Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Miller first met Ivo when the latter was in London for The Hope Blister session. ‘Ivo gave me a tape with Scott Walker’s Climate Of Hunter and Tilt album tracks, and with songs by [Screaming Trees frontman] Mark Lanegan and Tim Buckley. He wanted to know which one of The Corrs I’d most like to shag – I said all of them at once. He said, “You know all these [artist/label] relationships have to end at some point?” After that, we kept in contact by phone, usually every couple of weeks.’

  Ivo: ‘Had I still lived in London, I think we would’ve made a good pairing. I enjoyed Vinny’s playful intelligence and it was clear we shared some demons. I can’t remember having The Corrs conversation but it is a valid question.’

  Over distance, it remained an unusual relationship. ‘When we did my contract, Ivo predicted we’d hate each other within eighteen months,’ Miller recalls. ‘That never happened, probably because we were rarely in the same place. But the bit of Ivo that I saw appeared at peace with himself. He was living quite a Zen existence away from the circus, surrounded by animals and continuing to explore art.’

  Miller’s Anakin cut, ‘Dreamt U In A Dream’, had been recorded at Protocol with producer Guy Fixsen, who had engineered records by Ultra Vivid Scene, The Breeders and The Wolfgang Press. Fixsen had also formed Too Pure signing Laika with Margaret Fiedler of Too Pure signing Moonshake. Only one other track (‘Coco Crush’, still unreleased) was recorded. ‘I wish he’d carried on working with Guy, but Vinny was headed in a different direction,’ says Ivo. ‘He’d already started to be influenced by glitchy laptop stuff. His songs went through quite a few different versions or possibilities, much like Ultra Vivid Scene before him.’

  Miller: ‘Ivo ended up being really hands off. Occasionally, he’d get stuff from me but often half-formed and binned by the time it reached him. He wanted “prettiness” in music; not exclusively, but something that would meet that aesthetic. The easiest way for someone like me to achieve that would be through melody, not a squelchy sound off a sampler. Ivo cautioned me a couple of times about prospects for artists, like Tim Buckley ended up as a cab driver. But I never got any “give me the hits” nonsense.’

  As Ivo’s newest signing battled with demons before he’d even got started, 4AD’s other new arrivals were employing samplers in a much more organised fashion. Thievery Corporation had come together after Rob Garza walked into Eighteenth Street Lounge, a bar in Washington, DC co-owned by Eric Hilton. On the phone from his home in San Francisco, the half-Mexican Garza recalls growing up listening to mariachi and soul, ‘but also new wave and hardcore punk,’ he adds. He’d known of 4AD through Pixies: ‘I loved the fact Pixies had songs in Spanish but I also saw them live. They blew my mind and captured my imagination.’

  An electronic music course at high school had sent Garza in another direction, as had the moment he walked into Eighteenth Street Lounge and heard ‘March’ by Brazilian bossa nova legend Antônio Carlos Jobim. ‘Brazilian music wasn’t commonly heard outside of South America,’ says Garza. ‘Eric and I started talking, and soon we’d started recording. We wanted to combine music from around the world with something futuristic and electronic.’

  Dub, bossa nova, jazz and easy listening fed into three singles the duo released in 1996 on their own Eighteenth Street Lounge (ESL) Music label. ‘The Foundation’, ‘Shaolin Satellite’ and ‘2001 A Spliff Odyssey’ also slotted into the debut album Sounds From The Thievery Hi-Fi that a friend in Washington had sent to Rich Holtzman, who commissioned the duo to remix GusGus’ ‘Polyesterday’.

  Lewis Jamieson liked what he heard. ‘They reminded me of how Massive Attack had projected itself on to the world, with a record label, club and lifestyle vibe. Their album took elements of dub and easy listening, a unique combination, and treated them in very delicate ways.’ Jamieson’s suggestion that 4AD license Thievery Corporation’s album outside of North America got the green light. ‘Eric and Rob didn’t want to deal with majors, so why not talk to us?’ says Jamieson. ‘Rich was key in this as we had the same agenda. His job was to convince Ivo to go for it.’

  ‘We saw 4AD going in a different direction with GusGus and we thought it was a great label,’ says Garza. ‘Bauhaus, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Pixies of course, even M/A/R/R/S – it was a real artist’s label. Nobody used the word “boutique” then but it was that kind of label, which was what mostly attracted us.’

