by Alex; Ogg
4AD’s roster had grown slowly but, aided by the striking designs of 23 Envelope, the label began to build a totemic identity in independent music. Some fell by the wayside – The Past Seven Days and My Captains – yet critics and John Peel in particular was staggered by the Birthday Party’s ferocious ‘Release The Bats’ and their debut album proper, Prayers On Fire in 1981; birthing ground for a contemporary, and demonic, blues. Matt Johnson of The The (who had moved to Some Bizzare from 4AD) also cut an album for 4AD – Ivo’s first co-production credit resulted – and there were solo excursions by members of Bauhaus and Wire’s Colin Newman. In 1982 The Birthday Party released a second and final album for the label, Junkyard, in the same year that Modern English’s After The Snow saw them enjoy a huge American radio hit when Sire licensed ‘I Melt With You’.
A trio comprising Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie and Will Heggie, the Cocteau Twins had handed a demo to Watts-Russell after following the Birthday Party tour to London. “I can recall the moment when that tape was literally popped into my hands,” he remembers. “All the 4AD stuff was stored on the floor in the basement of Hogarth road, the quadraphonic department, so I was there packing boxes for deliveries or distribution. I remember running up the stairs that were in the middle of the shop. And this person was standing at the counter. Whoever was behind the counter said, ‘That’s Ivo’, and Robin put the tape in my hands. He said very little, or what he did say I perhaps didn’t hear, because he was very quiet and talked in a very broad accent. The first time I heard that tape I remember very clearly. I’d been to Cambridge to see Dance Chapter in the studio at Spaceward, and it was really going badly. I was driving home and stopped off to see Danielle Dax, who was living out in Milton Keynes. I was driving back to London to see Bauhaus playing or something at the Rock Garden. When I left Danielle, I stuck the tape in and I heard the infamous Cocteau Twins. You could hear there was a voice on there, but you could not tell remotely the calibre of the voice. I later invited them down to record a couple of songs at Blackwing. When Liz started to sing, when I heard that voice properly for the first time, I realised that I was in the presence of something quite special. In some ways, the demos they recorded were incredibly familiar, suggestive of the Banshees, and in some ways [debut album] Garlands hints at that, but it was even more so before then.”
So enthralled was he by Fraser’s vocals that he immediately asked them to record a debut album, and later offered to bin 4AD to look after them as his sole focus. “Yes, it was absolute awe. Probably in 1983, after Will had left, I said I would stop the label and just manage them. Thank God, they never answered. Which was typical as well. I was perfectly serious about that. Yeah, the idea of perhaps just focusing on one thing with every ounce of my being, or enthusiasm, was quite appealing. Yeah, their music just meant everything.” They were invited to join The Birthday Party on tour while John Peel gave them his immediate and ecstatic endorsement. They also had Watts-Russell’s emphatic support too. “That’s where any allegations of perceived arrogance that were hurled in my direction came from,” he ponders. “Much as I said that Rema Rema was as good as anything that was being released and it was something I would buy and be excited about, when it came to the Cocteau Twins, I didn’t care one iota what anyone else thought about them. They were just so musically important to me. Not a lot of people have had that experience. But to be in the room when Liz was singing – not to take anything from Robin or Will – but that instrument, that weapon that she has – for me, it was like a living Tim Buckley.”
The Cocteau Twins arrived with their own entourage. “Gordon Sharp of Freeze/Cindytalk was one of them,” remembers Watts-Russell. “The other two, Colin Wallace and Scott Roger, had two of the most bizarre haircuts you’ve seen in your life, crimped Flock Of Seagulls things, on two shy and severely depressed individuals. Colin ended up working with me and beyond that with Geoff at Rough Trade and now works with Alan McGee and manages Liz Fraser. Scott Roger manages Bjork and Arcade Fire. The latest thing I heard is that he was tour managing Paul McCartney. These grubby little individuals who came along with the even grubbier Cocteau Twins – Liz with her necklace of Kentucky Fried Chicken bones!” And of course, the Sex Pistols tattoo. “I believe it’s Sid on one arm and Siouxsie on the other – I think there was some mis-spelling involved too!”
