by girls, so music was the means by which you formed an identity. It spoke to him in ways that regular life didn’t. He’d listen to Peel religiously, while I was so taken up with school.’
While his older brother studied intensely to pass his Oxbridge entrance exams, Ivo wasn’t academic (or sporty), and music played an even more defining role. ‘I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t relate to anything I was being taught.’
His first chance to physically escape came that summer of 1968. Aged fourteen, Ivo and a school friend plotted to follow their friend Peter Thompson, one year older, to London. Thompson was squatting in a dilapidated house in the city centre near Marble Arch, helping to distribute Richard Branson’s first venture, the free magazine Student. It was in this house, which doubled as Student’s HQ and Branson’s living space, that Ivo smoked hash for the first time. But his education in this new illicit high was short-lived after an errant joint smoked by another schoolboy implicated Ivo.
His subsequent expulsion from school alongside two other boys made the news in Peterborough. ‘Our family’s position in society in that part of rural England stretched back two hundred years,’ says Perry. ‘It was a traumatic, life-affecting experience for Ivo and he was treated as a pariah. Maybe it drove him towards music being even more of a saviour.’
The cloud’s silver lining turned out to be the offer of a place at a nearby technical college where the class system, peer pressure and school uniforms didn’t apply, and girls were everywhere. Ivo persisted with buying records with odd-job cash, guided by John Peel’s tastes; his next pivotal discovery was the Los Angeles quartet Spirit, led by prodigious teenager Randy California, a peer and friend of Jimi Hendrix who specialised in an ‘infinite sustain’ guitar technique, by aligning guitar feedback with the note that creates it. Ivo recommends the delicately searing solo in ‘Uncle Jack’ from 1968’s debut album Spirit: ‘I still get the same tingling feeling as when I first heard it.’
The doors of perception swung open to the sound of The Nice’s keyboard-heavy The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack and Deep Purple’s proto-heavy Shades Of Deep Purple, and especially The Mothers of Invention’s heavy satire We’re Only In It For The Money, which Ivo found more intriguing and challenging than Hendrix. For starters, chief Mother Frank Zappa mocked not only the establishment’s corporatisation of youth culture but the hippie dream too, hard to take for dreamers such as Ivo. Zappa claimed both sides were ‘prisoners of the same narrow-minded, superficial phoniness’.
More crucially, the album was assembled like a collage, an anarchic and operatic meld of jazz, classical and rock that consistently changed tack. ‘All these noises and whispers, the chop-ups and talking … It proved to be incredibly influential on me, how something that cropped up in one song reappeared in another seven tracks later,’ Ivo recalls. ‘It made me think about how an album could be assembled. And if that kind of record can become normal, it suggests one is really open to pretty much anything in music. And that was me set. I had this ongoing relationship with whatever was contained within a twelve-inch-square sleeve. That’s what I lived for.’
Ivo soon got to see The Mothers of Invention on stage. Other formative concert experiences were psychedelic seers King Crimson and Pink Floyd. To Ivo, Syd Barrett was the personification of cool, and even once Barrett’s fragile eggshell mind had broken, like the acid Humpty Dumpty, he believed fully in Floyd’s subsequent journey to the outer reaches of space rock. The realisation that music could be a journey sent Ivo on his own quest to unearth music of an equivalent mindset.
A recommendation to investigate the burgeoning acid rock scene over on America’s west coast introduced Ivo to traditional folk/country roots, through Buffalo Springfield’s newly liberated frontman Neil Young and the collective jamming of The Grateful Dead. ‘I was exposed to more than the electric guitar individuality that English bands had,’ he recalls. And it wasn’t long till Ivo was exposed to acid itself, experiencing his first hallucination in Kettering’s Wimpy hamburger bar in the company of his friend (and future heavy metal producer) Max Norman. Ivo’s parents allowed Max’s band to rehearse in a cottage on the family estate; Ivo acted like their roadie: ‘I’d bash away at the drums, but I never dreamt of picking up a guitar or learning an instrument. I was the only one of the eight kids to not have piano lessons, though musically none of us were remotely gifted.’
In 1972, when they were eighteen, Max and Ivo hatched a plan to move to London, which failed after one day when the friend they hoped to stay with turned them away. A month later, Ivo returned alone. Drawn to High Street Kensington because of its popular hippie market, he spotted a shop on Kensington Church Street called Norman’s with Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (already five years old) in the window. It was run by a father and daughter partnership. ‘The place was shabby and out of time but it still appealed to me, so I asked if they had a job going. By the time I’d got home, the father had called, saying I could help on the record side. I think his plan was to train me to run the shop with his daughter.’
Ivo and two college friends subsequently moved into a basement flat in nearby Earls Court, stricken by damp and frogs in the kitchen, but there’s no place like home. ‘Behind the counter, that was my territory,’ Ivo says, ‘just as behind my desk at 4AD later on. But I was still incredibly shy.’
Six months later, Ivo had had enough of Norman’s. ‘The stock was limited and we’d get asked for a Steely Dan album but we didn’t have a clue because it was only on import. It was a road to nowhere.’ In an early and risky show of self-determination, he left Norman’s and moved in with his sister Tessa’s boyfriend in the nondescript outer west London suburb of Hanwell. One day, exploring the busier streets of nearby Ealing, he found a branch of Musicland, a more clued-in record retailer. After boosting his credibility by asking for the album Alone Together by [Traffic’s] Dave Mason, he asked the manager, Mike Smith, for a job. Smith happened to need an assistant, but he accurately predicted Ivo would be managing his own Musicland branch within two months.
Ivo ran Musicland in the deeply dull suburb of Hounslow – had the Sixties even reached Hounslow, let alone the Seventies? – but he managed to return to Ealing when Musicland – now called Cloud Seven after a takeover – transferred Mike Smith to another branch. It was now 1972, the time of glam rock, a revolution in dazzling sound and satin jackets, which helped British pop escape the cul-de-sac of denim and hard rock, a world of singles as well as albums. But Ealing, with its copious clubs, bars and students, had held on to its Sixties dream, as one of London’s musical epicentres, the birthplace of British jazz and blues where The Rolling Stones had got their first break.
One regular at the Cloud Seven shop was Steve Webbon. A few years older than Ivo, Webbon had boosted his credibility by quizzing Ivo about country rock pioneer Gram Parsons – and then asking about a job. Ivo hadn’t heard of Parsons, but he’d found his assistant.
Steve Webbon currently runs the back catalogue department of both 4AD and Beggars Banquet labels. In the late Sixties, he studied at Ealing Art School, moving on to unemployment benefit and spending most of it in Cloud Seven, in thrall to the sound of west coast American music. Manned by its two Yankophiles, Cloud Seven stocked up on what Gram Parsons had labelled ‘cosmic American music’, before he died, like Tim Buckley, of a heroin overdose. Nowadays, people call it Americana, a repository of roots music that pined for a simpler, humanistic society while rejecting the flash and excess of rock’n’roll. Only in the shape of Bob Dylan and The Band’s return to American roots did British audiences pay attention; in America as well as the UK, Parsons’ raw, Nashville-indebted sound was overshadowed by the softer, sweeter bedsitter folk of the era’s million-selling singer-songwriters such as Carole King and James Taylor.
Next to this, Ivo felt glam rock and its more adult cousin art rock to be inauthentic. ‘It was too “look at me”, too frivolous. I later learnt that there was depth there,
