I’m full of dust and guitars. The only work I’ve done the last two years is interviews. I’m very good at it.
(Syd Barrett, 1971)
‘We’re at the foot of the future and it’s kicking us up the past’
(‘Don’t Even Know Which Day It Is’ – Edgar Broughton Band)
If the spirit of 4AD was to live on, as Martin Mills had suggested, it would have to do so not just without Ivo but without trusted lieutenants Simon Harper and Robin Hurley. The latter had been offered the chance to run 4AD from Beggars’ New York base, but he didn’t want to move back to the east coast, and he didn’t feel it was a viable option. ‘I realised that I would really miss Ivo and I had no confidence that 4AD would thrive without him.’
Like Ivo, Hurley believes that 4AD should have changed tack, to survive and even thrive – as a back catalogue operation. He suggests Ivo could have made that a condition of the sale: ‘The purchase price from Martin wouldn’t have been noticeably lower.’
Mills knew that particular course of action would have been financially prudent. ‘We needed to generate an income from 4AD, and the easiest way over a period of time would have been to run it as a museum piece, knowing 4AD was Ivo, and it could never be the same again. But that would have been a waste. There was something great there that we couldn’t just give up on. I wanted to reinvent 4AD in Ivo’s image, a label that he would continue to be proud of. I don’t know if we succeeded, but we tried.’
With Simon Harper making his move to the USA, Mills needed to find someone to head the label.* Just as 4AD’s A&R team after Ivo’s move to America had been plucked from the warehouse, Mills looked within the company rather than bringing in an outsider. Chris Sharp had joined Beggars Banquet’s press department in 1995, progressing to head both Beggars and XL press operations after successful high-profile campaigns including The Prodigy. ‘It was an incredible opportunity,’ says Sharp. Given his incisive business brain, communication skills and good taste, he was a capable choice. Responsibilities were to be shared with new head of A&R Ed Horrox, now that Beggars Banquet’s subsidiary label Mantra had been shut down.
Sharp’s first task was to examine 4AD’s existing contracts and accounts, and to visit the relevant artists to discuss the future. He made contact with Kim Deal, Warren Defever, Tanya Donelly, Kristin Hersh, Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, Mojave 3, GusGus, The Thievery Corporation and Vinny Miller – not a bad roster to inherit.
Sharp was confronted with mixed reactions to Ivo’s departure. ‘Ivo didn’t tell me he was leaving, I heard it from Brendan,’ says Lisa Gerrard. ‘I was devastated. I had tried calling Ivo a few times in the Nineties, but Brandi began to ask why I was calling – she felt I was putting him under pressure, and so I’d stopped.’
Sharp says Hersh and Donelly appreciated the fact that someone was now offering a sense of direction. Warren Defever was more suspicious, adding: ‘His view was that His Name Is Alive had been releasing records with diminishing returns, so could I still pursue my vision to make R&B records? And did anyone at 4AD truly care?’ Thievery Corporation’s Eric Hilton was the toughest negotiator: ‘He wanted 4AD to drop them so he could make lots of money if they could re-sell the overseas rights to a second album,’ says Sharp. ‘But we wanted to keep them.’
There was just one person Sharp couldn’t reach: ‘Kim Deal was off the radar. She was in the thick of her drink and drugs period, but she popped up a year later.’
Vinny Miller’s case was even more complicated. As starry smooth hound, he’d received an advance for an album that remained unfinished, three years on. In Sharp’s mind, ‘Ivo had given Vinny the spiel, that he was a genius, and that he was a rough diamond that Ivo could polish. But he never did, which left Vinny in limbo. Ivo’s hands-off approach had left a few people potentially unprotected.’
Sharp was as obsessed with music as Ed Horrox, and the connection that Horrox had made with Ivo regarding Low showed the potential for a continuity of Ivo’s original spirit. ‘I was aware of this label that had been as great as any other, and incredibly attractive,’ says Horrox. ‘It was a case of just trying to sign the things that you love, or that you see as important. I loved how key records on 4AD went their own way.’
As a teenager during, he says, ‘one blissful summer’, Horrox had been entrusted the family house on his own for the first time – the soundtrack to this time was dominated by This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins and Le Voix Bulgares. Horrox’s own path shows how the times had changed, as he dived deep into club music, from house to Madchester. He’d tried, and failed, to forge a career as a jobbing musician but at least this provided common ground with the artists that he was trying to sign as an A&R man.
In 1993, Horrox joined Island as an A&R scout, moving to London Records and then Mantra, where his more imaginative and eclectic tastes could prosper. There, he signed The Delgados (pensive, orchestrated rock), Six By Seven (expansive rock) and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci (wistful, folky psychedelia; Ivo had once been keen on the Welshmen). He couldn’t sign Low, but he had turned Ivo on to their album Secret Name. ‘Ivo called to say the album had brought him to tears, and why weren’t people sending him this kind of stuff?’ Horrox recalls. ‘It was a nice little encounter, but we didn’t speak again until I was at 4AD.’
Martin Mills was again to take a hands-off approach. He says he hadn’t understood Colin Wallace and Lewis Jamieson’s promotions to A&R, or Scheer’s signing, but then he admits he didn’t get Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim either. ‘But I know Robin and Simon managed things to the best of their ability. And it wasn’t my role to second-guess their A&R.’
