Читать книгу Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD - Martin Aston - Страница 16

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The scenario of 4AD as a family, drawn together by associations at school or shared aesthetics of sound and vision, expanded further with the arrival of Deborah Edgely, 4AD’s third full-time employee, following Ivo and Vaughan Oliver. Edgely started as general assistant but quickly graduated to 4AD’s press officer – and Ivo’s partner.

In the historic city centre of Exeter, three hours south-west of London in the county of Devon, Edgely is understandably anxious about revisiting the many scenes of her past, complicated by her severed relationship with Ivo, the lost friendships with the artists and other friends at the label. She’s lived in Devon since the mid-1990s, after escaping London and the music business. Though Edgely’s current job running a nursery school might, in some ways, echo that of looking after musicians, there are far fewer phone calls after midnight. In any case, her two sons keep her extremely busy.

Edgely first met Ivo at a Bauhaus show. She was dating the band’s drummer Kevin Haskins while both were studying at Northampton College; she was taking a foundation course in art. ‘We were Jam fans, travelling around the country to see them,’ Edgely recalls. ‘I suppose we were mods. Kevin had a mohair suit and winklepickers and I had a lamé suit.’

With Edgely moving to Kingston for a fine art degree and Haskins’ tour commitments, their relationship fizzled out. Ivo later bumped into her at The Camden Palace; they had a couple of dates, ‘but things didn’t click,’ Ivo says. ‘That influenced my decision to hire her – because we wouldn’t then get involved.’

Edgely was planning a course in theatre design, but following lunch with Ivo and her flatmate Stella (then Pete Murphy’s girlfriend), she changed her mind. ‘I don’t think Ivo even offered me a job, but just said, What about working with me? He needed help, and didn’t have anyone else.’

Ivo: ‘I was spending a lot of time in the studio, and physically packing AND unpacking boxes. And occasionally I needed letters typed. I needed an assistant.’

One of Edgely’s first tasks was to write a press release for Modern English’s Ricochet Days: ‘I didn’t know what press was all about, though my sister had always bought the NME,’ she admits. Slowly, she took on more press duties, as Ivo increasingly felt that Sue Johns, an associate of Chris Carr’s who was handling press for both Beggars Banquet and 4AD, was underachieving. ‘I never got back to doing my own art but I don’t regret what happened,’ Edgely says.

Initially, she and Ivo shared a desk and chair, ‘which might have something to do with the fact things quickly got sparky between us,’ she says. ‘One day as we were driving, Ivo said, Deb, I have to tell you something, I’m in love with you, let’s go to the mountains in Switzerland. It was a real outpour! We were too busy to go away, but suddenly we were living together. And on a mission with 4AD.’

Thirty years after Edgely joined 4AD, Vaughan Oliver was able to tell her that he was initially jealous of her presence. ‘Beforehand, it had just been Ivo and I, and Deb took his time and attention. I never quite clicked with her at the time. But I was also in my own world. I just wanted to make the best record sleeves ever.’

The family atmosphere at 4AD was further underlined by the addition of a new rehearsal studio in the Alma Road basement. ‘[It was] like a youth club for musicians,’ says Mick Conroy. ‘There was no daytime television in those days, or the money to do much, so we’d just hang out in the studio, making noise and talking to others.’

Modern English needed to rehearse as they’d returned from America with no songs, ‘just bits of music,’ Conroy admits. Their level of success meant the band was prematurely thrown into recording, again with Hugh Jones, who recalls the sessions without much fondness. ‘They’d done something absurd like a hundred shows in eighty-two days. They were better musically this time around but it was a much harder record to make. We stitched bits together and got it organised, but their management was always looking for another “I Melt With You”, so the mood was fraught.’

It wasn’t just the band’s management. While visiting Warners’ LA office, Perry Watts-Russell overheard a conversation where an executive was suggesting Modern English put ‘I Melt With You’ on their next album as well, ‘so they could have another crack at it,’ he says. The idea was mercifully nixed, and a new single, ‘Chapter 12’, was released instead, a passable facsimile of ‘I Melt With You’ that subsequently ended up on the album Ricochet Days. ‘It was a more produced and thought-through album than After The Snow, and not as raw,’ says Robbie Grey, but in reality, it was a passable facsimile in itself, sounding more forced and less intuitive. If Ivo says he was a fan of the album, it wasn’t enough to prolong his relationship with Modern English.

