by Martin Aston
One of v23’s first commissions in its new office was a CD of 4AD tracks, which was to be cover-mounted on the November 1998 issue of the UK music monthly magazine Uncut. There were tracks by GusGus, Thievery Corporation and Cuba, yet it embodied the cold fact that as a popular cause, 4AD was dependent on the past with Pixies, Lush, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Colourbox and The Birthday Party all present. 4AD itself went back to the archives for new releases. Pixies At The BBC was a self-explanatory compilation of radio sessions that gave fans access to something rare rather than recycled; even rarer was Throwing Muses’ double CD In A Doghouse, combining the band’s debut album, Chains Changed EP, the pre-4AD demo tape The Doghouse Cassette and five songs written in 1983 but recorded in 1996 by the Muses trio.
Kristin Hersh fans were also treated to another solo album in one year, to launch 4AD’s new mail order-only service. Murder, Misery And Then Goodnight was a collection of doomy Appalachian ballads that Hersh’s father had played to her as a child before bedtime (something that arguably goes some way towards explaining her own fearless approach to songwriting). At no point did Hersh’s commitment to her art waver. She couldn’t do it any other way. And neither could Ivo.
Yet Hersh, Donelly and Defever, familiar faces all, couldn’t collectively provide a secure future. Mojave 3 couldn’t take the weight of any expectations. And what of The Amps? More to the point, what of The Breeders? In either incarnation, Kim Deal was the one 4AD artist missing from Anakin except in the liner notes: ‘also recording: The Breeders’.
Deal had not released anything since The Amps’ Pacer in 1995. The Uncut CD included The Breeders’ ‘Saints’, already six years old. The band had even got back together, after a fashion. In 1996, Deal had decided The Amps’ live set needed bolstering with Breeders songs, and so that audiences didn’t get confused, she decided to resuscitate the band’s name. ‘It was … fine,’ demurs Josephine Wiggs. ‘I’ve thought a lot about this, and I’ve concluded that The Breeders is whatever Kim is doing.’
Kelley Deal, meanwhile, had followed the path of rehab by staying on in St Paul, Minnesota: ‘I didn’t know anyone in Dayton who wasn’t always shit-faced,’ she says. With a less demanding schedule, she’d formed a new band, The Kelley Deal 6000, and recorded two albums, 1996’s Go To The Sugar Altar and 1997’s Boom! Boom! Boom!, both similar in feel to Kim’s modus operandi. In 1997, Breeders bassist Josephine Wiggs says Kim had called to ask if she wanted in on a new Breeders album, but knowing that drugs might still be in the equation, Wiggs politely declined.
Kim had rehired Last Splash co-producer Mark Freegard to record a new album with the former Amps, plus Kelley when the timing was right. Kim not only had an advance for the new record, but a considerable amount of royalties from the sampling of Last Splash cut ‘S.O.S.’ by The Prodigy for the British electronic band’s global smash single ‘Firestarter’. ‘Even after seven weeks, and a studio cost of two thousand dollars a day, we had nothing to hear,’ says Freegard. ‘Kim got totally lost. She was taking substances and not wanting to go to bed, but she wouldn’t let the other musicians play. I had to give up on her.’
Drummer Jim Macpherson also bailed. ‘Kim had changed,’ he agrees. ‘The band had a totally different feel, and I was drinking and smoking with Nate and Luis. And I felt I wasn’t wanted. I also had two small children.’
On the subject of drugs, Kim simply says, ‘Pot, opiates and beer, I still love them all. I just don’t do them anymore.’ At the time, it turned her search for a sound that was only in her head into a purist obsession. ‘Digital production had burned through recording studios like crack,’ she recalls. ‘Everyone was densely layering everything, making keyboards sound like guitars, and I’m so reactive. I could have put a hundred melodies on top but for me it’s more about drums and clean guitar. I worked really hard to keep it that hard and basic and people said it sounded unfinished! I was obviously doing the wrong thing.’
By 1998, she decided to jack it in and go AWOL in New York. ‘It was a lost year, and a lot of fun,’ she says, unrepentant. ‘I’d been touring consistently since 1987. So what was the worst that could happen? I finally met some guys in LA and moved out there, and I learnt to play drums, so it wasn’t wasted time.’