Watts-Russell was finally able to relinquish his commitments to Beggars’ retail outlets. “I was running all of the Beggars shops. Here’s an interesting thing, and an illustration of my personality. I remember the day I was over in the Kingston shop they’d recently opened, and Nick Austin came over and said, ‘You know, Martin and I have decided that it would be best if you just focused on the label and stopped doing this.’ That was actually the first time – I’m a fucking fruitcake! – that I can truly remember being happy. I couldn’t handle it, I was so happy! I’m a naturally depressive character, or used to be. I just remember driving back to Earl’s Court from Kingston being so happy.”
In 1983 the whole operation relocated to Beggars’ new offices in Alma Road, Wandsworth. Watts-Russell hired Vaughan Oliver full time, followed shortly after by Deborah Edgely. “The three of us shared a room separate from the Beggars offices, but we had shared warehouse space underneath. We also shared an accounts department and had access to the same legal team as Beggars. Vaughan was employed by me to jump in and get involved – but it didn’t really work out that way. He focused on the design element rather than humping boxes!” Oliver’s designs, as stylistically individual as they remained, were now growing organically from the music. “He would always argue that,” says Watts-Russell, “and describe a process. I remember seeing him give a lecture in Japan with the Cocteau Twins – he would talk about how listening to demos would inspire an idea that he’d present to the group and refine and change. To an outsider, would it have appeared like that? Possibly not. But that was absolutely the process. To have the thing start to grow to being myself and Vaughan and Deborah – wonderful really! To go see a record company and be presented with us three! Thinking about it now – just three people. I was the oldest. It was clear that there was passion and drive there. There wasn’t experience. There weren’t connections. We’re all very shy people. Vaughan can take a drink or two and come out of himself. Deborah was probably the most natural and gregarious. And it suited us well when she flipped into the role of doing press for the label.”
The Birthday Party, meanwhile, decamped amicably to Mute (Nick Cave quickly going solo soon thereafter) when the infant 4AD worked out it couldn’t underwrite the group’s efforts much further, following an expensive trip to Berlin. “It was financial reasons,” admits Watts-Russell. “They wanted to be in Berlin full time. I’d paid for them to be there for a brief period of time to do the ‘Bad Seed’ EP. But they really wanted to be there. If you know anything about certain members of the Birthday Party – it kind of gets difficult. Though I remained friends with Mick [Harvey] for a long time. It was very natural for them to go over there [Mute] and absolutely right.
Nick has gone on to make some of the most beautiful music. But yes, it was financial. I can remember the conversation where that was expressed, and everything was fine. It was just dead right. I don’t know that the kind of savagery that was becoming Birthday Party performances was something that I really thought could be sustained creatively.” Of course, it’s easy seeing the ‘asset’ that Cave would become with hindsight, but at the time, it certainly didn’t seem a given, in light of his more self-destructive energies. “What a wonderfully creative person,” states Watts-Russell. “But, in the space of a year, I remember sitting on the steps outside of the Rock Garden talking quietly with Nick. Flash forward a year to him being passed out on a couch post-gig where he’d kicked someone in the face – it was a different thing. And the appropriate steps were taken, and he found an ideal permanent home.”
But 1983 was very much the year of the Cocteau Twins, who lost bass player Will Heggie – ultimately replaced b
y Simon Raymonde – but released the ‘Peppermint Pig’ and ‘Sunburst And Snowblind’ EPs and the Head Over Heels album. It saw them emerge from a period in which influences were generally worn on sleeves to one in which they set out their own baroque pop agenda; a netherworld of enveloping sonic textures which were emotionally resonant while being lyrically impenetrable and playfully opaque. They supported Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark on a 50-date tour (though they would never be nearly as compelling a live band as they were in the studio) and made light of their perceived status as classicists by claiming, with some accuracy, to be beer monsters in the press. Peel was so impressed by the album that he played both sides in their entirety over successive nights.
Others to release material that year included X-Mal Deutschland (who would subsequently sign to Phonogram), the willfully obtuse Wolfgang Press, featuring Mark Cox and Michael Allen who had previously recorded for the label as part of Rema Rema and Mass, and Colourbox. The latter would begin to integrate hip hop references into their music, and later expanded that when Watts-Russell lent Martyn Young a bunch of his favourite reggae records – notably toaster U-Roy’s ‘Say You’. The signing of Colourbox, masters of a very idiosyncratic avant pop-reggae groove, in the same year as the Cocteau Twins, gave the lie to the common perception of 4AD as a label dedicated to the ‘dark and doomy’. Indeed, Young confessed that he would ‘never have sent a tape to them’ given their reputation, had a mutual friend not intervened.
