Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  More plugged-in to the new generation of young beats-infused pop and electronica being fussed over by the fresh legions of blog writers, Halliday was hired to provide a jolt in the arm for the revitalised 4AD. His first idea was to unite most of Beggars’ labels. XL, Rough Trade (Mills had just purchased half of Rough Trade from its owner Geoff Travis) and Matador (an American label founded in New York by Gerard Cosnoy that Beggars had also bought into) were strong enough to stand alone, but Mills agreed that both Beggars Banquet and Too Pure labels should be mothballed, those bands deemed surplus to requirements let go, and those worth retaining to be affiliated under one roof. ‘Simpler is easier,’ says Halliday. ‘And the strongest element was 4AD.’

  That was enough of a vision for Mills to finally interfere with the running of 4AD and make Halliday the new label head. ‘It was just the next phase,’ Mills explains. ‘The A&R needed to become more dynamic and energetic, and Simon was very ambitious.’

  Chris Sharp and Ed Horrox had tried to restore, even expand, Ivo’s original aesthetic, not in his image but with respect for it. But releases such as Plague Songs, a concept album about the ten plagues of Egypt commissioned by the British arts organisation Artangel for its project The Margate Exodus, and even perhaps Scott Walker, were too left field to be financially viable. As Sharp says of Minotaur Shock’s Maritime, ‘This delicate, complex, melodic, tricky electronic record, in time-honoured, beautiful packaging … but it just didn’t happen. We already knew from Magnétophone how hard it was in the current market.’

  ‘The Ed and Chris model proved not to be particularly successful in a commercial sense,’ says Ivo. ‘But I’d really admired how, clearly, they were releasing music that they loved. I like both of them immensely as people and had appreciated how both, for a while anyway, would send me music that they were enjoying, regardless of whether they were thinking about releasing it. But the last time Ed came to visit, I chastised him for not having signed one band or individual that hadn’t already released a record with someone else. In his response, I realised that, once again, the pressure and need to sign something that would sell had raised its ugly head. But that decision was taken away from Ed and Chris by Martin.’

  Under Simon Halliday’s charge, Brooklyn’s majestically brooding The National, the eclectic, art-rocking St. Vincent (Oklahoma singer-songwriter Annie Clark) and the indefatigable, gravel-voiced Mark Lanegan moved from Beggars Banquet to 4AD. Krautrock/lounge fusioneers Stereolab, after enjoying a long association with Too Pure, also moved over.

  Sharp says that Beirut left 4AD as a result of his dismissal, but otherwise little changed. ‘Martin’s been hugely successful because he’s always made moves to preserve the business,’ Sharp says, magnanimously. ‘And it was a great opportunity for them to weed out the roster. But it was unfair to say I wasn’t interested anymore. It didn’t help my state of mind that Bon Iver’s album quickly sold 50,000 copies.’

  Another disgruntled individual was Ivo, who was incandescent about the folding of labels into 4AD: ‘At the time, I was very hurt he didn’t let me know what he intended to do. I still don’t understand the decision, effectively just to start calling Beggars 4AD, but I can’t deny it’s proved to be a sound business move.’

  ‘After Jac Holzman sold Elektra, lock-stock-and-barrel to Warner Brothers in the early Seventies, he was probably not pleased that [hard rockers] Staind ended up on his old label,’ says Robin Hurley. ‘But Jac put his label behind him. Ivo hasn’t.’

  In 2011, Martin Mills and Ivo met face to face for the first time in twelve years when Mills visited Ivo’s home in Lamy after concluding some business Stateside. ‘It was very moving to see Ivo,’ recalls Mills. ‘He’s always been an odd fish, which I’m sure he’d take as a compliment! He’s incredibly pure and principled – ascetic, if you like.’

  Ivo: ‘It was really good to see Martin and be reminded of the man himself and not the man of business. He’s put up with so much from me over the years, eager to play devil’s advocate or just to let me vent. He’s supported me in more ways than anyone will ever know.’

  Mills: ‘I know that it’s more than just about business with Ivo. And he’s been very good in saying he’s forfeited the opportunity to voice an opinion, and he’s never told me what to do. He left, and we had no choice but to carry on, and I think 4AD is stronger for having those extra bands. It’s not like they wouldn’t fit within a broader definition of 4AD. [Beggars dance act] Basement Jaxx clearly wouldn’t have fitted. Even M/A/R/R/S shows how catholic 4AD could be. And [current 4AD acts] tUnE-yArDs, Grimes and St. Vincent are not just female singers but are totally compatible with Ivo’s purist ethos. But 4AD couldn’t have survived without changing. The growth and broadening of 4AD is consistent with its history. And Grimes is clearly a Cocteaus fan.’

