Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  I had met with the band in a London hotel in 2009, before they were to play the launch party for an exhibition of photographs taken from the latest memorable collaboration with Vaughan Oliver, and found them to be outwardly cheery and relaxed. Then, and throughout Pixies’ reformation, Deal had not shown any resistance to the arrangement.

  Pixies had agreed that a box set of the band’s 4AD albums was worth supporting if their favourite designer was involved. And there is no one else in record sleeve design who would have proposed such a radical artwork interpretation as Oliver did for Minotaur.

  Jeff Anderson, the owner of the American label A+R (short for Artist in Residence) that specialises in collector’s sets, told Oliver he wanted to assemble a Pixies box set, covering all the studio albums. The rights had reverted back to Thompson, and with his support, Oliver saw his chance to do something extraordinary. Minotaur ended up a mammoth entity, surely the largest ever product masquerading as a music project at almost two foot high, to house vinyl and CD copies, DVDs and posters, with gold-plated CDs and new artwork throughout. This included a ninety-six-page booklet, the images for which Oliver called on his students at Epsom’s University of the Creative Arts to help originate; he also contacted Simon Larbalestier for more of his illuminating photographs. ‘You don’t make the package monumental for it to become pompous or pretentious, which is all the things that Pixies isn’t,’ Oliver explains. ‘But it needed to be dramatic and substantial.’

  Oliver even came up with the title Minotaur, after the figure from Greek mythology – continuing the animalistic theme of Pixies artwork – and a surrealist magazine from the Thirties. ‘Charles loved the name Minotaur when I suggested it,’ Oliver recalls. ‘I was thinking more of the magazine but it’s a beast of a package, so the half-bull, half-man is appropriate.’

  Minotaur costs a considerable $449.99, but for cheapskates there is a ‘deluxe’ model (just $169.99). Anyone claiming that Minotaur is a rip-off because it contains no new Pixies music was missing the point, says Oliver. ‘This is about the packaging, which of course comes out of the music, as it always does with me when I’m designing, but I wanted to challenge the convention of what the record sleeve does.’

  To Oliver, Minotaur is less a box set than, ‘a visual exploration’. Charles Thompson plumps for ‘art project’. Either way, it is the complete antithesis of MP3 culture, where artwork and packaging has disappeared into the ether. ‘It’s the responsibility of our generation to remind people otherwise,’ says Oliver. ‘I gave this talk and some kids came up afterwards and said, “We know the music you’re describing but we haven’t seen the sleeve” – which is something that can enhance the whole experience of the music. It’s tragic!’

  Ivo guardedly views Minotaur as ‘what you get when Vaughan is let loose’. His own version of restoration was embodied by the limited edition box set of This Mortal Coil’s entire recordings that 4AD released in 2011, in his favourite Japanese paper-sleeve CD format on to which original vinyl artwork was shrunk down. On a much smaller scale than Minotaur, Ivo had Oliver expand the original artwork with out-takes from Nigel Grierson’s Pallas Citroen shoots and new gatefold sleeves, with everything manufactured to the highest spec by the Tokyo-based printers Ichikudo. A fourth CD of rarities was named Dust & Guitars after Syd Barrett’s quote from 1971.

  ‘Barrett’s words just made sense to me when I first read them,’ says Ivo. ‘It was fairly fresh in my mind when Ed [Horrox] or Chris [Sharp] asked me if I’d agree to include [the This Mortal Coil track] “Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust” on an iTunes exclusive download [in 2006], and would I come up with a title? It was wasted on the silly, disparate sampler that they put together, so I reclaimed it, in part, for the box set. Believe it or not, I only made the “Gathering Dust” connection after all of that had happened!’**

  The rarities’ CD also included a cover of Neil Young’s ‘We Never Danced’ left over from the Blood sessions, which was destined to be released through Rough Trade’s singles club until Ivo changed his mind. ‘I just didn’t think it was good enough. Though I now love its over-the-top drama.’††

  Compare This Mortal Coil’s box set manufacture to that of the comprehensive Colourbox box set that 4AD released in 2012. Ivo deems the latter to be a travesty of perfunctory packaging, and printing, with no additional images or information. ‘It’s not particularly 4AD,’ says Martin Mills, ‘but today’s market economies won’t allow us to do what should be done.’ In other words, the spirit of Ivo does not live on. Profit overrules art.

