by Martin Aston
† 4AD once considered reissuing Cocteau Twins’ two subsequent albums on Fontana, Four-Calendar Café and Milk & Kisses, though the only 4AD release containing Fontana material is the 2006 singles collection Lullabies To Violaine.
‡ The floodgates were to open over the next years, with compilations from Modern English (The Best Of … Life In The Gladhouse: 1980–1984), Lush (Ciao! Best Of …), Pixies (Complete ‘B’ Sides), The Wolfgang Press (Everything Is Beautiful: [A Retrospective 1983–1995]), Colourbox (Best Of 82/87), Dead Can Dance (1981–1998) and Belly (Sweet Ride: The Best Of …). An especially beautiful four-CD Cocteau Twins compilation, Lullabies To Violaine, followed in 2006.
§ Now an acclaimed solo artist, in 2003 John Grant was still fronting The Czars, whose uniquely broody, dark roots had a touch of Tarnation’s western/prairie character. In fact, Paula Frazer added backing vocals to several Czars songs, found on the band’s first two Bella Union albums, Before … But Longer (2000) and The Ugly People Vs. The Beautiful People (2002).
¶ Defever subsequently released a varying spread of music through his Time Stereo label before co-founding the Silver Mountain Media label and getting major label Sony-BMG on side to distribute 2006’s Detrola and 2007’s Xmmer albums, both of which restored His Name Is Alive’s original idiosyncratic mystery. Detrola became Defever’s most commercial and critical success in ten years; Pitchfork described it as, ‘Fantastic art, full of depth and warmth and creativity. It’s probably the best thing Defever’s ever done.’
** Tanya Donelly’s band name lives on in one sense, as her own experience of the traumatic birth of her daughter Gracie led to her working as a qualified doula, assisting in pregnancies and childbirth. She says she has finally done more recordings, and is about to release them in a series.
†† Neil Halstead has recorded two solo albums, 2008’s Oh! Mighty Engine and 2012’s Palindrome Hunches. Goswell is raising a daughter and Ian McCutcheon is a member of the band The Loose Salute. Though Mojave 3 reformed for live shows in 2011, Halstead maintains the band is still on hiatus though his commitment to surfing never wavers.
‡‡ Paul Cox at Too Pure had also found Martin Mills tougher to deal with than Ivo. In 1998, the label finally stopped signing bands and became a Singles Club, releasing one single a month, on a subscription basis. ‘Control had slipped out of my hands by then,’ Cox recalls. ‘[Partner] Richard [Roberts] emigrated to Australia in 1998, and I couldn’t afford to buy his shareholding, so Martin bought it. With Richard’s replacement, Nick West, we had started a little Too Pure in LA, out of American Recording, and then Martin brought Nick back to help run things in the UK and asked me to give him some of my share to motivate him. Eventually we became another Beggars Banquet label, working in their office, run by Jason White. I was A&R consultant. Around 2000, he let me go. I never felt I could prevent losing my job. It may have been a different story if Ivo had remained. We loved the 4AD office vibe much more than Beggars.’
§§ Regarding his feelings towards contemporary music, on 4AD or otherwise, Ivo says, ‘It takes a lot for something to really stand out for me. I just long for real singers that hit the mark as Gene Clark or Roy Harper did.’ After loving 2011’s King Creosote/ Jon Hopkins’ Diamond Mine, he finally found something in 2013’s Perils From The Sea, a similarly folk/electronic collaboration between Jimmy Lavalle of The Album Leaf and – bringing it on back home – Mark Kozelek. ‘When I made that comment about Diamond Mine for Domino’s press release, I had the first three Red House Painters albums in mind,’ says Ivo. ‘How fitting the album I’ve enjoyed the most since is Perils From The Sea. Two tracks – “Ceiling Gazing” and “Somehow The Wonder Of Life Prevails” – are quite possibly the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in my entire life.’
¶¶ The comment that accompanies the official download of SpaceGhostPurrp’s recent – and self-released – mixtape B.M.W. EP will only inflame the doubters: ‘Instructions before listening to this EP: 1. Get yo weed 2. Get yo drank 3. Get yo pillz 4. Get yo coke 5. Get yo bitch 6. Get Phucked up 7. Then blast this shit.’
