Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Ivo sequenced the order as he would an album. ‘I found a starting point, removed just three photos, and 40 minutes later I had something that flowed beautifully, almost mirroring the journey through an album that I’d always found so important. I sent it to Tom, he moved one image, and that was it. I’m so proud of that book, the way it came about, the quality of work, materials and reproduction, the simplicity of design and the purity of intention behind the whole project.’

  For the printing, Ivo tracked down a couple in Connecticut after seeing the quality of Alfred Stieglitz’s book of Georgia O’Keeffe portraits. The couple’s trademark was to painstakingly print in black and white as they did the traditional four-colour process – one ink at a time.

  Tom Baril was a stunning 176-page monograph that included a wide range of subjects, a prized piece of art that displayed Ivo’s love of the medium. He wanted to press 5,000 copies but the distributor, DAP, was wary of 4AD’s ability as a new publisher and convinced Ivo to go for half that amount. There was also a limited edition of fifty copies with a gelatine silver print (yours now for $2,500). ‘Everything sold out immediately, proving the experts wrong,’ says Ivo. ‘We did a second run of fifty limited editions with a different print. But we still lost quite a bit of money.’

  There was a chance that Robin Hurley would see Ivo’s interest in photography as a distraction from the main task of heading a record label, but he fully supported Ivo’s plan for a book-publishing division. ‘I’d seen how photography had taken the place of Ivo’s enthusiasm for music and it felt very positive for the label, to get Ivo re-connected,’ says Hurley. ‘The experience of the Baril book was a rare, unique success. We’d hit on an artist rising up in the photographic world and we’d made a precious and beautiful book that had immediately sold out.’

  Baril: ‘Everyone loved the book. It was a big deal when it came out, and people started to make books that looked like that.’

  Two more books were lined up, one by San Diego photographer Robert Maxwell, who specialised in dramatic portraiture, the other from Han Nguyen, a Vietnamese photographer who had settled in San Diego, and whose singular vision and gorgeous compositions chimed with Vaughan Oliver’s love of texture. Maxwell had already done a Lisa Germano shoot, and the relationship was moving along, when he told Ivo that his agent – who also represented Tom Baril – had persuaded him to go with a more established publisher, despite the job that 4AD had done.

  ‘The agent felt it would be better for Robert’s career in the long run,’ says Ivo. ‘I felt betrayed by a man whose client we had already given a major career boost. The only reason I’d got into publishing was to return to the purity of reasoning that I’d cherished in 4AD’s early years and I was very disappointed to discover identical mercenary individuals in photography. Rather than offering any apology, the agent simply asked why I’d imagined the photography business would be any different. Combined with losing money on Tom’s book and Robert’s withdrawal, I then had my own very difficult conversation with Han to explain I wasn’t going to carry on with the book imprint.’

  To compound another premature end to a project with so much promise, Warners president Steven Baker had come to the same decision regarding the 4AD licensing deal. Despite the promise of GusGus and the suggestion that 4AD was branching out, he hadn’t seen enough progress since he’d extended the agreement in 1995 – which he says he still doesn’t regret. ‘I now look back at the people as opposed to the charts, and I cherish all the bands that I dealt with at 4AD. A lot of that music makes a lot of sense to me now, which happens with a lot of cool music.’

  ‘For me, Warners not renewing the option was the turning point,’ says Hurley. In theory, 4AD was finally free to find a label that might prioritise 4AD, but the Warners money was funding 4AD’s LA office. Hurley was faced with finding smaller premises and to reduce the staff count, which left just himself and Rich Holtzman.

  Holtzman had been a witness to the way 4AD had risen and fallen in the space of just four years. In 1993, he was working in college promotions at IRS Records when his friend, Muses manager Billy O’Connell, mentioned a vacant job at 4AD, ‘the coolest label on the planet,’ says Holtzman. ‘After his job interview with Hurley, Holtzman had met Ivo at a Red House Painters show. ‘To a young kid like me from the New York suburbs, Ivo was very mysterious, the wizard behind the scenes. But he was this regular person when we met.’ But perhaps not a regular record label chief: Ivo didn’t stay for long at the show, nor did Hurley; finally Holtzman was left standing on his own. ‘It was the era of Red House Painters’ interminably long shows, and everyone was exhausted,’ he recalls. ‘But getting Ivo to any show was hard. Because he was Ivo, he got away with it. Bands never expected him so no one got upset when he didn’t turn up. It was the same with meetings.’