  The artists that Mills mentions as fitting Ivo’s purist ethos are a wide-ranging collection, and in the case of tUnE-yArDs and Grimes, their penchant for glitchy rhythm and jarring textures makes this highly unlikely.§§

  Yet Grimes – the adopted name of Vancouver-born Claire Boucher – is at 4AD mostly because of Ivo. In 2012, 4AD licensed her third album Visions from the Montreal label Arbutus. Leading online music site Pitchfork made the lead single ‘Oblivions’ its number one track of 2012, for its ‘steely, hyper-minimal beat, layered vocals, and hypnotic, circular melody’, and the lyric ‘beautifully fragmented and open to interpretation’.

  Boucher’s tough, flighty, imaginative ‘cyborg-pop’ has seen her compared to Abba and Aphex Twin, Björk and Enya, though at high school, Boucher was more besotted with Pixies and Cocteau Twins. ‘I was really into female vocalists, and I’d started listening to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but someone said Cocteau Twins were better,’ she recalls. ‘Pixies were big for me too. I didn’t know Birthday Party was on 4AD, but I’d listen to them too. Their aesthetic was just so intense and scary, and it was music that my parents wouldn’t like! I started finding out about Bauhaus, New Order, Dead Can Dance … but Cocteau Twins are one of my biggest influences. If Liz wasn’t singing lyrics, I didn’t need to either. I like to improvise, but it’s not free jazz or jamming; it’s beautiful, raw vocal expression. With Pixies, it was more “I’m sixteen and getting wasted!”’

  Boucher says that most other record labels wanted her to change her material in some way, but that 4AD’s reputation was the real deal-maker. ‘I’d always felt that, if the music industry was The Simpsons, then 4AD is Lisa Simpson. She’s not the most popular person in the family but the cool, intelligent, subversive one. 4AD don’t sign buzz bands, they’re super-tasteful, and distinctively feminine a lot of the time.’

  Interestingly, the number of female artists signed in the Halliday–Horrox era matches that of Ivo’s, whose support helped women become so visible in contemporary music. But in other respects, ‘4AD Present’ is a very different label to ‘4AD Past’. For example, the feminine was emphatically absent in June 2012 when 4AD released its first rap act, SpaceGhostPurrp, the self-styled leader of underground rap group Raider Klan Mafia. Judging by his album Mysterious Phonk: The Chronicles Of SpaceGhostPurrp, Miami rapper/producer Markese Roller is a master of hypnotic, slurred rhythm, but he’s still a contentious presence among the label’s traditional followers, which have baulked at lines such as, ‘Grind on me/ I got your bitch on my dick, bitch.’

  ‘I’m sure SpaceGhostPurrp is appropriate for some label out there,’ reckons 4AD keeper of the flame Jeff Keibel. ‘But it simply doesn’t belong in the 4AD universe. It forever taints the legacy of the label.’

  ‘Most great hip-hop has lyrics that can offend people, and some lyrics aren’t to my personal taste, but I tend to be liberal when I like a beat,’ Halliday responds. ‘But I think he’s insulting other competing rappers and producers, not women. There’s a lot of love for women on that album.’¶¶

  Halliday says his approach with SpaceGhostPurrp is no different to every 4AD artist: ‘We try to get the purist form of that person’s artistry or e
xpression. We trust our big acts like Bradford and Ariel, so we don’t get involved. They have the vision. The more involved we are, the more scared I am that it’s not going right.’

  Alongside Grimes, the big acts that Halliday trusts in are more typical of 4AD’s original valued currency, less in the margins alongside Scott Walker (whose second 4AD album, 2012’s Bish Bosch, was no less experimental) and firmly in the flourishing concourse of modern popular culture. As the frontmen of Atlanta quartet Deerhunter and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti respectively, Bradford Cox and Ariel Marcus Rosenberg are mercurial, dictatorial auteurs with their own particularly skewed outlook. Deerhunter’s three 4AD albums, Microcastle, Halcyon Digest and Monomania, reveal a uniquely eerie, heavy-lidded and cryptic vision of psychedelia, loose like Cox’s beloved Breeders and tight like his beloved Echo & The Bunnymen. Ariel Pink is more of the loopier Syd Barrett brand, though his two 4AD albums to date, Before Today and Mature Themes, are increasingly soulful and accessible.