So could Sharp and Horrox rebuild 4AD by bringing in new artists to match 4AD’s original ethos, and also inspire those remaining artists that had initially helped create it? To begin with, nothing appeared to have changed on the surface. 4AD in the twenty-first century began with Kristin Hersh’s single ‘A Cleaner Light’ taken from Sky Motel. The reserved optimism sounded perfect for Ivo: ‘I was trying to skip out on this high … but in a cleaner light, it’s OK.’ Three live versions of Throwing Muses classics added continuity with the past.
A new album, GusGus vs. T-World, did much the same. It was a devious title as the tracks featured songs from remaining members Biggi Veira and Herb Legowitz recorded in their former T-World days. This explained the album’s series of techno instrumentals, with just seven tracks, the closing ‘Esja’ at 11 minutes long. And that was GusGus out of the picture.
Mojave 3 were content to stay, and released its third album Excuses For Travellers: song titles such as ‘Bringin’ Me Home’ and ‘Got My Sunshine’ expressed the simple sentiments and melodies, but Vaughan Oliver would most probably have refused to use the primitive and child-like drawing that ended up on the cover. The absence of v23’s visual flair was the most obvious difference between the old and new 4AD, without even a surface beauty to keep the doubters at bay.
After a second Thievery Corporation album, The Mirror Conspiracy, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton were to follow GusGus. On 4AD’s side, the album suggested a new artful and budget-conscious outlook. The lead single, titled ‘Sound File 001’, was released only on ten-inch vinyl, fronted by a remix of the album track ‘Focus On Sight’. The following ten-inch single ‘Sound File 002’ was led by the album track ‘Shadows Of Ourselves’. Both releases had inexpensive videos, and there were no other remixes. With far fewer staff members and less overheads, there was less anxiety over bringing in money.
4AD’s first new signing since starry smooth hound was a sign of how things might be restructured; something esoteric, modern, select, with a touch of continuity with the past. It wasn’t folk, America, dance, singer-songwriter balladry or a sound built to compete with Creation, but one that paralleled the leading British independent Warp, at the experimental end of electronica.
If the movie Blade Runner had been made in the year 2000 and not 1982, it might have had a soundtrack by Magnétophone rather than Vangelis. Dark, dystopian and restless in mood, jagged and soothing in equal measure, Birmingham duo Matt Huish Saunders and John Hanson’s debut album I Guess Sometimes I Need To Be Reminded Of How Much You Love Me wasn’t the same ear-buzzing challenge as that offered by Warp’s prominent artists Aphex Twin and Autechre, but they nevertheless tapped into ‘glitch’, the sound of machine malfunction, hum and hiss.
Musically, Ivo would never have gone there: ‘A glitch was something I’d spent hours in the studio, or when mastering, asking engineers to get rid of,’ he comments. ‘To have it as the fabric of a piece, a style even of music, just didn’t suit my brain, and still doesn’t, but in many ways that’s good and proper. Each generation should be offending the previous one with its originality and disregard for what is acceptable. Unfortunately, most offend for the opposite reason – a complete lack of originality.’
‘Uppermost in our minds,’ says Sharp, ‘was that 4AD had squandered its credibility having hit records, with endless Cuba twelve-inch remixes, in a desperate attempt to be on the radio and have hits. All previous successes on 4AD had happened organically. Ed and I were into labels such as Warp, so we looked for artists with integrity and staying power to re-establish 4AD as a home for uncompromised creativity. Perhaps we were naïve in signing bands that lacked commercial ambition, but that had been the problem before. At the same time, we were under much more direct financial scrutiny than Ivo ever was. He never needed to seek Martin’s approval. We had to make tiny deals, never over £5,000 an album.’
The artwork for I Guess Sometimes I Need To Be Reminded Of How Much You Love Me was pure v23, with the photos and credits printed on the inside of an inner slipcase, and the track listing on a strip of card at the rear. Yet cost-saving was involved. The designer was Martin Andersen, a v23 assistant working under Vaughan Oliver’s art direction, which was a cheaper option than using the head honcho.
4AD continued to repackage its enviable back catalogue, with compilations from Heidi Berry (Pomegranate: An Anthology) and, finally, a Cocteau Twins collection (Stars And Topsoil: A Collection)† before the year was out.‡
More discerning collectors were engaged by the compilation Fwd>Motion given away free at a 4AD-sponsored event at an abandoned foam factory in London, featuring Magnétophone, future 4AD signing Minotaur Shock, and a live recording by electro-ambient duo Paul Schütze and Simon Hopkins. More decisive esoterica came from Piano Magic’s 4AD debut, the ambient soundtrack to Spanish director Bigas Luna’s art-house film Son de Mar – not even Dead Can Dance’s early film soundtracks were so indulged. The Sharp/Horrox version of 4AD appeared to be moving closer to Ivo’s post-Bauhaus years, of Gilbert/Lewis and David J/René Halkett, and disregarding any sense of clear-cut trends.
Son de Mar was already Piano Magic’s fifth album, and 4AD was the London trio’s fourth label, but the soundtrack was more of an introduction to the main event. Released in 2001, Writers Without Homes was a contemporary reading of a familiar blueprint: Sharp says core member Glen Johnson ‘was obsessed with This Mortal Coil, and the album was to keep in with the old 4AD spirit of collaboration’.