Everyone was deploying their best coping mechanism to deal with the changes that had swept through the industry. Ivo would have empathised with Neil Halstead finding peace in reclusion and a new obsession, though Ivo was not at the beach, among the waves, but still dreaming of a desert. He had looked, unsuccessfully, for the right plot of land on which to build a house, but he needed finance for when it would happen.
In the summer, he and Martin Mills had discussed a way forward. ‘It was the what-ifs,’ Ivo says. ‘The options were carrying on, which meant the likelihood of more layoffs and cutbacks, or shutting the whole thing down to a one-office operation back in the UK as effectively a catalogue label, or Martin buying me out. I knew that Martin wasn’t in a position to at that time but we both agreed that, should that become my preference, he’d try and find a way. We agreed to carry on thinking.’
In the meantime, 4AD was left drifting, much like the helpless narrator of ‘Song To The Siren’, lying lovelorn on the rocks.
chapter 23 – 1999
Everything Must Go
(BAD9001–CD: 4AD M2)
Chris Bigg recalls an email from Ivo in mid-1999 that included a confession: ‘We’re trying to play a game we’re not equipped to play.’
None of Ivo, Robin Hurley and Simon Harper can remember the exact date in 1999 that the trio convened in Twentynine Palms in California, just outside the Joshua Tree National Park. ‘Ivo said that we needed to talk about the future of the label, and his future in it, and what Robin and I both wanted, with or without him,’ recalls Simon Harper. ‘It was only on the second night that he said he wanted out. It wasn’t a shock. I didn’t fall off the sun lounger. The writing was on the wall.’
‘I only fully decided that I wanted to leave the company on that night in Joshua Tree,’ Ivo recalls. ‘Simon saying he wanted to move to New York, for family reasons, and that he’d no longer be part of 4AD London helped me express what I’d been scared to admit, even to myself, for years. The next morning, I told Robin and Simon that I wanted out.’
‘It was clear for a long time that Ivo was desperate to get out, that he was totally disconnected from it all,’ says Martin Mills. ‘He was pretty clear he wanted the money to live on for the rest of his life, and fair enough, who wouldn’t? But he valued the company at a level that we couldn’t afford.’
Beggars Banquet was in a particularly prosperous state following its dance-label offspring XL’s signing of The Prodigy. The band’s 1996 album The Fat Of The Land had entered the American and UK charts at number 1 on the back of the ‘Firestarter’ single and had eventually topped charts in twenty-six countries. But Mills was not in the habit of funding one label off the back of another (despite being forced to borrow funds from 4AD to defeat the court case against Nick Austin in 1989/1990). So an agreement had been shelved, and Ivo had carried on.
There was still hope that GusGus could make good on their investment, after the expensive videos, the top-drawer DJ remixes (including Carl Craig, Amon Tobin and DJ Vadim) and another media trip to Iceland for the band’s second album This Is Normal. ‘A huge amount of money was being spent on GusGus because we believed they would break,’ says Colleen Maloney.
But there was a marked difference between the extravagant booklet that accompanied Polydistortion and the standard bland CD jewel case that housed This Is Normal. The bulk of GusGus’ new tracks, largely written between Daníel Ágúst and Siggi Kjartansson, stood every chance of succeeding. The album had nothing as definable as Big Beat, trip hop or factory-produced pop – just the troupe’s usual progressive and inventive brand of Nordic soul, equal parts melody, beats and bleeps. Yet factions within GusGus blamed 4AD for bullying them into a less adventurous and atmospheric record.
‘We first sent a demo of “Teenage Sensation” and 4AD said, “What are you trying to do, music for space scientists?”’ recalls Biggi Veira. ‘It was too weird and electronic for them, so we changed it to what you hear on the album. This Is Normal wasn’t interesting enough and a lot of older fans would have hated it. We hadn’t progressed from Polydistortion, which combined different people and backgrounds without any ambition besides having fun. After signing to 4AD and touring, the opinions and desires of other members didn’t sync with mine, which were more electronic than pop. We knew GusGus would split after This Is Normal.’
