R, Jamieson abandoned any pretence at a media career and joined 4AD.
‘I didn’t want to be lugging boxes, but it was a way in,’ he recalls. ‘And as an indie kid in the Eighties, I’ll never forget walking in on my first day and seeing Bauhaus, Pixies and Cocteau Twins records. I was in heaven.
‘It was an interesting time, because to me, 4AD was just on the downside of a peak,’ says Jamieson. ‘But I went to loads of gigs, and Star and Last Splash had meant 4AD’s ambitions had increased, and there was a feeling we could push on if they had an A&R strategy. So it made sense to have someone younger and hooked in, like me. It didn’t easily work out that way because labels are about the people out front, and 4AD’s problem was that Ivo wasn’t present. It was a very odd situation.’
It was going to be an interesting time, given that Ivo had only semi-approved of one artist that Colin Wallace had sent on, but Jamieson was willing to go to every show, travel to every country, seek out everything that could work. Yet he didn’t discuss A&R with Ivo for another two years, and he was never briefed about any supposed A&R strategy. For now, hopes for a new beginning rested on Tarnation and Slowdive – or Mojave 3 as the band renamed itself, in honour of their new sound. Both bands were committed to playing live, and had consummate songwriters. As singers, Halstead and Goswell weren’t as distinctive or powerful as Tarnation’s Paula Frazer, but they could carry the airy sentiments of the songs.
Mojave 3 were also willing to follow Red House Painters and have their demos form their first 4AD album, Ask Me Tomorrow, with only similarly minor tweaks to bring it up to scratch. Goswell sang the opening ‘Love Songs On The Radio’ with all the breathy languor of a sun-stoked desert afternoon, while ‘Candle Song 3’ had something of Leonard Cohen’s nocturnal sound. The album only really woke up in the slowly escalating finale ‘Mercy’, driven by a guitar solo straight out of the progressive rock textbook. Notably, no single or video was attached to the album campaign. 4AD was turning into Guernica.
Halstead had been open to Ivo’s suggestion of releasing demos, but pulled back at his request to add strings to ‘Mercy’. ‘I finally got to work with an orchestra!’ Ivo recalls. ‘I had suggested it because the song had reminded me of the album … And Other Short Stories by [UK progressive r
ock band) Barclay James Harvest, which featured magnificent orchestration, and in parts, a very similar guitar sound to “Mercy”. Slowdive had reminded me of Barclay James, too. But Neil didn’t like it, so the orchestrated version was never released.’
It was a rare excursion for Ivo into a pro-active A&R role, and didn’t involve any kind of potentially damaging confrontation. Moreover, he was not about to step in on any level when Deal, 4AD’s most lucrative asset on paper, decided to abandon The Breeders for a side project that had an element of fuck-you-tiger punk rock to it.
The trigger for this change of heart wasn’t The Breeders’ 1994 raw Head To Toe EP but twin sister Kelley. The Deal twins had made Last Splash on a varied diet of drugs, and after The Breeders had come off the Lollapalooza festival tour in September 1994, Kelley had been arrested for possession of heroin. She admits that she had been using for years – ‘I was a drug addict and an alcoholic waiting to happen’ – even when working in office jobs that required security checks.
The outcome of the court trial in January of 1995 was a spell in rehab, which she did in St Paul, Minnesota. Whatever was to follow for sister Kim, she knew it couldn’t be The Breeders: ‘I really didn’t think they’d ever come back.’ Josephine Wiggs says Deal announced that she wanted to pursue a solo project, ‘something quick and dirty, under the radar,’ says Wiggs. ‘Something without the pressure of following up “Cannonball”. It’s always a good idea to do something in a different way. And why would you want to stop someone if that’s what they want to do?’
Wiggs recalls that Kelley Deal had been concerned with this news. ‘Kelley made moves to try and orchestrate us all playing on it, but I told Kim that if it was to be a Breeders record, I’d come out to Dayton, but it was clearly going to be a side project.’
But after Kim Deal had begun to record in her basement, she changed her mind and decided her new songs should be road-tested with a band. Tammy Ampersand and the Amps, later abbreviated to The Amps, was Kim, Breeders drummer Jim Macpherson and two other Dayton musicians, guitarist Nate Farley and bassist Luis Lerma. The songs duly road-tested, Deal then decided to use the band to record an album. It proved as difficult as the Last Splash sessions, a costly exercise, using five separate studios, one belonging to Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices (‘I Am Decided’ was a Deal–Pollard co-write). It wasn’t Nassau, but it was still expensive, except that this time Deal was searching for a raw, unproduced sound closer to the Steve Albini model.
‘Frankly, I was really struggling to deal with Kim’s lo-fi,’ says Ivo. ‘I couldn’t tell if it was truly a demo or if it was the sound she was trying to pursue. It was alike to Syd Barrett – she’s got this unique language to making music, but I didn’t understand the story and I couldn’t give any input, except to be encouraging when she’d call. I felt bad about not having come up with an alternate approach that might’ve been less costly and more fruitful. But, ultimately, I thought it cool that she was releasing something far removed from what everyone would have expected as a follow-up to an enormously successful record.’
‘Kim’s idea was of being able to re-create songs live for a club audience, without all that texture of Last Splash,’ says Kelley. ‘But really, she just wanted to break free.’
That’s precisely what Elektra didn’t want Kim to do. After the bankable success of Last Splash, Kim says the label had colluded with her manager to get her to sign an improved contract that would tie her to Elektra for much longer. ‘It meant the advances were bigger, like a couple of hundred thousand dollars for the next album,’ Deal recalls. ‘I told them, “I might make a tuba record next, I’m from the Midwest, I’m just a normal person”. I didn’t want to present myself as a fraud, to take the money and then not make the record they wanted. I said that they’d got the wrong person. I’ve tried, but I don’t have the killer spirit in me to generate chart sales for the sake of it.’
