Facing the Other Way Page 21

  This suited the era: ‘Economic depression, distrust in government, the fight for social justice and the need to create and take possession of affordable homes,’ says Moorings, blighted Holland in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

  Moving up the country to Nijmegen to attend university, Moorings studied the social sciences and formed a new band, LA Ruin, which he then renamed Lace: ‘We were almost heavy metal but with melodies,’ he says. But as his political views led to demonstrating for nuclear disarmament and squatters rights, and squatting himself, he turned to Joy Division and the ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’ (‘New German Wave’), which he describes as, ‘the new industrial music from Germany that set the mood perfectly for total nihilism and cynicism … soundtracks for all the people dressed in black. It fitted the lifestyle of most young people, mainly students and drop-outs in this period.’

  Working as a barman at a local venue, Doornroosje, Moorings saw countless shows, including Bauhaus – ‘the ultimate goth band’ – and The Birthday Party: ‘Nick Cave was swinging like a monkey from left to right using the light rig frames. I wanted to be part of things which were happening in front of my eyes. I wanted a band instead of just making things late at night on my own that no one else would hear.’

  The chance came after he’d met Anka Wolbert in a Nijmegen bar, ‘hair up, backcombed. I had to talk to her. We ended up spending the night together. She said she wanted to play bass on the tracks I played for her. I released the tape under the name Xymox.’

  Living in Highgate in north London since returning to London in 2009 after extended periods in New York and Amsterdam, Wolbert now spells her first name Anka; unlike Moorings, she has retired from music, and now designs websites. ‘In the Eighties,’ she says, ‘it was so exciting experimenting with music technology, as it was in the Nineties with the internet.’

  Born 50 miles east of Roosendaal in Eindhoven, Wolbert had moved to Nijmegen to study Psychology. ‘But I got corrupted by music,’ she says. ‘It was all new wave, and I saw Bauhaus too, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order. Dutch bands were desperate to get out of Holland, and I was always looking at England. I started playing bass and guitar, and I wanted to be a singer, but I bought a keyboard and started playing around with tapes and loops.’

  Following Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, Xymox’s dynamic also depended on a male and female couple, but Moorings and Wolbert were particularly competitive. Moorings says that the lovers would test each other by sleeping around, adding, ‘yet for a long time, we could not let each other go’. What made this equation more interesting, and trickier, was a third prominent band member, Pieter Nooten. Moorings had met him while squatting: ‘Pieter was a funny guy with short, punk-like red-blonde dyed hair who shared the same passion of making music.’

  Another southern Dutchman, Nooten was also another precocious child, ‘nervous and restless,’ he says. To help pacify him, his parents bought him a home organ, which he became obsessed with: ‘No lessons, no notes, no chord structures, just random searching for harmonies and melodies.’ He was eventually diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), which, he says, ‘brought on annoying side effects such as isolating myself from people and situations’.

  In his university student years, Nooten shared Moorings’ outlook on life. (He also asks to respond to questions by email.) ‘The early Eighties were a time of pent-up panic, when we were constantly exposed to the threat of war, a further economic decline and no positive perspective,’ he writes. ‘The trend was “black” and “gloomy” and the regulatory mood was “depressing”. I felt at home in this culture, but I longed for a glimmer of beauty, something more aesthetically satisfying, and I found it in Joy Division’s Closer, which had an immediate transformative impact on my life.’

  Nooten and Moorings had shared musical equipment but composed separately, and Xymox’s debut EP Subsequent Pleasures featured just Moorings and Wolbert after they’d both moved to Holland’s capital, Amsterdam. Returning to Nijmegen to distribute copies of the EP, Moorings discovered that Cocteau Twins was playing at Doornroosje. Before the show, he saw who he thought were Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser: ‘Without hesitating, I started asking them questions. They said they were the support act, Dead Can Dance. They put me on the guest list and I gave them a copy of Subsequent Pleasures. Both bands blew me away that night.’

  Sensing his chance, Moorings called Nooten. ‘After severe persuasion, Pieter also moved to Amsterdam and the band was now complete. We only needed more songs.’ Moorings and Nooten began co-writing – pale, sad, dreamy, gloomy songs that mirrored the need for a glimmer of beauty in troubled times. The politics of squatting or anti-nuclear protest were conspicuously absent.

