Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  ‘Uppermost in our minds,’ says Sharp, ‘was that 4AD had squandered its credibility having hit records, with endless Cuba twelve-inch remixes, in a desperate attempt to be on the radio and have hits. All previous successes on 4AD had happened organically. Ed and I were into labels such as Warp, so we looked for artists with integrity and staying power to re-establish 4AD as a home for uncompromised creativity. Perhaps we were naïve in signing bands that lacked commercial ambition, but that had been the problem before. At the same time, we were under much more direct financial scrutiny than Ivo ever was. He never needed to seek Martin’s approval. We had to make tiny deals, never over £5,000 an album.’

  The artwork for I Guess Sometimes I Need To Be Reminded Of How Much You Love Me was pure v23, with the photos and credits printed on the inside of an inner slipcase, and the track listing on a strip of card at the rear. Yet cost-saving was involved. The designer was Martin Andersen, a v23 assistant working under Vaughan Oliver’s art direction, which was a cheaper option than using the head honcho.

  4AD continued to repackage its enviable back catalogue, with compilations from Heidi Berry (Pomegranate: An Anthology) and, finally, a Cocteau Twins collection (Stars And Topsoil: A Collection)† before the year was out.‡

  More discerning collectors were engaged by the compilation Fwd>Motion given away free at a 4AD-sponsored event at an abandoned foam factory in London, featuring Magnétophone, future 4AD signing Minotaur Shock, and a live recording by electro-ambient duo Paul Schütze and Simon Hopkins. More decisive esoterica came from Piano Magic’s 4AD debut, the ambient soundtrack to Spanish director Bigas Luna’s art-house film Son de Mar – not even Dead Can Dance’s early film soundtracks were so indulged. The Sharp/Horrox version of 4AD appeared to be moving closer to Ivo’s post-Bauhaus years, of Gilbert/Lewis and David J/René Halkett, and disregarding any sense of clear-cut trends.

  Son de Mar was already Piano Magic’s fifth album, and 4AD was the London trio’s fourth label, but the soundtrack was more of an introduction to the main event. Released in 2001, Writers Without Homes was a contemporary reading of a familiar blueprint: Sharp says core member Glen Johnson ‘was obsessed with This Mortal Coil, and the album was to keep in with the old 4AD spirit of collaboration’.

  Johnson had a more eclectic reach than This Mortal Coil, drawing on shoegaze and post-rock, but guest performers included long-lost folk singer Vashti Bunyan, former Cocteau Twin and TMC contributor Simon Raymonde, and the stunning, dolorous baritone of John Grant.§ v23’s sublime artwork – with Vaughan Oliver at the helm – maintained the image and feel of old. There was one weak spot: the concept. Sharp felt that Johnson hadn’t fully delivered on his collaborative promise. More ominously, there were echoes of the 4AD–Warners relationship of old.

  ‘4AD’s press and marketing people struggled with the album and I never sensed much enthusiasm for Piano Magic around Alma Road,’ says Sharp. Johnson’s plan to write a rockier album for the live incarnation of Piano Magic didn’t alleviate Sharp’s concerns. ‘I was put off by the prospect of getting the project through the Beggars system, so we didn’t pick up the option.’

  In its eclectic reach and quirkier feel, Writers Without Homes was more His Name Is Alive than This Mortal Coil, and now it was the turn of the real thing. With 2001’s Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth, Warren Defever persisted with his progressive R&B evolution, though without Karin Oliver for the first time. But Defever couldn’t settle, and sought a working environment that was unencumbered by contracts and strangers at 4AD’s office. After one last album for the label, 2002’s Last Night, ‘I begged to be released from our contract one record early,’ he says.¶

  Kristin Hersh had already established career independence with her consumer-funded organisation CASH Music, but had agreed to persist with 4AD as the budgets, though smaller than they once were at the label, gave her a profile. Some of the old demons, though, returned during the making of her fifth solo album, 2002’s Sunny Border Blue. ‘It was some of my best work, but I sang about things I shouldn’t have and played things I shouldn’t have – it was like a mania. Things could be insular and a mindfuck, and lonely without Ivo, and I’d already lost Dave [Narcizo], the only two people who spoke my musical language. So I compensated with my first real work of obsession since I was a teenager. I’d get drunk in the studio and call people, and they’d say, “Tell the truth, it will be fine, just record it”. And it wasn’t my 4AD any longer. And I’d been there longer than the other employees! Piece by piece, we’d lost the family, but it was inevitable. The entire music industry was collapsing. But it was fine too. It was about the music again instead of the family, and I still had some good people on my side.’

