Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD

Up in the high desert of New Mexico, 7,000 feet above sea level and 18 miles outside of the state capital Santa Fe, the community of Lamy is comfortably off the beaten track. It was once a vital railroad junction: the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) line – colloquially known as the ‘Santa Fe’ – was to stop in Santa Fe but the surrounding hills meant that Lamy was a more practical destination. But few people disembark here now. The restaurant (in what was the plush El Ortiz hotel) and tiny museum are outnumbered by the rusting, abandoned rail carts, memories of a more prestigious past. Not many people live here either: the 2010 census gave a population count of 218.

By nightfall, a hush descends; it’s the kind of place where you come to get away, or hide away, from it all. To give an idea of its isolation, America’s first atomic bomb was tested just two hours away. It’s a landscape on to which you can put your own impression, and also disappear into. ‘I’ve moved to where I feel my most comfortable,’ Ivo confesses. ‘But people just think I’m eccentric.’

It’s here, on a ridge outside of Lamy, that Ivo built his house. On the roof, you can see 360 degrees to the surrounding mountains. To the left, the Manzanos; straight ahead towards Albuquerque, the Sandias; to the right above Los Alamos, the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo ranges that host ski season. Trails lead through the rock and scrub, but generally only dog walkers follow them; the remoteness is both impressive and comforting. In his decidedly modernist house, which stands out among New Mexico’s predominantly pueblo architecture, Ivo lives with his three dogs, his art, his music and his privacy. It’s an idyll, a hideaway, a fortress, possibly even a prison. Sometimes the only sounds are the sighs, whines and occasional barks of his dogs. The sun bakes down for much of the year. The skies are huge, the silence deafening.

Among the albums is a box set of This Mortal Coil recordings that Ivo recorded back in the day with a revolving cast of musicians, some close friends and others mere acquaintances. Some remain friends; others he hasn’t seen, talked or corresponded with for many years. No expense was spared in the mastering of this music or the packaging of the collectors CD format known as ‘Japanese paper sleeve’, though the high-end quality is more like stiff card, like it’s a book or a piece of art. These miniature reproductions of the original vinyl album artwork, only reproduced by specialist manufacturers in Japan, is the antithesis of the intangible digital MP3 that now defines music consumption. ‘I’m fascinated by the quality of what the Japanese do, and the obscurity of some of the releases they archive and document,’ Ivo says. ‘Record companies say that no one buys finished product anymore. So why not give them something of beauty?’

Shelves and drawers in Ivo’s rooms contain thousands of these limited edition box sets, which he trades as a hobby, to turn a profit if he can, ordering early and then selling on once they have sold out. After a period of not even being able to listen to music, it has again become an obsession. The music industry, or rather 4AD’s place in it, used to be an obsession as well. Not anymore. Now it’s a foggy, jumbled-up memory of highs and lows, a black dog growling at the foot of his mind.

Much contemporary music has a similar effect. Edgy, glitchy electronic music, the currency of the present technological age, ‘is just wrong for my brain,’ Ivo shrugs. He also admits he very rarely sees any live music anymore; too many people, too much fuss. The concept of the latest sound, the latest trend, the hyped-up sensation, leaves him cold. It has to be music that exists for its own sake. Music that can provide what he describes as ‘solace and sense’. For the most part, Ivo explains, ‘it doesn’t involve the intellect, but evokes an emotional response. It draws one away from analysis, from the brain constantly questioning.’

This music often comes from his past, discovered in his youth or while he was building 4AD’s catalogue, when he experienced epiphanies, love affairs, drug trips, through a cassette demo or a live show, before there was even the awareness of a black dog or what it meant to run a business. Music from the worlds of American folk and country appear to provide the most solace and sense these days. But the uncanny world of progressive rock rooted in the Sixties and Seventies, fusing the techniques of classical and avant-garde music to play havoc with tempo, texture and access, has become a recent fascination. ‘Give me originality,’ he says. ‘Give me something challenging. I listen to music now and I’m always running an inventory in my head of what it reminds me of. I mean, if you’re going to copy, to mimic, without putting an ounce of yourself into it …’

Ivo hasn’t recorded any of his own music since 1997, when he assembled a series of cover versions under the name The Hope Blister. ‘There have been a couple of times where I’ve talked about it,’ he admits. ‘I sent tapes out for people to consider, but I couldn’t go through with it. In any case, I haven’t had an original idea for years. In fact, I have no idea how I was ever that imaginative.’

Yet despite his disappearance into the desert and retirement, Ivo’s opinion clearly still stands for something. Colleen Maloney, 4AD’s head of press through the Nineties and currently at fellow south London independent Domino, heard that Ivo had fallen for Diamond Mine, a collaborative album between Scottish vocalist King Creosote and British electronic specialist Jon Hopkins that Domino had released in 2011. Ivo’s name subsequently appeared on a press advertisement beside the quote: ‘the best vocal record of the last twenty years’.