If This Is Normal was in some way unadventurous, it was still a sublime collection of tracks. Sung breathily by Hafdís Huld, ‘Teenage Sensation’ was about as definable as GusGus got, with a loping trip-hop feel. ‘Bambi’ had the strings-lined dreaminess of classic 4AD, ‘Ladyshave’ was 4AD’s best dance hit-in-waiting since The Wolfgang Press’s ‘A Girl Like You’, complete with gospel-tinged backing vocals. ‘I was convinced “Ladyshave” would be an enormous hit,’ says Ivo (Colleen Maloney claims the track paved the way for American disco campers Scissor Sisters). Being ahead of your time is only rewarding in posterity: at the time, the UK chart placing of 64 – much higher than ‘Believe’ but still lower than ‘Polyesterday’ – was a grave disappointment for the label.
A second single was released before the album followed six weeks later. The smoother techno pulse of ‘Starlovers’ reached 62. This Is Normal only scraped the UK top 100 at 94. Wasn’t 4AD an albums label? It seemed GusGus’ fan base was more of a discerning club crowd that didn’t care much about albums on top of singles. ‘VIP’, the third single drawn from the album, reached 86 to conclude another dismaying sales campaign. ‘GusGus had to get on Radio 1 to break in the UK,’ says Maloney, ‘and we weren’t like a major label that goes in every week plugging bands that can make the playlist.’
Biggi Veira thinks 4AD should share the responsibility for the failure. ‘Our manager Baldur said “Ladyshave” had sold out in its first week of release, and 4AD didn’t press enough copies to get it into the top 40. I also think 4AD was putting too much faith in too few active acts. The older artists, for example Kim Deal, had nothing going on at the time. 4AD should have had lots of cool artists with low recording costs, not loads but enough releases to have things going on. The crowd keeps buying everything from the label, and there is also the chance that some albums will sell more. And maybe 4AD should have been more careful on what they spent on GusGus!’
4AD returned once again to its back catalogue. Compiled for the American market, Always Stay Sweet drew from those His Name Is Alive records that had gone out of print. Soundpool made Dif Juz music finally available on CD, combining Huremics and Vibrating Air tracks with Lonely Is An Eyesore’s ‘No Motion’. The Birthday Party’s Live 1981–82 was more mercenary since it contained the whole 1981 Venue show (bar, this time, the cover of The Stooges’ ‘Loose’) that the band had previously reckoned wasn’t good enough to release in full.
Ivo was at least involved in one half of Red House Painters’ Retrospective double CD compilation of the band’s 4AD years. His exacting attitude was illustrated by his decision to exclude ‘Take Me Out’, his all-time favourite 4AD track. ‘I couldn’t get it to fit the running order. Leaving it off spoke to something bigger and more important about the record, and I’m proud of that.’
Mark Kozelek sequenced the second CD, subtitled Demos, Outtakes, Live (1989–1995). He recalls that he and Ivo had reconnected in a mastering suite where Retrospective was being cut, followed by dinner. ‘He seemed happier than I’d ever seen him,’ Kozelek recalls.
This might have been because Martin Mills and Ivo had finally agreed a sale price for 4AD: ‘a seven-figure sum,’ says Mills. ‘We didn’t negotiate,’ says Ivo. ‘I didn’t hire a lawyer. We just did it. Martin had once again just been there for me.’
Ivo had first approached Marc Geiger about buying out his 50 per cent share of 4AD. Geiger had recently left American Recordings in 1996 to launch ARTISTdirect, one of the first companies to recognise the internet as the future of the music industry: alongside a booking agency and start-up record label (in partnership with major label RCA-BMG), ARTISTdirect had an e-commerce division, which was establishing individual ‘stores’ to create a business and information link between artist and fan – the Kristin Hersh model writ (very) large. But Ivo’s offer came in just as ARTISTdirect was about to become a public company, and the stock market crashed.
‘I desperately wanted to do it,’ says Geiger. ‘But I ended up losing all my stock and couldn’t make it happen, or afford it. I was very bummed.’
The architect of the successful arrangement turned out to be former 4AD staffer Rich Holtzman. Mindful of 4AD’s problems and what limited career opportunities lay ahead, Holtzman had jumped before he could be pushed and joined Atomic Pop as label and marketing manager. The LA-based company was at the forefront of the new digital era, building up a portfolio of rights to a wealth of music from numerous independent labels: in PR speak, ‘a compelling platform to promote, market, and distribute their music digitally directly to consumers’.
