Читать книгу Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD - Martin Aston - Страница 12

(BAD5–BAD19)

The spirit of rebirth behind the change of name from Axis to 4AD was underlined by the need for fresh blood, given that The Fast Set, Bearz and Shox would never again record for 4AD. Sales of Bauhaus’ ‘Dark Entries’ meant that 4AD would re-press the single another three times, while Shox’s ‘No Turning Back’ was temporarily given a Beggars Banquet catalogue number (between the changeover from Axis to 4AD) for a second pressing before the band vanished. Dave Gunstone’s dream was quickly over when Ivo informed Bearz that their new demos weren’t good enough. The Fast Set would resurface, but only once, in 1981, with a second T. Rex cover, ‘King Of The Rumbling Spires’, on the first compilation of synth-pop, released by a new independent label, Some Bizzare, in 1981. But while the album’s new inductees Depeche Mode and Soft Cell were to use Some Bizzare Album as a springboard to superstardom, David Knight retired The Fast Set.1 Even the revolutionary Do It Yourself opportunities of the punk and post-punk movements bred more frustrated failures and dead ends than established breakthroughs.

Conditioned by the pre-punk era of beautiful artwork and hi-fi, Ivo also embarked on raising the quality of the packaging and sound after judging the production company that Peter Kent had employed for Axis: ‘They were among the worst-sounding vinyl I’d ever heard, in really poor-quality sleeves.’

This spirit of rebirth was to be reinforced by 4AD’s official debut release. Ivo had been doing his round of the Beggars Banquet shops and had returned to Hogarth Road: ‘Peter was behind the counter with all of Rema-Rema. When I heard their music, I knew it was a sea change for 4AD.’

On the seventh floor of a council-block flat overlooking the hectic thoroughfare of Kilburn in north-west London, Mark Cox not only remembers the first time he met Ivo, but the last – the pair remain friends thirty-three years on, and he is the only former 4AD musician who visits Ivo in Lamy. But then Cox knows all about staying the long course. He’s lived in this flat for three decades, and recently tackled the contents of a cupboard for the first time in two of them, where he discovered a Rema-Rema cassette that brought on a rush of nostalgia. ‘We only ever released one EP, you see,’ he sighs. One of the potentially great post-punk bands was over before it had even begun.

Cox grew up further out, in London’s leafy and stiflingly conservative suburb of Ruislip, near the famous public school of Harrow. Cox himself ditched his educational opportunities at another public school in the area, snubbing the exam that could have led to university qualification. Two weeks into an apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery, he was on tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees, American punks The Heartbreakers, and Harrow’s own punk ingénues The Models.

At school, Cox had found himself at odds with his schoolmates’ preference for hard rock, preferring Seventies funk and Jamaican dub, and like most every proto-punk, Bowie and Roxy Music. While fending off the attention of bullies for his skinhead haircut, he had bravely ventured into the still-underground society of London’s gay nightlife, whose liberated clubbers had thrown the nascent punk scene a vital lifeline. ‘You could wear different clothes, dye your hair and wear make-up there,’ Cox recalls. ‘And everyone was having a good time.’

Cox first met Susan Ballion, the newly christened Siouxsie Sioux, at Bangs nightclub, and seen, up close, John Lydon/Johnny Rotten at Club Louise. But he’d actually befriended Marco Pirroni, who’d played guitar in the impromptu stage debut of the original Banshees and then started The Models with singer Cliff Fox, bassist Mick Allen and drummer Terry Day. Cox was employed as The Models’ roadie – he owned a car while the rest of the gang couldn’t even drive – and even occasionally become a fifth Model on stage, in his words, ‘making noise on a synthesiser over their pretty songs’.

Released in 1977, the band’s sole single ‘Freeze’ was poppy enough, but its bristling, scuffed energy was far from pretty. There was evidently more ambition than two-minute bites such as ‘Freeze’. As Cox recalls, ‘Marco showed me you didn’t need to go to college for ten years to play music. I discovered Eno and his exploration of sound. I became interested in rhythm, frequency and vibration.’

When Mick Allen introduced his friend Gary Asquith to the gang, Cox recalls that The Models split into two camps, ‘and one was Mick, Gary, Marco and me’. Though they didn’t know it at the time, they’d become Rema-Rema.