  Ivo didn’t return the same level of appreciation but he took a pragmatic view. ‘It just wasn’t the kind of music I was interested in, but it was nice to give Rich the confidence that he could bring something to the label, and he got on well with them. But if my true feelings had been known, 4AD would only have been releasing three records a year. To say no to people, you need a degree of confidence in your own decision-making process and to make alternative suggestions, which I didn’t have.’

  After a deal was struck, Garza and Hilton flew to Europe and met the 4AD London office. ‘You’d hear Ivo’s name a lot, but we only met him the once,’ says Garza. ‘For someone that you associate with bringing this whole scene together, he was the opposite of what I expected, very clean-cut. I wasn’t focused on the structure and politics behind that but I loved the label, its music and the legacy, and I think they did a great job for us. We were darlings of the UK press, and had great relationships with 4AD’s label partners in Europe. People held 4AD in very high esteem.’

  Lewis Jamieson’s signing, Cuba, had an altogether more strained relationship with 4AD. For starters, Ivo says the Anglo-American duo of Christopher Andrews and Ashley Bates was his ‘least favourite act on 4AD’. But Robin Hurley – who says that he had personally enjoyed Cuba – took the pragmatic view: ‘It had a chance of being successful in the current British climate. And we were keen to have some success.’

  Born in Toronto, Canada, Andrews now lives in Chicago where he works as an account director for advertising agency Leo Burnett, having been based in Amsterdam. He was born in Toronto but left Canada for London in 1994: ‘I wanted to live somewhere different and to play music for a living. I wasn’t a particular Anglophile but I’d grown up with British music.’

  Andrews had met Bates, the former drummer of Home Counties shoegazers Chapterhouse, at a party. ‘I knew the band, so we’d started chatting,’ says Andrews. ‘We didn’t set out to form a band, but Ashley is technically fantastic and a great engineer, so armed with a sampler, some loops and guitars, we had the shell of a track after one day.’

  Jamieson had been pursuing his A&R job at an alarming pace: ‘I was in Iceland one minute and then the Miami dance conference, the South By Southwest festival in Austin, the College Music Journal festival in New York, Warners in Burbank, going to gigs all the time, flying the 4AD flag, and burning out quite heavily.’ But the route to Cuba was easy; Andrews had recently married Rachel Goswell of Mojave 3 (they met at a Slowdive show in Toronto). Jamieson visited the couple, who lived around the corner from him, and heard the Cuba demo ‘Fiery Cross’. ‘He said he loved it and wanted to release it,’ says Andrews.

  Jamieson: ‘Cuba was the biggest break from the 4AD tradition, because they were the most obviously English, and had attracted the traditional British kind of vibe through the music papers. But to me, it was marrying guitars and technology, like the best ideas of My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream.’

  Ashley Bates’ experience at the RCA faux-indie offshoot Dedicated, which had mercilessly pushed Chapterhouse into writing more clear-cut singles and accepting a ‘name’ producer before being dropped for not delivering the requisite goods, had moved on to secure employment as a drum tutor and studio engineer. Cuba, and 4AD, provided the means for a new creative outlet, but he was still wary. ‘I wasn’t sure how serious to take the offer. I wondered what 4AD was after because I knew we were a strange signing for them. But 4AD had the best back catalogue around. I was an old goth, and my brother was a graphic designer, so we had more faith in and respect for 4AD than any other label.’

  Andrews
had no such qualms. ‘From the outside, 4AD always seemed like a sanctuary, an island of art, very of itself, a very cool club. I knew if 4AD signed someone, it wouldn’t be an obvious signing.’

  It helped that Cuba was a self-reliant duo, as opposed to GusGus’ expensively maintained collective, but Cuba (named after the birthplace of Andrews’ mother) was about as obvious a signing as Scheer. At least Thievery Corporation shared some DNA with The Wolfgang Press and Colourbox, but ‘Fiery Cross’ occupied the same landscape as Chemical Brothers’ thumping sampledelia that was known as Big Beat. Jamieson knew it, so he decided on a touch of subterfuge.