Robbie Grey’s lyric for ‘Breaking Away’ had already identified a need for change, and on returning from America, the band’s original core sacked drummer Richard [Brown] and keyboardist Stephen Walker. ‘We’d shifted gears musically and they couldn’t keep up,’ Grey says. A streamlined Modern English had demoed ‘Breaking Away’ as a potential single with a new producer, Alan Shacklock, who had form with the much rockier ‘Welsh U2’ The Alarm. ‘He changed the song completely and turned it into a pastiche of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”,’ says Ivo. ‘It was awful.’

Grey: ‘We were miffed that Ivo didn’t want to release “Breaking Away”. Sire said it would sign us worldwide, so encouraged by our manager, we told Ivo things had run their course. He didn’t say, please don’t leave!’

Ivo: ‘Ricochet Days didn’t make any more impact in the UK than After The Snow, and everything with Modern English was focused in America and having hits. Of course things had to develop and grow, but that wasn’t where 4AD was going. It wasn’t a betrayal to let them go. I knew Sire would pick up their option.’

Grey: ‘Afterwards, I felt like we were people that Ivo used to know. But we were probably an expensive band to have on 4AD. To get on MTV, you needed £20,000 for a video and that was a large outlay for what was still a small independent label. And though people have had hang-ups about 4AD over money, Ivo had been quick to put us on a weekly wage, a hundred quid a week, when we’d started to do well. It had really taken off for us in America so it seemed a natural progression to sign direct to Sire. Our publisher [Beggars Banquet’s sister company Momentum] was pushing for more sales too. I think Ivo thought it wasn’t a bad thing for us to sell lots of records. And for the next two years, we were a very big band in America.’

Commercial success meant the band had to sacrifice their sanity. ‘We slogged our way across America, without a hit single this time, and got seriously frazzled,’ recalls Mick Conroy. ‘And incredibly poor. We never received royalties from 4AD until the end of the Eighties.’

Contrary to the behaviour of typical record executives, Ivo had passed on 4AD’s two biggest money-spinners Bauhaus and Modern English. Discussions regarding promo videos, choice of singles and chart strategies were not how he wished to spend his day. That didn’t mean Ivo didn’t try and help his bands do their best, and to have a chance to realise commercial as well as creative ambitions. His attention turned back to Colourbox, though this was going to be a tricky project as the trio was determined not to play live. ‘I didn’t think we could carry it off,’ Martyn Young admits. ‘Nowadays, people sequence all the music, but at the time, we’d have felt a fraud.’

Young admits that Colourbox was suffering from songwriter’s block, both in general and to suit Lorita Grahame’s voice. ‘I really like songs, I just don’t think I’m good at it,’ Young shrugs. ‘We were more concerned with production and messing around in the studio, so we began to consider cover versions.’

After enjoying U-Roy’s lilting ‘Say You’ on one of Ivo’s reggae compilations, Colourbox recorded a version at Palladium for a single, where Jon Turner’s watchful approach allowed Martyn, like Robin Guthrie before him, to gain valuable production experience. This new ‘Say You’, minus fiddly edits, added clarity and a bounce to Colourbox’s rhythmic stash, and was the band’s first UK independent top 10 hit and helped secure a second BBC Radio 1 session for the Kid Jensen evening show that preceded John Peel’s slot.

The paucity of songwriting was laid bare: all four Jensen session tracks were covers of pop legends, such as Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look Of Love’ and a horrible throwaway version of Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’ sung like a pub entertainer by manager Ray Conroy. By this point, Young admits, he and Ian Robbins were working separately instead of as a team, and when Robbins chose to take a holiday over recording the session, he was out for good.