  In 2000, there had been a very brief Throwing Muses reunion, with Tanya Donelly also on board, for two fan gatherings (in Massachusetts and at a Rhode Island music festival) christened ‘Gut Pageant’. Hersh then got busy. Her fourth son Brodie was born in November 2002, followed by her sixth solo album The Grotto. It was the most nakedly acoustic album she’d yet made, but this was partly down to siphoning off the electricity for a new Throwing Muses album. Husband Billy had noticed Hersh was writing Muses-style songs, and suggested she use part of her advance for the solo album on a band record, so Hersh, Narcizo and Georges reconvened after seven years apart.

  Hersh named the album Throwing Muses, like the 1986 debut, in the spirit of starting over. Recorded over two weekends, the album had an intensely knotty mood – ‘quick and dirty, playing by the seat of our pants,’ says Hersh. Both the solo and band album were released on the same day in March 2003: ‘They were two sides of the same coin,’ says Hersh. ‘I didn’t want either to suffer because of the other, and they came from the same time and place. They’re related.’

  Throwing Muses even featured a guest backing vocalist – Tanya Donelly. It was an extraordinary moment for them both. ‘I just asked her,’ Hersh recalls. ‘I thought she’d be too busy, as she had had a baby. She wrote all these crazy melodies around mine, and by the end, I couldn’t tell whose voice was whose. We were both in tears, because it felt like we were singing together.’

  Hersh wanted Throwing Muses to tour; with Narcizo committed to his design company, he helped find a replacement drummer, Rob Ahlers. Since Hersh saw Narcizo as an irreplaceable Muse, she named the new trio 50 Foot Wave. It took on a life of its own, recording 2004’s self-titled mini-album and 2005’s full-length Golden Ocean, in which Ahler’s more aggressive style pushed Hersh to blistering heights.

  ‘Since Hips And Makers, I’d been releasing a record a year, and touring until I wore out my welcome,’ she recalls. ‘I saw 50 Foot Wave as an opportunity to not think about solo material and to travel in a different sphere. Different sound, clubs, engineers. And then to come back with fresh ears and impulses.’

  Like Hersh, Donelly too had found a way to combine motherhood with music. Her 2002 second solo album Beautysleep again featured husband/bassist Dean Fisher and Narcizo, before the entrancing acoustic Whiskey Tango Ghosts finished her 4AD contract on a high, in a country/folk reverie that spoke of her present state ten years on from Belly.**

  However, the most anticipated return was Kim Deal – with Kelley again by her side. The sisters had been recording piecemeal since 1998, but the only track they’d managed was a cover of The James Gang’s ‘Collage’ (the B-side of the first single they’d bought together) for the 1999 soundtrack of The Mod Squad. Five other tracks from this period ended up on the new Breeders album, but it wasn’t until 2001 that Kim and Kelley toured again under that name, with three Breeders debutantes: guitarist Richard Presley and bassist Mando Lopez from the LA punk band Fear, and drummer Jose Medeles. The same year, Steve Albini was recalled to record the rest of the album, which Kim called Title TK. ‘That was the title I wanted to call Last Splash, but it didn’t make so much sense for that record,’ she says. ‘But here, it worked. Title TK sounds like I know nothing, even after fighting for so many rounds, not even a title for
the fucking record! I thought it was funny.’

  Although there were five Breeders on the credits, the album’s sombre, skeletal feel resembled the solo album that Kim had once intended to make. She was even playing some of the drums. 4AD bravely released ‘Off You’ as the lead single, a haunting ballad that laid bare the suffering and doubt that the sisters had endured. It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to ‘Cannonball’, and all the energies of Elektra to keep her on side failed.

  Deal had also to contend with the fact 4AD had changed. ‘I was very suspicious when I first met Ed Horrox, because he wasn’t Ivo. I also talked to Ivo, and to Vaughan, and it was all confusing. I didn’t know what anyone was doing. I don’t know if anyone suggested producers, but I’d wanted to shoo away everyone since everything had gone digital. But my 4AD contract ended with Title TK.’