*** One tangible difference between 4AD Past and Present was encapsulated by a website posting by Rob Sanders titled Modern-era 4AD, Revized on a website for US graphic design company, The Mystery Parade (it has now been archived at the company’s Facebook page): Wrote Sanders, ‘This post is admittedly a reaction to the 4AD record label’s de-emphasizing of their cover art that was once one of their trademarks. The brief is to basically utilize existing cover art and attempt to create new art and capture at least some of the essence of the older, beautifully designed covers.’ For example, Sanders redesigned Bon Iver’s For Emma … album with artwork by Shinro Ohtake. ‘It’s such a shame that 4AD has decided not to put the care, time, and effort those old packagings by v23/23 Envelope used to have,’ wrote one respondent. ‘I recently read an Ivo interview and in it he talks about the passion they had for creating something beautiful.’
chapter 25
Facing the Other Way
August 2012. Elizabeth Fraser has reached the last song of her second show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. She’s appearing as a special favour to Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, this year’s curator at the RFH’s annual arts festival Meltdown. These are her first solo concerts in the fifteen years since Cocteau Twins split in 1997, during which time Fraser had recorded enough songs for an album but only released one of them – and that was as a tribute to a friend who died tragically in a motorbike accident, released in 2009. The atmosphere throughout the night has been pregnant with expectation, and she’s back on stage for her second, and presumably final, encore. What will she choose to complete this most auspicious occasion?
Fraser hasn’t yet sung ‘Teardrop’, the track she fronted for Massive Attack in 1998, and the most popular song, in terms of sales, that she has ever sung. Nor has she performed one of her two contributions to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. Maybe it will be another of her new songs, ripe for a live interpretation. Maybe it will be another Cocteau Twins song; she’s already sung nine, including ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ (Robin Guthrie needn’t have worried about the way Fraser’s backing band would play his music; their fluid, ambient-tinged treatments are lovely but can’t hold a candle to his beautiful noise).
The encore begins with a slow draw of cellos and guitar drone. It’s hard to pick out what the song is until Fraser begins to sing: ‘Long afloat on shipless oceans I did all my best to smile …’ It’s ‘Song To The Siren’.
‘We probably did get a bee in our bonnet about [Song To The Siren] not being Cocteau Twins,’ Fraser told Volume magazine in 1992. ‘That was Head Over Heels time and it felt more right to have success because of Cocteau Twins music. Having said that, though, I heard it played in a shop … and I liked it. I realised why I got in such a pickle and it wasn’t because it was a bad recording of an amazing song. It is a beautiful song.’
Contrary to Guthrie’s memory that Ivo wouldn’t let the track be featured in a film, Ivo did allow the This Mortal Coil version of ‘Song To The Siren’ to be used – twice, in fact. Ivo hadn’t been the only one heartbroken by the greed of Tim Buckley’s estate in 1985. In an interview, David Lynch admitted that not getting the song for Blue Velvet ‘broke my heart’. The director subsequently gave some of his own lyrics to the composer Angelo Badalamenti and asked for ‘something cosmic, angelic, very beautiful’, which led to ‘Mysteries Of Love’, sung by Julee Cruise. By the time of his 1997 cryptic film noir Lost Highway, Lynch had another scene that required the same mood, and he could now afford the asking price. Instead of the surreal prom scene planned for Blue Velvet, Fraser and Guthrie’s cosmic, angelic and very beautiful sound accompanied Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty’s characters Alice and Pete making love bathed in the white glow of their car headlamps.
But Guthrie had been partially right: Ivo wouldn’t allow Lynch to put ‘Song To The Siren’ on the soundtrack, in order to limit what he saw as c
ommercial exploitation. ‘I didn’t want people coming to it unsuitably squished between two other tracks, but rather on its own, or to take them to hear it on a This Mortal Coil album,’ Ivo explains.
