single, with the original ‘I Fell In Love With A Ghost’ on the B-side, and much the better track; Ivo’s fondness for the A-side is perplexing given his love of singing, and given the Lunch/Howard duet features a man who couldn’t sing and a woman who gleefully sang out of tune, desecrating the song’s magnetic allure.
‘Some Velvet Morning’ showed that although Ivo’s own taste might lean towards the extended listening experience of the album format, he remained committed to singles, a collectable and affordable format that could sell in tens of thousands. Following the pattern of Gilbert and Lewis, Colin Newman followed up an album with a new seven-inch, ‘We Means We Starts’. However, he didn’t intend it to be his last 4AD release.
Ivo recalls Wire’s re-formation as the reason it was: ‘I don’t remember turning down more of Colin’s demos,’ he says, though the band’s reunion was still two years off. Newman says he did submit demos to 4AD, which, he says, ‘Ivo didn’t think were pop enough’. But the singer’s dissatisfaction went deeper. ‘I didn’t have a way forward at that point. Independent labels tended to live on a wing and a prayer, and if things work out or not, it’s fine either way. I didn’t feel part of how everything worked at that time, and so I disengaged myself. I’d been to India for fourteen months and I’d had enough of the beast of the music industry. I did vaguely talk to Ivo about another project, but we drifted apart. I don’t feel close to those records I did on 4AD, or that part of my life.’
Newman also admits to other frustrations with Ivo: ‘He didn’t want me to produce his bands, even though I’d produced an album for [Irish art rockers] The Virgin Prunes that had done really well. And I think I’d have been more honest with his bands than he would have. I think he had his eye on producing himself.’
Ivo does recall a conversation with Newman about production, but says the only outside producer in 4AD’s first three years was Hugh Jones. ‘Most bands wanted to produce themselves and we didn’t have the budgets that Colin was used to with EMI and [Wire producer] Mike Thorne. It’s lovely to fantasise about what, say, the Mass record would’ve sounded like had they been interested in input and Colin had been keen to get involved.’
As Newman suggests, Ivo did take a more active role in Cocteau Twins’ debut album. Garlands was recorded at Blackwing, with Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer engineering and Ivo given a co-producer credit alongside the band. Guthrie recalls they had quickly regarded Ivo as a mentor: ‘He was very intelligent, one of the first grown-ups we’d met, with a car and a flat; we didn’t know anyone like that! He was switched on to music, and he was listening to us! We were enthralled by him.’
Ivo, however, downplays his role. ‘I might have suggested an extra guitar part, or sampling a choir at the end of “Grail Overfloweth” in the spirit of [krautrock band] Popol Vuh’s music or sampling Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but it was minimal stuff. I also suggested, stupidly, extending the start of “Blood Bitch”. But I was there because someone had to say yes or no, and the band lacked the confidence to do so.’
Elizabeth Fraser was an especially vivid example of deep-set insecurity. Back in Rennes, Guthrie paints a picture of a girl who left home at fourteen, with Sid Vicious and Siouxsie tattoos on her arms, self-conscious to an almost pathological degree. In the mid-1990s, after becoming a mother and having therapy, Fraser told me about the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth, from within her own family. In 1982, she was still a teenager, her issues still fresh and unresolved, and facing not just decisions about her life but being judged on her creativity.
‘When we mixed the album, you’d isolate an instrument or voice to concentrate on it,’ says Ivo. ‘Whenever we’d solo Liz’s vocal, she wouldn’t let it be heard, or she’d have to leave the room. She had very low self-esteem. On stage, she’d wear a very short mini-skirt and bend over, showing her knickers, and she’d strike her bosom. She was a striking presence on stage, doing all this stuff with her fingers, and you’d see the pain on her face.’
Guthrie later told the NME that Garlands sounded ‘rather dull compared to what we know we’re capable of’, but it was a promising start. ‘In the same way as 4AD hadn’t yet proved its individuality, the Cocteau Twins didn’t with their first album,’ says Ivo, but both label and band could be proud of creating an uncanny and original template with such extraordinary potential. Garlands may have drawn some comparisons to Siouxsie and the Banshees, but it had its own enchanted and anxious tension. Heggie’s trawling bass and Guthrie’s effects-laden yet still minimalist guitar was rooted to a drum machine that occasionally lent a quasi-dance pulse. It gave Fraser a restlessly inventive backdrop for her melodic incantations and lyrical disorder, for example: ‘My mouthing at you, my tongue the stake/ I should welt should I hold you/ I should gash should I kiss you’ (‘Blind Dumb Deaf’) and, ‘Chaplets see me drugged/ I could die in the rosary’ (‘Garlands’).
The sleeve dedication to Fraser’s brief singing cohort followed suit: ‘Dear Carol, we shall both die in your rosary: Elizabeth.’ There were thanks to Ivo, Yazoo’s Vince Clarke, who lent the band his drum machine, and Nigel Grierson, whose photo graced the cover. Robin Guthrie disliked the Banshees comparisons, so it’s good he didn’t know the original inspiration behind the photo, which Grierson says the band selected from his portfolio; it had been part of a college project on alternative images for Siouxsie and the Banshees’ own album debut The Scream. ‘I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t want it, and I wasn’t asked,’ Guthrie counters. ‘It looked really gothy, and we had enough trouble with that as it was, with our spiky hair! We quickly got a goth audience but we never wore black nail varnish.’
Ivo disputes Guthrie’s statement that the band weren’t consulted; Grierson suggests that the trio’s chronic shyness meant they never articulated their own views or verbally disagreed. The mercurial Guthrie takes another view: ‘[The band appreciated] everyone was helping us make this record, but the underlying attitude was, what do you know about art? You never went to art school. You’re not an aesthete, you’re from Scotland.’
But Ray Conroy confirms Grierson’s summary. ‘Cocteau Twins would stay at my flat. I was their translator; they were so shy and timid,’ Conroy explains, adding: ‘Liz had her head shaved all round the side, with a long ball on top of her head, like a pancake or a bun had landed on there. With Robin and Will, it was all about hairspray! Boots unperfumed. And the amount of speed they did! A ton of it. It was all part of the fun.’
Yet amphetamines didn’t loosen anyone’s tongues. Chris Carr was entrusted with the duo’s first press coverage. ‘Liz and Robin were so incredibly shy, I thought that if anyone was to interview them, could the journalist hear them speak? How could we overcome this? But Ivo had faith. And he knew that, musically, something was there.’
As it turned out, Guthrie did speak up in interviews, and was hardly shy; more headstrong and even comical. ‘How can we be stars when we’re so fat?!’ he asked NME journalist Don Watson. Guthrie also expressed shock at Garlands’ extended occupancy in the independent charts despite ‘hardly any reaction from the press,’ he claimed. John Peel’s role could never be underestimated.
The interview made up in part for the fact that NME hadn’t reviewed Garlands, though Sounds praised, ‘the fluid frieze of wispy images made all the more haunting by Elizabeth’s distilled vocal maturity, fluctuating from a brittle fragility to a voluble dexterity with full range and power’. Even so, Guthrie felt the trio were much better represented by the sound – and art – of the Lullabies EP that followed just a month after the album. For this, Grierson chose two complementary images of a dancer and a lily, illustrating an elegant beauty over any overt angst and darkness. ‘At least they asked us about that one,’ Guthrie concedes.
Lullabies’ three tracks – ‘Feathers-Oar-Blades’,