‘It’s so full of atmosphere, so sharp and so sad,’ he says, nailing the very qualities that so often elevated the music released on 4AD to such sublime heights. But, as the cliché goes, the higher you climb, the harder you can fall. Beneath the beauty, lies a deeper ocean of emotion in which to drown.

chapter 2 – 1980 (1)

Piper at the Gates of Oundle

(BAD5–BAD19)

Far from Lamy, the ancient market town of Oundle in the UK has a markedly different flora, fauna and geography – flatter, greener, though just as sedate. In a rural idyll 70 miles north of London in the county of Northamptonshire, Oundle is also isolated: 12 miles from the nearest main town of Peterborough, and almost surrounded on three sides by the River Nene.

The house where Ivo grew up was also isolated – the driveway to the main house was half a mile long. The Watts-Russells are inextricably linked to Oundle: records show that Ivo’s ancestor Jesse Watts-Russell Junior built the town hall and the church, though it’s the ancient church in the nearby village of Lower Benefield that can be seen through the avenue of trees from the estate’s manor house.

Ivo’s family came from aristocratic money, but while they still own much of the land in the area, the low-rent tithes set by his grandmother in the 1930s drastically reduced the income. The farmhouse property where Ivo was raised while his grandmother occupied the manor house had broken windows in every room. ‘Sixty years earlier, the family name was a presence – my grandparents’ marriage was society news,’ he recalls. ‘But the reality was five of us in one bedroom, and the farm itself was only a modest success.’

Ivo’s father served in the British army in Egypt before and during the Second World War, and in Germany afterwards, before returning to Oundle in 1950 to run the estate farm. Ivo was born four years later, named after Ivo Grenfell, a cousin on his grandmother’s side and brother of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, whose famous war poem ‘Into Battle’ was published the same month he was killed in 1915. Ivo was the youngest of eight, with two brothers and five sisters. By the time his grandmother had died in 1969 and Ivo’s family moved into the manor house, all his siblings had left home. His other brother Peregrine (known as Perry) remembers Ivo assisting with the move in a rare bonding exercise with an emotionally distant father.

‘My older sister would joke, though not necessarily so, that the first time our dad talked to us was when we’d each turned fifteen, and he’d say, “OK, get on the tractor and drive”. He was a very aloof man, who lost his own father when he was seven and was raised by a tyrannical Victorian English mother. We never related emotionally to either parent.’

Ivo’s mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was born in 1954, keeping her and the baby apart for three months for fear of passing on the potentially fatal disease. It was a harsh domestic regime of a father with a farm to run and a mother raising eight children without modern appliances … ‘I don’t remember many visitors,’ says Ivo. ‘My uncles would come for the weekend, and then we’d have fun.’

In any environment of emotional deprivation, any form of art can become a vital lifeline, a source of comfort, inspiration and imagination. Ivo’s pre-teen memories were of the rousing film soundtracks to South Pacific and The Sound of Music. Even earlier, West Side Story, the first ‘teen’ musical, was his introduction to the culture of attitude, fashion and sex (‘Got a rocket in your pocket, keep coolly cool, boy!’). All three musicals emphasised the urge to escape, from ‘Climb Every Mountain’ and ‘Over The Rainbow’ to the lovers Tony and Maria from West Side Story believing, ‘there is a place somewhere’ – a better place, beyond the control of authority and circumstances.

Eight children meant pop music was always in the Watts-Russell house. For Perry, it was The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. ‘There was a three-year age gap between me and Ivo,’ he says, ‘so they couldn’t be his soundtrack to adolescence.’ Ivo has no memory of why the first single he bought at the age of six was ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ by R&B legend Ray Charles. EPs by The Who and The Kinks followed, but his epiphany, the road from Oundle to Damascus, was The Jimi Hendrix Experience miming to the trio’s debut single ‘Hey Joe’ on a 1967 edition of BBC TV’s weekly flagship music show Top of the Pops. Their Afro hairstyles alone would have triggered intrigue in middle England, even consternation. But it was Hendrix’s sound – liquid, sensual, aching, unsettling, alien – that had coloured the imagination of an impressionable twelve-year-old, thrilled at the subversive invasion of a drab farmhouse lounge.

‘My sister Tessa and my parents were watching too and I remember a shared feeling of jaws dropping, of confusion,’ Ivo recalls. ‘I thought, this is having an impression, and being very interested by that. The next Saturday, I listened to [BBC radio DJ] John Peel’s Top Gear, with sessions by Cream, Hendrix and Pink Floyd. I bought Hendrix’s Are You Experienced and Pink Floyd’s equally mind-altering Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. I’d finally found, to paraphrase John Lennon, the first thing that made any sense to me. My gang.’