  Holtzman had arrived in time for 4AD’s second golden era, spearheaded by The Breeders’ ‘Cannonball’ and Dead Can Dance’s ‘The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove’: ‘They were awesome songs that people wanted to play, and not just on college radio, where we were the kings. Every record we released went to number 1 on the college radio charts: Red House Painters, Unrest, Air Miami. Even Insides did really well. We even got The Glee Club to number 1. Even the Paladins got a look-in! People were like, where did this come from?’

  Holtzman had worked in marketing, label management and production, and when Robin Hurley started to run 4AD, some artist liaison. ‘We ran things our way, and hoped Warners would come along for the ride. It often didn’t seem like they did. We gave them very cool artists, but by the time it ended, alternative radio had become hard rock and rap rock, all things we clearly didn’t fit in with, other than Scheer, which might have been the last record through Warners.’

  A series of limited edition releases served the hardcore fan base: the Scheer EP Demon, a US-only GusGus remix EP, Standard Stuff For Drama (which was given a Warners catalogue number), and the mail order-only His Name Is Alive EP Nice Day, which Warren Defever had recorded in 1996 only for 4AD to delay the release by a year.§ The hardcore fan would probably also need to buy into 4AD’s more mercenary programme of starting to recycle its venerated back catalogue to provide a necessary revenue stream.

  Singles and rarities had previously been gathered and turned into compilations on vinyl and subsequently CD. But Death To The Pixies was 4AD’s first ‘Best Of …’ compilation. ‘When Pixies split up, I was asked if 4AD would release a “Best Of” album,’ says Ivo. ‘I said if they saw one, it was because either the band or the label was desperate for money.’

  ‘Using the back catalogue felt like we were conning the fan base,’ says Lewis Jamieson. ‘At least the track listing for Death To The Pixies wasn’t a typical reissue. And they didn’t do a Best Of Cocteau Twins for years. A Throwing Muses compilation would have sold too. But Ivo’s approach was totally ethical. He had this label that was still operating in a world where purity was no longer valued. But times had changed and it was now less about 4AD and more about the artists – or less about the artists and more about single tracks.’

  Chris Bigg recalls that Simon Larbalestier and Vaughan Oliver had fallen out (the photographer won’t say why; the designer says he can’t remember), so the rock covered with Pixies images on the cover Death To The Pixies was v23’s own idea: ‘The planet of Bossanova exploded into fragments,’ Oliver explains. ‘We shot the old artwork and stuck them on to rock and reshot the image. It made sense at the time.’

  What didn’t make sense at the time was how Surfer Rosa only donated two tracks while three were taken off Bossanova. What made sense, though it was a cynical exercise, was to take ‘Debaser’ from Doolittle as a single to promote the compilation. Ivo was equally dismayed when he pulled out the CD booklet ‘and the paper just flopped, it was so thin’. He adds that ‘Sales across the board weren’t great and it was clear that, financially, we were struggling badly. But I’d rather have fired everyone than cut back on the quality of production.’

  Ironica
lly, Death To The Pixies led the way for the record industry’s deluxe ‘heritage’ reissues that now feed the collectors market (with the Japanese paper sleeve the top of that particular market).¶ It had two special limited edition CDs, one with a bonus live album and the other a ‘Golden Ticket’ version adding two early Charles Thompson demos. There was a ten-inch vinyl box set too. The humble cassette even got a look in. ‘Debaser’ came in live, studio and demo versions, proving that a job worth doing well is clearly worth overkilling.

  ‘Debaser’ reached 23 in the UK chart, the highest Pixies ever got, but plummeting sales figures for singles meant this wasn’t a real achievement. The album’s shock chart placing of 20 could be blamed on having two CD formats that didn’t count towards one set of sales. ‘The chart rules were changing every week,’ says Cliff Walton. ‘But even so, we thought a Pixies compilation would be a bigger event given the love for the individual albums, the references from Nirvana, and an appreciation for Pixies that had continued to rise.’