The offer to license music from Beggars Banquet and its associated labels was enough to fund buying Ivo’s share of 4AD. ‘It was a short licensing deal but a big wad of cash,’ says Holtzman. ‘Digital rights weren’t going to mean that much for a few years to come, and by then Martin would get the rights back. But it was the right deal to strike.’*
Determined to arrest 4AD’s financial drain, Mills wanted to quickly announce the sale and to initiate another round of staff redundancies. The decision was taken for Robin Hurley to fly over to Alma Road and break the news, face to face.
In the meantime, Kristin Hersh’s new single ‘Echo’ was released in June. The sultry electric piano underpinning each verse gave way to the gritty Muses-lite rock for the chorus and signified a change of approach: its parent album, Sky Motel, was Hersh’s first part-electric solo album. There were drums on six tracks (ex-Muse David Narcizo played on two). Hersh had not just relocated her mojo but the family had relocated to New England, though the new album had again been recorded in New Orleans with her trusted friend and engineer Trina Shoemaker. The face on the back cover wore an unconditionally happy smile, as if the burdens of the past had again been lifted. But when the photograph was taken, Hersh hadn’t known that Ivo, her friend and long-term supporter, would have to leave her behind.
Sky Motel was released on the Monday following the annual Glastonbury festival weekend, where GusGus had been playing. The 4AD London office had attended en masse. ‘Martin said, “Let’s not do it now, let’s do it after the staff have had their fun”,’ says Robin Hurley, ‘and GusGus was one band that the office all believed in. But it fucked me up, having to return to Alma Road but not being able to tell them [about the sale and redundancies] until after Glastonbury. I remember trudging up that hill on the Monday, and a calmness coming over me, because it was inevitable, and the right thing to do for the company.’
‘The way it all ended was perverse in the extreme,’ says A&R man Lewis Jamieson. ‘GusGus were second headliners on the dance stage, and they played a great set to eight thousand people, and it felt like it was finally going to happen, with the clubs going mad for “VIP”. We came back into the office after the weekend, where Robin was sitting, saying he needed to talk to us all. Colleen disappeared for an early lunch and the rest of us were told that we were being let go, immediately, because the label was out of money. It felt very savage and I felt betrayed. But that’s the music industry. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of people since, at big and small labels.’
Maloney had disappeared early as she was to be the only staff member retained by 4AD’s new outright owner, Martin Mills. ‘There were no guarantees to start with,’ she says. ‘So I went clothes shopping and bought an interview outfit, just in case. It was a very tough, emotional time. I was offered a job by Rough Trade but Marti
n asked me to stay and become head of press for the whole of Beggars Banquet, and I thought at least the bands would know someone if I stayed. It wasn’t the easiest place to work as people so identified with Ivo, and he wasn’t there. We just had to get on with it.’
There was a one-month lull before Cuba’s album Leap Of Faith was released, a spectacularly ironic title given that, as Jamieson says, ‘4AD was in no state to promote it by then’.
4AD was in no state to design it either. Leap Of Faith was the first sleeve since Vaughan Oliver’s arrival not to be even laid out by v23, and the simplistic band logo, jazzed up with spotlight effects, showed what one-dimensional blandness could look like without a unique overview by a visionary designer. Cuba’s next single ‘Black Island’ limped out, with the artwork in complete contrast to the euphoric sound.
Fortunately, Ivo had managed to ensure that there was still time to leave his imprint by agreeing to release a record by David Narcizo. With his wife Misi, the former Throwing Muses drummer was running his graphic design company, Lakuna, Inc, but had also been recording kaleidoscopic instrumentals, from ambient to loops-based rhythm created from samples of Fifties and Sixties records. ‘I was attracted to the idea of making a sound that has bits of past and present stuck to it in a truly random fashion,’ Narcizo told Jeff Keibel.
Under the name Lakuna (the Sri Lankan word for ‘symbol’), Narcizo released the single ‘So Happy’, followed by the album Castle Of Crime. With former Belly drummer Tom Gorman, Kristin Hersh and Bernard Georges among the guests, the record resembled a final reunion of some of Ivo’s most cherished 4AD contacts, given Throwing Muses had been his all-important entry into the country he had since made his home, and hopefully for good. But Ivo wasn’t home and dry yet. ‘Everyone was keen to support David because he’s such a lovely bloke,’ he recalls. ‘He was reaching out to me, looking for input, but I had nothing to give. I couldn’t feel it … or anything, still. That was what was so ultimately depressing.’