  Today, the spirit of ‘4AD Past’ exists most strongly as music – and as memories. In an appearance in January 2013 on the BBC Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs (in which public figures choose eight all-time favourite pieces of music to be stranded with, and then pick which of the eight they favour over all the others) British comedian Dawn French chose This Mortal Coil’s ‘Song To The Siren’ as her penultimate choice. Following many years of marriage that resulted in separation, French had met a new beau who had introduced her to the track. ‘I knew when I heard this song that it was an offer,’ she told interviewer Kirsty Young. ‘You would fall in love, wouldn’t you, with somebody who gave you that song?’

  ‘I have done some good after all, haven’t I?’ says Ivo, when he hears the news.

  Five years earlier, in 2008, Ivo read Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression, and felt his fog of bewilderment lift. Sally Brampton, the founding editor of the women’s magazine Elle, had named her book after Winston Churchill’s ‘black dog’.

  Ivo: ‘Sally Brompton had gone from great success to literally not being able to function, for years. My collapse was minor in comparison, but it was still the same blueprint, of depression taking hold and you’re never the same again.’

  Ivo was never facing the wrong way; he was just facing the other way. Just as 4AD was, throughout the time that he ran it. And his spirit continues to live on in the more uniquely slanted of 4AD Present’s signings.

  And take the wide-ranging influence Ivo’s 4AD has had on contemporary music, on a wildly diverse set of current genres: dream-pop, industrial, shoegaze, nu-gaze, ambient, nu-goth, synth-pop and its R&B counterpart chillwave.

  Or 2012’s cult film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Eighties coming-of-age saga The Breakfast Club. Directed by the author of the book by the same name, Stephen Chbosky, the setting is an American high school in the early Nineties, where the introspective lead character Charlie finds acceptance among a bunch of other misfit adolescents who use music and mixtapes as a shared language. Michael Brook wrote the film’s incidental soundtrack, but the pivotal tracks are David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, The Smiths, Nick Drake and Cocteau Twins: Charlie’s friend Sam admits she had a personal epiphany the first time she heard ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’, and finally knew her true self.

  Take the 20th-anniversary reunion tour of The Breeders’ Last Splash. The four that recorded the album have reunited to play it, and some of the band’s non-hits. Kim Deal says she will enjoy it much more this time around, minus all the expectations and stress. ‘I think she still really enjoys doing music that’s just unadulterated,’ says bassist Josephine Wiggs. ‘For me, it’s a chance to replace the memory of how The Breeders ended so oddly. It’s a much happier ending this time.’

  Everyone has downed tools to take part; Kim from her Pixies and solo projects, Jim Macpherson from his work as a carpenter, Wiggs from her soundtrack recordings, Kelley from her musical sideline R Ring, part-time job in a funeral home and her bespoke knitting, the hobby that replaced her heroin addiction for a different set of needles.

  Take south Londoner Daniel Woolhouse, who calls himself Deptford Goth, though ironically, as his music wouldn’t go down well in The Batcave Club; it’s more haunting electronic soul, but his 2012 debut album Life After Defo has as beautiful and sad an aura as a certain Tim Buckley cover. “Song To The Siren” still sounds really new, and it would not just be p
opular and trendy now, but a new sound,’ Woodhouse maintains. ‘[This Mortal Coil’s] “Kangaroo” is another, the big, echoey bass sound … every time it repeats, it reels you in a bit more. Those tracks are doing two things – pulling you in and seducing you, and you’re identifying with the sadness but they also build, up and up. It’s like a sad euphoria. It’s the best kind of music.’

  Take the example of Waves On Canvas, the alias of Sardinian composer Stefano Guzzetti, whose 2012 album Into The Northsea features 4AD Past luminaries Louise Rutkowski, Ian Masters and Pieter Nooten in combined settings of electronica, ambient and soundtrack that is quintessential This Mortal Coil; Vaughan Oliver even did the artwork. That so few people know of Waves On Canvas shows how much has changed since It’ll End In Tears. But 4AD began as a cult; when Ivo departed, it was still a cult, and that’s what its descendants are too – something to be treasured whether a hit or not. Something worth hearing because it was made. The artefact.

