Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston
with what she’d achieved. But this was just for a B-side so it she let it pass.
The NME, while featuring Depeche Mode on the cover, buried its review low down on the Singles page, citing, ‘a respectable job on “Song To The Siren” and that’s about it – no revelation’. But if the leading UK music paper was still being sniffy about 4AD (The Burden Of Mules had been reviewed six weeks after release), ‘Song To The Siren’ entered the independent chart, and Fraser and Guthrie were asked to perform it live on BBC TV’s late night show Loose Talk. ‘I’ve never been more nervous in my life for anyone as I was for Liz that day,’ says Ivo. Fraser was visibly shaky but still cut a mesmerising figure.
The duo also agreed to make a video, and by the end of its run on the UK independent singles chart, ‘Song To The Siren’ was to rack up 101 weeks, the fourth longest ever in indie singles chart history, behind Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (131 weeks), New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ (186 weeks) and Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (195 weeks). ‘Song To The Siren’ also reached number 66 in the UK national charts, selling in excess of half a million copies, without the film soundtrack or major label marketing that had launched ‘I Melt With You’.
Only a reissue of Bauhaus singles on the 4AD EP separated the release of ‘Song To The Siren’ and new Cocteau Twins records, which had been recorded before the This Mortal Coil sessions. Having had one-off contracts for Garlands, Lullabies and Peppermint Pig, the band had signed a contract for five albums, or to run five years, whichever condition was fulfilled first. Colourbox signed the same kind of deal. ‘Both bands wanted a wage and I thought they deserved a certain standard of living,’ says Ivo. ‘I also wanted to carry on working with them. We all recognised we were part of something that was becoming quite special.’
Cocteau Twins’ second album Head Over Heels was released at the end of October, followed just one week later by the EP Sunburst And Snowblind, a collective hit of newfound freedom, expressed in a lush, panoramic drama that far exceeded Garlands’ stark origins. The album cut ‘Sugar Hiccup’ also fronted the EP with an equally new-found commerciality, while the album’s serene opener ‘When Mama Was Moth’ further extinguished all convenient Banshees and goth comparisons. Equally, ‘Glass Candle Grenades’ fed in a graceful, rhythmic imagery and ‘Musette And Drums’ was a magnificent finale.
Ivo: ‘Robin and Liz’s relationship and their music had just blossomed. Head Over Heels showed an extraordinary growth, especially Elizabeth’s singing. The Peel session recorded shortly after includes my favourite ever Liz vocal, in the version of [Sunburst And Snowblind cut] “Hitherto”. It’s the track I play people if they’ve never heard Cocteau Twins. She sounds completely unfettered and it still gives me shivers.’
If Cocteau Twins could magic this up on the spot, what could they do with a little planning? Part of the music’s magic was down to the euphoria between the duo, bound up in the album title’s expression of love and Fraser’s new engagement ring. ‘We were young and in love,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘We’d just moved to London, people were saying how great we were, which fuelled us. As did loads of speed!’
23 Envelope mirrored Cocteau Twins’ huge pools of reverb with a silver-metal pool of ripples (inspired by a key scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker) and a fish disappearing, stage right, from the photo. ‘That was a mackerel,’ Nigel Grierson explains, ‘in coloured ink, in a bath of water, into which we’d thrown flower petals. Everyone at 4AD went nuts over the image, and from there, we were directing operations more, trying to create a connection between the music and the visuals, without narrowing the interpretation, but to let the imagination work.’
Yet Guthrie again didn’t find 23 Envelope’s choices suited his own image of the band. ‘Some of Nigel’s other photos were joyous and beautiful but the one they chose was dark, dull and ugly. We’d say what we didn’t like, but they still did what they wanted. We had this joke, that Vaughan put fishes on everything, and we’d say, “No fish!” So I think he’d put it on there to piss us off. But I liked the Sunburst And Snowblind 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