How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (36 page)

‘Martin was a rock through all of it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I was seriously losing the plot by then and being courted by the music industry.’

‘Ivo probably only had about two dinners,’ says Mills. ‘I’m surprised he had any, but he hated them as much as he was always going to hate them.’

Watts-Russell had had a bitter experience. Blanching at the idea he was anti-success – an accusation that the majors regularly aimed at the independents – he had wanted his bands and his label to thrive, but on his and their own terms. ‘I always said that if a record existed, then that was a success,’ he says, ‘but everything had changed.’

As far as Watts-Russell was concerned, the terms on which 4AD had reached no. 1 had been undignified and sordid: having to deal with judges in order to release a record, even if it reached the top of the charts, was not remotely worth the time, effort and distraction. The substantial income 4AD generated from the single felt like blood money.

‘I think that first taste of success, and everything that brings to the table, be it business affairs, bullshit, the accounting issues, for anyone to get their head round that is a major pain in the arse,’ says Simon Harper, ‘and it absolutely left a bad taste in Ivo’s mouth. I know it did.’

*

‘I see a turning point in 1987 with the release of M/A/R/R/S,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and hot on the heels of that, the Pixies going mental.’

In 1986 Watts-Russell had signed his first American band, Throwing Muses, a quartet of teenagers from Rhode Island, and with them came Watts-Russell’s first taste of having to work with an American manger, Ken Goes, who handed him a demo by a Boston band called Pixies which became known apocryphally as
The Purple Tape
. Watts-Russell immersed himself in the
Pixies, playing the cassette on his Walkman while wandering around New York and wavering between signing the Pixies and rejecting them for being slightly antithetical to the 4AD ethos. He was nevertheless playing the tape relentlessly, as was Deborah Edgely back in London.

‘I was sort of thinking that 4AD was becoming a label that was abstract’, say Watts-Russell. ‘Also, having worked with Throwing Muses and their less than ideal manager, Ken, and the fact that he’d be doing these Pixies … Then Deborah said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid, sign them.” I called Charles [Black Francis] up and he said, “Come on, Pilgrim – Billie Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse 5 – let’s put it out, and I want it to be called
Come on Pilgrim
.’

Come on Pilgrim
comprised tracks taken from
The Purple Tape
and was released to imminent acclaim in the UK in 1987, in the slipstream of Throwing Muses whose debut, a tightly woven set of shifting time signatures and the hallucinatory domesticity of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly’s lyrics, had garnered large amounts of critical praise.

‘England took Throwing Muses to their hearts – that first album got incredible press,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘They re-recorded the demos and we signed them for one album. Kristin was full-on pregnant recording the LP with what became Dylan. She was seventeen, and bipolar and a cutter, and a gorgeous person and so smart, scary smart. They were all such gorgeous people.’

Seymour Stein, seeing the reaction to Throwing Muses, signed the band for the world outside the UK and a Throwing Muses tour had been booked with the Pixies as support. As the reaction to
Come On Pilgrim
began to take hold, the running order was quickly reconfigured and the Pixies became headliners. While monitoring the success of the Pixies in Europe, Watts-Russell became aware that Throwing Muses, now with Sire and Warners in Europe, were losing ground.

‘Throwing Muses and Pixies did the Town & Country and then went off to Europe, and the billing by that point was switched,’ say Watts-Russell. ‘The Pixies were on 4AD – this tiny UK label – going absolutely mental with their first-ever record. Throwing Muses were turning up at Warners somewhere in the mainland and the people at Warners were enquiring when their singer was going to arrive. I just got on the phone to Seymour saying, “Come on, you’ve got to sort this out and do something for this fucking band.”’

Once the tour was completed, the Pixies were ready to record their second album. An idea from Colin Wallace prompted Watts-Russell to call Paul Smith at Blast First and ask for Steve Albini’s number. ‘Wallace came up from the warehouse saying, “I think I know who should do the Pixies: Albini.”’

Throwing Muses and Pixies came out of a different milieu from the Blast First bands. Spared the rigours of the SST punk circuit and licensed early in their careers via 4AD to major affiliated labels in the States, both Pixies and Throwing Muses were perceived in their homeland as in the collegiate REM mould and would start to develop a medium-grade momentum on the CMJ college radio networks. In the UK they were the next logical, more accessible, generation of visiting Americans with guitars.

