Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  ‘I felt like it was almost a Rema-Rema moment for Chris and Ed, something that really didn’t sound like anything else, a starting point of something real,’ says Ivo.

  The band’s guitarist and producer Dave Sitek was a 4AD obsessive to the point that he’d call studios where 4AD records had been recorded, asking for insider tips. ‘You could hear Cocteau Twins in Dave’s guitars, Gerard [Smith, the band’s bassist/keyboardist who died of lung cancer in 2011] was a massive fan of His Name Is Alive, and they knew 4AD’s catalogue inside out,’ says Sharp.

  Sitek even called Ivo at home, ‘trying to be a fan, and trying to be kind,’ Ivo recalls. But Ivo still wasn’t ready to reconnect with 4AD, even after six years away from the front line. ‘I was still listening to much less music, and it took me a long time to be able to go back and listen to anything on 4AD for pleasure,’ he says. ‘In 2002, I’d moved into this house where the environment was appropriate to re-create that feeling of that Majorca trip, where Vaughan and I mostly just listened to Eno. When I moved into this house, I banished voices and drums and that’s when my true love of Stars of the Lid and their offshoots blossomed. I found there was a finite amount of time one can listen to ambient music from the Eno camp on a loop.’

  Stars of the Lid was the Austin, Texas duo Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, specialists in drone-based, orchestral ambience that created a spellbinding sense of awe. Ivo started buying their albums, and with his name cropping up on sales reports, Wiltzie had emailed Ivo about concerns over the duo’s European distribution. ‘Adam didn’t know I had left 4AD,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I said Ed and Chris were the ones to contact, and I emailed Ed, whose response was, “Love them, love to hear something”. But he later told Adam that 4AD needed to be signing things that sold. That was an alarm bell in all sorts of directions. That’s the best example of how the post-Ivo model of 4AD differed, because I’d have done anything to have worked with Stars of the Lid.’

  Ivo also saw 4AD’s attempt to keep him in the loop as a cynical exercise. ‘They were trying to suggest I was still involved by never announcing I was not involved. People like Warren and Kim kept telling me that it had never really been made clear that I had been gone since 1999.’

  Ivo did re-engage with 4AD on one occasion when the label reissued The Hope Blister’s previous mail order-only Underarms in 2005, packaged with Sideways, a bonus CD of Underarm remixes by the Bavarian ambient composer Markus Guentner. ‘It was an excuse to get my dearly and recently departed [Shar Pei] Otis on the cover,’ Ivo admits. ‘The carrot to get Ed and Chris involved was Marcus, to create something new out of the record.’

  There might have been a Dead Can Dance album too, but after Gerrard and Perry had reformed for a tour in 2005, they again butted heads and egos and decided against persisting. Perry then decided he would leave 4AD too. ‘I’d become a bit of a nature boy, and a father, and it was the only time I ever needed a kick up the arse, to get back to making music,’ he says. ‘But no one [from 4AD] got in touch to ask how things were going. I also thought the label had lost kudos with its new signings. And all the old faces had gone. I had one album left on the band-cum-solo deal but I left by mutual agreement. There was a healthy debt that Eye Of The Hunter hadn’t put a dent in, and I later discovered that if I’d done a second solo album, 4AD would have cross-collateralised the debt from Dead Can Dance and so there would have been no income. That’s the old antiquated contracts for you.’

  In contrast, Mojave 3 had stuck around. Neil Halstead says the band hadn’t missed Ivo as other artists had since they’d only had a direct relationship with him before their debut album in 1995. Horrox and Sharp treated them reverently, allowing Halstead and Rachel Goswell to record respective solo albums Sleeping On Roads (2002) and Waves Are Universal (2004) that were released either side of the band’s fourth album Spoon And Rafter.

  ‘There was a lot of good will towards them at 4AD, including Martin [Mills],’ says Sharp. ‘I always felt that Neil was an underrated songwriter. His solo album was a relative surprise; it picked up good reviews and did pretty well in America, which worked as a good springboard between Excuses For Travellers and Spoon And Rafter, which became their best-selling record. So it felt like they were always on an upward trajectory, albeit a gradual one.’