The divisive problem was Cliff Fox: ‘He just wanted to be David Bowie,’ says Asquith, ‘which had become a real problem.’ As Fox pursued his own path, abruptly terminated by a fatal heroin overdose, the remaining four friends combined for a minimal, chugging and quintessentially post-punk tour de force titled ‘Rema-Rema’, named after the Rema machine manufacturers in Poland: ‘It sounded industrial, like Throbbing Gristle,’ Cox explains. Rema-Rema became the band’s name too, signifying the shift from the simple punk dynamics of The Models.

‘Marco wanted to go places, do things,’ says Gary Asquith. ‘It moved fast for everyone.’ Another north London resident, living in Kentish Town, adjacent to the more famous swirl of Camden Town, Asquith still comes across as the same ‘larger-than-life, livewire, I’m-tough Cockney’ that Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party recalls. Asquith admits that he and Mick Allen were typical teen rebels. ‘But no knife crime!’ he claims. ‘And no drugs either – though there were later. But at first, it was food! After rehearsals, we’d descend on Marco’s parents’ house, who being Italians, always stocked the fridge.’

Suitably fuelled, Rema-Rema quickly abandoned the drum machine that was being adopted by every synth-pop band and advertised for a human drummer. Dorothy Prior, known as Max, added Velvet Underground-style metronomic thump to Rema-Rema’s coarse energy, as well as becoming Marco’s girlfriend. With Mick Allen now singing, the band’s demos had drawn interest from the major-affiliated progressive label Charisma, keen to update and rebrand, but the label baulked at Allen’s lyric on the track ‘Entry’, ‘and you fucked just like Jesus Christ’.

Cox says that Rema-Rema – already a fragile coalition – even considered splitting up, but Peter Kent saw the band play and immediately suggested they release a record on 4AD. Four tracks, two studio and two live, were proposed for a twelve-inch EP, Wheel In The Roses. Ivo devised a catalogue system to differentiate between releases: the prefix AD was for a seven-inch single, BAD for a twelve-inch, CAD for an album, and the numbering would identify the year. As the label prepared for the EP, Rema-Rema supported Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire at London’s basement club underneath the YMCA, but their ‘big moment’, according to Asquith, had been supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Human League at London’s art deco palace The Rainbow Theatre; David Bowie was at the side of the stage to watch The Human League, but Asquith says it felt like the bar had been raised and Rema-Rema could garner the same kind of press appreciation as the others. The only problem was that Marco left the band before Wheel In The Roses was even released, and the remaining members were beginning to doubt whether they would continue without him.

Pirroni had been seduced by an offer from the equally ambitious Stuart Goddard who, as Adam Ant, had lost his original backing band to Malcolm McLaren’s new project, Bow Wow Wow (former Models drummer Terry Day was also to join the new Ants). Pirroni remained supportive enough to attend a band meeting with Beggars Banquet, where Ivo recalls Nick Austin insisting anything 4AD signed had also to sign to Beggars’ publishing wing, and for at least five years. ‘This for a band that was no longer together! It was very surreal.’

No deal was struck, but 4AD still released Wheel In The Roses: ‘It still stands out from that era,’ Ivo reckons. ‘Hearing Marco’s rockist guitar, wailing and screeching, but with very controlled feedback, over something that was so post-punk, was very unusual. It carried forward the idea that this little thing Peter and I had started would really mean something.’

Wheel In The Roses sounded something like a gang out of A Clockwork Orange expressing itself through music. The opening 35 seconds of gleeful howls and screams prefaced the menacing crawl of ‘Feedback Song’, a combative mood that extended through a pounding ‘Instrumental’ and a live take of ‘Rema-Rema’. A second live song, ‘Fond Affections’, showed a startlingly tender and melodic streak, though the mood was undeniably eerie. The EP’s sleeve image was equally layered: a 1949 photo of two imposing Nuban tribesmen in Sudan taken by British photographer George Rodger that Mick Allen had doctored by drawing a tiny red rose between one of the men’s fingers.

Despite Rema-Rema’s short-lived promise, Ivo felt he’d learnt a valuable lesson. ‘I understood punk much more after meeting Rema-Rema. They were real individuals, not aggressive, but they’d get in your face and argue their point. They believed in themselves, so you supported that even more than their music. Those people deserved support.’

