by Martin Aston
Ivo feels that Berry’s core band on Miracle (multi-instrumentalist brother Christopher Berry, bassist Laurence O’Keefe, drummer Jon Brookes and violinist Anna Wood) was ‘the best playing ever on a 4AD record’. Woods’ violin lent more pronounced Celtic flavours but there was the purer balladry of ‘Only Human’, ‘the most naked of all my songs,’ Berry says. She feels ‘Northern Country’ has her best vocal performance on record, and her take on Youngbloods’ late-Sixties track ‘Darkness, Darkness’ captured its spirit of longing.
‘Heidi was an incredible communicator and a very subtle one,’ Ivo feels. ‘Her music has great lasting value for me – the albums have stood the tests of time, and they’ve given me a degree of peace. But ironically, her albums turned out to be the ones that the fewest people have heard.’
In his song ‘Fruit Tree’, Nick Drake envisaged that fame might await people once they were no longer alive: certainly Berry’s trio of 4AD albums would have benefited from some drama to hook in more people, but when Miracle was released, Colleen Maloney found there simply wasn’t enough interest. For example, when she sent Berry’s second album to the specialist monthly magazine Folk Roots, she recalls, ‘They sent it back with a note saying, “this is not folk music”. The British press was generally obsessed with what was trendy, and she wasn’t – which was no failing on her part.’
Too folk for the hipsters, not trad enough for the folkies, Berry fell between two stools. In an effort to widen her appeal, 4AD used a dramatic close-up of her face on the cover of Miracle, in direct contrast to v23’s usual delightful obfuscation. ‘Robin Hurley wanted an image of me, so there was more of a presence and personality,’ says Berry. ‘Vaughan thought it was crappy, which was a shame. I should have stuck with the way that we’d worked before, but I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, or if I’d soon be starving to death.’
The marketing ploy made no difference, as Miracle sold the same as Berry’s preceding two albums, around 25,000 copies. ‘Warners wanted double that figure, and when that didn’t happen, they pulled the plug,’ says Berry. ‘Robin told me in London that 4AD had to let me go as well. He felt so bad that I ended up comforting him! I started smoking cigarettes for the first time in ages, and we both got trashed on brandy. My hard feelings towards 4AD were only fleeting – I put them into a song and got it out of my system. But there was one time, when I saw Ivo, getting back into his BMW late at night after he was dropping me off, I thought, all right for some. But that feeling only lasted a day. If it hadn’t been for Ivo, I wouldn’t have had the most amazing experience of my life and got to know as much about myself as an artist and a person. I don’t regret the relationship in any way.’*
Deborah Edgely says she could understand why artists like Berry might have felt similar twinges of envy or loss. ‘Whatever toll it took on him, it took on others as well. Ivo made himself a future, but a lot of artists gave a huge amount of their lives to try and develop their future and careers and ended up with little or nothing.’
As Spirea X’s Jim Beattie had noted, Ivo wasn’t using any profits to fund a particular lifestyle beyond which a head of a thriving record label could expect. And Ivo was also known to fund things out of his own pocket. But in times of diminished sales, artists did suffer. Lush had seen tour support increasingly shaved, as did Lisa Germano when she’d planned to tour after Excerpts From A Love Circus. ‘There wasn’t a lot left,’ she recalls. ‘Dead Can Dance had broken up, Kim Deal didn’t feel she had a hit record in her, and Pixies and Cocteau Twins were long gone. Everything making money for 4AD had, or was, breaking up and they needed to be very careful.’
This meant that investing in a nine-piece Icelandic multi-media electronic pop collective was risky. In hindsight, it was ludicrous. But it was also a sign that 4AD was still willing to be adventurous; the music had to be the reason to get involved. And if Lewis Jamieson and not Ivo was behind the band’s signing, at least GusGus seemed much more suitable than Scheer, more individual and charismatic, more forward-looking rather than what had just been.