Wallace’s idea of pairing a band as direct and melodic as the Pixies with Albini, a producer who could emphasise the band’s dynamic shifts and bring out the rawness of their sound while doing so, was inspired. Wallace was part of the wider scene around Paul Smith and Richard Thomas that congregated long into the night in Thomas’s Kings Cross flat,
*
as various epicureans
like Shane MacGowan and Nick Kent told ever taller stories of lives spent in rock ’n’ roll. Wallace had been a regular at Blast First gigs. ‘British indie music sort of went Wedding Present and all that,’ says Wallace, ‘and it wasn’t very interesting. I became quite friendly with Paul Smith. Me and the Cocteau Twins went to see the Butthole Surfers at ULU. The film they had showing behind them was of a castration and Elizabeth threw up – she had to leave.’

In the meantime, Watts-Russell had no time for any kind of social life. His post-‘Pump Up the Volume’ disillusion with the industry was starting to harden on the back of the Pixies’ success. Throwing Muses’ and the Pixies’ manager, Ken Goes, came from the American tradition of litigation and full exploitation of rights, a world that was both foreign and repellent to Watts-Russell, who was now having to spend more and more time renegotiating and arguing over clauses in the Pixies’ contract.

‘Ken Goes later refused to fly,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘but this was early on and he’d taken so much medication that he could fly over to England with the Muses and Pixies. But he got in a bad mood at the airport because Kim in particular refused to sign his management contract before she’d had someone look at it. Deborah had gone to meet them, and Ken gets off the plane completely valiumed out, and Deborah asks, “Where are the bands?” and Ken goes, “I don’t know, back there somewhere.” That was indicative of the calibre of management that we had to deal with.’

The success of the Pixies and the fact that 4AD had the band for the world meant that the transatlantic way of doing business was a permanent feature in Watts-Russell’s life whether he liked it or not. It was another indication that merely added to his sense that the more successful the label became, the less grasp he had on the company he had so carefully nurtured.

‘I love Ken, but he was a nightmare,’ says Wallace. ‘This is a massive generalisation, but American managers are quite brutal really, and very money-orientated and that’s probably what did Ivo’s head in.’

As Watts-Russell’s nerves were becoming more frayed, so his temper would start to make itself known in the office, an environment where he was feeling increasingly claustrophobic. A consummate A&R man who was happiest in the studio or going through the finer details of the production schedule,
Watts-Russell
had no interest in managing the office. ‘When there were more people working there,’ he says, ‘I would really resent people making me behave like a schoolmaster or an employer.’

‘Ivo was under a hell of a lot of pressure at the time,’ says Wallace. ‘The Pixies’ rise was meteoric, and it wasn’t just in the UK. It didn’t touch America really, but everywhere else, if you’d seen how many records we were selling – it was almost out of control.’

Still on the receiving end of Watts-Russell’s more incendiary outbursts, Vaughan Oliver was producing sleeves for the American bands with his customary witty juxtapositions. The artwork for the Pixies’ debut single ‘Gigantic’ was a photograph of a baby screaming, an image that had struck Oliver when he saw Black Francis singing on stage. ‘That was seeing Charles for the first time,’ he says, ‘the bald head, the rotund figure, the primal scream.’ Simon Harper, whom Watts-Russell had recruited in an attempt to let someone manage the office as well as keep up with the label’s developments overseas, witnessed the relationship between Watts-Russell and Oliver boil over regularly. ‘Vaughan is obviously extremely charismatic, a very funny and kind-hearted man in many ways,’ says Harper, ‘but he does get a little thirsty and he and Ivo had a very very fiery relationship often, which was no surprise, frankly.’

Oliver too was feeling the heat from having to work with a
new layer of control. Having been given the freedom of an
in-house
designer that had developed a distinct and remarkable house style, he was now having to tailor his ideas to Goes’s interpretation of what might work in the market. ‘The beautiful thing when we started was that the bands never had managers,’ Oliver says. ‘That was crucial in terms of the creativity that came out of the graphic side of it. There’s no manager and upstairs, there’s no marketing person, there’s only Ivo. And Ivo would say at times, “I don’t know what you’re doing, man,” and he’d have the grace … six months … maybe four years … later to say, “Fantastic,” so he had confidence to let go. There was nobody else putting their oar in. It was great.’