To that end, Ivo hired Chris Carr, a freelance PR who was promoting bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure, to work on the Rema-Rema EP. Carr says he doesn’t recall any reviews in the music press, which was disappointing for a record of such steely adventure, but without a band, what were its chances? But Carr says he was keen to continue working with Ivo. ‘He wasn’t remotely interested in what the majors were doing, only in developing the punk ethos, where punk meets art, and not for commercial gain. But it was hard to finance records at that time and Ivo would release demos if they were good enough. Though you could only keep releasing records if they got reviews.’

By comparison, Peter Kent had more old-fashioned ambitions: ‘I wanted to be commercial,’ he says. ‘To have money to spend on bands.’ It would have been very interesting if, as Kent claims, Duran Duran – soon to become costumed New Romantic flagwavers alongside Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant – had been available. ‘We nearly signed them,’ says Kent. ‘I played their demo to Ivo, who really liked it, but they’d just signed to EMI.’

Ivo denies ever having heard any Duran demos, but says that journalist Pete Makowski (who had commissioned Ivo to write two album reviews for the weekly music paper Sounds before Axis/4AD had begun) had played him demos by The Psychedelic Furs. ‘I liked it, but the band had already signed to CBS,’ he says. Looking back, the Furs and Duran’s ambitions would have clashed with 4AD’s developing ethos. Much more aligned was a young band that could combine the commercial aspirations that Kent sought with the musical spirit that Ivo understood.

The Lepers were a down-the-line punk band from Colchester in Essex fronted by singer Robbie Grey (who called himself Jack Midnight) and guitarist Gary McDowell (a.k.a. Justin Sane). Bassist Wiggs and drummer Civvy were soon respectively replaced by Mick Conroy and Richard Brown, but they’d already changed the band name to Modern English before Stephen Walker arrived, whose keyboards accelerated the shift to post-punk. ‘Punk’s fire had gone out, so we started listening more to Wire and Joy Division,’ says Grey. ‘Ivo could see what could become of us with a bit of development.’

Wire and Joy Division were two of the best, and most creative, bands to provide an alternative to punk rock’s single-speed, two-chord setting. London-based Wire were punk’s most artfully oblique outsiders, yet they also wrote clever, melodic pop songs. Manchester’s Joy Division had transcended their punk roots as Warsaw and taken on a more rhythmic and haunting shape, embodied by its enigmatic, troubled singer Ian Curtis. Post-punk was a sea of possibilities.

With a sense of adventure, Modern English had followed Mick Conroy’s older brother Ray to London where he was squatting in Notting Hill Gate, near Rough Trade’s offices. Grey describes a time of sleeping bags in the basement, meagre unemployment benefit, suppers of discarded vegetables from the street market, and bleeding gums as the price they had to pay, but out of it came the debut single ‘Drowning Man’ on the band’s own label, Limp. A Wire-like hauteur over a blatant Joy Division pulse was too slavish a copy, but after Peter Kent had booked Modern English to support Bauhaus at central London’s Rock Garden in March 1980, he and Ivo saw just enough reason to commission another single.

‘Their demo had stood out, but initially, Modern English weren’t great live,’ recalls Ivo. ‘They couldn’t win over an audience like Bauhaus, who were fantastic on stage. And like Bauhaus, the British music press didn’t enjoy Modern English. Coming from Colchester, they weren’t necessarily considered cool but they weren’t, thank God, the kind to hang out with journalists anyway. The first time I saw Gary, he had a huge stegosaurus haircut!’

The band’s 4AD debut ‘Swans On Glass’ was a lashing version of the Wire model of nervous punk-pop. Ivo’s faith in Modern English highlighted the gulf between his intuitive belief in raw talent and Beggars Banquet’s nose for commerce. ‘Martin [Mills] might not have seen what Ivo saw,’ says Conroy. ‘We were still pretty ropey then. The Lurkers, for example, had songs. We just had bits of music stuck together.’

Nevertheless, Beggars Banquet still wanted to sign the band to a long-term label and publishing deals. But unlike Rema-Rema, Modern English shared Mills and Nick Austin’s commercial instinct: ‘A five-year contract gave us the chance to grow,’ says Grey.