  In 2002, 4AD had also released the debut album Nonument by Sybarite, a neo-classical-ambient-electronic assemblage by Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Xian Hawkins. But it wasn’t all edgy electronica, as other signings The Mountain Goats and Cass McCombs represented a new vanguard of Americana.

  The Mountain Goats was a loose collective arranged around the poetic, narrative strengths of Californian singer-songwriter John Darnielle, who had released numerous lo-fi tracks across cassette, vinyl and CD before 2002’s Tallahassee. It was the first of six albums that 4AD was to release over the next seven years, as success in America – though very little outside – made it worthwhile continuing.

  McCombs, another Californian, was even more of a curio, living as a restless hobo, sleeping in cars, on couches and at campsites across the country. Asked what he’d like on his tombstone, he said, ‘HOME AT LAST’. His 2002 EP debut Not The Way shared Alex Chilton’s resigned, mournful stamp, and McCombs could have been the new 4AD’s Mark Kozelek. But after two albums, A (2003) and PREfection (2005), McCombs moved on, to the London-based Domino label, just as he’d moved on to other cars, couches and campsites.

  Another character who would have slotted in alongside McCombs’s tormented nature was Vinny Miller. He had dropped the starry smooth hound alias, and finally completed an album. 4AD released On The Block in 2004, six years after his Anakin demo. Fittingly, the album is one of the label’s most buried treasures, as Miller was in no reasonable state to promote it bar a few shows in America. He didn’t even have the will to continue making music.

  Miller recalls how hopeless he’d felt during those intervening years. ‘I blew opportunities most musicians would give their teeth for. I dived headfirst into music tech with hardware samplers and hard disk recorders, when I should have spent the time being creative. The momentum gets lost and the length of time becomes a burden in itself. If you’ve worked 12-hour days for two and a half years but haven’t completed even one piece, something’s gone badly wrong. At the least, you’re not cut out for a career in music. They [Ed and Chris] wanted to help, but however supportive or tuned in somebody is, they can’t finish your record for you. And finishing it was a matter of recognising my own mediocrity.’

  Chris Sharp recalls an upsetting conversation where Miller expressed ‘a paranoid hallucinatory belief that Vaughan [Oliver] was this male force, trying to control, or damage, his career’. Miller’s finished album careered over twelve wildly undulating tracks, his fevered voice couched in hushed and violent outbursts. ‘It’s not super-dark,’ he reflects today. ‘If it’s mad, it’s benevolently so. A lot of it came from boredom. I’d do something beautiful, melodic and atmospheric and then be so sick of that sound that I’d do something different for a bit. Then I’d get something shouty to a finishing point and be exhausted by it.’

  Ivo heard On The Block at a point, he says, where it was best he didn’t listen to 4AD releases: ‘But, of course, I did. It’s not the overall album that I’d imagined when I contacted Vinny years earlier. In some ways, it’s better. It’s almost like he jumped straight to his second album. He’d got very glitch and “laptop” and I’m happy Ed and Chris didn’t necessarily respond positively to that approach. For me, it was Vinny’s voice. It was before the era when post-Jeff Buckley wannabes became a dime a dozen, without the voices to deliver the emotion. Vinny seemed to have returned to a place where he wanted to allow his voice to be heard, to shine. I find the recording unnecessarily lo-fi for my taste, but the arrangements, and his voice, were fabulous.’

  Yet Miller was still intent on a sense of disruption. For starters (literally), ‘The Yes/No Game’ has to be the most bizarre opening track in 4AD’s canon – two minutes of conversation between Miller and an east London pirate radio DJ. ‘He popped up while I was flicking through for radio samples,’ Miller recalls. ‘I wasn’t prank-calling … I originally wanted a taped shout-out, then wanted to win his game. It’s supposed to disorientate.’

  The album cover portrayed Miller tarred and feathered, eyes heavily lidded, as if drugged or hypnotised. ‘It is to date, the worst album sleeve concept ever released on 4AD,’ he states. ‘I’m chuffin’ proud of that. It was by accident but I remembered Sebastião Salgado’s photo of the Gulf War oil well-capping guys. It was for purposes of liberation too. With every new track being completed, it felt like unzipping a skin from the top of my head right the way down to my feet. It was a fucking great feeling.’