  Was it that 4AD no longer had the power to sell its most popular band, or just that it was too soon for a retrospective? The rock on the album cover suggested an archaeological find but Pixies had only split up five years earlier. ‘The head of music at [BBC] Radio 1 said Pixies was an oldies band, and I was better off talking to Radio 2,’ says Tim Hall. Not that Radio 2’s older demographic would appreciate Charles Thompson’s scream and Joe Santiago’s sympatico guitar, meaning exposure on radio was relegated to those specialist indie-rock stations such as XFM.

  It wasn’t only in the UK the album struggled. Death To The Pixies limped to 180 in the US. Yet it was still 4AD’s most popular album in four years. The fan base had become selective. As Lewis Jamieson had noted, it was now more about the artists than the label.

  Behind the façade of normality, says Jamieson, ‘it was the maddest, most eclectic release schedule, with two rosters running in parallel with nothing in common, a contemporary side for a younger audience and a left-field side targeted at a more mature audience’. And in the thick of it, he adds, ‘was a battle for the soul of the label’.

  * Tony Morley and fellow PR Julian Carerra had started Leaf in late 1994, concentrating on instrumental/electronic music. After being hospitalised for three months after a car crash in September 1995, Morley decided to concentrate on Leaf full-time: ‘It was an opportunity to do something different.’ Today, Morley runs Leaf from his West Yorkshire home. ‘I’ve been influenced by what Ivo did,’ he says, ‘a label driven by one person, not making decisions based on market share. But Leaf has never had something sell enough to fund other things, as other labels have, which snowballed for them to the point of becoming money machines. And what labels did in the Eighties isn’t possible anymore, to get that level of success without kowtowing to get to that point.’

  † Of the six acts Detox Artifacts released, the Aeroplane single ‘Signs Of Life’ featuring Heidi Berry was the best. Toücan, Stellar, Thrush Puppies, Ajax Disco Spanner and Suckle were the other five bands of no fixed reputation, and none went past recording a single or EP for the label. ‘Ivo didn’t like any of it!’ says Colin Wallace.

  ‡ Ivo was also credited as music supervisor for the soundtrack that Brendan Perry’s brother Robert composed for Gary Tieche’s 1997 film Nevada, though, he says, ‘I did little more than introduce Gary to Rob and commission a version each of “Danny Boy” by Michael Brook and Paula Frazer. I also gave Rob some money to start a solo record that never materialised.’

  § While His Name Is Alive’s Nice Day EP was originally a mail order-only release of a thousand copies, the EP was re-pressed and sold in stores as well as added to the 1998 reissue of Stars On ESP.

  ¶ 4AD’s reissues for the American market were less impressive and reinforced Ivo’s dismay over production quality. Jeff Keibel, who runs the comprehensive online site Fedge, wrote, ‘Things first started going wrong in the 4AD catalogue number system in July 1998 when the label was faced with reissuing key titles after the end of their US Warner Bros distribution deal. The reissues included M/A/R/R/S, all three This Mortal Coil albums, Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field, Dead Can Dance’s A Passage In Time, His Name Is Alive’s Stars On ESP/Nice Day, The Birthday Party Hits and Lonely Is An Eyesore. All these reissues were hastily thrown together, using cheap paper and strange-smelling ink. Certain graphics were omitted from the designs as well. For example, It’ll End In Tears is missing its front cover logo. To cut costs, 4AD even reduced the beautiful Lonely Is An Eyesore booklet to a single sheet with the reverse side blank, but did make up for it by offering to send fans a full booklet in the mail.’

  chapter 22 – 1998

  Smile’s OK, a Last Gasp

  (TAD 8001–4AD M1)

  Any struggle over the soul of 4AD was put on hold for the unified display, and sound, of the first release of 1998. Anakin was a compilation engineered to raise the label’s profile after the end of the Warners deal; it neatly confirmed 4AD’s rich and varied roster while stressing the downbeat and serene folk/country focus at the heart of its owner.