As Cocteau Twins had found, a reduced core unit helped to focus creativity. Three months later, the A-side of new seven-inch single showed a change of tack. ‘Punch’ was Colourbox’s first direct, upbeat pop song, though the track only reached 15 in the independent charts; it was as if Colourbox fans – and 4AD collectors – didn’t want anything remotely cheery. There was little to celebrate either in the B-side support: ‘Keep On Pushing’ made another appearance and ‘Shadows In The Room’ was a drum track in search of a song. Altogether, it seemed a waste of Lorita Grahame. The soul/funk root of ‘Punch’ was also spoilt by the kind of production bluster that typified the Eighties, for which Martyn Young blames producer Bob Carter: ‘He wanted to play everything himself, so it wasn’t a nice experience. We didn’t even like what he did and the samples were clichéd. But we had to release it as money had been spent.’

Colourbox’s presence on 4AD is always wheeled out as proof that Ivo wasn’t only driven to release music that fitted compilations entitled Dark Paths – what Bradford Cox, of current 4AD signing Deerhunter, calls, ‘hyper-ethereal, borderline-goth’. But as Ivo’s first signing in over a year showed, he also wasn’t to be deterred from proceeding down the path if the music inspired. And the band’s name alone, Dead Can Dance, seemed like the very last word in goth.

Anyone who knows the work of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry can vouch for the group’s dedication to rhythm, but a club was not the place you were destined to hear Dead Can Dance; a church, perhaps, or a grand hall in a stately home, or an amphitheatre, to bring the best out of their classically infused, hyper-ethereal ethno-fusion.

In summer 2012, sat around a modest conference table in a plush hotel in Dublin’s city centre, Gerrard and Perry were about to release the first Dead Can Dance album in sixteen years – and their first not on 4AD. The photograph on the cover of Anastasis features a field of sunflowers blackened by the sun, their seed-heads drooping, exhausted. But once the heads and stems are chopped down, the roots will ensure that life, and flowers, will return. As Perry explains, anastasis is Greek for ‘resurrection’, as Dead Can Dance’s ongoing worldwide tour – at the time of writing, it’s been going for over a year – proves.

Perry also explains that anastasis also means, ‘in between two stages’, an appropriate term, as Gerrard and Perry are two very distinct characters. One is female, blonde, Australian, possessing a glorious, mournful, open-throated contralto and a penchant for speaking-in-tongues, or glossolalia, who later made her mark in Hollywood with film soundtracks, yet sees improvisation as the key: ‘That’s when I have that initial connection and everything seems to unlock,’ she proclaims. ‘If I try to refine that, I start thinking as opposed to feeling.’

The other character is male, bald now but once dark-haired, of Anglo-Irish stock, possessing a gorgeous, stately baritone, and a penchant for a painstakingly prepared music inspired by the distressed heartbreak grandeur of 1960s-period Scott Walker and Joy Division’s late talisman Ian Curtis, tinged with the Gaelic ballads absorbed via his Irish roots. After meeting in Melbourne in 1979, these apparent polar opposites were to strike up a formidable alliance, traversing not just genres but centuries and continents, bound up in a uniquely visionary sound. Anastasis shows how age, and time, hasn’t withered their cause.

Gerrard was raised in East Prahran, one of Melbourne’s melting-pot neighbourhoods, largely Greek but with Turkish, Arab, Italian and Irish communities. She recalls, ‘Exquisite, dark, arabesque voices that would blare out of the windows. It was so sensual and moving.’ By the age of twelve, Gerrard was playing the piano accordion and able to sing in her own sensual, arabesque style. ‘It was the most alive I’d ever felt. This sounds arrogant but I felt I could change things because of this great gift.’ Only a few years later, she was bold enough to perform, on her own, in pubs, ‘Some of the most insalubrious environments on earth,’ she says, ‘with broken bottles and fights, and people screaming, “Get yer top off!”’

By the end of her teens, she’d joined a local band, Microfilm, and mastered the yang ch’in (Chinese dulcimer), which resembled a metallic harp: ‘There was no concept of tuning, you just wound it up, and off you went,’ she says. When Brendan Perry first saw Gerrard play with the yang ch’in, he says, ‘It was frightening! Lisa was singing a song about taking a man home …’

Gerrard obliges with the lyric: ‘I found a man in the park, I took him home in the dark/ I put him in the cupboard, can I keep him for a treat?’