For Watts-Russell, the label’s growth can best be gauged by tracing the evolving line-ups of the residency they took at The Venue. “We had this residency for a long time. The promoter John Reed gave us the first Monday of each month – unlimited guest list – just pack the place out. So 1981 or 1982, in those two years, it would have started with the Birthday Party supporting Modern English, then the Cocteau Twins supporting the Birthday Party, then Xmal Deutschland supporting the Cocteau Twins. But I guess the success ground to a halt when the Wolfgang Press opened for Xmal Deutschland! You could see new highlights each year. Bauhaus the first year, the Birthday Party in the second year, Cocteau Twins in the third. Is it fair to say This Mortal Coil in the fourth year? One could. Or one could say Xmal Deutschland, which at the time was quite a big deal. Then it was Dead Can Dance and then Xymox. So there was always something new released through the label that felt worthwhile, different, inspirational, and I guess people responded, collectively adding to the label’s reputation. And beyond 1983, visually as well, there was a consistency. I became the biggest champion of the Vaughan Oliver mantra of all. You see a 4AD logo on it, you’ll trust it, and you’ll think it’s worth listening to.”
Appreciation for the efforts 4AD put into packaging was widespread, establishing a marque of quality that matched, and some would say surpassed, Peter Saville’s designs for Factory. “Somehow to me,” notes Watts-Russell, “it didn’t seem something that your average record buying person would know as a fact, but they would instinctively feel it when they held the record in their hands. We would spend more, the weight of the board was heavier, we would print on special boards.” Budgets, apparently, were never much of a concern. “Frighteningly, I’ve never really budgeted. The one time I remember was the mid to late 80s. Overall accountant Nigel Bolt would come around with pad and paper and say, ‘OK, we need to do some cash flow projections, let’s go through what you’re putting out this year.’ A classic example was a couple of months before ‘Pump Up The Volume’ came out and we said, ‘that might do 10,000?’ That was as close to budgeting as we came and look at how completely inaccurate it was! It was just going OK. The overheads weren’t really that huge. There were really three of us doing everything. Vaughan might not have been down there packing boxes, but Deborah and I were. Deborah and I did everything physical. Then somewhere in there, around maybe 1984, God bless him, the late Rob Deacon, the smiling postman, came to work at 4AD part time. In exchange for helping out in the warehouse, and getting paid, he could learn the ropes, or some of the ropes or have access to photocopiers and so forth. And then he went on to start Volume magazine.”
The concept of This Mortal Coil evolved after Watts-Russell failed to persuade Modern English to re-record ‘16 Days’ and ‘Gathering Dust’. Instead, he asked Gordon Sharp of Cindytalk and Liz Fraser to contribute as vocalists alongside Modern English’s Mick Conroy and Gary McDowell. It would be issued as the first a-side credited to This Mortal Coil, backed by a version of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song To The Siren’. One of Ivo’s favourite songs, it again featured Fraser, the finished version retaining the Robin Guthrie guitar part he’d laid down as a guide on the demo; producing a stunningly evocative piece of work. 4AD’s roster would frequently interact and record with each other, but this was arguably the most enduring, instantly brilliant collaboration. “The story there,” expands Watts-Russell, “it was the Ritz in New York, Modern English encoring at a headlining gig, doing really well. They ran the encore of ‘16 Days’ into ‘Gathering Dust’. Really exciting, the place was jumping. ‘Why don’t you re-record those two songs for an EP? They said, ‘Fuck off, why do that? Why would we want to go backwards?’ So I thought I’d have a go. My first experience of expressing an idea to an engineer and actually hearing it happen had been with Modern English during the recording of ‘Gathering Dust’. It was incredibly exciting for someone, a non-musician who had spent years listening to the detail of music, to suddenly be part of the creative process. That’s how I slipped into the role of producer. But I never felt comfortable with that role. I didn’t have the right, or technical savvy, to impose my ideas onto someone else’s work. With the Cocteau Twins, though, I think my input on Garlands probably helped Robin become determined to produce himself!”