  After the recycled nature of the All Virgos Are Mad compilation, Ivo was back in charge of Anakin and the eleven tracks were new and exclusive, and programmed to give goosebumps. ‘I wasn’t interested in a compilation to start with, but then I began to pick tracks to present the softer side of 4AD,’ he says. ‘For me, it felt like a last gasp, a left turn when everyone was expecting a right. The soft, acoustic nature of most of Anakin was not yet where everyone else was going.’

  The album title wasn’t Ivo’s but the collective choice of 4AD’s LA office, to honour Rich Holtzman’s Siberian husky that had been named after Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars. Robin Hurley had found the dog wandering near the office: ‘We couldn’t find an owner and Anakin quickly owned me,’ Holtzman recalls. Anakin joined him in the office every day and even attended in-store shows until she suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Vaughan Oliver was sent a commemorative photo of Anakin for the cover, which he re-shot, in a negative print, stuck to the back of his own head. ‘I was appalled at the sentimentality,’ he says. A psychotherapist might have seen it as a subconscious act of wrestling back control on behalf of the London office.

  Even artists that didn’t distil those particular roots provided acoustic ballads, starting with His Name Is Alive’s ‘Ain’t No Lie’ – a fabrication since the track was both written and played by Ida duo Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell. Scheer’s second album trailer, ‘Say What You Came To Say’, showed what kind of exquisite ballads were being shouldered out of the way for the electric guitars. Album previews came from Kristin Hersh, Lisa Germano, Lisa Gerrard – with new collaborator Pieter Bourke – and The Hope Blister. Mojave 3 and GusGus provided demos: ‘“To Whom Should I Write” was Neil Halstead doing his Nick Drake,’ says Ivo, while the Icelanders’ ‘Blue Mug’ was a sequel of sorts to ‘Is Jesus Your Pal?’ written by the band’s filmmaker Siggi Kjartansson and sung by Hafdís Huld. The different arrangements took Anakin away from a depiction of roots music and into the realm of an expertly flowing chillout mix.

  But a new chapter was about to break. The most revealing aspect of Anakin was the unveiling of three new signings to 4AD. These potential harbingers of survival – two of which were based in London – had come from three different sources: Thievery Corporation via Rich Holtzman, Cuba via Lewis Jamieson, and starry smooth hound (lower case intentional), Ivo’s first signing to 4AD since Tarnation.

  Vinny Miller’s alluring alias ‘starry smooth hound’ had been conjured up in a tearoom meeting with Robin Hurley and Colin Wallace. Growing up in south-west England, Miller’s voice was an early gift; he’d been a young chorister at Salisbury cathedral but European ecclesiastical music had made way for Boney M’s disco popsicle ‘Ma Baker’. ‘It was like an arrow through my head,’ he says. His teenage years reverberated to The Police, The Beatles, Adam Ant and U2, but he had rejected rock and pop by his early twenties: ‘It seemed empty to me. I wanted to he
ar things that would last beyond their moment of promotional saturation.’

  Miller turned to the intense troubadours of folk-blues: Van Morrison, Roy Harper, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Fred Neil, Tim Rose, Ritchie Havens – an Ivo covers project in the making. By the time he’d recorded a demo, Miller had been shaped further: ‘Drones and birdsong … and how [Talk Talk’s] Mark Hollis sounded like a reed wind instrument, where word formation melts into pure tone, so you’re unsure what you’re listening to.’

  Of all his influences, Miller’s voice was closest to Tim Buckley’s, though his raw, nervous energy put him close to Tim’s son Jeff Buckley, especially the demos Jeff had been recording in preparation for his follow-up to his ecstatically received album debut Grace. Ivo, with his habitual preconceptions, had found it hard to accept Jeff because of his love for father Tim, but now Ivo had his own version, albeit at a much earlier stage of development.

  Miller’s lack of interest in contemporary music meant he hadn’t heard of 4AD when a friend advised him to contact the label. ‘If it hadn’t been for 4AD, I’d have ducked out at that point,’ Miller claims, in a premature admission of unsuitability for the business of music. ‘It was typically tedious of me to record something and hate it the next day, and it happened too many times to mention.’