Ivo: ‘Long-term contracts were unnecessary, but Peter and I were just two employees for Beggars Banquet Limited, trading as 4AD. But I learnt quickly, and up to 1988, Modern English was the last band we signed long term without doing one or two one-offs with the artist first. Martin could see that even without deals, Bauhaus had immediately started making money for us.’

Bauhaus’ quotient of gothic camp was turned down several notches by its second single for 4AD. ‘Terror Couple Kills Colonel’ showed a stripped-down restraint for a similarly curt lyric inspired by newspaper headlines about the German terrorist unit Red Army Faction. It wasn’t as successful as ‘Dark Entries’, reaching 5 in the independent chart and not hanging around for as long; if the press didn’t like goth, there was a swell of public support for the sound. The band played a thirty-date tour and retired to record their debut album, confident enough to produce it themselves.

As Ivo began to mentor Modern English, so Peter Kent’s relationship with Bauhaus strengthened when he became the band’s tour manager.2 ‘Peter was charming and witty with great taste, though we discovered he had a very fragile ego,’ David J recalls. ‘Ivo was very interesting too, with sartorial style. He wore exquisite shirts buttoned up to the top, and you’d discover how knowledgeable he was about music, and what good taste he had as well. To me, he was the ultimate hipster.’

The next arrival at 4AD didn’t seem like an obvious fit for either Ivo or Kent, though it was the latter who introduced In Camera, surely the toughest, bleakest sound on 4AD, that came from one of the toughest, bleakest parts of 1980 London.

In Camera’s singer, David Scinto, sits in the downstairs bar of nineteenth-century art nouveau landmark the Theatre Royal in Stratford, one of the few survivors of the regeneration that has swept through this part of London’s East End. The Olympic Games of 2012 was held only a few minutes away, where former barren stretches of land used to be. But other landmarks have been wiped away, or buried, in the name of modernisation and the area’s former industrial working-class heart has been re-clad in shopping-centre glass and steel. ‘It’s no longer the Stratford I knew,’ says Scinto.

Scinto cuts a burly stature now, but during In Camera’s time, he was a lean, intense figure, who called himself David Steiner after James Coburn’s character Sergeant Rolf Steiner in Sam Peckinpah’s torrid war movie Cross of Iron. He’s more than a movie buff, he’s a bona fide screenwriter, having co-written two acclaimed films, Sexy Beast and 44 Inch Chest, that psychologically dissected a particularly East End kind of gangster. ‘I keep trying music, and acting too, but I always come back to writing,’ he says. ‘Always have done, since I was a kid.’

Born to Maltese immigrants, Scinto was captivated by funk, soul and soundtracks, from Mission Impossible to Ennio Morricone’s work. ‘But then punk did to me what it did to others, a complete inspiration. I fear my options without punk could have been unbearable. Just before punk hit, I was fifteen, and my friend and I were going to rob a shop. I had a replica pistol, but as we walked towards the shop, a police car stopped right outside, so we just kept on walking and then bolted.’

From the Sex Pistols through to his post-punk rebirth fronting Public Image Limited, John Lydon – ‘for his courage, and how he spoke what I thought’ – was Scinto’s key inspiration. ‘Siouxsie was important too. But the first band I loved was The Pop Group. They pricked my social conscience. They instigated thought, which people are afraid to do nowadays; we’re all bullied into behaving.’

At school, Scinto began to articulate his conscience with two school friends, but both fell by the wayside as In Camera’s line-up initially gelled around bassist Pete Moore, drummer Derwin and guitarist Andrew Gray.

In a pub overlooking the Thames, this time in Bermondsey on the south side of the river, the diminutive figure of Andrew Gray sups a beer next to his much taller and imposing friend and former bandmate Michael Allen, of Models and Rema-Rema fame. The pair was to unite in 1983, alongside Mark Cox, in the band The Wolfgang Press; but in 1980, Gray was experimenting at home with his guitar, seeking potential bandmates that also valued feeling over proficiency.

Like Scinto (the two were born just two days apart), Gray grew up primarily as a soul and funk fan, but he appreciated theme tunes too: he cites the sensual wah-wah lick of ‘Theme From Shaft’ as his gateway to making his own music. ‘But the first time I heard a guitar through loud amplifiers, that was it,’ Gray recalls. And Berlin-era Bowie, punk and post-punk changed the way he approached the guitar.