  A fifth band album, Puzzles Like You (2006), fulfilled Mojave 3’s five-album contract with a more upbeat take on country/folk roots, though it remains the band’s last album to date. ‘It didn’t really take them any further audience-wise, so there wasn’t a huge sense of urgency on either side to do another deal,’ says Sharp. ‘And the band was increasingly precarious as an entity thanks to the long gaps between records, people’s different side projects and the increasing need all of them had to cope with real life.’††

  Nor was there urgency to persist with the standard v23 had set for artwork, going by Mojave 3’s twee folk-art imagery. The graphic design studio was only occasionally re-employed, to bring something special to the table, such as for Magnétophone’s second album The Man Who Ate The Man: enigmatic image, exquisite typeface and a little insert for eight small cards, with lyrical phrases on one side (‘walk beneath bad light’; ‘who are you here for?’) and a graphic image on the back that could be assembled into one complete picture, in a homage to the cardboard joy inside packets of bubblegum.

  The Man Who Ate The Man wasn’t just about the packaging. It was a more approachable listening experience than its predecessor, weaving in folk influences with guest folk singers King Creosote and James Yorkston. But the surprise was to be found on the buzzing instrumental ‘Kel’s Vintage Thought’ – with Kim Deal on drums and sister Kelley on violin and guitar. ‘Getting Kim and Kelley involved was a tactic for widening their musical horizons,’ says Sharp. ‘Ed had some Magnétophone demos with him when he was visiting them in Dayton, and they knocked up some bass and guitar in Kim’s home studio.’

  Perhaps the Deals swayed it, but ‘Kel’s Vintage Thought’ was a wayward choice for a lead single and hardly the vehicle to promote the album, which ranks as another neglected 4AD jewel. ‘I’d be surprised if it sold a thousand copies worldwide,’ says Sharp. ‘More attention should have been paid to the realpolitik of fighting for people’s commitment at Beggars. Plus it was an abrasive and abstract record in places, so there weren’t many obvious ways in. [Magnétophone’s] Matt and John were knocked back by the experience as they’d seen 4AD as a significant step up.’

  The spin-offs designed to promote the album had been an inspired choice, from a limited twelve-inch of Sonic Boom’s 20-minute remix of ‘Benny Insobriety’ to John-Mark Lapham’s impressionistic mix of the entire album. Lapham would play an unheralded part in 4AD’s next phase. Of the nine new acts unveiled between 2005 and 2007, The Late Cord was the best – Ivo agrees – and most frustratingly, the briefest.

  The Late Cord was Lapham’s collaboration with singer Micah P. Hinson, a fellow Texan out of the Cass McCombs mould of troubled souls who was trying to overcome a history of addiction and homelessness. Lapham had been the studio mastermind behind the Anglo-American quartet The Earlies, whose two albums patented an adventurous blend of folk and electronica. His motivation for working with Hinson, he says, ‘was to create my own “early 4AD sound”. I wasn’t trying to replicate it, but it was a massive influence.’

  Without knowing of Lapham’s reverence for the label, Ed Horrox had asked The Earlies if they wanted to remix a Rachel Goswell song. ‘I jumped at the chance to do something for 4AD,’ Lapham says. After hearing the Lapham/Hinson demos, Horrox offered to release a record, which became the mini-album Lights From The Wheelhouse, a filmic serving of sad, restless mystery with long stretches of ambient darkness, etched by titles such as ‘My Most Meaningful Relationships Are With Dead People’ and ‘Hung On The Cemetery Gates’. A full album was meant to follow, but Hinson fell off the radar and Lapham was forced to concede defeat. Having connected with Ivo, the pair talked about a This Mortal Coil-style project with Lapham
handling the music, but it never got further than a conversation.

  At least Ivo was rediscovering a love of music. Hearing Danish quintet Mew’s And The Glass Handed Kites – a progressive rock record out of its time, from an unexpected source – was the trigger for a fuller investigation of the gatefold sleeves of the progressive genre, which led to the artwork of many British prog rock labels, ‘especially those that didn’t work,’ he says, ‘like Deram Nova, I don’t know why.’

  An online search led Ivo to the Japanese paper-sleeve box set of King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, which kickstarted a love for the paper-sleeve format. ‘Since I was buying these records, I thought I might as well listen to them, with the feeling of a boy in a record shop, or working in a record shop,’ he says. ‘I was delighted to find genuinely exciting, original musicianship that really impressed me at a point in time when I was always running an inventory in my head of what contemporary music reminded me of, so it was a relief to be challenged. It was an emotional response to something that existed in the arts, like photography, rather than getting frustrated with what was meant to be in fashion.’