Perry’s background had been equally eventful. Born and raised in Whitechapel in east London, he left for Auckland, New Zealand with his whole family when in his early teens. He learnt guitar at school and after considering teaching or the civil service, he sensibly changed course to play bass in the local punk band The Scavengers. He called himself Ronnie Recent. When original vocalist Mike Lesbian left, Perry began singing too, but feeling New Zealand was too small a scene, the band moved to Melbourne and changed its name to The Marching Girls. After a year and one minor hit single, ‘True Love’, Perry had re-adopted his real name and was investigating electronics and percussion with bassist Paul Erikson and Marching Girls drummer Simon Monroe as Dead Can Dance.

The first time that the pair had met, Gerrard taught Perry how to cheat on Melbourne’s tramway system. Gerrard had already seen a Marching Girls show: ‘I’d never heard bass guitar played that way, with a classical, anchored approach. Brendan was a brilliant musician.’

Gerrard joined Dead Can Dance, and the pair became lovers. The first piece the new line-up attempted, she recalls, ‘didn’t sound like anything either of us had done before, which drew us close together’. That first demo, ‘Frontier’, didn’t resemble much else on earth. Mixing yang ch’in, Aboriginal rhythms and the duo’s hypnotic vocals, it sounded both ancient and modern. Perry says audience reactions were very positive, adding, ‘But there was no future in Australia, just like New Zealand. We kept playing to the same crowds. But bands like The Cure, who we supported in Melbourne, showed that this kind of music was appreciated overseas, so we had to go where it was happening.’

Monroe chose to stay behind, so only Erikson joined Gerrard and Perry on the flight to London in 1981. For three months, the couple stayed with Perry’s parents (who had also returned to the UK), in east London. Craving independence, they had accepted a hard-to-let flat on the seventeenth floor of Bowsprit Point, a council housing block on the Isle of Dogs, near to the now bustling business district of Canary Wharf but in 1981, one of London’s most derelict districts (Stanley Kubrick’s war film Full Metal Jacket was partly filmed there because of the available wasteland in which to stage explosions).

When I visited the couple in 1986, Perry admitted that his unemployment benefit had initially sustained them and Erikson alike, with odd jobs on top. Showing her propensity to roll up her sleeves, Gerrard also sold houseplants, door to door. What little spare cash they had after buying instruments and seeing concerts was spent on beer, the odd piece of hash and an art-house movie every Sunday. Music was really their sole driving concern. ‘There is so much negativity in London, one is inspired to do something positive here, something untainted,’ Gerrard said that day. ‘You put your ear to the ground, and describe what’s lacking.’

‘It was incredibly tough,’ she says today. ‘We’d eat just bread and water sometimes, and the venues we’d play were fashionably filthy and it wasn’t unusual to get food poisoning. But we knew people would love our music if we could just get it out there.’

One technical tool was a cassette player with built-in drum machine, and on their rickety second-hand bicycles, they took their demo to a select number of independent labels across London. ‘We knew from import copies of the British music press who to approach. Factory was our first choice because of Joy Division – they changed my outlook on music, and their incredibly atmospheric qualities that mirrored Ian Curtis’s wonderful lyrics, and the industrial sound by [producer] Martin Hannett. I knew 4AD from The Birthday Party, though I wasn’t a fan of their big, cheesy American gothic. Bauhaus’ first album, though, was very forward thinking, mixing guitars and percussive rhythms. I only heard Cocteau Twins when we got to London. I’d tape John Peel’s show every night.’

Yet Ivo initially turned them down: ‘He said he had a full roster,’ recalls Perry.

‘Ivo had a bit of a phobia about signing acts,’ recalls Deborah Edgely. ‘It’s a big commitment taking on people’s lives, and he wouldn’t sign long-term deals because then you’d be responsible for their future, and have to maintain a band’s income. These young kids would pitch up, and who was going to look after them? If you have a relationship built on one album at a time, there is less responsibility. You release something and hope for the best and then make a choice whether to carry on.’