Yet he agreed to have ‘Song To The Siren’ included on the prospective soundtrack to Peter Jackson’s 2009 film The Lovely Bones, ‘because [Brian] Eno was involved,’ says Ivo. But no soundtrack was ever released: Guthrie loses again. At least the version is in the film, accompanying an afterlife sequence where the lead character is watching over her family. ‘It’s good music for a funeral,’ claims one YouTube contributor.* But not as good for a superhero movie, perhaps. Ivo rejected the request from Marc Webb, the director of 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. ‘He wrote me a pleading letter, saying he’d listened to This Mortal Coil throughout his youth. But I just couldn’t say yes.’†
October 2012. Dead Can Dance is near the end of its first London show in sixteen years following the release of Anastasis. It’s time for the encore, and Brendan Perry and the present DCD live band return without Lisa Gerrard to sing a particularly emotional version of … ‘Song To The Siren’. ‘We’re doing it precisely for the wow factor,’ Perry tells me afterwards.
It’s not the first time Perry has sung Tim Buckley’s deathless classic. In 2011, Perry did a rare solo tour across America, with a solo Robin Guthrie in support, scotching any leftover rumours of animosity between Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance.‡ On the first night, Guthrie says he was backstage following his opening set when he heard Perry start to sing … ‘Long afloat on shipless oceans I did all my best to smile …’
‘I didn’t know Brendan was going to do “Song To The Siren” in his set,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘I heard this sound and thought, What the fuck’s that? Oh, fuck! The next night, he asked me to play it with him and I thought, Why not? So I noodled along and did my thing. But most nights, I just watched the audience, and saw the rapture on their faces, which made me happy. That’s what entertainment’s about, isn’t it?’
Ivo was sent a YouTube clip of Perry singing ‘Song To The Siren’ on a radio session. Robin Guthrie has made his peace with the song that had given him so much turmoil, but Ivo was unable to watch the clip – the weight of memory still too heavy. But he did watch Liz Fraser’s live version on YouTube, unable to resist, curious to hear how she now sounded. Ivo hasn’t talked with Fraser for many years, though he is in sporadic email contact with Guthrie following a long gap after an initial reconciliation in the late Nineties.
‘I can’t remember how we got back in touch,’ says Ivo. ‘But I later visited Robin and Simon at their September Sound studio, and as I left, we hugged, and Robin said, “I’m so glad you’re back in my life”. Possibly with Robin and Simon now running their own [Bella Union] label, they’d experienced life on the other side. Simon said how difficult it must have been to have Raymond Coffer in the picture, as he knew, for good or bad, how managers get in the way of a direct relationship.’
In the mid-Nineties, Robin Guthrie had entered rehab, and has never taken drugs again. ‘Robin really benefited from doing the twelve-step programme,’ Ivo believes. ‘He was able to express warmth towards me, and vice versa. He said that the worst thing that ever happened to the band was leaving 4AD, which implies, as I let them go, that the biggest mistake they made was in not addressing the problems that existed between us. I certainly am not afraid or ashamed to admit that was my own biggest regret. We just didn’t talk.
‘I last spoke to Robin in April 2012 when he called me, incredibly upset, having just found out that Liz was to perform at the Meltdown festival and was going to be singing Cocteau Twins songs. During our conversation, I confessed that our “split” remained a huge disappointment in my life. He laughed and said that by letting them go, my problems with Cocteau Twins were over whereas for him, the problems were only just beginning.’
‘Signing to [major label] Fontana in 1992, after we fell out with 4AD, was the biggest mistake we ever made,’ says Guthrie. ‘Fontana was a faceless, corporate-wank entity, who pressured us into album-tour-album-tour work. We had to keep recording extra formats for singles so we were constantly thrust together in the studio. I cringe when I hear our Twinlights and Otherness EPs [both 1995]. Twinlights was acoustic and has violins and shite like that, and Otherness was some pointless remixes of our songs. Neither was what Cocteau Twins was all about, but I wasn’t in control then. I’d come out of rehab and I thought I should make the band a democracy. But our musical legacy was joyous. Even our dark and melancholic stuff sounds exuberant. When I hear the odd Cocteaus track, I’m so happy I wasn’t in Kajagoogoo.’§
Robin Guthrie and Vaughan Oliver had re-connected. Despite all the wrangling over artwork in the 4AD era, Guthrie asked Oliver to work on his first post-Cocteaus project, Violet Indiana (a collaboration with singer Siobhan de Maré). ‘All the things that Robin and Vaughan used to argue over were still there!’ says Chris Bigg. ‘There was still that element of control, a real battle.’