The Amps songs, such as the lead single ‘Tipp City’, a 128-second blast of bubblegum punk, showed exactly what she had meant. Nine out of twelve songs on the finished album, Pacer, came in under three minutes. Most were gristly scraps of lo-fi endeavour interspersed with weary melancholia, with none of Last Splash’s melodic summer. ‘Pacer was mostly a love song to Kelley,’ Kim admits. ‘I was feeling love, anger, worry, resentment, and grateful that nothing worse had happened.’
‘I know a handful of people who think Pacer is one of Kim’s best records,’ says Ivo. ‘I like it too, though it’s coloured for me by how much money she spent on a record that sounds like it cost very little.’
‘God damn, I was fucking nuts,’ Kim recalls. ‘I really did feel that I’d dropped the ball and the project lacked direction. I’d sent Ivo a demo of each song at a time, wrapped in a Polaroid, like a plug. It felt like an art project. I assumed he’d keep it like it was treasure, but he probably burned the cassettes in the backyard.’
Ivo says that Kim would sometimes stay in the flat above the 4AD office. ‘Martin Mills told me she’d sometimes stroll over to the pub across the road in her pyjamas. After Chris Bigg had asked her for the lyrics to Pacer, Kim left the flat with the message that the lyrics were upstairs, and she’d written them all over the bedsheet!’
One of those demos, ‘Empty Glasses’, even made it to the B-side of ‘Tipp City’. It’s not hard to imagine Elektra’s reaction to The Amps, though the label dutifully pressed up enough copies as if it was Last Splash part two instead of the anti-Last Splash. Unsurprisingly, Pacer sold poorly, leading to a surfeit of discounted copies in the shops that harmed further sales.
Deal wasn’t unhappy at the commercial return on a project that was dear to her heart, only at the business arrangements that she felt restricted her. She had first been upset when Rough Trade America’s licensing of Pod meant the album wasn’t included as one of the three albums that Deal owed under the terms of her Pixies contract with Elektra. ‘If I’d have stomped and screamed, Ivo would have let me go because he doesn’t like working with anyone if they’re not happy,’ Deal contends. ‘I had no reason to work with anyone else, but it didn’t seem fair, it seemed skeevy. I understood it’s a business, and a label puts in money and time, and then a band can break up. But no one was in the hole because of me.’
This time, she says, if she had refused to sign Elektra’s improved offer, they said they’d stall on the money that was in the pipeline. ‘Though Robin later told me they legally couldn’t do that,’ she adds. ‘I signed, as it would have been irresponsible to the other Breeders not to. Like Jim had just become a father again. And where was Ivo in all this? What was going on?’
Ivo has since apologised to Kim for his unavoidable absence – at this time, except for Mark Cox, he had kept news of his breakdown even from his friends. Ivo was trying to discover what had exactly happened on his own through various self-help books. One promised, ‘a three-step program to help us understand our place in the world and develop a sense of satisfaction with ourselves and others’. Your Sacred Self by Dr Wayne Dyer began with the words, ‘You have been facing the wrong way.’
Ivo used the phrase Facing The Wrong Way for a promotional CD sampler given away in a UK retail campaign to anyone buying an album from 4AD’s back catalogue. ‘It just resonated for me,’ Ivo recalls, ‘like [fellow retail sampler] … And Dogbones, Too, which was a phrase from [His Name Is Alive’s] “The Dirt Eaters”.’ Even if the title was, in one sense, throwaway, a marketing device associated with clinical depression was symptomatic of where Ivo and his record label had found themselves.
Ivo’s trip to Warners to support Scheer was his first since that fateful Wolfgang Press meeting: ‘I was happiest at home with Brandi,’ he says. He was now giving their dogs the attention he might have given to music, and to his artists, though he’d also been trying to learn Photoshop as well as Cubase: ‘I spent days and nights on the computer,’ he admits.
Another new obsession that didn’t require him to leave the house was photography. ‘I’d lost the
connection on a daily basis with music for some time, and I was trying to find other things to feel as strongly about as I’d felt about music in the previous decades of my life,’ he says. Through 4AD’s artwork, from Nigel Grierson to Simon Larbalestier, Ivo had a journeyman’s appreciation of the medium, but now he had time to investigate the history of photography and start a small collection.
The image that had led the way was Worker’s Parade from 1926, taken by Italian émigrée (and both political revolutionary and model) Tina Modotti: ‘The most successful unknown photographer in the world,’ Ivo reckons. ‘It was taken from a bridge in Mexico, of protesting workers, a sea of sombreros. There was an inexplicable character to the image, a softness that wasn’t sharp or out of focus. Something just happened to me.’
Ivo tracked down a rare copy of the print to a gallery in LA that was charging $40,000. He declined but saw, at the same gallery, an exhibition by Tom Baril, a photographer from New England who was living in New York. Baril had been celebrated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s exclusive printer for fifteen years before embarking on his own striking monochromes of botany, cityscapes and seascapes, often with a handmade pinhole camera. His work had a textural detail, with a similar soft focus to Modotti’s image. Baril was also responsible for printing the Mapplethorpe image of Cath Carroll on the cover of the Unrest album Perfect Teeth, so there was already a connection.
Ivo bought a Baril print of a Brooklyn skyline and warmed to the idea of publishing a book of Baril prints: ‘To go back to the simplicity of saying, “I love your photos, can we do something? And, look, it can be of this quality”.’