‘An extravagant, unstable and, in the end, unsustainable project,’ is how 4AD’s own website summarises GusGus. The band was named after a line in German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Fear Eats the Soul, where a woman cooks couscous for her lover but pronounces it ‘gusgus’. Its members had only assembled eighteen months earlier after aspiring filmmakers/designers Stefán Árni Þorgeirsson and Siggi Kjartansson had co-directed the short film Pleasure. The film’s core cast of Daníel Ágúst, Magnús Jónsson and Hafdís Huld (who was only fifteen) were also singers who had decided to record an album together; Þorgeirsson and Kjartansson paired them with T-World, a.k.a. Birgir Þórarinsson (or Biggi Veira) and Magnús Guðmundsson (Herb Legowitz), a duo fashioning cool, chic electronic dance. The filmmakers joined in to add a visual aspect to the mix, while additional members such as Stephan Stephensen (a.k.a. President Bongo) and Emilíana Torrini Davíðsdóttir swelled the ranks, though Torrini had left by the time 1995’s debut album GusGus was released in Iceland.
Lewis Jamieson had only been in the 4AD job for a week when his Icelandic friend played him the album. ‘The job hadn’t even become official, but I met their manager Baldur in a pub in Clapham Junction before Christmas,’ Jamieson recalls. ‘It was one of those moments of serendipity. It sounded contemporary but with a 4AD vibe, especially “Is Jesus Your Pal?” because to me, 4AD was much less about ethereal, warbling, gothic stuff and much more about skewed pop music, taking the genre and tilting it on its head and making it interesting again. I sent a copy to Ivo, saying we should sign them.’
‘Ivo wouldn’t have signed GusGus, or if he had, he would have made a different record,’ says Robin Hurley. ‘An electronic band was very rare for 4AD, but they did seem to fit.’
Ivo: ‘I enjoyed the album but “Is Jesus Your Pal?” was the only track I truly loved. I said they had to release it as the single beforehand, which everyone thought was stupid. I could understand their reason – Emilíana sang it, and GusGus was working in the dance arena. [The diaphanous ballad was also not a GusGus original, having been written by the Icelandic band Slowblow.] But it would have been a fantastic single. I think Lewis would have been happy to leave it off. I later discovered he was a soul boy at heart. He wondered what had taken me so long to figure that out.’
Talking from his home studio in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík, Biggi Veira says he was more of a fan of Mute, following the course of electronic music, from Depeche Mode to club mixes. ‘But I knew of 4AD, mostly Pixies. Everybody knew M/A/R/R/S too but we didn’t know it was on 4AD. Ivo was cool, but it felt like the old acts were tired, and 4AD was unable to renew them. And in all our conversations with 4AD, I never got the feeling that he was involved.’
GusGus nevertheless knew 4AD, and Warners, were a reputable gateway to a global audience. A svelte and springy ‘Polyesterday’ – a remixed version from the Icelandic album – became the first release under a new deal, making it 4AD’s first original dance track (not counting remixes) since ‘Pump Up The Volume’. Anyone wanting every version would have been stung, with one twelve-inch EP version, three CD versions (one was an edit for radio) and, if fans could find them, radio promos of a remixed ‘Polydistortion’ and of the forthcoming album track ‘Chocolate’. But the single picked up enough airplay – and the band enough media inches – to reach 55 in the UK national charts, which still counted as a hit in 4AD terms.
Funding remixes was one thing; tour support for a multi-media troupe was another. ‘Being young and naïve, I just thought GusGus was the greatest thing rather than a problem regarding finance and investment,’ says Jamieson. The bill for the band’s London stage debut wasn’t crippling but it topped £10,000. ‘They claimed they knew what they were doing but they were making it up as they went,’ Jamieson reckons. ‘They had two massive cinema projectors, and we spent the day working out how to sync them with the music, before triggering it with computers. Now
it’s all pre-programmed but everything was done in real time back then.’
Jamieson readily admits that his tastes were different to Ivo’s – in any other record company, they might be seen as complementing each other rather than clashing. Jamieson says his style of A&R was also not that of his boss: ‘I was less nuts-and-bolts and more general vibing,’ he says. Two of his preferred hangouts were the social heart of Britpop – The Good Mixer pub and the Blow Up club night at The Laurel Tree pub, both in Camden Town. Jamieson would play football with members of Blur; Ivo wouldn’t even entertain a Blur record.