These weren’t the cool Sharks or Jets gangs of West Side Story, but the freaks, in all their animalistic glory. In this first flowering of psychedelia, the possibilities were endless. ‘How mad was [Pink Floyd’s] “Apples And Oranges” as a single?’ says Ivo. ‘What a brilliant reflection of the times. Aurally and visually, this was the counter-culture, the hope for the future.’

Despite his advanced tastes, Ivo – or George as he was affectionately known – wasn’t allowed to join Perry and his friends at a concert with the epic bill of American R&B singer Geno Washington and the kaleidoscopic heaviness of Pink Floyd, Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. His first ever show was more pop-centric but still staggering – The Who, Traffic, Marmalade and The Herd. ‘Ivo was much more obsessive about music than I was,’ Perry recalls. ‘He wasn’t yet distracted 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, and obviously there was something different about David Bowie. But his Ziggy Stardust explosion had put me off, and Alice Cooper and Roxy Music weren’t serious enough either.’

Ivo was happy in his domain behind the Cloud Seven counter: ‘I was having a whale of a time. Until I got mugged, that is.’ It was just before Christmas 1973; the victim of a second mugging that evening died from the attack. Carrying the night safe wallet after shutting up the shop, Ivo was knocked unconscious, landing face first and breaking his nose: ‘I was freaked out, and left London, back home to Oundle, to the womb. But I immediately knew I’d made a stupid mistake.’

After two months, Ivo called Cloud Seven and got a desk job at the company head office. He graduated to conducting impromptu stock checks (to catch potential thieves among the staff) before managing the branch in Kingston, a relatively unexplored satellite town just south of London. Yet it was home to a thriving student campus, and the Three Fishes pub, an enclave of American west coast and southern rock: ‘Everyone wore plaid shirts, drove VW vans and listened to The Grateful Dead,’ Ivo recalls.

The Kingston shop was first on the import van’s route from Heathrow airport, so Ivo was the first to lay his hands on albums such as Emmylou Harris’ Pieces Of The Sky, Tim Buckley’s Sefronia, and Bill Lamb and Gary Ogan’s Portland, pieces of exquisite rootsy melancholia that he’d sticker with recommendations and sell a hundred copies of each. Ivo became especially infatuated with Buckley’s five-octave range and equally audacious ability to master different genres. He began ordering album imports such as Spirit’s The Family That Plays Together and Steve Miller’s Children Of The Future because they had gatefold sleeves, made from thick board; the packaging was part of the appeal, tangible objects to have and to hold. Pearls Before Swine’s use of medieval paintings that were rich in symbolism but gave no indication of the music inside was another alluring draw.

But again Ivo became restless. Once he’d received the Criminal Compensation Board’s cheque for £500 to fix his broken nose, Ivo forwent the operation (it was later paid for by the National Health Service) and went travelling with his friend Steve Brown, hitchhiking through France, taking the train through Spain and then the boat to Morocco, in the footsteps of those who’d sought out premium-grade hashish. After two months of beach-bum life, a cash-depleted Ivo was back in London, seeking work again. Steve Webbon, now managing the Fulham branch of a new record shop, Beggars Banquet, said the owners were looking for more staff.

One of the owners was Webbon’s old school friend Martin Mills. They’d stayed friends while Mills attended Oxford University; Webbon remembers hedonistic nights in student dens, where casual use of heroin was part of the alternative lifestyle, though, he adds, ‘Not Martin, he was more disciplined, not stupid like some others.’ Mills’ room would resonate to west coast classics: ‘The Byrds, Moby Grape, Love, The Doors,’ Webbon recalls. ‘English groups weren’t that inspiring – we were more interested in the next Elektra Records release. That was the kind of record label to follow, and ideally to be part of.’

Elektra had been founded in 1950 by Jac Holzman and Paul Rickolt; each invested $300. During the Fifties and early Sixties, the label had concentrated on folk music, but also classical, through its very successful budget Nonesuch imprint, sales of which helped to fund music of a more psychedelic nature, starting with the bluesy Paul Butterfield Band, Love, The Doors and a nascent Tim Buckley. The Nonesuch Explorer Series was a pioneer in releasing what became known in the Eighties as world music. Put simply, Holzman ran the hippest, coolest, trendiest and also the best record label around. But, like Ivo, he too got restless, and in 1970, Holzman sold his controlling share in Elektra, which became part of the Warner Brothers music group. Holzman stayed in charge until 1972, when it merged with Asylum Records, which specialised in west coast singer-songwriters, from Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt to Joni Mitchell and The Eagles. Politics and rivalries under the Warner umbrella made for a bumpy ride, but the quality of the music rarely wavered.