  Wolbert was also writing. ‘Xymox was an intense band,’ she recalls. ‘Three songwriters didn’t make it easy. But we worked towards a common goal, and we wanted to grow. And it was fun at first to explore.’

  Dead Can Dance asked Xymox to support them on a UK tour, and Brendan Perry told Moorings about 4AD, and gave Ivo his copy of Subsequent Pleasures. Moorings delivered a second demo: ‘It was melodic but very experimental, as we weren’t good songwriters yet. Everything was about atmosphere.’

  As with Dead Can Dance, Ivo was initially guarded. ‘I told Ronny I really liked it, because it’s important to say well done, but that I wasn’t looking to get involved. But Xymox had a sadness that I really enjoyed. Their influences were apparent but some things didn’t sound like New Order or The Cure. Pieter’s ballad “Equal Ways” was absolutely gorgeous.’

  Unfortunately, touring worsened Nooten’s ADHD and he’d already left Xymox, so it was Moorings and Wolbert that had turned up at Ivo’s house, in full make-up and hair extensions, ‘our gothic extravaganza’, in Moorings’ words. He says that he told Ivo they wanted to visit ‘the notorious Batcave club’, London’s centre of goth subculture. ‘But Ivo was dismissive and said goth was over in the UK and The Batcave had become a tourist attraction.’

  Goth was indeed floundering as a scene, but that wasn’t important; what was key was Ivo finding Xymox’s heart-rending tunes hard to resist, and offering Xymox a one-album contract. Nooten’s replacement Frank Weyzig, and drummer Jos Heijnen had joined the band, but Moorings claims Nooten suddenly reappeared after he’d found out about the 4AD deal. ‘Pieter said he was feeling relaxed, and he had his priorities straight … he could always charm people when he needed something off them,’ Moorings claims. ‘I had no problem because he was part of the songwriting team. I was glad he was giving it one more try.’

  Nooten remembers it very differently. ‘I was asked back by Ronny and Anka, for obvious reasons: I wrote a lot of the music and owned the synthesiser and drum computer, and most importantly, I knew how to make them work!’

  On a modest budget, and buoyed by the experience of It’ll End In Tears, Ivo took the (unpaid) producer’s role at Palladium for a ten-day stint at recording Xymox’s album debut. The pressure and the band’s inexperience immediately showed, with Heijnen effectively sidelined for the more trustworthy Linn drum machine. This only reinforced the New Order comparisons: remove the inspired mellotron intro and ‘Stranger’ was a dead ringer for ‘Blue Monday’. But the predominantly crepuscular mood of the finished album, Clan Of Xymox, more closely mirrored Movement, New Order’s own debut album that had preceded the Mancunians’ electro-pop rebirth, a despondent dance through the ruins.

  Moorings felt that a Dutch band wouldn’t be taken as seriously, so he didn’t put the band’s individual name credits on the album: ‘It was better just to hide our identity, giving us a degree of mystery and the benefit of the doubt with reviews.’ True, there was little precedent for Dutch bands, alternative or otherwise, in the UK; Moorings claims the majority of UK reviews reckoned the band was Scottish (was it the Palladium connection, or the ‘Clan’ suggestion?). In any case, reviews were positive: ‘a nervous and brilliant record’ (Melody Maker), ‘a strange and wonderful debut’ (Sounds). 4AD�
��s roster seemed to protect any new signing from adverse press … the wheel had turned.

  Ivo even believes, ‘Clan Of Xymox was a much better record than New Order could ever dream of making.’ This lofty claim, favourably comparing his nascent pretenders to a band that were loved as much as their former incarnation Joy Division, was not atypical, this being a man whose tastes did not dovetail with popular opinion. For example, Ivo says, ‘all the fuss around The Smiths, I never got over. And I never liked Morrissey’s voice. Apart from “How Soon Is Now”, I’ve never enjoyed a Smiths song.’ As for New Order, ‘I really hate them,’ he says. ‘That’s an extreme reaction, but I respected Ian Curtis so much, it’s ridiculous that Joy Division would carry on with someone who couldn’t sing or write lyrics.’

  Following John Fryer’s mix of Xymox’s album, he and Ivo remixed and extended two of the strongest tracks for a twelve-inch single. Ivo has mixed feelings about what he and the engineer had achieved: the nine-minute ‘A Day’ remix, for example, ‘is nuts … there’s even a didgeridoo on there. But it doesn’t really work.’ Regarding ‘Stranger’, ‘it wasn’t much different to the album version but it’s one of the best mixes I was ever involved in.’