Johnson had a more eclectic reach than This Mortal Coil, drawing on shoegaze and post-rock, but guest performers included long-lost folk singer Vashti Bunyan, former Cocteau Twin and TMC contributor Simon Raymonde, and the stunning, dolorous baritone of John Grant.§ v23’s sublime artwork – with Vaughan Oliver at the helm – maintained the image and feel of old. There was one weak spot: the concept. Sharp felt that Johnson hadn’t fully delivered on his collaborative promise. More ominously, there were echoes of the 4AD–Warners relationship of old.
‘4AD’s press and marketing people struggled with the album and I never sensed much enthusiasm for Piano Magic around Alma Road,’ says Sharp. Johnson’s plan to write a rockier album for the live incarnation of Piano Magic didn’t alleviate Sharp’s concerns. ‘I was put off by the prospect of getting the project through the Beggars system, so we didn’t pick up the option.’
In its eclectic reach and quirkier feel, Writers Without Homes was more His Name Is Alive than This Mortal Coil, and now it was the turn of the real thing. With 2001’s Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth, Warren Defever persisted with his progressive R&B evolution, though without Karin Oliver for the first time. But Defever couldn’t settle, and sought a working environment that was unencumbered by contracts and strangers at 4AD’s office. After one last album for the label, 2002’s Last Night, ‘I begged to be released from our contract one record early,’ he says.¶
Kristin Hersh had already established career independence with her consumer-funded organisation CASH Music, but had agreed to persist with 4AD as the budgets, though smaller than they once were at the label, gave her a profile. Some of the old demons, though, returned during the making of her fifth solo album, 2002’s Sunny Border Blue. ‘It was some of my best work, but I sang about things I shouldn’t have and played things I shouldn’t have – it was like a mania. Things could be insular and a mindfuck, and lonely without Ivo, and I’d already lost Dave [Narcizo], the only two people who spoke my musical language. So I compensated with my first real work of obsession since I was a teenager. I’d get drunk in the studio and call people, and they’d say, “Tell the truth, it will be fine, just record it”. And it wasn’t my 4AD any longer. And I’d been there longer than the other employees! Piece by piece, we’d lost the family, but it was inevitable. The entire music industry was collapsing. But it was fine too. It was about the music again instead of the family, and I still had some good people on my side.’
In 2000, there had been a very brief Throwing Muses reunion, with Tanya Donelly also on board, for two fan gatherings (in Massachusetts and at a Rhode Island music festival) christened ‘Gut Pageant’. Hersh then got busy. Her fourth son Brodie was born in November 2002, followed by her sixth solo album The Grotto. It was the most nakedly acoustic album she’d yet made, but this was partly down to siphoning off the electricity for a new Throwing Muses album. Husband Billy had noticed Hersh was writing Muses-style songs, and suggested she use part of her advance for the solo album on a band record, so Hersh, Narcizo and Georges reconvened after seven years apart.
Hersh named the album Throwing Muses, like the 1986 debut, in the spirit of starting over. Recorded over two weekends, the album had an intensely knotty mood – ‘quick and dirty, playing by the seat of our pants,’ says Hersh. Both the solo and band album were released on the same day in March 2003: ‘They were two sides of the same coin,’ says Hersh. ‘I didn’t want either to suffer because of the other, and they came from the same time and place. They’re related.’
Throwing Muses even featured a guest backing vocalist – Tanya Donelly. It was an extraordinary moment for them both. ‘I just asked her,’ Hersh recalls. ‘I thought she’d be too busy, as she had had a baby. She wrote all these crazy melodies around mine, and by the end, I couldn’t tell whose voice was whose. We were both in tears, because it felt like we were singing together.’
Hersh wanted Throwing Muses to tour; with Narcizo committed to his design company, he helped find a replacement drummer, Rob Ahlers. Since Hersh saw Narcizo as an irreplaceable Muse, she named the new trio 50 Foot Wave. It took on a life of its own, recording 2004’s self-titled mini-album and 2005’s full-length Golden Ocean, in which Ahler’s more aggressive style pushed Hersh to blistering heights.
‘Since Hips And Makers, I’d been releasing a record a year, and touring until I wore out my welcome,’ she recalls. ‘I saw 50 Foot Wave as an opportunity to not think about solo material and to travel in a different sphere. Different sound, clubs, engineers. And then to come back with fresh ears and impulses.’
Like Hersh, Donelly too had found a way to combine motherhood with music. Her 2002 second solo album Beautysleep again featured husband/bassist Dean Fisher and Narcizo, before the entrancing acoustic Whiskey Tango Ghosts finished her 4AD contract on a high, in a country/folk reverie that spoke of her present state ten years on from Belly.**
However, the most anticipated return was Kim Deal – with Kelley again by her side. The sisters had been recording piecemeal since 1998, but the only track they’d managed was a cover of The James Gang’s ‘Collage’ (the B-side of the first single they’d bought together) for the 1999 soundtrack of The Mod Squad. Five other tracks from this period ended up on the new Breeders album, but it wasn’t until 2001 that Kim and Kelley toured again under that name, with three Breeders debutantes: guitarist Richard Presley and bassist Mando Lopez from the LA punk band Fear, and drummer Jose Medeles. The same year, Steve Albini was recalled to record the rest of the album, which Kim called Title TK. ‘That was the title I wanted to call Last Splash, but it didn’t make so much sense for that record,’ she says. ‘But here, it worked. Title TK sounds like I know nothing, even after fighting for so many rounds, not even a title for the fucking record! I thought it was funny.’