  Both declared champions of 4AD, Cox and Pink helped compile tracks for a Japanese-only 4AD sampler to coincide with a Far East tour of Deerhunter, Ariel Pink and Blonde Redhead. Showing a more slapdash approach to visuals, the compilation had no title, with only Cox’s lyric on the cover: ‘What did you want to see/ What did you want to be/ When you grew up?’ which craftily showed 4AD’s ability to shape impressionable brains. Displaying his teen goth roots, Pink chose tracks by Clan Of Xymox, Xmal Deutschland and Cocteau Twins as his answers. Ever the Kim Deal aficionado, Cox picked The Breeders, The Amps and Pixies. Blonde Redhead (whose subsequent 23 and Penny Sparkle albums refined their dream-pop exotica) chose Lush, Stereolab and TV On The Radio.

  ‘New’ 4AD signing The National chose tracks by Cocteau Twins and St. Vincent, while The Big Pink (London electronic rock duo Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, behind two albums of booming electronic rock, 2009’s promising A Brief History Of Love and 2012’s less promising Future This) chose Unrest and M/A/R/R/S.

  The compilation was an acknowledgement of Ivo’s years by the new Halliday era, but more recent signings have a similar hallmark to Grimes’ 4AD Present. Two are even male-female couples. Montreal duo Corin Roddick and Megan James make beats-driven dream-pop as Purity Ring (unlike Grimes, they were unaware of 4AD in their youth), while the tempestuous rock trio Daughter is the sound of London-based couple Elena Tonra and Igor Haefeli. Indians, a.k.a. Denmark’s singular and gentler enigma Søren Løkke Juul, would have fitted into Ivo’s 4AD.

  ‘I’m very glad there was a period between Ivo and myself,’ Halliday concludes. ‘Chris and Ed had an almost impossible task in taking over the reins from Ivo. 4AD’s personality was so big that it would have been hard not to be too reverential, to prop up the legacy, and to make Ivo happy. I don’t want to be dismissive of Ivo, who I’ve never met, but now 4AD just does what 4AD does. We don’t want to destroy the past, and we don’t want to not allude to it. Now I know that we’re good and we’re relevant, I’m more open to the past and how glorious it was. We have a weighty inheritance, but we still care more about today than yesterday.’

  The number of artists on the current roster far outweighs what Ivo would have assembled, and so it is inevitably more fractured than cohesive, but then what did connect Colourbox to Dead Can Dance or Pixies to Mojave 3, other than being the best at what they did? The same can be said for LA’s digi-soul brothers inc., Oxford folk-pop band Stornoway, UK dubstep/grime artist Joker, the similarly beats-based Zomby, Scots indie-pop band Camera Obscura, American synth-pop revivalist Twin Shadow, Denmark’s orchestral Efterklang, Manhattan’s progressive Gang Gang Dance, the sombre Americana of Iron and Wine (whose 4AD debut Kiss Each Other Clean was the first co-operative Warners/4AD venture since 1997) …

  ‘Being spontaneous about decisions seemed the best thing to do,’ Halliday concludes. ‘We didn’t plan Purity Ring being a throwback, for example. I’ve tried to make sure that there is a core running through, but with some deviations from the core, as there were in Ivo’s era. But I’m not Ivo, and so 4AD is a different label, but hopefully our legacy in years to come will match his. And I do believe that 4AD has blossomed again.’

  Halliday is not the only one. ‘The difference between the bands signed now and the first phase after Ivo is that someone now has the spirit of the original Ivo,’ reckons Tim Carr. ‘I’m amazed that every time I like any record, it’s on 4AD.’

  Marc Geiger agrees: ‘The current roster is as good as 4AD’s heyday. It’s like someone is channelling from Santa Fe. I don’t know how you get this many right, record for record, artist for artist.’

  ‘The 4AD that exists now is the label I was trying to shape at the time,’ Lewis Jamieson claims. ‘It’s regained its artistic vision after the dead years after Ivo, which saw the second wave of Britpop with The Libertines and The Strokes. 4AD is again very cool with twenty-year-old journalists.’