  John Peel was on side, particularly enjoying ‘7th Time’, with Wolbert on lead vocals, leading to two Peel sessions in June and November. But though ‘A Day’ was 4AD’s most concisely commercial single since Modern English’s ‘I Melt With You’, it only sold 3,500 copies, compared to 45,000 for Cocteau Twins’ Sunburst And Snowblind and even 13,000 for Xmal Deutschland’s ‘Incubus Succubus II’. But in America, the video to ‘A Day’ (in which Nooten didn’t even figure and Wolbert was a peripheral figure next to Moorings) got valuable exposure on MTV, despite the fact the track was only available on import. Before Clan Of Xymox became the second 4AD album to be licensed to the States, by the US independent Relativity, ‘Xymox contributed to the growing popularity of 4AD on a global scale,’ says Ivo.

  4AD and Beggars Banquet’s profile in America had been further raised by working with British exporters Windsong and American importers Caroline, with three to five hundred copies of each release serviced to Rockpool, a marketing company with its own newsletter and alternative chart. By 1985, American college radio had gathered momentum alongside the spurt in independent record labels, with the likes of ‘A Day’ striking radio programmers as adventurous and commercial, and a modern, gleaming alternative to the guitar-centric homegrown scene spearheaded by bands such as R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü.

  Given the small amount of staff, the workload in the 4AD office must have been considerable, but Ivo also found time to initiate another round of This Mortal Coil sessions. The idea of a trilogy of This Mortal Coil albums had taken shape as It’ll End In Tears came to fruition, so in March 1985, he had booked five days at Palladium and taken Martin McCarrick to score a series of string arrangements. ‘At Palladium with Xymox, I’d realised what an incredible musician Jon Turner was, and that he really wasn’t precious about how his work might end up distorted, manipulated or simply abandoned,’ says Ivo. ‘I also wanted to establish a blueprint for working that wasn’t reliant on 4AD musicians and friends, and I also enjoyed the relaxed residential aspect that everyone I’d sent to Palladium had enjoyed. We’d work from 11am until 11pm and finish off with a few hands of poker with whoever was around.’

  One poker player who hung around the studio was Turner’s friend Les McKeown, the former singer of the Scottish Seventies pop stars The Bay City Rollers, an obsession of many a pre-pubescent and teenage girl. ‘Late at night,’ Ivo recalls, ‘I’d often play a cassette with David Sylvian’s Brilliant Trees on one side and Scott Walker’s Climate Of Hunter on the other. Les would say, “Who’s this, then? Do people make a living out of this kind of music?”’

  Ivo had a good reason for not relying on the immediate 4AD family: the fact that the term ‘family’ could even be used. ‘I hated the fact that people described This Mortal Coil as a band,’ he says. ‘There was never any rehearsing and other than Gini [Ball] and Martin [McCarrick], no two musicians ever played together in the studio. Some never even met each other. It was a studio project.’

  Yet the news would draw on label allies Mark Cox, Steven Young, Andrew Gray, David Curtis, Richie Thomas and Peter Ulrich. Ivo had not invited Robin Guthrie: ‘He’d been no fun on It’ll End In Tears. He’d played on “The Last Ray” and afterwards he disowned it, saying I’d taken out all his good bits.’

  But Ivo had approached Elizabeth Fraser and Lisa Gerrard, and been turned down by both, albeit for different reasons. Fraser’s refusal wasn’t down to Robin Guthrie’s negativity but a common cold; the Cocteaus singer had felt it had spoilt her attempt at singing Judy Collins’ ‘My Father’ and she declined to try again. Gerrard was offered Pearl Before Swine’s ‘The Jeweller’. ‘It was a song that Ivo connected to but I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘Music is so elusive, and you either get it or you don’t. I needed an internal connection, from the source of the work itself, and these weren’t even my words. I felt like I’d have had to reinvent myself, which would have been too difficult.’