Although there were five Breeders on the credits, the album’s sombre, skeletal feel resembled the solo album that Kim had once intended to make. She was even playing some of the drums. 4AD bravely released ‘Off You’ as the lead single, a haunting ballad that laid bare the suffering and doubt that the sisters had endured. It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to ‘Cannonball’, and all the energies of Elektra to keep her on side failed.
Deal had also to contend with the fact 4AD had changed. ‘I was very suspicious when I first met Ed Horrox, because he wasn’t Ivo. I also talked to Ivo, and to Vaughan, and it was all confusing. I didn’t know what anyone was doing. I don’t know if anyone suggested producers, but I’d wanted to shoo away everyone since everything had gone digital. But my 4AD contract ended with Title TK.’
In 2002, 4AD had also released the debut album Nonument by Sybarite, a neo-classical-ambient-electronic assemblage by Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Xian Hawkins. But it wasn’t all edgy electronica, as other signings The Mountain Goats and Cass McCombs represented a new vanguard of Americana.
The Mountain Goats was a loose collective arranged around the poetic, narrative strengths of Californian singer-songwriter John Darnielle, who had released numerous lo-fi tracks across cassette, vinyl and CD before 2002’s Tallahassee. It was the first of six albums that 4AD was to release over the next seven years, as success in America – though very little outside – made it worthwhile continuing.
McCombs, another Californian, was even more of a curio, living as a restless hobo, sleeping in cars, on couches and at campsites across the country. Asked what he’d like on his tombstone, he said, ‘HOME AT LAST’. His 2002 EP debut Not The Way shared Alex Chilton’s resigned, mournful stamp, and McCombs could have been the new 4AD’s Mark Kozelek. But after two albums, A (2003) and PREfection (2005), McCombs moved on, to the London-based Domino label, just as he’d moved on to other cars, couches and campsites.
Another character who would have slotted in alongside McCombs’s tormented nature was Vinny Miller. He had dropped the starry smooth hound alias, and finally completed an album. 4AD released On The Block in 2004, six years after his Anakin demo. Fittingly, the album is one of the label’s most buried treasures, as Miller was in no reasonable state to promote it bar a few shows in America. He didn’t even have the will to continue making music.
Miller recalls how hopeless he’d felt during those intervening years. ‘I blew opportunities most musicians would give their teeth for. I dived headfirst into music tech with hardware samplers and hard disk recorders, when I should have spent the time being creative. The momentum gets lost and the length of time becomes a burden in itself. If you’ve worked 12-hour days for two and a half years but haven’t completed even one piece, something’s gone badly wrong. At the least, you’re not cut out for a career in music. They [Ed and Chris] wanted to help, but however supportive or tuned in somebody is, they can’t finish your record for you. And finishing it was a matter of recognising my own mediocrity.’
Chris Sharp recalls an upsetting conversation where Miller expressed ‘a paranoid hallucinatory belief that Vaughan [Oliver] was this male force, trying to control, or damage, his career’. Miller’s finished album careered over twelve wildly undulating tracks, his fevered voice couched in hushed and violent outbursts. ‘It’s not super-dark,’ he reflects today. ‘If it’s mad, it’s benevolently so. A lot of it came from boredom. I’d do something beautiful, melodic and atmospheric and then be so sick of that sound that I’d do something different for a bit. Then I’d get something shouty to a finishing point and be exhausted by it.’
Ivo heard On The Block at a point, he says, where it was best he didn’t listen to 4AD releases: ‘But, of course, I did. It’s not the overall album that I’d imagined when I contacted Vinny years earlier. In some ways, it’s better. It’s almost like he jumped straight to his second album. He’d got very glitch and “laptop” and I’m happy Ed and Chris didn’t necessarily respond positively to that approach. For me, it was Vinny’s voice. It was before the era when post-Jeff Buckley wannabes became a dime a dozen, without the voices to deliver the emotion. Vinny seemed to have returned to a place where he wanted to allow his voice to be heard, to shine. I find the recording unnecessarily lo-fi for my taste, but the arrangements, and his voice, were fabulous.’
Yet Miller was still intent on a sense of disruption. For starters (literally), ‘The Yes/No Game’ has to be the most bizarre opening track in 4AD’s canon – two minutes of conversation between Miller and an east London pirate radio DJ. ‘He popped up while I was flicking through for radio samples,’ Miller recalls. ‘I wasn’t prank-calling … I originally wanted a taped shout-out, then wanted to win his game. It’s supposed to disorientate.’
The album cover portrayed Miller tarred and feathered, eyes heavily lidded, as if drugged or hypnotised. ‘It is to date, the worst album sleeve concept ever released on 4AD,’ he states. ‘I’m chuffin’ proud of that. It was by accident but I remembered Sebastião Salgado’s photo of the Gulf War oil well-capping guys. It was for purposes of liberation too. With every new track being completed, it felt like unzipping a skin from the top of my head right the way down to my feet. It was a fucking great feeling.’
