cover.’
Guthrie also resented the sleeve credits. ‘John Fryer only came in towards the end and listened to the mixes, but got a co-producer credit, which I didn’t know until I saw the sleeve. Best of luck to John and I’m sure he got some work out of that, but he had nothing to do with it.’
His mood would have lifted when John Peel played all of side one of Head Over Heels, and all of side two on the following night’s show. Like ‘Peppermint Pig’, the Sunburst And Snowblind EP fell just one place short of topping the independent chart, while reaching 86 in the UK national chart. But Head Over Heels was 4AD’s first record to top the indie charts, and only fell one place short of the UK national top 50. This wasn’t Depeche Mode-level success, but it added to 4AD’s tangible sense of arrival.
If would be a perfect end to the year if Colourbox could make similar advances. At least the new EP, called Colourbox, had a new direction: Ivo knew Martyn Young’s reggae/dub predilections and had suggested reggae specialist Paul Smykle as a producer. New singer Lorita Grahame was a reggae specialist too, in the ballad-leaning area of lover’s rock, despite the band’s advertising for a soulful singer. Grahame had a more expressive soul than her predecessor Debian Curry, but she didn’t have enough to bounce off apart from ‘Keep On Pushing’.2 The problem was, Young’s obsessive edits and mixes were wearing down the sonic quality of the music. ‘Nation’ had a memorably funky synth-bass riff but it had been as arduous to make as it was to listen to, at ten minutes long.
‘Some tracks were created with three Revox machines, cutting and pasting sound from the TV, which pre-dated sampling,’ Ray Conroy recalls. ‘One track might take three days, chopping it about. Martyn was so anal at getting it finished. But Ivo gave them a lot of time and space.’
‘The record was a real hotchpotch,’ Ivo concludes, ‘and not the most likely thing to progress their visibility and popularity.’
The EP cover wasn’t designed to make it an easy sell, and the fact it didn’t create a stir showed Colourbox’s low profile. Among fans, the Colourbox EP was known as ‘The Shotgun Sessions’ after the lead track, but also ‘Horses Fucking’ after the chosen image, a photo (in reversed negative, so that the horse’s red penis turned green) taken by Vaughan Oliver years earlier while working a glamorous summer job at a local sewage works. In a manner more befitting a provocateur like Mick Allen, Colourbox had requested ‘something revolting’, says Oliver, who was encouraged by the EP song title ‘Keep On Pushing’. From the pretty horses on After The Snow to the rutting equine couple on Colourbox, Oliver could never be relied on, he says, ‘to take the easy road. I like to provoke, to be perverse.’
‘We thought the cover was funny,’ recalls Martyn Young. ‘You could discuss things with Vaughan, and then he’d go and do his own thing, but they were better than our ideas.’
It was a temporary lull in a year that had seen 4AD on an upward trajectory that climaxed with Cocteau Twins’ first American visit, playing two shows in New York interspersed with a show in Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve, ‘to about twelve people in the audience,’ recalls Ivo, who flew over to celebrate. In the heat of excitement, he even suggested he could manage the band, and give up 4AD in the process: ‘I was so proud to be involved with them,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I felt total commitment. I’m truly grateful they never responded to that particular idea!’
In the meantime, there was a shared sense of love, pride and excitement – and tour profits to revel in: ‘I have a picture of Ivo with three grand in his hand!’ Guthrie grins. Grangemouth and Oundle would have felt a long way in the past.
Another band in the giddy heat of ascendancy was The Smiths, who happened to be on the same New York flight as the Cocteaus, to make their own US debut. But Smiths drummer Mike Joyce fell ill and had to return home after one show, so their dates were cancelled. At a consolation party in promoter Ruth Polsky’s tiny New York apartment, Guthrie recalls, ‘being cornered in the kitchen by Johnny Marr – a lovely guy but all he wanted to talk about were Rolling Stones records! I was more, “OK, let’s have more drugs!”’
1 The Birthday Party turned out to only have one more EP left in them, the four-track Mutiny, which, in 1989, Mute allowed 4AD to add to the CD reissue of The Bad Seed, ensuring that every Birthday Party release did end up on 4AD. Mutiny rang the changes for The Birthday Party as Rowland S. Howard didn’t turn up for sessions and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld stepped in on guitar, lending a more controlled, less jagged aura to the sound. Harvey confirms that communication between Cave and Howard had broken down, and the band had ‘no new direction’. Even before Mutiny had been released, Harvey had proposed the band split up; Cave and Howard instantly agreed, paving the path to the formation of Cave’s solo career with his Bad Seeds backing band, which changed over the years but started off with Bargeld, Harvey and Barry Adamson.
2 Without Ivo’s knowledge, Martyn Young had recorded a phone conversation with him, and part of it was spliced into one of the Colourbox EP tracks: ‘It was one of Ian’s,’ Young reckons, which makes it either ‘Nation’ or ‘Justice’. Yet the only audibly sampled phone call appears to be ‘Keep On Pushing’, even though the accent sounds more like Ray Conroy than Ivo. ‘When Ivo found out, he wasn’t pleased,’ Young adds. ‘It’s still on there, but we had to disguise his voice.’
chapter 7 – 1984
Dreams Made Flesh, but It’ll End in Tears
(BAD401–CAD413)
The scenario of 4AD as a family, drawn together by associations at school or shared aesthetics of sound and vision, expanded further with the arrival of Deborah Edgely, 4AD’s third full-time employee, following Ivo and Vaughan Oliver. Edgely started as general assistant but quickly graduated to 4AD’s press officer – and Ivo’s partner.
In the historic city centre of Exeter, three hours south-west of London in the county of Devon, Edgely is understandably anxious about revisiting the many scenes of her past, complicated by her severed relationship with Ivo, the lost friendships with the artists and other friends at the label. She’s lived in Devon since the mid-1990s, after escaping London and the music business. Though Edgely’s current job running a nursery school might, in some ways, echo that of looking after musicians, there are far fewer phone calls after midnight. In any case, her two sons keep her extremely busy.
Edgely first met Ivo at a Bauhaus show. She was dating the band’s drummer Kevin Haskins while both were studying at Northampton College; she was taking a foundation course in art. ‘We were Jam fans, travelling around the country to see them,’ Edgely recalls. ‘I suppose we were mods. Kevin had a mohair suit and winklepickers and I had a lamé suit.’
With Edgely moving to Kingston for a fine art degree and Haskins’ tour commitments, their relationship fizzled out. Ivo later bumped into her at The Camden Palace; they had a couple of dates, ‘but things didn’t click,’ Ivo says. ‘That influenced my decision to hire her – because we wouldn’t then get involved.’
Edgely was planning a course in theatre design, but following lunch with Ivo and her flatmate Stella (then Pete Murphy’s girlfriend), she changed her mind. ‘I don’t think Ivo even offered me a job, but just said, What about working with me? He needed help, and didn’t have anyone else.’
Ivo: ‘I was spending a lot of time in the studio,