  Ivo was also turned down by a trio of iconic singers: Scott Walker, David Sylvian and Robert Wyatt, the former drummer and co-vocalist of UK progressive rock icons Soft Machine who carved out a rich and varied solo career that included his own notable series of covers. ‘I only got a direct response from Robert Wyatt – who I’d asked to try Pearls Before Swine’s “Rocket Man”. He said, “My days for singing funny little pop songs are over”. That was a massive “FYT” and I never again asked more established singers, for fear of being turned down again.’

  Simon Raymonde was a principal part of the second, and longer, session of recordings at Blackwing with John Fryer. ‘It’ll End In Tears had been super-rushed, like a production line of people,’ Raymonde recalls. ‘This time, I could come into my own.’

  Raymonde wrote and played the piano parts for Van Morrison’s ‘Come Here My Love’, Pearls Before Swine’s ‘The Jeweller’, and Colin Newman’s A–Z cut ‘Alone’ and his own ‘Ivy And Neat’. This was one of several instrumentals that Ivo and John Fryer began to stockpile, supplemented with their own compositions, to help, Ivo says, ‘the whole thing flow, to feel like four separate sides to an album that would also work as a single CD’.

  As the music took shape, prototype versions of ‘Rocket Man’, [ambient pianist] Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s ‘Not Yet Remembered’, The Comsat Angels’ ‘Total War’ and The Boys Next Door’s ‘Shivers’ were abandoned, as Ivo strived to find the best blend. ‘For example,’ he explains, ‘the vocal I had for “Come Here My Love” was beautiful but it didn’t gel with Simon’s arrangement, so the music evolved into “Red Rain”, which I named after the slice of French film dialogue hidden in the song.’

  Other music samples were buried in the mix, while the second half of ‘A Heart Of Glass’ was inspired by the spectral foghorn effect from Steve Miller’s ‘Song For Our Ancestors’ and its parent album Sailor, ‘a crash course in really interesting, unpredictable crossfades’.

  Ivo clearly favoured the similarly progressive actions of his art-rock-leaning hot house of artists, and taking the producer’s role to help shape the outcome advanced the aspect of what truly engaged him – the music. But it inevitably left less time for the business side of running a record label, which Ivo admits was neither his strength nor his interest. Contracts, for example, he calls, ‘about as interesting to me as Chemistry classes had been at school’.

  It turned out that Dif Juz had felt sufficiently perturbed to leave 4AD – a first for Ivo – after 1981’s twin EPs, releasing a full-length album Who Says So? for another independent label, Red Flame. But by the time the improvised performance Time Clock Turn Back was released by the cassette-only label Pleasantly Surprised, Dif Juz were back in the fold and recording a new album, Extractions.

  Ivo feels the band had abandoned 4AD because they thought they were being ripped off. ‘The
re was absolute mistrust, but I don’t know why. Maybe we didn’t give them enough of an advance.’

  ‘It was more that we were scared of being typecast as a 4AD band,’ bassist Gary Bromley admits. ‘4AD wasn’t fully recognised that way back then but it had started to get like that, or so we believed. We just wanted to be Dif Juz.’

  Unlike Cocteau Twins, Dif Juz had had the courage of their convictions to move away from the label. ‘We had played a show in Italy, where people thought we all lived in a 4AD house, with Colourbox and Cocteau Twins, this big, happy family, and had asked what it was like,’ recalls drummer Richie Thomas. ‘We didn’t want to get pigeonholed, but equally, Ivo didn’t show us a great deal of encouragement, to record again, or even say he really liked us – not to me, anyway. So we made our own way, and we did a deal with Red Flame where we paid for, and owned, the music. But Who Says So? came out disjointed and not very professional.’

  4AD and Dif Juz had become reacquainted in late 1984, when Thomas bumped into Ivo on the morning of a Dif Juz concert, and invited him along to the band’s matinee show. Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser, who were cutting a Cocteau Twins record around the corner, also came along. ‘Dif Juz was exciting, different, rhythmic, outside the box, and very powerful,’ Guthrie recalls. ‘They blew me away.’

  At Ivo’s suggestion, Guthrie took the band to Palladium to record the new album. When Fraser visited the studio, she agreed to sing on a track that Thomas – suffering from a busted relationship – had named ‘Love Insane’. ‘I think Liz agreed to cheer me up,’ says Thomas. ‘She said, “Do you think I’ll do it justice, do you really want me to sing?” Yeah, I said, give it a shot! She used her voice as an instrument anyway. But we didn’t ask Liz because we were trying to sell more records.’