  ‘I was amazed that 4AD was letting me do Thievery Corporation as they were so not a 4AD band,’ Jamieson says. ‘By Cuba, I’d long gone past caring. So I used some of the promotional budget and cut 500 [vinyl] white labels of “Hot Shit” that I sent to a few people without anyone else knowing, and [Radio 1 DJ] Steve Lamacq went for it. Before, we couldn’t get a record away on radio to save our lives, so this was serious. I had to put my hands up – I’d done something bad, but this was the result. It was a confrontational approach but I’d lost Belle and Sebastian. I would have repaid the money if 4AD had asked, but we had such a desire to get something properly away that Robin and Simon said to carry on.’

  Ivo had heard a demo, ‘Havana’: ‘I felt it could be a good twelve-inch single, for the clubs,’ he says, so there was some support. The track was included on Anakin but as a hidden last track, completely at odds with what came before it. Andrews recalls that Ivo’s name had only cropped up at the end of contract negotiations. ‘We knew he had to sign off on our deal, and we got the sense some arm-twisting went on. But Robin was president and this was a whole new world.’

  As a trial by fire, Jamieson persuaded Cuba to make their live debut at the University of London Union on a 4AD showcase with Thievery Corporation and headliners GusGus. This one-nighter demonstrated the shift that had taken place since All Virgos Are Mad, but it retained a boutique feel across three diverse and creative exponents of electronic dance music.

  In between the reissued GusGus single ‘Polyesterday’ and forthcoming Thievery Corporation and Cuba debuts, 4AD’s old guard was still rallying, having found a way to work without unnecessary compromise. Kristin Hersh’s decision to put Throwing Muses into hibernation had been tough – the sleeve dedication on her new album Strange Angels was to her husband, three sons and ‘TM (1984–97)’. But having a solo outlet made it bearable. ‘It was a relief,’ she admits. ‘People wanted pencil sketches instead of the bright colours I was used to painting with, but I no longer had to work with dollar-to-decibel or dollar-to-production-values. And Ivo treated the songs with even more deference than Muses records.’

  Ivo’s bond with Hersh had re-opened the channel to lending A&R support and friendship. ‘We would allude to each other’s struggles but we saw our time together as a respite from struggle,’ says Hersh. ‘We’d talk about the desert and music because that was all we cared about at the time. I’d run away to the desert even before he did, into forty acres of moonscape.’

  After giving birth to her third son, Wyatt, Hersh and family had felt their now habitual wanderlust, renting out their east coast house and moving to a friend’s plot in Pioneertown, California, a small town originally built in the 1940s as a Wild West film set near Joshua Tree Monument Park. The location provided some refuge, just not enough. ‘We learnt the vocabulary of the moon and coyotes and owls and cacti, but I’d tried to run away and it hadn’t worked. My son that I’d lost custody of couldn’t come with us and I found that umbilical cords only stretched so far.’

  Hersh’s problems only got worse as the lithium that she was taking for her bipolar disorder had deadened her creative senses. ‘I felt I couldn’t write anymore, so Strange Angels was a bunch of leftover songs. And I hadn’t been able to listen to music for years. I was sleepwalking and I later toured the album in a half-arsed manner. Ivo was bemused but there was nothing he could do, or say.’

  Ivo was also bemused by his credit on Strange Angels. Now Hersh was the one providing support and succour. ‘Kristin was looking for my input when they were mixing the album in LA, to help make a track into a single. I made some suggestions, not heartfelt ones, and they peculiarly made me executive producer. It was so sweet that they were reaching out to me, to draw me back in, but I didn’t need it, and I didn’t do anything anyway. It was an odd combination of genuine friendship and a clinical misreading.’

  Strange Angels lacked the undulating range and luminosity of Hips And Makers, and its fifteen songs were a lot if its songwriter didn’t truly believe in them. But even Hersh’s leftovers wove a persuasive spell, with her particularly urgent brand of gentleness, or gentle brand of urgency. ‘Gazebo Tree’ and ‘Like You’ – released as a limited edition single in time for her tour – were career highlights, and ‘Home’ was a fine album intro. And Hersh’s creative energy and her love of music were both to return, on that supposed half-arsed tour, while out buying coffee.

  Hersh: ‘I could see music again, coming out of the speakers in 3D, and I remembered how I’d thrown my life away. Tears were streaming down my face. This old Indian guy, Leonard Crow Dog, was burning herbs over a guitar, and Billy told him, “My wife is crying about music, did you do this?” He said he was doing a musical blessing, and he must have hit me in the back! He had me play the guitar, and hoped the blessing would rub off on me.’

