MD, claims to have been the first to re-appropriate the cinematic term ‘New Wave’ for the new breed of bands after he’d felt that the punk rock tag was putting people off before they’d even heard the music. He had signed the Ramones, Talking Heads and The Pretenders, and after snapping up an unknown local singer called Madonna, he had turned his attentions back to the UK and added Modern English to his stable of UK licensees (The Undertones, Depeche Mode, Echo & The Bunnymen), to be joined by The Smiths.
Stein was especially keen on Modern English’s ‘I Melt With You’. ‘I knew within the first eight bars that it was a smash, it was so infectious and strong,’ he recalls. ‘I also knew I had to grab the band there and then, without hearing any other songs, or someone else would take them. Other things Ivo signed were too experimental for me, though you could always expect the unexpected from 4AD.’
Ivo’s A&R ears weren’t attuned to unearthing or spotting hits, though his brother Perry Watts-Russell – now working as the manager of the fast-rising LA band Berlin – says he’d instantly recognised the value of ‘I Melt With You’. ‘It struck me as really catchy and a definite hit, which didn’t sound much like 4AD but could take 4AD into a different space.’
Modern English had played just a handful of US dates in 1981, and when After The Snow was initially on import, Sire had licensed ‘I Melt With You’ at the end of 1982, becoming the first 4AD track to be licensed in America. Sire followed it by licensing the album in early 1983 when the band returned for an east coast tour. But the breakthrough turned out not to be via a show, or even radio, but a film soundtrack. Stein secured ‘I Melt With You’ a spot in what became that spring’s rom-com film smash Valley Girl, and MTV began rotating the video despite its alarming absence of merit. American audiences simply saw Modern English on a par with Duran Duran, without any of the post-punk image baggage that might have been hindering them in the UK. ‘It all went haywire from there, in a Beatles and Stones way, with all the trappings that went with it,’ says Robbie Grey. ‘We played Spring Break in Florida to thousands of kids going bananas.’
Ivo: ‘I had the bizarre experience of seeing Modern English one afternoon, with screaming girls throwing cuddly toys at them. The band’s name moved to the top of the film poster when “I Melt With You” kept selling.’
The single reached 78 in the national US charts in 1983, with After The Snow making number 70 and also selling half a million. But the breakthrough could, and should, have been even greater. ‘Warners didn’t open their cheque book to help move things to the next level,’ says Ivo, ‘such as the top 40. “I Melt With You” is still one of the most played songs ever on American radio.’
For Modern English, the joy of popularity was tempered by the reality of where they’d landed. ‘We played San Diego baseball stadium to 60,000 people, with Tom Petty top of the bill,’ recalls Mick Conroy. ‘The change was immense and the pressure got insane. Ivo hooked us up with an American manager, Will Botwin, who gave us practice amps, and said to start writing the next album, between gigs. It was so different to 4AD’s approach.’
That didn’t stop 4AD from joining in marketing the band, with a view to breaking them further. As Sire did in America, 4AD released ‘Someone’s Calling’ in the UK, its first attempt to take a single from a preceding album – though the twelve-inch version had a new, booming remix by Harvey Goldberg and Madonna associate Mark Kamins – and a similarly amped ‘Life In The Gladhouse’ remix by Goldberg and Ivo with additional edits from Martyn Young. The latter was a reasonable success in American clubs but ‘Someone’s Calling’ reached a miserable 43 on the UK indie chart, barely higher than ‘Swans On Glass’ three years earlier.
One thing Modern English did achieve was a knock-on shift in profile for 4AD. Even legendary Asylum and Geffen label head David Geffen, who had worked with several of Ivo’s American west coast icons, ‘was sniffing around, wondering what the story was,’ says Mick Conroy. The story for Modern English turned out to be a typical one, of success breeding pressure. Tour manager Ray Conroy was the first to bail. ‘I’m very cynical about arrogant singers – once they start believing it all, it’s not worth the bother,’ he explains. ‘Nick Cave, for example, I found full of shit. And Robbie turned into an asshole. We had a flaming row in New York, and when we got home from America, they went off on their merry way.’
Robbie Grey: ‘We were pushed too hard. I especially didn’t like soundchecks, standing around for hours, only to go on stage and the sound would be all different anyway. I was probably snappy and distant, but I was in my own cocoon, protecting myself.’
Ray Conroy was now tour-managing any 4AD band that required help, such as The Wolfgang Press, Xmal Deutschland and Dif Juz, but he singles out Cocteau Twins as the stand-out live act of the time, even without Will Heggie. ‘Robin had just one guitar pedal and a drum box, but as they got more popular, he got the biggest FX rack ever! It was pretty raging stuff, with Liz screaming her head off. Robin loved noise and our mission was to make them the loudest band in the world.’
The personnel of Modern English and Cocteau Twins became entwined in a project of Ivo’s instigation. He had flown over to see Modern English play New York’s The Ritz in December 1982, where the band’s encore conjoined two tracks, the ‘Gathering Dust’ single and Mesh & Lace cut ‘Sixteen Days’. Ivo liked the version enough to ask the band to re-record it in that segued form, but they turned it down: ‘We were more interested in recording our new material,’ says Mick Conroy.
Trusting in his own judgement, and in John Fryer to press the right buttons, Ivo decided to create his own version. He asked Elizabeth Fraser to sing ‘Sixteen Days/Gathering Dust’ accompanied by Cocteaus’ pal Graham Sharp, who had sung the high, delicate vocals on the band’s second Peel session and was now fronting his own band, Cindytalk (Sharp now likes to go by the first name of Cindy). Martyn Young and Modern English duo Mick Conroy and Gary McDowell were on hand to create the backing track. ‘Ivo was so much into music and creativity that it seemed a natural step for him,’ says Conroy.
Ivo: ‘I loved the experience of affecting the sound of a record, but it wasn’t my place to impose anything. I couldn’t play music and I wasn’t technical. So I needed to create a situation where people gave me sounds that I could have ideas about, that could be manipulated in the studio.’
With Sharp woven around Fraser’s lead, the vocals had power and presence, but the speed of the recording and Ivo’s inexperience of direction showed in the stiff and overlong (at nine minutes) result. ‘The programming is boring and I’d rather forget about it,’ Ivo says. ‘But obviously I thought it was good enough at the time to release as a single.’
Ivo now needed a B-side. He had a brainwave: to conjoin his new vocal crush, Fraser, with the song that Ivo had told the pro-4AD American fanzine The Offense Newsletter ‘was probably the most beautiful song ever written by anybody’, and to UK music weekly Melody Maker, he said, ‘[It’s] probably the most important song ever … it’s moved me more than anything.’
Today, Ivo still holds the track, and the singer, in the same regard. ‘If anyone wanted to demonstrate what’s so special about Tim Buckley,’ he says, ‘I’d play them “Song To The Siren”, because he soars. His voice is the closest thing to flying without taking acid or getting on a plane.’
Though he had first recorded ‘Song To The Siren’ in 1968, Buckley didn’t release a (re-recorded) version until 1970, after being stung by a comment poking fun at the song’s lyrics, written by his writing partner Larry Beckett. In either incarnation, ‘Song To The Siren’ had that uniquely, uncannily eerie lull, using metaphors of drowning to allude to what Ivo calls, ‘the inevitable damage that love causes’.
Fraser agreed to record Buckley’s ballad a cappella,