Bigg had experienced his own battles with Oliver. The pair had entered into an equal business partnership in 1998, which was severed in 2009. ‘Vaughan wanted to take us to the next level, beyond music design, but he was very embittered about everything, after all the pioneering work that he’d done – he’d get angry and aggressive, and it wasn’t really him,’ Bigg concludes. ‘We get on fine now as there isn’t the burden of work.’
Despite the talk of plans in 1998, v23 had not expanded into new ventures and mediums. Oliver admits that self-promotion was neither his nor Bigg’s strength, and that not enough new work found them. ‘It took me about three years to come to terms with having no retainer anymore,’ he says. ‘We ran up too much debt because we had to have assistants, due to the technological revolution – we still couldn’t work the computers.’
Oliver was also to discover that, before v23 had moved out of the 4AD office into its own, Bigg had been offered Oliver’s job – which Bigg had turned down out of loyalty. ‘That’s business for you,’ says Oliver. But there was a positive outcome. Like Bigg, Oliver now lectures in graphic design: he holds an honorary Master’s degree (for achievement in industry) at Epsom’s University of the Creative Arts, and the title of Visiting Professor at University of Greenwich. ‘Given my work’s maverick nature, to be recognised by the academic establishment is OK,’ he says. ‘But more importantly, it recognises the cultural significance of the simple old record sleeve, or a simple piece of printed ephemera.’
Since his 23 Envelope partnership with Oliver disintegrated, Nigel Grierson also found the terrain difficult to manage. Through the Nineties, he’d worked for the London-based production house Limelight. ‘Like with 4AD,’ he says, ‘the consistency of working at one place creates a strong public following, but once you’re freelance, it’s only industry people who know what’s going on and who’s doing what. Vaughan seemed to hang on to 4AD like a life raft, but I understand more now, knowing what else is out there. It’s rare to have such an experience, on a family level, and you end up talking about the era as a golden age.’¶
Another former clash of head and heart found a way back, from Dead Can Dance to Charles Thompson and Kim Deal. While fronting his own band Frank Black and the Catholics, Thompson had regularly dismissed the possibility of a Pixies reunion, but after he’d begun to play Pixies songs on stage, got divorced and had therapy, a Pixies reunion tour was brokered by Marc Geiger, who had left ARTISTdirect and was now heading the booking agency William Morris. In April 2004, Pixies played a show for the first time in twelve years.
But there was one relationship that not even an arbitrator such as Geiger could fix. Cocteau Twins had split up in 1997 while recording a new album: ‘Things just reached the point when I knew we couldn’t do it anymore, but Liz was first to say so,’ says Robin Guthrie. ‘It was the formative music of my life, so in effect to be stopped by someone else was hurtful. Now I can see it couldn’t have ended any other way.’
Eight years later, Guthrie re
ceived a call from Geiger, asking if Cocteau Twins would play the annual Coachella festival in California. ‘I had to be coaxed into it as I wanted to protect myself from getting fucked up by walking back into the same situation,’ Guthrie says. ‘But it was explained to me, as with Pixies, we were all older and wiser, and human beings in our own right. I thought, OK, I can deal with that. We had a long meeting and got along very well and decided to try it. Shortly after, we were advertised to play, but at some point Liz got cold feet. Maybe we just fell back into our own dynamic. I did, however, think it was inexcusable, really, to commit to something for the fans and then pull out.’
Steven Cantor, who co-directed the 2004 Pixies tour documentary loudQuietloud, told Billboard that he felt the Pixies reunion was, ‘75 per cent … for money, but the other 25 per cent was because of the fact that they’re legends’. The mended relationship extended as far as Charles Thompson’s magnanimous gesture to record Kim Deal’s song ‘Bam Thwok’ as the only new Pixies song as yet released since the reformation. It seemed Deal held more power than in the past; when talk of a new album spread in 2006, Thompson told NME, ‘We’re rehearsing in January, if we can persuade Kim to come out of her house. We offered to go to her but we figured if we book the rehearsals she’ll show up.’ The proposed album has still not happened, though Pixies finally went back in the studio with producer Gil Norton in late 2012, and in June 2013 released (via a free download) the band’s first new track in nine years, ‘Bagboy’, which followed two weeks after the announcement that Kim Deal had left the band. She didn’t comment publically on her decision; however, according to Ivo, ‘she never felt that they were back together as a band, and faced with recording and more touring, thought it best if she stopped.’