Wallace and Jamieson had still started their own record label, at Ivo’s suggestion, to give them an outlet to sign bands without his rubber stamp of approval. Detox Artifacts was a separate entity, not an official offshoot of 4AD like Guernica, though the label could take advantage of 4AD’s distribution and production facilities. But for the purposes of 4AD, the set-up was flawed.
‘It was A&R by mad, dysfunctional committee,’ says Simon Harper. ‘For the right reasons, Lewis [Jamieson] was trying, in Ivo’s absence, to embrace a more modern take on what 4AD could move towards, namely intelligent dance music. I don’t think Ivo ever had time to sit down with Lewis. Maybe Lewis was too young, and diplomacy wasn’t his natural forte, or even on his agenda. Ivo would sometimes come back with input and ideas, but a lot were confusing and frustrating. And it could get very feisty and competitive between Colin and Lewis, and a lot of my time was spent on various human resources issues. It was also impractical on a daily basis. Having three A&R people, for a company our size, was ridiculous.’
Jamieson admits his attitude did him few favours in the office environment. ‘I became an arrogant little fucker. I was only about twenty-four; a lot of people I knew in Leeds had tried to do what I’d done, and more by luck than judgement, I was A&R-ing a band getting coverage in [style bible] The Face and on [BBC] Radio 1. I just wanted to swan around like my heroes, being a mouth like Alan McGee and telling everyone how great I was, at the point that GusGus looked like they were going to happen. 4AD didn’t concentrate on one band but GusGus dominated the conversation from morning to night. It was a breath of fresh air for 4AD, a new dawn. And with Colin signing Scheer, the UK office was back in the frame.’
Kristin Hersh would have been happy not to be the topic of any conversation: ‘From Red Heaven onward,’ she admits, ‘I wouldn’t listen to any advice.’ Chris Staley had taken over from Ivo the role of artist liaison with Throwing Muses, but Hersh, with husband/manager Billy O’Connell, was a self-sufficient unit. Throwing Muses had a new US deal with independent label Rykodisc, and with the proceeds from recording and touring, the couple had put down a payment on a small house. Hersh’s new blonde buzzcut served as a sign of renewal, with Sire and other traumas in the past.
The band’s seventh album, Limbo, consolidated the steamrolling glee of Red Heaven, but the two singles – ‘Shark’ in the UK and ‘Ruthie’s Knocking’ for America – showed Hersh still valued concise tunes. Two limited edition seven-inch versions of ‘Shark’ included alternative versions of album tracks, from the title track (the much looser ‘Limbobo’), album highlight ‘Serene’ (the rockier ‘Serene Swing’) and a countrified version of ‘Tar Moochers’, but these were more fan collectables than marketing tools. Hersh wasn’t going to be fooled again.
But operating outside of the Warners deal with 4AD, the band didn’t have the kind of advances that could keep the band going by building up a debt to the label. Without sizeable sales, and with 4AD now unable to inject more tour support, Hersh admits they reached an impasse: ‘We ran out of money,’ she says. The band decided to go into hibernation, with Dave Narcizo setting up his own graphic design business called Lakuna.
But Hersh threw herself into a period of productivity, both as a solo artist and a pioneering businesswoman. She and O’Connell created the Throwing Music label and linked up with Donita Sparks of the all-women grunge band L7 to launch CASH Music. The Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders was a non-profit online organisation that pre-dated the Kickstarter model of private funding for creative projects by thirteen years: ‘a way for audiences and creators to exchange creative perspectives and ideas,’ the website claimed, or as Hersh put it, ‘a way to circumvent the music industry’.
Since 1996, songs posted to Hersh’s CASH Music have been released under a Creative Commons licence, to be downloaded and also remixed using ‘stems’ of each track’s individual components. The cost ranges from free to one-off payments, at incremental levels with corresponding benefits, up to $5,000, which gives the subscriber an ‘executive producer’ credit on Hersh’s next album. This single-minded response to the traditional relationship between artist and record label was an instinctive and brilliant vision of how outdated that relationship was, and how artists who valued independence and integrity needed to reinvent their means of survival.