  ‘It’s heresy to say it, but I think the 4AD roster is stronger than it’s ever been,’ Ed Horrox contends. ‘It’s just been a journey to get there. At times, we weren’t in a position to do what we’ve done in more recent years. It’s like a fire – it grew and burned brightly under Ivo, and then it nearly went out. For years, we had to convince people we were still active. Something that had such a strong identity, to become of your time as well, is a process of reinvention, and convincing the artistic community, like Blonde Redhead, who Dave Sitek almost stalked, and to get the trust of people like Kim Deal to release Title TK and Mountain Battles.’

  But Deal won’t be returning again. In 2009, she pressed and distributed The Breeders’ EP Fate To Fatal herself and has so far released two limited edition solo singles through her website. ‘I don’t even know if music sells anymore, or that bands exist as they used to,’ she says. ‘Ivo and I have talked about the death of the music industry, and there is so much more of it to die. People no longer look at a band, their life, their reality, the sub-culture they’ve created, as 40 minutes’ worth of their time. I don’t even know the value of music anymore. I downloaded Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue for 99 cents and I know that’s not the value of it.’

  Kristin Hersh feels the same way. 50 Foot Wave’s 2005 EP Free Music had even pioneered the name-your-own-price model three years before Radiohead’s much-publicised In Rainbows. The old record label model, of giving artists the platform to release music that appealed to enough people to purchase it, was changing, and Hersh was going to ride the wave rather than get crushed by it. Yet for a while, she stayed with 4AD, and in 2007 released her first solo album in four years, Learn To Sing Like A Star. It was never less than vital, engaging and uncompromising, but it was to be her last original 4AD album, after twenty-one years in the family.

  In 2011, 4AD released Anthology, a double CD of band-chosen highlights and rarities timed with another Throwing Muses reunion tour, but the limited budget and pressing allocated left Hersh feeling short-changed, and her 2010 solo album was not even released by a record company but a book publisher, HarperCollins. Crooked took the form of a handsome book of photographs, lyrics, essays and a download link to what her website called ‘a treasure trove’ of online content, including: ‘The full Crooked album, full recording stems for every track allowing fan remixes, track-by-track audio commentary by Kristin, the opening chapters of her forthcoming memoir, exclusive video content, outtakes, and a forum enabling fans to interact with Kristin, ask questions, and participate in live web chats.’

  This close interaction with fans is what Hersh had been working towards since co-founding CASH Music. There may be fewer fans now than at Throwing Muses’ peak, but every one is rewarded for their support. Every new solo and Throwing Muses demo is now posted online, to be downloaded for free, or for a suggested donation of $3. All Hersh’s recordings, and the new Throwing Muses album due out in autumn 2013, are CASH Music-funded.

  Nevertheless, contrary to Hersh’s unconventional model, and Kim Deal’s suspicions, the old record label model still lives on. Artists
still make records and play shows, which is how 4AD still manages to prosper. Across its three A&R sources – Horrox at Alma Road, Halliday’s desk in Beggars’ Manhattan office, and an additional A&R scout in LA – 4AD is once again a very desirable destination for artists. Martin Mills must imagine that the spirit of Ivo lives on.

  Yet, for fans of music, it’s no longer a question of trusting a record label enough to collect everything on it. Not only can consumers try first online, but MP3 downloads are invisible: there will never again be the same joyful feeling of imagining what lies inside the enigma of a 4AD album cover. It’s also doubtful that there will ever again be a record label like the original 4AD, one with the attention to design and packaging, within current economic constraints. It’s hard to imagine The Wolfgang Press would now get the support they once did. Perhaps all record labels are record companies now.***

  Yet Ed Horrox remains hopeful. ‘The challenge,’ he concludes, ‘is to consistently keep finding artists from the underground or the left of centre, the music makers, which is what Ivo did with Deb and Vaughan and Nigel and the others, to create something lasting, that speaks to a new generation. That is hooked on the same dream, living through spellbinding music.’

  * Simon Harper originally took a role as a consultant for Beggars Banquet in New York, but in 2001 he left the company to follow his ex-wife and son to North Carolina, where he worked as a consultant for the Haw River-based independent label Yep Roc. Harper now lives in Hillsborough, and works as general manager at Bud Matthews Inc, a residential building and service company in Chapel Hill. ‘As a result, I now enjoy music a lot more,’ he says. Robin Hurley joined Atomic Pop/Artists Direct, but the dotcom boom-and-bust of the early Noughties saw him out of a job after nine months, ‘so,’ he says, ‘maybe I should have taken the 4AD job!’ After working for Warners-owned reissue specialists Rhino for a decade, Hurley now runs his own consultancy business in Los Angeles.