  Ivo did find time for current records too – the country melancholy of South San Gabriel, or Richmond Fontaine. It wasn’t remotely original but it clearly hit the right spot – worn and sad, authentic and true. There was one more 4AD album that Ivo fully endorsed – Jóhann Jóhannsson’s second 4AD album, 2008’s Fordlandia, another cinematic – but wholly instrumental – composition. The ambient minimalist from Iceland was as likely to incorporate orchestras as electronics in his work, and used concepts to shape his music. Released in 2006, IBM 1401, A User’s Manual was based on a Seventies recording of an IBM mainframe computer by Jóhann’s father (Jóhann Gunnarsson); Fordlandia was the name of American motor industrialist Henry Ford’s fantasy-style settlement in the Amazonian jungle, set up to source the rubber needed for car tyres.

  So far, Sharp and Horrox had slowly amassed an impressive body of work, mostly with an esoteric appeal, but a sense of adventure. Yet besides TV On The Radio, there was little significant sign of advancing the label. And this wasn’t going to happen with Celebration. The Brooklyn trio’s self-titled debut album, produced by Dave Sitek, shared much of TV On The Radio’s restless energy, but not their charisma or groove. Nor with the electronic instrumentalist Minotaur Shock, a.k.a. British-born David Edwards, who released two albums, Maritime (2005) and Amateur Dramatics (2008). Nor was there much chance with Portland, Oregon singer-songwriter-guitarist M. Ward, whose two albums, 2006’s Post-War (a rare political treatise for 4AD, concerning the United States’ reaction to the war in Iraq through its creative resources) and 2009’s Hold Time, were licensed from US indie Merge.

  With Australian quartet Wolf & Cub, the Sharp–Horrox A&R model even started to resemble the confused roster of late-Nineties 4AD, a rare excursion into rock that combined Sixties and shoegaze versions of psychedelia, with two drummers. But Vessels became the band’s only 4AD album. ‘They were originally more angular and sprightly but changed their minds and wrote long, lumpy, proggy songs that sank without trace,’ says Sharp. The solo album Watch The Fireworks from Emma Pollock, the singer of Scots band The Delgados that Ed Horrox had signed to Mantra, was similarly underwhelming and wasn’t followed by another.

  Pollock and Wolf & Cub were the newest kids on the bill of 1980: Forward, 4AD’s 25th-anniversary showcase in the tradition of The 13 Year Itch and All Virgos Are Mad. Shows at venues across London included Kristin Hersh playing Throwing Muses and solo songs; The Breeders, with Kim and Kelley Deal sober and sorted, according to special guest Josephine Wiggs; even Mark Kozelek, performing Red House Painters songs. It served to draw a line under most of what 4AD had so far achieved. TV On The Radio had been important, but the label lacked the kind of signing that would create a story, to make other artists – and journalists – wonder what was going on at 4AD. This would happen in 2006 with the surprise signing of Scott Walker, whose presence alone could command the right level of respect for the label.

  As one third of the Sixties idols The Walker Brothers, the man born Scott Engel specialised in grand, lugubrious melodramas in the style of Phil Spector’s kitchen sink productions. His rich, sonorous voice had iced several astonishing solo albums through the late Sixties, the cavernous arrangements and funereal tempos framing lyrics set in a definitively non-swinging part of London. Having retreated from fame and survived a series of MOR and country covers, and then The Walker Brothers’ patchily successful reunion in the Seventies, Engel only re-emerged for 1984’s sleek and audacious album Climate Of Hunter and, after an even lengthier retreat, 1995’s alarming, electronic-fused Tilt for major label imprint Fontana.

  Walker had always recorded for the majors. ‘But his manager has played the major label game for too long,’ says Sharp, ‘and he understood the integrity of a label like 4AD. I only talked to him after the deal had been done, but he said that it felt like a great place to be.’

  Walker had declined to make his 4AD debut in 1986 on This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow, but he would have already known of Ivo’s achievements. As it was, he arrived at the label with 2006’s The Drift, another avant-rock, neo-classical mass with a quaking industrial core, as challenging as it was rewarding. By increments, 4AD began to build on Walker’s residency, a signing that was never going to bring in the profits but proved 4AD was a viable option, an artist’s label.