Though both Mute and Cherry Red reacted positively to Dead Can Dance, the trio carried on without signing a deal. A new drummer, Peter Ulrich, was found living in one of the neighbouring tower blocks, and more demos recorded. Perry says Ivo eventually called again: ‘Two tracks, “The Fatal Impact” and “Frontier”, had captured his imagination, and he said he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tape. But he wanted to see us play live.’ 4AD helped by finding them two support slots to Xmal Deutschland. ‘Ivo was so impressed we’d got it together, and really enjoyed it [the gigs],’ says Gerrard. ‘That turned things around.’

Ivo: ‘It was Lisa’s voice that initially did it, which is odd because of how much I love Brendan’s voice too. Live, they were really powerful and tight, and Lisa was at her most raw. She sang in a non-lyrical way, using her voice almost like a weapon.’

Ray Conroy remembers meeting Gerrard and Perry in the pub across from the 4AD office: ‘This weird hermit-like bloke with a pointy beard and the willowy, ghostly, porcelain figure that was Lisa. She really had something.’

‘Ivo,’ Perry recalls, ‘had a little ponytail, but about seven or eight inches long. I thought he was Buddhist or Krishna.’ Gerrard feels that Ivo was a figure of divine intervention. ‘He provided a way for artists to express themselves in ways they’d never otherwise be able to, and to reach their potential – which is what This Mortal Coil was about. Bands didn’t feel that they were absolutely brilliant, so there was no real conflict or threat. He attracted that kind of energy, of quite shy people, like he was looking for musicians hidden under stones, making this fragile music. Without Ivo, I don’t think I’d have developed my own voice – given our circumstances, I don’t know if I’d have had the strength to keep going. We were so driven to reach our own idea, this passionate purity about the work, and if we’d been confronted by anyone who put us under pressure to do otherwise, we’d have buckled.’

By November 1983, Dead Can Dance had recorded a John Peel session and a debut album, Dead Can Dance, recorded with new musicians – James Pinker, the band’s New Zealand programmer (and live soundman) and English bassist Scott Rodger (though the departing Paul Erikson was also on the record). Dead Can Dance was instantly gripping, leading with a re-recording of the instrumental ‘The Fatal Impact’ (the title alluded to the colonial invasion of Aboriginal territory), with haunting chants taped off a TV broadcast of the 1964 film Zulu. The equally revamped ‘Frontier’ was an aural equivalent of the New Guinea tribal mask on the album cover, the idea of ‘dead’ wood being brought back to life by the carver representing the spirit behind the band’s name rather than the goth label tied around Dead Can Dance’s neck.

Of course there was a clear gothic element to Dead Can Dance. Not long after they’d arrived in Britain, Gerrard and Perry had gone on a cycling tour of Gothic cathedrals and their sound was tailor-made for such spaces. But just as much, Perry agrees, the album bore the influence of life from a fourteenth-floor eyrie: ‘Sparseness, darkness, shadows,’ he says. And Joy Division was gothic too, a music debt that the duo paid by the album homage ‘Threshold’.

The only disappointing aspect of Dead Can Dance was the production, which managed to come through as both dense and thin. Following a now familiar path, Dead Can Dance had been designated John Fryer and Blackwing: ‘Every day a different band or a different album every week, no one had money and we’d turn things round very fast,’ Fryer recalls. However, though Fryer was (unusually for an engineer, says Ivo) willing to give artists room to experiment, Brendan Perry already had years of experience, and they immediately clashed.

‘We fell out with John from day one,’ says Perry. ‘We only had two weeks for the entire album, which was really hard work. He thought he knew more about the recording process than we did, and came over arrogant and unhelpful when he should have been a bridge for us to get down what was inside our heads. We told Ivo it wasn’t working, but we couldn’t change it, so as a result, the production was really poor.’ Fryer says he didn’t like Perry’s domination of Gerrard in the studio, and, ‘how we had to replicate what he had played on the demos, but without any of their personality’.