  Take the fact that Tim Buckley’s ‘Song To The Siren’ has now become a modern standard, covered twenty-four times since This Mortal Coil’s version, by singers such as Robert Plant, Sinead O’Connor, George Michael, Bryan Ferry and Sheila Chandra, not forgetting dance versions (Lost Witness’s remix reached the UK top 30), punk parodists Half Man Half Biscuit and Elvis impersonator Jimmy ‘The King’ Brown.‡‡

  ‘I was always afraid to record it, because I knew that it would bring up more grief,’ says O’Connor. ‘I’d sing a line and then cry for twenty minutes. It was when my eldest child Jake had left home; you’d think someone had died from my reaction. So it became important for me to sing it out, and move on. That’s what’s so powerful about music; if you could describe music, you wouldn’t need music. It does all the shit there aren’t words for. And Liz Fraser’s version – you can apply any kind of pain or grief or longing or hunger, she just has all these things in her voice that just speak to your soul and stop you in your tracks.’

  All this is 4AD’s lasting legacy. ‘Revisiting every release for this book has done me a lot of good,’ Ivo concludes. ‘For once I am able to look at it all, which I fail so badly to do in my daily life, with a cup of well-over-half-full perspective. I remember those crazy, beautiful days, full of idealism, if temporarily, but the young people we all were, and the product of our passion and inventiveness is there to be seen and admired … in homes dotted around the world, or in museums rather than record shops, sadly.

  ‘But 4AD was a fantastic opportunity. And for a while, we all participated in something quite pure and unique. Those records are a reflection of an idea that became a dream that became a reality that will continue to vibrate long after I have ceased to do so myself. Whether people connect to them or not is down to personal taste, but I’ve yet to hear music, before they were made or since, that sounds anything like them. That can’t be bad.’

  In Altmusic’s online list of the top 20 independent labels of all time, Mute is number 13, Factory is number 7, Creation is number 4 and 4AD is … number 1. ‘Perhaps the greatest of all record labels …’ the review starts.

  ‘4AD was a significant supernova that gave birth to a legion of landmark artists that continue to influence generations of discerning music lovers,’ claims 4AD whore Craig Roseberry. ‘They set the bar and mould which many labels, major and indie, tried to emulate.’

  ‘Ivo’s legacy was the music that he introduced everyone to,’ says Simon Raymonde. ‘Prince and Madonna loved Cocteau Twins, Robert Plant and Perry Farrell were massive 4AD fans. And Vaughan’s designs have been copied by advertising, graphics and films. 4AD’s ripples continue to move through the water.’

  Kristin Hersh added her own, coursing through the years, inspiring anyone to face the fear and do it anyway. Listening to her commentary on her 2010 album Crooked about her creative process, it’s clear that it’s only music that truly matters. This was her struggle, right from the start, to serve the song, and to be true to herself as she handed the song over to the listener.

  Hersh’s fight with her impulses, her songs and her need to get them out formed the crux of her 2011 memoir Paradoxical Undressing/Rat Girl. The book concentrates on events between early 1985 and early 1986, concluding with a new relationship formed with an enigmatic English gentleman called Ivo, and the alien experience of recording an album. Without Ivo, Hersh acknowledges, she would never have experienced the freedom of expression and the foundations of a career that thrives to this day. ‘Ivo is my hero,’ Hersh concludes, ‘the person who allowed me to be my own version of Ivo, musically and in the music business, shy and more like a dog than a person. He made it look good and facilitated the work that reflected that perspective.’

  The last time she and Ivo met, in Santa Fe, ‘We spent the day together and he then drove me over to the show,’ says Hersh. ‘As we were driving, we looked at the desert stars, and how quiet it was, and Ivo said, “You know what we should do, we should just keep driving”. That’s what we always wanted anyway. There had always been too much turning up, too much talking, too much failure. Really, we just wanted to be the music.’