Many of the staff at 4AD were becoming reliant on something other than their work ethic and the buzz of success to get through the day. Following the Top Ten crossover of ‘Pump Up the Volume’, the company had reached a new echelon of music industry approval – it had its own drug dealer. ‘We were all doing too many drugs, me included,’ says Wallace. ‘Vaughan’s dark room’s probably still got fucking razor marks on it, we were doing it all the time.’

‘My dark room was a focal point for that,’ says Oliver. ‘Everyone was doing lines of coke off the top of my PMT machine. Those were hedonistic days all round.’

The label’s sales were surpassing anything Watts-Russell had expected: the Pixies’ follow-up to
Surfer Rosa, Doolittle
, entered the national charts at no. 8; the momentum behind the band was vastly different to anything he had experienced with the Cocteau Twins, and unlike the success of M/A/R/R/S it was with an act that he had signed long-term for the world. Despite the interventions of Goes, the band and label also enjoyed a healthy, mutually respectful, working relationship.

‘I’ve never experienced that level of critical and commercial
success [we had] with the Pixies anywhere else,’ says Harper. ‘You’re always wondering when the backlash is going to start, and with the Pixies that backlash was a long time coming. It was pretty effortless in some ways.’

In signing international bands to long-term deals,
Watts-Russell
was leaving the intimacy of 4AD and becoming more of a player on the main stage, occupying a role he felt ill-suited for, while simultaneously bending to the orthodoxies of the industry.

‘As you started doing contracts with options, you’re taking on a responsibility – you’re taking on a band’s life,’ says
Watts-Russell
. ‘So it’s your obligation and duty to do as much as you can to get their music across to people. Quite often I’ve wished I’d been more of a despot and just decided, no, we’re not going to release a single from an album, and, no, we’re not going to make a video because it’s a waste of money. I’ve still massive regrets about virtually every video we ever made. We could have given the money to somebody on the street and got more of a result, artistically and as a promotional tool.’

As someone who had always responded to the studio and the sound-world bands had imagined and carefully created for themselves, often with his help, Watts-Russell’s next move took his colleagues by surprise. Sensing that he needed to add to the release schedule, Watts-Russell did something wholly uncharacteristic. He went to a gig at the Camden Falcon and signed both bands on the bill: Lush and the Pale Saints. Not only was it the first time Watts-Russell had offered bands a contract on the basis of a live performance, but both groups bore the influence of 4AD quite heavily. Compared to the leap in direction he had taken in signing the Pixies, Lush and Pale Saints felt like a more orthodox pair of additions to his roster.

‘One had to be careful, because there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t very good and had been clearly influenced by what we
were doing,’ says Watts-Russell, who had encountered a gentle sea-change in the indie nightlife from the austere atmosphere of the 4AD nights at the New Cross Venue. ‘I remember being at the Camden Falcon and people coming up to me going, “Oooooooh,” and rubbing me saying, “I really love you, Ivo,” – that was starting to happen. Not me particularly but Vaughan. You’d see it every day, there was loads of that going on.’

On top of cocaine the slow emergence of Ecstasy also started to make its presence felt at Alma Road, with Oliver finding the drug conducive to some of his more heightened flights of fancy. At his most ebullient and in his element when in his design studio going through proofs with a visiting band, he regularly held court in a manner his clients would never forget.

‘There was a band called Spirea X,’ says Oliver. ‘We had a glass roof over the studio that dropped two floors and halfway through the presentation I said, “Keep them talking.” All the stuff’s out on the desk and on the way upstairs I dropped everything. I was totally naked and slid down the roof with the whole scrotum flattened out and the band look up in horror. I suppose that’s a couple of Es later. We worked on the stuff and we were
certainly
productive on it.’

While 4AD didn’t have a reputation for heavy partying in the industry, behind closed doors at Alma Road drugs became a regular part of the daily routine. ‘Ivo really didn’t care what you did as long as you were there doing the work,’ says Wallace. ‘Because I grew up with such a strong Protestant work ethic, I was there every day. Didn’t matter what state I was in, I’d still be there and I’d still be doing it, and Ivo was the same. We’d still all turn up, but it did get a bit mental, not as bad as Creation – we weren’t party animals like fucking Creation became.’