Yet On The Block had no lasting cathartic effect. When Miller’s concert in the tiny backroom of London pub The Water Rats was shut down by a fire between the soundcheck and the show, it seemed to be an omen. Miller says that 4AD’s decision to terminate the relationship ‘was pretty merciful, as things panned out’. He now works as a nurse with people suffering from ‘severe and enduring mental illness’.
How perfect that Ivo’s last signing at 4AD was someone whose mental fragility couldn’t make enough sense of the business of music. ‘I like obscurity. It’s underrated,’ concludes Miller, adding, ‘There are too many records out there. Some of them are great. Bands have creative differences and split, solo artists isolate and go nuts. I don’t regret leaving.’
The same year saw Lisa Gerrard’s departure after twenty-two years on the label. In 2002, 4AD had released her soundtrack to the film Whale Rider, a widely successful (and independently released) magic-realist saga based around Maori culture, and Immortal Memory followed in 2004. It was her first original album in six years, recorded with a new collaborator, Irish classical composer Patrick Cassidy. ‘4AD after Ivo was like someone had lifted up the house and put a new one on top, and you don’t know where anything is. I decided to see out my agreement, and that was it.’
So where was Ivo during these developments? Having twice failed to buy land in the Santa Fe region on a neighbouring ridge to where he’d first searched, he had purchased a plot of ten acres in 2000, initiated building in August 2001 and taken possession of his new house in June 2002. The stress of 4AD had gone, but not the clinical depression. Despite a couple of moments of clarity where he’d considered making music again, to the point of sending out tapes of cover versions to a couple of people, ‘I couldn’t go through with it,’ he recalls. ‘In any case, I haven’t had an original idea for years. Just like so much modern music.’
Considerate towards 4AD’s legacy and aware its founder’s aura still hovered over Alma Road, Ed Horrox kept in touch with Ivo, posting him compilations. ‘It was mostly unsigned, emerging little bands, and he [Ivo] would write most of them off. He’d say, “Twelve of those thirteen tracks were shit, but I really like that Shins song”.’
In 2001, when Horrox flew toTexas to see XL signings The White Stripes at the South By Southwest festival, he paid Ivo a visit: ‘It felt like I was visiting the guru. I was looking at a fire that was nearly out, but nurturing the embers … and I wanted to say hello, music fan to music fan. We mostly talked about old music, like Spirit, Steve Miller, Judy Henske, or about dogs, but never about how or why things had tailed off for him. He even gave the impression he wasn’t listening to music.’
Horrox didn’t even get a positive reaction to Blonde Redhead’s brilliant 2004 album Misery Is A Butterfly, despite the New York-based trio’s inventive twist on the dream-pop dynamic. Japanese singer Kazu Makino and Italian twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace had had roots in a noisier dissonance – early albums were released on Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley’s label Smells Like. But by the time they signed to 4AD, they were mining a more concentrated, swooning sound, part vintage shoegaze in the style of Lush (especially ‘Equus’) and part baroque Gallic pop in the style of Serge Gainsbourg’s Sixties classic Histoire De Melody Nelson. Makino was a Lush, Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil fan. ‘Those people made the kind of records you had to make a choice to listen to,’ she explains. ‘I’d never imagined I had what it took to make a record like that, with that kind of conviction.’
‘Misery Is A Butterfly was the first time we felt we were making a step forward,’ says Chris Sharp. ‘It opened 4AD up to America again, which led directly to TV On The Radio, which was another step up – the hottest band on the planet – and we could be taken seriously again. Things began to accelerate.’
Brookyn-based multi-racial quintet TV On The Radio had released its debut EP Young Liars in 2003 on the US indie Touch & Go. The record had infused art rock with a funk/soul perspective, and had original ideas: the EP’s hidden track, for example, was an a cappella version of Pixies’ ‘Mr Greaves’. ‘It was the first thing I sent Ivo that he freaked out about,’ says Horrox. ‘I thought, fucking hell, wow, something’s going on here.’
‘I felt like it was almost a Rema-Rema moment for Chris and Ed, something that really didn’t sound like anything else, a starting point of something real,’ says Ivo.
The band’s guitarist and producer Dave Sitek was a 4AD obsessive to the point that he’d call studios where 4AD records had been recorded, asking for insider tips. ‘You could hear Cocteau Twins in Dave’s guitars, Gerard [Smith, the band’s bassist/keyboardist who died of lung cancer in 2011] was a massive fan of His Name Is Alive, and they knew 4AD’s catalogue inside out,’ says Sharp.
Sitek even called Ivo at home, ‘trying to be a fan, and trying to be kind,’ Ivo recalls. But Ivo still wasn’t ready to reconnect with 4AD, even after six years away from the front line. ‘I was still listening to much less music, and it took me a long time to be able to go back and listen to anything on 4AD for pleasure,’ he says. ‘In 2002, I’d moved into this house where the environment was appropriate to re-create that feeling of that Majorca trip, where Vaughan and I mostly just listened to Eno. When I moved into this house, I banished voices and drums and that’s when my true love of Stars of the Lid and their offshoots blossomed. I found there was a finite amount of time one can listen to ambient music from the Eno camp on a loop.’