  * Another layer of mystique to the aquatic setting and tragic demeanour of ‘Song To The Siren’ is the fate of Jeff Buckley. After hearing Elizabeth Fraser’s interpretation of his father Tim’s song, Jeff had contacted Fraser and the pair embarked on a brief affair in the mid-Nineties, even recording the (unreleased) duet ‘All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun’. In 1997, Buckley drowned in Memphis as he prepared to record his second album. He was thirty, just two years older than Tim was when he died. ‘I always felt there was a prophecy of death in that song,’ says Sinead O’Connor. Fraser subsequently met Damon Reece, Massive Attack’s drummer. The pair live in Bristol and have one daughter, Lily.

  † For any filmgoers starved of ‘Song To The Siren’, Tim Buckley’s original appeared in Neil Armfield’s 2006 film Candy, a story of doomed junkie lovers starring the late Heath Ledger. The same year, it was sung by Ivri Lider in Israeli director Eytan Fox’s film HaBuah (The Bubble).

  ‡ Before the Perry–Guthrie tour, Perry had planned a similar touring venture with former Bauhaus singer Pete Murphy, which fell apart before it got started. ‘Whoever suggested that, I mean, have they ever met either of them?’ says Ivo. ‘Through my entire life, I’ve attracted mad people.’ Perry reports that Murphy’s demands were impossible; the singer certainly showed his madder side in March 2013 when he was involved in an accident while driving in LA, and subsequently charged with misdemeanour DUI, hit-and-run driving and methamphetamine possession. He had pleaded not guilty and at the time of writing is due back in court, though he remains on course to tour through North America and Europe, ‘celebrating 35 years of Bauhaus’ and performing only Bauhaus material.

  § Ivo: ‘Robin once told me, what was the point of making music, post-Cocteaus? He said it would either be Cocteaus music without a vocalist or Cocteaus music with a vocalist and without Elizabeth. Well, he’s now done both. I called him recently, excited after listening to Heaven Or Las Vegas again, to encourage him to rethink a band. There are, surely, many vocalists out there that partially fill Liz’s shoes and, frankly, outshine the modern Liz. But he couldn’t hear me on the phone, so I rang off. And I didn’t call back.’

  ¶ Nigel Grierson has been working for years on a book of nature-based photographs (working title: Passing Through), but it will be preceded with a volume of his 4AD work, Photographs, scheduled for publication in March 2014. ‘It’s closer to what people know of me,’ he explains. ‘It seems important to build on any kind of foundation, however depleted it’s become, that I already have – most people from that era think I died years ago.’

  ** The This Mortal Coil box set gave Ivo the chance to put some personal words on the spine of each original album sleeve. On It’ll End In Tears, it reads: ‘Every day takes figuring out, all over again how to live’, as said by the character Calamity Jane in the TV series Deadwood. The first part of Filigree & Shadow’s quote, ‘Yo
u know that I don’t like riddles’, comes from Ivo’s mother Gina, and the second part, ‘You know that thinking makes me ill’, from Charles Dickens. Blood’s message, ‘but life is not a succession of urgent “nows”, it’s a listless trickle of “why should I?”s’ was spoken by Johnny Depp’s character, the Earl of Rochester, in the film The Libertine.

  †† The cover version of ‘We Never Danced’ was inspired as much by Alan Rudolph’s 1987 film Made in Heaven, ‘an odd, beautiful little film,’ Ivo recalls. The angel, played by Kelly McGillis, says those very words to Timothy Hutton’s recently deceased character, and back on earth, the couple indeed do get to dance, to Young’s song (the film’s theme tune) sung on the soundtrack by Martha Davis of The Motels. On Filigree & Shadow, Ivo re-created some of Made in Heaven’s incidental sound: ‘an intake of breath, a sigh, running water and tinkling bells’, underneath the voice of cellist Emily Proctor, who says, ‘You know what we never did? We never danced.’ It can be heard right before ‘Nature’s Way’. ‘I can’t even dance in front of the mirror without getting embarrassed,’ Ivo confesses. ‘Chris Bigg says he likes nothing more than dancing. I should dance one time before I die.’

  ‡‡ ‘Song To The Siren’ had cast other shadows. In the extra-terrestrial TV series The X Files, ‘Scully’s Theme’ written by Mark Snow was ‘Song To The Siren’ in all but name, while series creator Chris Carter titled one episode This Mortal Coil.