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a songwriter. The performance and the sound was the most important.’

      Xmal Deutschland’s debut album Fetisch – ‘a word in both German and English, and a word of the time,’ says Huwe – was a faster and harsher take on the cold, black steel of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Mass and In Camera. John Fryer engineered the session at Blackwing, where Ivo was again co-producer with the band, but the album could have sounded less dense and flat. ‘I did them a disservice by producing,’ Ivo reckons. ‘I don’t take all the blame, as John wasn’t the best at that time at micing up a drumkit, which then hinders positioning the guitars around it.’

      On stage, Xmal was freer to pull out the stops. The memory of the band’s debut UK show, opening for Cocteau Twins at The Venue, is etched in Ivo’s memory: ‘I’d never seen an audience, clustered around the bar, run so fast to the front of the stage when Xmal plugged in. You could see the audience think, who are these women? They looked really striking.’

      Both bands set off on tour, sharing a base in London. ‘Because of their Scottish accents,’ says Huwe, ‘only Fiona could understand a word they said – and the other way around too!’ Xmal later supported Modern English. At that time, Huwe says, ‘4AD felt like a family’.

      Oliver expanded the 4AD family by briefly dating Xmal drummer Manuela Zwingmann, who Ivo says he alienated by hiring a Linn drum machine for his lengthy remix of Fetisch’s opening track ‘Qual’. ‘What Manuela played on Fetisch was fantastic, but she struggled to get good takes, and the drum sound was the weakest part,’ he feels. Ivo’s remix remains his favourite Xmal recording, though at the Venue show, Ivo recalls John Peel DJing between sets: ‘After he played the “Qual” remix, he said, “That’s another interminably long twelve-inch single”. And he was right.’

      The Qual EP was still fronted by the original album version, but longer remixes were to become a permanent fixture of singles and EPs, as the newly expanding synth-pop, New Romantic and electro sounds accentuated the dance element across both mainstream and alternative scenes, leading to an increase in club audiences and more specialist radio stations. Post-punk’s monochrome palate was slowly receding. Even a resolute rock band such as Xmal got the twelve-inch remix treatment. The apotheosis of the medium was New Order’s single ‘Blue Monday’, released in March, which was to become the biggest selling twelve-inch single of all time; it had only been just under three years since Ian Curtis died, but Joy Division felt like gods from a past age.

      At least the twelve-inch format gave Vaughan Oliver the opportunity for a larger canvas for singles. Ivo encouraged every 4AD signing to use the services of 23 Envelope, as it made both artistic and financial sense. The finished image might result from Oliver’s interpretation of a demo or a finished track – for example, his book of medical photographs for ‘Qual’. However, Nigel Grierson was responsible for the layout of Cocteau Twins’ new single ‘Peppermint Pig’, as well as the photo of a woman (shot from behind, submerged in water) in an outdoor Swiss spa bath. ‘That was more for the texture of the hair and the soft misty feeling,’ Grierson explains. ‘I can’t recall why the band chose it. Maybe they didn’t have much input.’

      Robin Guthrie approved of the image for the single, but not the music. The Cocteaus had accepted Ivo’s suggestion of taking on, in Guthrie’s words, ‘a pop producer’. Alan Rankine of The Associates was dispatched to Blackwing. ‘That was a huge mistake,’ says Guthrie. ‘Alan just sat at the back and read magazines. I did all the work.’ Guthrie also claims that Ivo suggested the band ‘write something upbeat for a single’. According to Guthrie, ‘We had a tour coming up supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and we needed a record out. “Peppermint Pig” is absolutely terrible, but we didn’t have the strength of character to wait for the right song to come along. It was an early indication of the power of the music industry, and of too many cooks.’