Stars of the Lid was the Austin, Texas duo Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, specialists in drone-based, orchestral ambience that created a spellbinding sense of awe. Ivo started buying their albums, and with his name cropping up on sales reports, Wiltzie had emailed Ivo about concerns over the duo’s European distribution. ‘Adam didn’t know I had left 4AD,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I said Ed and Chris were the ones to contact, and I emailed Ed, whose response was, “Love them, love to hear something”. But he later told Adam that 4AD needed to be signing things that sold. That was an alarm bell in all sorts of directions. That’s the best example of how the post-Ivo model of 4AD differed, because I’d have done anything to have worked with Stars of the Lid.’
Ivo also saw 4AD’s attempt to keep him in the loop as a cynical exercise. ‘They were trying to suggest I was still involved by never announcing I was not involved. People like Warren and Kim kept telling me that it had never really been made clear that I had been gone since 1999.’
Ivo did re-engage with 4AD on one occasion when the label reissued The Hope Blister’s previous mail order-only Underarms in 2005, packaged with Sideways, a bonus CD of Underarm remixes by the Bavarian ambient composer Markus Guentner. ‘It was an excuse to get my dearly and recently departed [Shar Pei] Otis on the cover,’ Ivo admits. ‘The carrot to get Ed and Chris involved was Marcus, to create something new out of the record.’
There might have been a Dead Can Dance album too, but after Gerrard and Perry had reformed for a tour in 2005, they again butted heads and egos and decided against persisting. Perry then decided he would leave 4AD too. ‘I’d become a bit of a nature boy, and a father, and it was the only time I ever needed a kick up the arse, to get back to making music,’ he says. ‘But no one [from 4AD] got in touch to ask how things were going. I also thought the label had lost kudos with its new signings. And all the old faces had gone. I had one album left on the band-cum-solo deal but I left by mutual agreement. There was a healthy debt that Eye Of The Hunter hadn’t put a dent in, and I later discovered that if I’d done a second solo album, 4AD would have cross-collateralised the debt from Dead Can Dance and so there would have been no income. That’s the old antiquated contracts for you.’
In contrast, Mojave 3 had stuck around. Neil Halstead says the band hadn’t missed Ivo as other artists had since they’d only had a direct relationship with him before their debut album in 1995. Horrox and Sharp treated them reverently, allowing Halstead and Rachel Goswell to record respective solo albums Sleeping On Roads (2002) and Waves Are Universal (2004) that were released either side of the band’s fourth album Spoon And Rafter.
‘There was a lot of good will towards them at 4AD, including Martin [Mills],’ says Sharp. ‘I always felt that Neil was an underrated songwriter. His solo album was a relative surprise; it picked up good reviews and did pretty well in America, which worked as a good springboard between Excuses For Travellers and Spoon And Rafter, which became their best-selling record. So it felt like they were always on an upward trajectory, albeit a gradual one.’
A fifth band album, Puzzles Like You (2006), fulfilled Mojave 3’s five-album contract with a more upbeat take on country/folk roots, though it remains the band’s last album to date. ‘It didn’t really take them any further audience-wise, so there wasn’t a huge sense of urgency on either side to do another deal,’ says Sharp. ‘And the band was increasingly precarious as an entity thanks to the long gaps between records, people’s different side projects and the increasing need all of them had to cope with real life.’††
Nor was there urgency to persist with the standard v23 had set for artwork, going by Mojave 3’s twee folk-art imagery. The graphic design studio was only occasionally re-employed, to bring something special to the table, such as for Magnétophone’s second album The Man Who Ate The Man: enigmatic image, exquisite typeface and a little insert for eight small cards, with lyrical phrases on one side (‘walk beneath bad light’; ‘who are you here for?’) and a graphic image on the back that could be assembled into one complete picture, in a homage to the cardboard joy inside packets of bubblegum.
The Man Who Ate The Man wasn’t just about the packaging. It was a more approachable listening experience than its predecessor, weaving in folk influences with guest folk singers King Creosote and James Yorkston. But the surprise was to be found on the buzzing instrumental ‘Kel’s Vintage Thought’ – with Kim Deal on drums and sister Kelley on violin and guitar. ‘Getting Kim and Kelley involved was a tactic for widening their musical horizons,’ says Sharp. ‘Ed had some Magnétophone demos with him when he was visiting them in Dayton, and they knocked up some bass and guitar in Kim’s home studio.’
Perhaps the Deals swayed it, but ‘Kel’s Vintage Thought’ was a wayward choice for a lead single and hardly the vehicle to promote the album, which ranks as another neglected 4AD jewel. ‘I’d be surprised if it sold a thousand copies worldwide,’ says Sharp. ‘More attention should have been paid to the realpolitik of fighting for people’s commitment at Beggars. Plus it was an abrasive and abstract record in places, so there weren’t many obvious ways in. [Magnétophone’s] Matt and John were knocked back by the experience as they’d seen 4AD as a significant step up.’
The spin-offs designed to promote the album had been an inspired choice, from a limited twelve-inch of Sonic Boom’s 20-minute remix of ‘Benny Insobriety’ to John-Mark Lapham’s impressionistic mix of the entire album. Lapham would play an unheralded part in 4AD’s next phase. Of the nine new acts unveiled between 2005 and 2007, The Late Cord was the best – Ivo agrees – and most frustratingly, the briefest.
The Late Cord was Lapham’s collaboration with singer Micah P. Hinson, a fellow Texan out of the Cass McCombs mould of troubled souls who was trying to overcome a history of addiction and homelessness. Lapham had been the studio mastermind behind the Anglo-American quartet The Earlies, whose two albums patented an adventurous blend of folk and electronica. His motivation for working with Hinson, he says, ‘was to create my own “early 4AD sound”. I wasn’t trying to replicate it, but it was a massive influence.’