  Yet On The Block had no lasting cathartic effect. When Miller’s concert in the tiny backroom of London pub The Water Rats was shut down by a fire between the soundcheck and the show, it seemed to be an omen. Miller says that 4AD’s decision to terminate the relationship ‘was pretty merciful, as things panned out’. He now works as a nurse with people suffering from ‘severe and enduring mental illness’.

  How perfect that Ivo’s last signing at 4AD was someone whose mental fragility couldn’t make enough sense of the business of music. ‘I like obscurity. It’s underrated,’ concludes Miller, adding, ‘There are too many records out there. Some of them are great. Bands have creative differences and split, solo artists isolate and go nuts. I don’t regret leaving.’

  The same year saw Lisa Gerrard’s departure after twenty-two years on the label. In 2002, 4AD had released her soundtrack to the film Whale Rider, a widely successful (and independently released) magic-realist saga based around Maori culture, and Immortal Memory followed in 2004. It was her first original album in six years, recorded with a new collaborator, Irish classical composer Patrick Cassidy. ‘4AD after Ivo was like someone had lifted up the house and put a new one on top, and you don’t know where anything is. I decided to see out my agreement, and that was it.’

  So where was Ivo during these developments? Having twice failed to buy land in the Santa Fe region on a neighbouring ridge to where he’d first searched, he had purchased a plot of ten acres in 2000, initiated building in August 2001 and taken possession of his new house in June 2002. The stress of 4AD had gone, but not the clinical depression. Despite a couple of moments of clarity where he’d considered making music again, to the point of sending out tapes of cover versions to a couple of people, ‘I couldn’t go through with it,’ he recalls. ‘In any case, I haven’t had an original idea for years. Just like so much modern music.’

  Considerate towards 4AD’s legacy and aware its founder’s aura still hovered over Alma Road, Ed Horrox kept in touch with Ivo, posting him compilations. ‘It was mostly unsigned, emerging little bands, and he [Ivo] would write most of them off. He’d say, “Twelve of those thirteen tracks were shit, but I really like that Shins song”.’

  In 2001, when Horrox flew toTexas to see XL signings The White Stripes at the South By Southwest festival, he paid Ivo a visit: ‘It felt like I was visiting the guru. I was looking at a fire that was nearly out, but nurturing the embers … and I wanted to say hello, music fan to music fan. We mostly talked about old music, like Spirit, Steve Miller, Judy Henske, or about dogs, but never about how or why things had tailed off for him. He even gave the impression he wasn’t listening to music.’

  Horrox didn’t even get a positive r
eaction to Blonde Redhead’s brilliant 2004 album Misery Is A Butterfly, despite the New York-based trio’s inventive twist on the dream-pop dynamic. Japanese singer Kazu Makino and Italian twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace had had roots in a noisier dissonance – early albums were released on Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley’s label Smells Like. But by the time they signed to 4AD, they were mining a more concentrated, swooning sound, part vintage shoegaze in the style of Lush (especially ‘Equus’) and part baroque Gallic pop in the style of Serge Gainsbourg’s Sixties classic Histoire De Melody Nelson. Makino was a Lush, Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil fan. ‘Those people made the kind of records you had to make a choice to listen to,’ she explains. ‘I’d never imagined I had what it took to make a record like that, with that kind of conviction.’

  ‘Misery Is A Butterfly was the first time we felt we were making a step forward,’ says Chris Sharp. ‘It opened 4AD up to America again, which led directly to TV On The Radio, which was another step up – the hottest band on the planet – and we could be taken seriously again. Things began to accelerate.’

  Brookyn-based multi-racial quintet TV On The Radio had released its debut EP Young Liars in 2003 on the US indie Touch & Go. The record had infused art rock with a funk/soul perspective, and had original ideas: the EP’s hidden track, for example, was an a cappella version of Pixies’ ‘Mr Greaves’. ‘It was the first thing I sent Ivo that he freaked out about,’ says Horrox. ‘I thought, fucking hell, wow, something’s going on here.’