      Contrary to Guthrie’s view, Ivo recalls he was very happy with the single, though says it does sound too much like The Associates. ‘But if I was interested in a “pop” producer, I’d have chosen someone like Mike Hedges [who had produced The Associates’ 1982 masterpiece Sulk]. I know Robin wasn’t happy with the single but it’s silly to suggest that I was trying to commercialise their music. It’s not my interest or one of my strong points. But accepting a producer actually did Robin a favour. By imposing myself on Garlands and Lullabies and then foisting Alan Rankine on them, he was so pissed off that he took control from then on.’

      ‘Peppermint Pig’ was only kept off the top of the independent singles chart by ‘Blue Monday’. But it’s easily Cocteau Twins’ least memorable single for a good reason: none of its assets – the melody, the production, the cover – are special. That all was not right in the band’s camp was underlined by the departure of Will Heggie. The OMD tour had been fifty-two dates long, a huge number for an inexperienced band such as Cocteau Twins, and the bassist left the band as the band itself left the tour two shows before the end. Guthrie says it was Heggie’s decision: ‘Maybe he had more integrity than me. He didn’t want to tour that much, or to move away from Scotland as we had planned.’

      Ivo also suggests that Elizabeth Fraser felt Heggie had come between her and Guthrie, while Guthrie wonders if Heggie was himself keen on Fraser. Ivo only knows for sure that it was Guthrie and Fraser’s choice, and that he was asked to tell Heggie. ‘They all returned to London, but only Robin and Elizabeth stayed with me. I remember Liz doing some ironing in the living room when they said they no longer wanted Will involved. The next day, he and I met at Alma Road.’

      ‘I didn’t know that,’ says Guthrie. ‘To my knowledge, Will said he was going home – and I’d suddenly lost my best mate, so what the fuck’s happened there? But every cloud has a silver lining, because that’s when Cocteau Twins started to really happen for me.’

      By bringing the core down to two members, Guthrie and Fraser closed ranks to create a strong unity and, it seems, more confidence. That touring had meant a dearth of new material only inspired the pair. As Guthrie recalls, ‘We were in a chip shop, unable to eat because of the speed we’d taken, and Liz said, “Let’s make the next album, just the two of us, get money off 4AD and say we have lots of songs, and then produce it yourself.” We wrote it all in the studio, and everything just fell into place. It felt like the chains had been taken off.’

      It was still a big step to allow Guthrie to take charge, so Ivo sent John Fryer up to Palladium to assist. ‘John and Jon [Turner] were happy to play pool and let Robin get on with it,’ says Ivo. ‘This is where his courage to do these huge reverbs first appeared.’

      ‘I’d leave Robin on his own, and if he needed help, obviously I was there,’ Turner recalls. ‘Liz was another story. She had to be in the right mood to sing, so it was better if I walked out. I’m amazed how it all came together. I was used to people knowing exactly what they were doing, and on what budget, but I learnt from the Cocteaus that it doesn’t matter how you get there, the end result is what counts, and they got great results. But it seemed a stressful way to work if you were in a relationship.’

      Ivo also felt that Colourbox needed objective input, enlisting Mick Glossop (whose post-punk CV included PiL) for a re-recording of both ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Tarantula’: ‘The band wanted another go, and we thought it was worth using a successful producer,’ Ivo explains. If this was a step up, it was also a worrying step; didn’t Colourbox have new songs they wanted to record?

      Martyn Young was more interested in perfecting the editing tricks he’d heard from the pirate radio tapes that Ray Conroy and Ivo had started to bring back from trips to New York. ‘These incredible mixes, which would sound nothing like the twelve-inch single,’ says Ivo. ‘Nowadays, you press a button and it’s done for you, but back then, you’d bounce down fifteen snare hits and edit them together to get a repeat sound. Mick [Glossop] and John Fryer would do the actual cuts amazingly fast, with Martyn to guide them, but he became an incredible editor.’

      The new ‘Breakdown’ (‘Tarantula’ was only remixed in the end) wasn’t radically different, just sharper and fuller. The single even got interest from the States. Before the licence deal

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