Hersh had already felt her soul slip away by trying to house her music within the profiteering structure of major labels; some independent labels could be similarly exploitative, though 4AD was trying hard not to be turned into one of them. But it took a lot of courage and vision at that point to see how the music industry was stacked against the artist, with too much debt incurred by large advances and video/tour costs, and the constant pressure of trying to ascend to a higher level. That’s where Lush were, in the summer of 1996, having played shows with the likes of Pulp, Sonic Youth, Garbage, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nick Cave, Sepultura, Bush, Super Furry Animals, Beck and The Prodigy, like an endless Lollapalooza merry-go-round.
Following the last of their American dates, Lush returned to tour Europe and the UK in July as a third single was taken from Lovelife. A remixed version of ‘500’ – now subtitled ‘Shake Baby Shake’ to boost its commercial sheen – reached 21 in the UK national charts – so tantalisingly close, yet again, to a confidence-boosting top 20 hit. But it was still the band’s third top 22 hit in a row. Five more new B-sides were needed this time, meaning that Lush had had to write and record over an album’s worth of bonus material. And then the band returned to the States, again, only eleven days after their final festival performance at Benicàssim in Spain.
Robin Hurley says that Lovelife sold a respectable 110,000 copies. ‘But for Warners, it still wasn’t enough to press the mythical button to turn 100,000 sales into 500,000.’
Tim Carr: ‘Lush was the warhorse of all warhorses. But when they toured America, they could draw 2,000 people in New York or LA, but only about thirty people in Des Moines, Iowa, which would take the wind out of their sails. And in the days before the internet, they’d have to talk to every radio show and retail outlet. It was tough on them.’
Colleen Maloney: ‘For young, impressionable indie kids, Lush were heroes. They had two sassy girls who looked great, without looking like they were trying too hard. They were living the life and having fun, even if the press would occasionally still give them a hammering. But I was aware more of frustration than unhappiness. Every band wants to sell records but I think that Lush was hungrier for recognition than sales and fame.’
For the first part of this third American tour of the year, Lush would be third on the bill in the unsuitable company of American rockers Goo Goo Dolls and the Gin Blossoms. ‘I told the others, shall we say we won’t do it?’ says Emma Anderson. ‘I waited for them to agree, but everyone looked down. Come on guys, help me here! I was dubbed the troublemaker, and anything I said was ignored. Our management started taunting me, saying, “For the next album, you won’t play Britain, just America, you’ll like that, won’t you Emma?” Morale was rock bottom. I told Peter Felstead how unhappy we all were and he said, “Stop moaning, you’re only there to keep them [Warners] interested or they’ll move on to the next thing”.’
Tim Carr: ‘Warners realised Lush had hit a watershed and we weren’t going to break through with them, as “Single Girl” hadn’t taken them any higher. Lush wasn’t The Sundays or The Cranberries, more a great low-level
indie band.’
Miki Berenyi: ‘It was madness, completely demoralising and it made the cracks spread rapidly.’
Anderson decided she needed outside help, and reached out to Ivo, without realising his present condition. They met for lunch in LA before Lush’s flight to Hawaii. ‘It was a very strange experience,’ Anderson recalls. ‘I wasn’t talking to the same bloke that I used to know. Ivo wasn’t listening to what I was saying, and what he was saying about therapy and new age stuff didn’t have any relation to me. He gave me some self-help books, such as [Susan Jeffers’] Feel the Fear And Do It Anyway. I felt so alone, like a bad dream. I decided I’d get through the tour and then I’d leave the band.’
Lush returned home from Tokyo on 18 September, eleven days after Chris Acland’s thirtieth birthday was celebrated on stage at San Francisco’s Fillmore. Anderson remembers that the last time she saw Acland the four Lush members were on the pavement after she’d called a meeting to announce her departure.
‘Emma had hated all the criticism of us going Britpop and said she wasn’t interested in that kind of music anymore,’ says Berenyi. ‘The most important thing for me was to keep the band together, as we only worked as a unit, so I agreed to get rid of Peter Felstead, and to do things her way. Emma was surprised, and then we agreed we’d do the European tour that had been booked and then redraw the whole template.’
Anderson says Acland admitted he felt unable to tour again. ‘We suggested that we’d start with another drummer and maybe Chris could join us a week into the tour. He could go home to his parents, which would help.’