Without knowing of Lapham’s reverence for the label, Ed Horrox had asked The Earlies if they wanted to remix a Rachel Goswell song. ‘I jumped at the chance to do something for 4AD,’ Lapham says. After hearing the Lapham/Hinson demos, Horrox offered to release a record, which became the mini-album Lights From The Wheelhouse, a filmic serving of sad, restless mystery with long stretches of ambient darkness, etched by titles such as ‘My Most Meaningful Relationships Are With Dead People’ and ‘Hung On The Cemetery Gates’. A full album was meant to follow, but Hinson fell off the radar and Lapham was forced to concede defeat. Having connected with Ivo, the pair talked about a This Mortal Coil-style project with Lapham handling the music, but it never got further than a conversation.
At least Ivo was rediscovering a love of music. Hearing Danish quintet Mew’s And The Glass Handed Kites – a progressive rock record out of its time, from an unexpected source – was the trigger for a fuller investigation of the gatefold sleeves of the progressive genre, which led to the artwork of many British prog rock labels, ‘especially those that didn’t work,’ he says, ‘like Deram Nova, I don’t know why.’
An online search led Ivo to the Japanese paper-sleeve box set of King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, which kickstarted a love for the paper-sleeve format. ‘Since I was buying these records, I thought I might as well listen to them, with the feeling of a boy in a record shop, or working in a record shop,’ he says. ‘I was delighted to find genuinely exciting, original musicianship that really impressed me at a point in time when I was always running an inventory in my head of what contemporary music reminded me of, so it was a relief to be challenged. It was an emotional response to something that existed in the arts, like photography, rather than getting frustrated with what was meant to be in fashion.’
Ivo did find time for current records too – the country melancholy of South San Gabriel, or Richmond Fontaine. It wasn’t remotely original but it clearly hit the right spot – worn and sad, authentic and true. There was one more 4AD album that Ivo fully endorsed – Jóhann Jóhannsson’s second 4AD album, 2008’s Fordlandia, another cinematic – but wholly instrumental – composition. The ambient minimalist from Iceland was as likely to incorporate orchestras as electronics in his work, and used concepts to shape his music. Released in 2006, IBM 1401, A User’s Manual was based on a Seventies recording of an IBM mainframe computer by Jóhann’s father (Jóhann Gunnarsson); Fordlandia was the name of American motor industrialist Henry Ford’s fantasy-style settlement in the Amazonian jungle, set up to source the rubber needed for car tyres.
So far, Sharp and Horrox had slowly amassed an impressive body of work, mostly with an esoteric appeal, but a sense of adventure. Yet besides TV On The Radio, there was little significant sign of advancing the label. And this wasn’t going to happen with Celebration. The Brooklyn trio’s self-titled debut album, produced by Dave Sitek, shared much of TV On The Radio’s restless energy, but not their charisma or groove. Nor with the electronic instrumentalist Minotaur Shock, a.k.a. British-born David Edwards, who released two albums, Maritime (2005) and Amateur Dramatics (2008). Nor was there much chance with Portland, Oregon singer-songwriter-guitarist M. Ward, whose two albums, 2006’s Post-War (a rare political treatise for 4AD, concerning the United States’ reaction to the war in Iraq through its creative resources) and 2009’s Hold Time, were licensed from US indie Merge.
With Australian quartet Wolf & Cub, the Sharp–Horrox A&R model even started to resemble the confused roster of late-Nineties 4AD, a rare excursion into rock that combined Sixties and shoegaze versions of psychedelia, with two drummers. But Vessels became the band’s only 4AD album. ‘They were originally more angular and sprightly but changed their minds and wrote long, lumpy, proggy songs that sank without trace,’ says Sharp. The solo album Watch The Fireworks from Emma Pollock, the singer of Scots band The Delgados that Ed Horrox had signed to Mantra, was similarly underwhelming and wasn’t followed by another.
Pollock and Wolf & Cub were the newest kids on the bill of 1980: Forward, 4AD’s 25th-anniversary showcase in the tradition of The 13 Year Itch and All Virgos Are Mad. Shows at venues across London included Kristin Hersh playing Throwing Muses and solo songs; The Breeders, with Kim and Kelley Deal sober and sorted, according to special guest Josephine Wiggs; even Mark Kozelek, performing Red House Painters songs. It served to draw a line under most of what 4AD had so far achieved. TV On The Radio had been important, but the label lacked the kind of signing that would create a story, to make other artists – and journalists – wonder what was going on at 4AD. This would happen in 2006 with the surprise signing of Scott Walker, whose presence alone could command the right level of respect for the label.
As one third of the Sixties idols The Walker Brothers, the man born Scott Engel specialised in grand, lugubrious melodramas in the style of Phil Spector’s kitchen sink productions. His rich, sonorous voice had iced several astonishing solo albums through the late Sixties, the cavernous arrangements and funereal tempos framing lyrics set in a definitively non-swinging part of London. Having retreated from fame and survived a series of MOR and country covers, and then The Walker Brothers’ patchily successful reunion in the Seventies, Engel only re-emerged for 1984’s sleek and audacious album Climate Of Hunter and, after an even lengthier retreat, 1995’s alarming, electronic-fused Tilt for major label imprint Fontana.