“That’s what This Mortal Coil became to me,” he continues, “my own project. This Mortal Coil was created because I could, I suppose. No-one would have paid me to do that. It was only because I owned the company that I got away with it. Also, I created the situation where I could be most confident, because I wasn’t mixing in front of five people and arguing about levels, EQ etc. To this day quite a lot of contributors to This Mortal Coil have never met each other. Yes, it became an escape for me, it was wonderful to get out the office and go over to Blackwing and work there till midnight. John Fryer was a delight to work with and seemed undaunted by my lack of technical ability or jargon. It was a real escape from the business side of things, and also lucky and exciting to have a creative outlet.”
Cocteau Twins enjoyed further sustained success through 1984, despite turning down the opportunity to make a Top Of The Pops appearance for ‘Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops’. “Elizabeth fits into a similar thing with Kristin [Hersh]” notes Watts-Russell. “It might be something as simple as their irises. You look into their eyes, both Elizabeth and Kristin, and you see this terror there – you want to protect them, you want to keep the big bad music business at bay. And in some ways that probably proved to be inappropriate. But there’s nothing on earth that would entice me as an individual at any point in my existence to appear on Top Of The Pops should I ever be given the opportunity. There’s nothing on earth that would persuade me to do inappropriate tour supports, or probably even press. I was totally sympathetic and supportive in helping them avoid the apparent agony they experienced when trying to do anything other than make records. Perhaps that was a mistake. Certainly later in life, all sorts of water under the bridge by then, but the dissatisfaction and anger that would come from Robin in particular about us as a record company – he started to treat us as a record company. It made me wonder if he would have been happier had we behaved like bullying ‘you’ve got to do this, or that’ – I don’t even know how to behave like that. How on earth could you possibly have a working relationship with creative people, musicians and artists that you like, if you’re saying you’ve got to do this, or else? We were supposed to be an alternative to the bullying majors. And doing things differently, and doing it together. Maybe briefly somewhere in there, ther
e was a six-month period of this really inspiring happy family at 4AD, where all the bands got on, and helped each other out and hung out together, with Vaughan and Nigel Grierson too at 23 Envelope. It was briefly a really fantastic place to be part of, at a fantastic time. People talk about Paris in the 20s, or Hollywood in the 30s. I think London in the late 70s to the mid-80s was just overflowing with original ideas and creativity, and I think we were lucky to be part of it.”
The third Cocteaus’ album Treasure (1984) even featured a tribute to their record label head in lead track ‘Ivo’ (though Fraser actually sings ‘Peep-Bo’ on the recording, its original title – the band subsequently decided each track would be given a ‘first name’). Meanwhile they moved to set up their own 16-track studio in an apartment rented by William Orbit, whom they’d met through Colourbox. 4AD also signed Dead Can Dance, a barely quantifiable unit who would build a rich catalogue of challenging music (critics struggled for appropriate terminology, but “ethno-Goth” probably came closest) around Lisa Gerrard’s soprano and Brendan Perry’s baritone, featuring chants, madrigals and Eastern influences.
The first This Mortal Coil album featured an impressive cast list including Alex Chilton, Howard Devoto and Roy Harper, in addition to much of the label’s roster. The most obvious song to deliver on the exquisite premise that was ‘Song To The Siren’ was the second single to be taken from it, ‘Kangaroo’, featuring Gordon Sharp covering Big Star’s lost classic. Sharp actually appeared on two other songs on the album, ‘Fond Affections’ (originally a Rema Rema song) and ‘A Single Wish’, which he wrote with Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins and Stephen Young of Colourbox. As he reflects, this was typical of an atmosphere surrounding 4AD artists where allegiances were quickly and amicably forged. It led to the apocryphal story that he was invited to join the Cocteau Twins. “Possibly one of my own, naive, making! Around the time I was recording the 1983 John Peel session with them and singing at the occasional gig, Ivo spoke to me about the possibility of joining up with the Cocteaus. He was musing over the possibility of adding new instrumentation, developing new ideas with their sound. He suggested that the combination of our voices (Eizabeth’s and mine) might be a unique way for them to further that sound. I’m fairly sure he had not discussed this with any of the band and I’m even more convinced they would not have been interested in the idea. They quickly showed they had enough in their armoury to develop their sound without me. Anyway, I quickly passed over the subject with Ivo. Cindytalk was gearing up to record its first album Camouflage Heart and that was my main concern. Incidentally, one of Ivo’s early ideas for This Mortal Coil was to use some of the tracks I was recording for Cindytalk (along with tracks by Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins). I declined this offer as well, because I was following my own path.”
