want to be a pop star,’ Huwe says. ‘I knew the price would have been me. It’s why 4AD was perfect at the time. I saw it as a platform or a nest. People there understood what we did.’
Huwe was destined to be a model, but she turned down an offer to move to Paris when she was seventeen after visiting London in 1977 and seeing The Clash and the all-female Slits at the London Lyceum. ‘The bands were our age, whereas even Kraftwerk felt like old guys to us,’ she recalls. ‘I also saw Killing Joke and Basement 5 on that trip, bands that had this fantastic mix of punk, ska and reggae. I started buying this music, cut my hair very short, and started seeing every band I could in Hamburg.’
The original Xmal Deutschland line-up had joined forces in 1980. ‘We weren’t in either punk or avant-garde camps, and we had a keyboard. No one could label us,’ says Huwe. That didn’t stop the German press from trying: ‘We were repeatedly told we sounded more British than German. A friend recommended we move to London, which wasn’t meant in a nice way. But we thought, why not?’ Once there, their black garb, nail varnish and song titles such as ‘Incubus Succubus’ (the second of two singles that had been released in Germany) had Xmal tagged as goth. ‘That drove us nuts. The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission – that all came later.’
A foothold in London was established after sending 4AD a rehearsal tape. ‘It was the label we wanted, because of Bauhaus and The Birthday Party,’ says Huwe. ‘Our English wasn’t that good, and we were aliens really. But Ivo respected what we did.’
Ivo says he had instantly enjoyed what he heard: ‘They were boiling over with energy, and Manuela Rickers was an incredible, choppy rhythm guitarist. I flew to Hamburg and agreed to an album.’
Xmal Deutschland became 4AD’s first European act, but didn’t record anything until their line-up settled on Huwe, Rickers, Scots-born keyboardist Fiona Sangster, new drummer Manuela Zwingmann and the first male Xmal member, bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock. The German contingent found London a marked contrast to Hamburg, where people had ‘health insurance, affordable apartments and heating’, says Huwe. ‘Many British bands we met were very poor, and desperate for success. I spent a summer with Ian Astbury [frontman of Beggars Banquet’s similarly goth-branded Southern Death Cult), spending his advance. He’d say, I will be big one day, a pop star, and he did everything he could to get there. That wasn’t our goal.’
That was clear from Huwe’s decision to sing almost entirely in German, which she saw as a much harsher language than English and which suited the band’s pummelling mantras and Huwe’s chanting style. ‘I was like Liz Fraser,’ she recalls. ‘British audiences couldn’t understand us! But they got the spirit of it. Ivo sometimes asked what I sang about. Oh, this and that, I’d reply! Relationships, loneliness, emptiness … what young people sing about. But I saw my voice as an instrument and myself as a performer, not a songwriter. The performance and the sound was the most important.’
Xmal Deutschland’s debut album Fetisch – ‘a word in both German and English, and a word of the time,’ says Huwe – was a faster and harsher take on the cold, black steel of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Mass and In Camera. John Fryer engineered the session at Blackwing, where Ivo was again co-producer with the band, but the album could have sounded less dense and flat. ‘I did them a disservice by producing,’ Ivo reckons. ‘I don’t take all the blame, as John wasn’t the best at that time at micing up a drumkit, which then hinders positioning the guitars around it.’
On stage, Xmal was freer to pull out the stops. The memory of the band’s debut UK show, opening for Cocteau Twins at The Venue, is etched in Ivo’s memory: ‘I’d never seen an audience, clustered around the bar, run so fast to the front of the stage when Xmal plugged in. You could see the audience think, who are these women? They looked really striking.’
Both bands set off on tour, sharing a base in London. ‘Because of their Scottish accents,’ says Huwe, ‘only Fiona could understand a word they said – and the other way around too!’ Xmal later supported Modern English. At that time, Huwe says, ‘4AD felt like a family’.
Oliver expanded the 4AD family by briefly dating Xmal drummer Manuela Zwingmann, who Ivo says he alienated by hiring a Linn drum machine for his lengthy remix of Fetisch’s opening track ‘Qual’. ‘What Manuela played on Fetisch was fantastic, but she struggled to get good takes, and the drum sound was the weakest part,’ he feels. Ivo’s remix remains his favourite Xmal recording, though at the Venue show, Ivo recalls John Peel DJing between sets: ‘After he played the “Qual” remix, he said, “That’s another interminably long twelve-inch single”. And he was right.’
The Qual EP was still fronted by the original album version, but longer remixes were to become a permanent fixture of singles and EPs, as the newly expanding synth-pop, New Romantic and electro sounds accentuated the dance element across both mainstream and alternative scenes, leading to an increase in club audiences and more specialist radio stations. Post-punk’s monochrome palate was slowly receding. Even a resolute rock band such as Xmal got the twelve-inch remix treatment. The apotheosis of the medium was New Order’s single ‘Blue Monday’, released in March, which was to become the biggest selling twelve-inch single of all time; it had only been just under three years since Ian Curtis died, but Joy Division felt like gods from a past age.
At least the twelve-inch format gave Vaughan Oliver the opportunity for a larger canvas for singles. Ivo encouraged every 4AD signing to use the services of 23 Envelope, as it made both artistic and financial sense. The finished image might result from Oliver’s interpretation of a demo or a finished track – for example, his book of medical photographs for ‘Qual’. However, Nigel Grierson was responsible for the layout of Cocteau Twins’ new single ‘Peppermint Pig’, as well as the photo of a woman (shot from behind, submerged in water) in an outdoor Swiss spa bath. ‘That was more for the texture of the hair and the soft misty feeling,’ Grierson explains. ‘I can’t recall why the band chose it. Maybe they didn’t have much input.’
Robin Guthrie approved of the image for the single, but not the music. The Cocteaus had accepted Ivo’s suggestion of taking on, in Guthrie’s words, ‘a pop producer’. Alan Rankine of The Associates was dispatched to Blackwing. ‘That was a huge mistake,’ says Guthrie. ‘Alan just sat at the back and read magazines. I did all the work.’ Guthrie also claims that Ivo suggested the band ‘write something upbeat for a single’. According to Guthrie, ‘We had a tour coming up supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and we needed a record out. “Peppermint Pig” is absolutely terrible, but we didn’t have the strength of character to wait for the right song to come along. It was an early indication of the power of the music industry, and of too many cooks.’
Contrary to Guthrie’s view, Ivo recalls he was very happy with the single, though says it does sound too much like The Associates. ‘But if I was interested in a “pop” producer, I’d have chosen someone like Mike Hedges [who had produced The Associates’ 1982 masterpiece Sulk]. I know Robin wasn’t happy with the single but it’s silly to suggest that I was trying to commercialise their music. It’s not my interest or one of my strong points. But accepting a producer actually did Robin a favour. By imposing myself on Garlands and Lullabies and then foisting Alan Rankine on them, he was so pissed off that he took control from then on.’
‘Peppermint Pig’ was only kept off the top of the independent singles chart by ‘Blue Monday’. But it’s easily Cocteau Twins’ least memorable single for a good reason: none of its assets – the melody, the production, the cover – are special. That all was not right in the band’s camp was underlined by the departure of Will Heggie. The OMD tour had been fifty-two dates long, a huge number for an inexperienced band such as Cocteau Twins, and the bassist left the band as the band itself left the tour two shows before the end. Guthrie says it was Heggie’s decision: ‘Maybe he had more integrity than me.