  Lisa Gerrard had also been adjusting to a new way of life, without the safety net and collaborative spirit of Dead Can Dance and Brendan Perry, her foil for eighteen years. But she’d found another in Australian composer, multi-instrumentalist and engineer Pieter Bourke, who had played on Gerrard’s solo album The Mirror Pool and in Dead Can Dance’s Spiritchaser tour band. She invited Bourke to engineer and play percussion on a track that she had begun recording at home in Gippsland, which blossomed into a co-writing venture and the album Duality.

  The album had the same blend of ethnic and medieval moods, but tracks such as ‘Forest Veil’ and ‘Pilgrimage Of Lost Children’ were sparser than previous Gerrard recordings, though it didn’t deviate from her default shivery settings. ‘Sacrifice’, heavy on the choral and Balkan influences, and a more percussive ‘Tempest’ would be included in Gerrard and Bourke’s 1999 soundtrack to The Insider, Michael Mann’s follow-up to Heat; soundtracks would singularly occupy Gerrard’s time for the next six years, giving her the chance to stay in Australia and yet embrace the wider world.

  Brendan Perry, however, says he didn’t feel neglected. ‘I made a conscious decision not to work in film,’ he says. ‘To leave edits up to the production, to manipulate your ideas … It feels like a job as opposed to being true to my art.’ Hearing this, Gerrard calmly responds: ‘I’m brought in as an artist, to do what I make, not to do generic film scores.’

  In Ireland, Perry had been working for years on a solo album, going through different permutations of arrangements that his perfectionist nature wouldn’t let him finish.

  The Hope Blister album smile’s ok completed a trio of releases by 4AD’s entrenched survivors, giving the core fan base a reason to stick around. The album title was another metaphor, as the surface image of coping with depression is often far from reality.

  Each track on the Anakin compilation had an attached commentary on the sleeve: a lyric, information or a comment. Under the Hope Blister track ‘Dagger’ were the words: ‘Is this the idiot bastard son of This Mortal Coil?’ Well, yes and no. The album’s cover versions drew on a well of loneliness similar to the Mortal Coil trinity. Louise Rutkowski was a clear link to the past. But there was no Pallas Citroen on the cover, just a blurry image that Ivo had photographed with an old, leaky Polaroid of a vase in his London flat. The starkness matched the reduced numbers under Ivo’s direction and the monastic sound, stripped of extraneous detail.

  ‘It [smile’s ok] went against the grain of much modern music, and gladly so,’ Ivo told me at the time. ‘This
record takes me on a journey to somewhere I want to go. I find very little music does that these days. I like the feeling of comfort and being at home within music. You know, like you’re in safe hands. It’s music for people who don’t like to go out.’

  Even if the core fan base swooned, The Hope Blister could never emulate the success of This Mortal Coil; the past was a foreign country, as Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh’s solo albums were proof of. The UK’s latest breakthrough band, for example, was The Verve; Radiohead had headlined Glastonbury in the wake of its masterpiece OK Computer. Epic rock, Britpop, Big Beat … this was music to go out to. Multi-cultural trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack – whose 1997 single ‘Teardrop’ had been sung by guest vocalist Liz Fraser after Cocteau Twins had finally split up – was the kind of music that people wanted to stay in to. The first Labour government in nearly two decades brought a sense of optimism after the Conservative years. But just as with Blood, going against the grain was all the more reason for The Hope Blister.

  ‘We wanted to do our best for Ivo,’ says Colleen Maloney, ‘but it was a very difficult record and we were very careful who we targeted in the press because it was risky to cast the net wide. It wasn’t a trendy form of music.’

  ‘A melancholic, yet oddly soothing record … what fascinates is the uniformity of themes and treatments, creating the illusion that all the songs were written by the same person,’ said MOJO magazine. But NME’s review read like an uninformed sneer: ‘It’s not a particularly good start, is it? That name. Lifted from the humourless depths of gothsville and no doubt intended to symbolise some kind of Yin and Yang of joy and ultimate pain.’ It continued in the same vein, raising the comparison of ‘the deadly earnest neo-folk wibblings of Enya or Clannad’.