Walker had always recorded for the majors. ‘But his manager has played the major label game for too long,’ says Sharp, ‘and he understood the integrity of a label like 4AD. I only talked to him after the deal had been done, but he said that it felt like a great place to be.’
Walker had declined to make his 4AD debut in 1986 on This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow, but he would have already known of Ivo’s achievements. As it was, he arrived at the label with 2006’s The Drift, another avant-rock, neo-classical mass with a quaking industrial core, as challenging as it was rewarding. By increments, 4AD began to build on Walker’s residency, a signing that was never going to bring in the profits but proved 4AD was a viable option, an artist’s label.
Zachary Francis Condon was next on board. Condon, who performed under the name of Beirut, was ‘incredibly important’ to the revival of 4AD, says Horrox. There were two – admittedly tenuous – links to Ivo: Condon hailed from Santa Fe, where, like Ivo, he developed a taste for the joyous Mexican folk sound of mariachi, to add to his love of Balkan folk, making his debut album Gulag Orkestar (licensed from the American label Ba Da Bing!) the first 4AD record rooted in ethnic folk since Dead Can Dance.
Condon was only twenty when Gulag Orkestar was released, and widely acclaimed. When he toured with a nine-piece version of Beirut, ‘in the middle of having a nervous breakdown,’ says Horrox, there was cause for concern. But he bounced back, and a second album, The Flying Club Cup, was released, blending new influences from French chanson including Serge Gainsbourg and Yves Montand. TV On The Radio’s second 4AD album Return To Cookie Mountain (2006) – with Vaughan Oliver sleeve and Chris Bigg assistance – consolidated 4AD’s upward curve, with David Bowie and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino among the guest singers. But the relationship ended when TV On The Radio’s US label Touch & Go was bought by Universal, which then assumed responsibility for the indie label’s overseas licensing.
Even though she was now out of contract with 4AD, Kim Deal returned in 2008, after a gap of six years – her tardiness this time could be blamed on the Pixies’ reunion in 2004 for a series of tours that continue, sporadically, to this day. The fourth Breeders album Mountain Battles retained Mando Lopez, Jose Medeles and engineer Steve Albini, bridging the raw nature of Title TK with more of the detail of Last Splash.
The loss of TV On The Radio was compensated by the licensing of a new singer-songwriter who was to prove even more influential. Bon Iver – after bon hiver, French for ‘good winter’ – was the pen name of American singer-songwriter Justin Vernon, who handled the break-up of a relationship and his band DeYarmond Edison by leaving his native North Carolina for an extended winter sojourn in his father’s log cabin deep in the Medford, Wisconsin woods. While debilitated by glandular fever, Vernon recorded a set of demos – just voice, guitar and the occasional drum, which seeped an air of restorative isolation.
These demos were merely intended to secure a record deal until Vernon realised the value of his intense, stark sketches and released 500 copies of an album, titled For Emma, Forever Ago. The blogsphere – which had expanded at an exponential rate, to create a whole new marketplace for artists – reacted with unanimous fervour and Vernon was chased by every independent label who could muster an offer.
Ed Horrox had witnessed Bon Iver’s breakthrough show in 2007, at the annual College Music Journal convention in New York. Chris Sharp was able to catch footage online. ‘We offered a worldwide deal with 4AD, but Justin and [US indie label] Jagjaguwar had a Midwest connection, so we got to license the album instead,’ says Sharp. ‘I left 4AD the week before it was released.’
If Sharp had been successful in licensing Arcade Fire’s own breakthrough album Funeral (Rough Trade won out) in 2005, it could have been a very different story for him. But Martin Mills was a pragmatic – as well as ruthless – businessman, judging by Sharp’s memory of a meeting that took place only weeks after he’d returned from compassionate leave.‡‡
Sharp: ‘Martin said something like, “I get the impression you’re losing your enthusiasm, is there anything you’d like to say?” I said I was still excited working at 4AD, and we agreed to revisit the conversation. Ed and I went to Nottingham to see The Breeders play. It was fantastic, Kim was clean and having a great time, and it was one of those evenings where you think, This is why I do this, to hang out with great people, it’s a privilege to work with these artists. The next day, Martin asked me to leave. He never did give me a clear explanation.’
The reason turned out to be Simon Halliday, the new general manager for Beggars Banquet’s associated labels. In his formative teenage years, Halliday had been a committed fan of Echo & The Bunnymen, New Order and Cocteau Twins, and says the first This Mortal Coil album ‘is near perfection for me’. Halliday, like Horrox, was also smitten by club music – from R&B and soul to hip-hop and house: ‘It balanced out the ethereal,’ he says. ‘Though I always thought Cocteau Twins weren’t a guitar band, but more dance, because of their beats.’
Halliday had promoted clubs nights in Manchester before joining the London-based promotions company Streets Ahead and then RTM, the distribution and marketing company that had risen from the ashes of Rough Trade Distribution. After working with labels such as 4AD and Tommy Boy, he’d joined Warp full-time, handling A&R and marketing before moving to New York to head the label’s US wing. In 2008, Halliday had departed over internal disagreements, but soon received Martin Mills’ offer of a job.
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 expression. 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.
† 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.’