  Zachary Francis Condon was next on board. Condon, who performed under the name of Beirut, was ‘incredibly important’ to the revival of 4AD, says Horrox. There were two – admittedly tenuous – links to Ivo: Condon hailed from Santa Fe, where, like Ivo, he developed a taste for the joyous Mexican folk sound of mariachi, to add to his love of Balkan folk, making his debut album Gulag Orkestar (licensed from the American label Ba Da Bing!) the first 4AD record rooted in ethnic folk since Dead Can Dance.

  Condon was only twenty when Gulag Orkestar was released, and widely acclaimed. When he toured with a nine-piece version of Beirut, ‘in the middle of having a nervous breakdown,’ says Horrox, there was cause for concern. But he bounced back, and a second album, The Flying Club Cup, was released, blending new influences from French chanson including Serge Gainsbourg and Yves Montand. TV On The Radio’s second 4AD album Return To Cookie Mountain (2006) – with Vaughan Oliver sleeve and Chris Bigg assistance – consolidated 4AD’s upward curve, with David Bowie and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino among the guest singers. But the relationship ended when TV On The Radio’s US label Touch & Go was bought by Universal, which then assumed responsibility for the indie label’s overseas licensing.

  Even though she was now out of contract with 4AD, Kim Deal returned in 2008, after a gap of six years – her tardiness this time could be blamed on the Pixies’ reunion in 2004 for a series of tours that continue, sporadically, to this day. The fourth Breeders album Mountain Battles retained Mando Lopez, Jose Medeles and engineer Steve Albini, bridging the raw nature of Title TK with more of the detail of Last Splash.

  The loss of TV On The Radio was compensated by the licensing of a new singer-songwriter who was to prove even more influential. Bon Iver – after bon hiver, French for ‘good winter’ – was the pen name of American singer-songwriter Justin Vernon, who handled the break-up of a relationship and his band DeYarmond Edison by leaving his native North Carolina for an extended winter sojourn in his father’s log cabin deep in the Medford, Wisconsin woods. While debilitated by glandular fever, Vernon recorded a set of demos – just voice, guitar and the occasional drum, which seeped an air of restorative isolation.

  These demos were merely intended to secure a record deal until Vernon realised the value of his intense, stark sketches and released 500 copies of an album, titled For Emma, Forever Ago. The blogsphere – which had expanded at an exponential rate, to create a whole new marketplace for artists – reacted with unanimous fervour and Vernon was chased by every independent label who could muster an offer.

  Ed
Horrox had witnessed Bon Iver’s breakthrough show in 2007, at the annual College Music Journal convention in New York. Chris Sharp was able to catch footage online. ‘We offered a worldwide deal with 4AD, but Justin and [US indie label] Jagjaguwar had a Midwest connection, so we got to license the album instead,’ says Sharp. ‘I left 4AD the week before it was released.’

  If Sharp had been successful in licensing Arcade Fire’s own breakthrough album Funeral (Rough Trade won out) in 2005, it could have been a very different story for him. But Martin Mills was a pragmatic – as well as ruthless – businessman, judging by Sharp’s memory of a meeting that took place only weeks after he’d returned from compassionate leave.‡‡

  Sharp: ‘Martin said something like, “I get the impression you’re losing your enthusiasm, is there anything you’d like to say?” I said I was still excited working at 4AD, and we agreed to revisit the conversation. Ed and I went to Nottingham to see The Breeders play. It was fantastic, Kim was clean and having a great time, and it was one of those evenings where you think, This is why I do this, to hang out with great people, it’s a privilege to work with these artists. The next day, Martin asked me to leave. He never did give me a clear explanation.’

  The reason turned out to be Simon Halliday, the new general manager for Beggars Banquet’s associated labels. In his formative teenage years, Halliday had been a committed fan of Echo & The Bunnymen, New Order and Cocteau Twins, and says the first This Mortal Coil album ‘is near perfection for me’. Halliday, like Horrox, was also smitten by club music – from R&B and soul to hip-hop and house: ‘It balanced out the ethereal,’ he says. ‘Though I always thought Cocteau Twins weren’t a guitar band, but more dance, because of their beats.’

  Halliday had promoted clubs nights in Manchester before joining the London-based promotions company Streets Ahead and then RTM, the distribution and marketing company that had risen from the ashes of Rough Trade Distribution. After working with labels such as 4AD and Tommy Boy, he’d joined Warp full-time, handling A&R and marketing before moving to New York to head the label’s US wing. In 2008, Halliday had departed over internal disagreements, but soon received Martin Mills’ offer of a job.