Scinto recalls that, of all the applicants to In Camera’s advert, Gray was the only one to fit the bill. However, Derwin’s flailing Keith Moon-style drums proved to be an awkward fit, so Pete Moore’s friend Jeff Wilmott replaced him as In Camera’s drummer. ‘Jeff looked like one of the Ramones, but he just locked musically with us,’ says Gray.

Wilmott, who is now a financial IT advisor living on Tierra Verde, an island in Florida’s Tampa Bay, says he only now drums for fun, preferring cave-diving, which makes him something of a rarity in 4AD circles. But in his teens, he and Moore had followed the Banshees all over Britain, and found themselves as the supporting rhythm section to Scinto and Gray’s intense blueprint. Moore also thought up the band’s name. ‘In Camera was a play by Sartre, but we were aware of its courtroom association, and it could be a lens or prism,’ Scinto explains. ‘We liked its in-private feel. We wanted to reach as many people as possible but we felt entitled to our inner sanctum, to put our minds together and see what we’d come up with next.’

The intellectual rigour reached as far as Scinto’s flattened vocal. ‘Singing suggests a manipulation of the voice, and saying “please like me”,’ he explains. ‘A voice simply suggests an expression. It’s not pretentious; it’s presenting a fact.’ On stage, says Gray, ‘Dave was very upfront and confrontational, in the Ian Curtis vein, dancing across the stage, angular like the music. Pete’s bass was like Mick Allen’s, distorted and hard.’

‘Gray,’ says Scinto, ‘used feedback, syncopation before we knew what that meant, and chopped things about. He was brilliant at sound.’

One of Malcolm McLaren’s associates, Jock McDonald, another former stallholder who had a pitch near to Peter Kent’s at Beaufort Market, was running Billy’s club night at Gossips in Soho. McDonald had heard of this forceful new band, and asked In Camera to support Bauhaus. Peter Kent was impressed enough to visit their dressing room after the show. ‘He burst in, and asked if we’d like to make a record,’ Gray recalls. ‘I was a bit shocked; we’d been going less than six months. Ivo was there too but he was apparently too drunk and obliterated to focus on us.’

Ivo: ‘Actually, I had a blinding headache that night, and another the following time I saw them. In Camera were very much Peter’s signing, but I grew to like them, and I really, really liked the Peel session we released later on.’

In Camera’s debut seven-inch single ‘Die Laughing’ blended staccato vocal, guitar frazzle, high lead bass line and martial drum attack. The rhythmic swish of the flipside ‘Final Achievement’ lurched in the direction of PiL’s ‘Death Disco’, as Scinto laced the monochrome sound with oblique images of social dysfunction that he’d witnessed across his patch.

Scinto says he could see the difference between introvert Ivo and extrovert partner Kent: ‘Peter was more adventurous and outgoing, hanging with the bands.’ As a part-time concert promoter, Kent was bound to mingle with musicians, and one night at a mutual friend’s in Notting Hill, before Axis/4AD had even been conceived, he had got talking to Graham Lewis, one quarter of Ivo’s beloved Wire. ‘I later told Graham about 4AD,’ says Kent, ‘and introduced him to Ivo. They got on like a house on fire, so it was Ivo that ended up working with him.’

On the phone from Uppsala in his wife’s home country of Sweden, Lewis recalls how Wire was seeking a way out of their EMI deal. Like many of the early punk bands, Wire had signed to a major, which is why independents such as 4AD were so urgently required. Lewis and Ivo – born a year apart – found much common ground.

Lewis’s air force family lived in Germany and the Netherlands but also the English seaside town of Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, where in the early 1960s, he had first experienced rock’n’roll, blasting through giant speakers at a fairground. ‘You’d find strange places between loudspeakers playing different songs, united by a common acoustic, which probably explains my obsession with dub,’ says Lewis. Pirate radio – ‘unmediated, straight out of the sky’ – introduced him to Jimi Hendrix and similar psychedelic voyagers; a cousin gifted Lewis ‘an incredible collection of soul music’, and at art school at the start of the Seventies, Roxy Music and pub rock’s oddballs Kilburn & The High Roads further widened his tastes.

Lewis’ musical ambitions were temporarily thwarted: ‘I couldn’t find anyone to form this fantastic group, as you were meant to at art school.’ Eventually, through his college friend Angela Conway, Lewis met Bruce Gilbert, an abstract painter working as an audio-visual aids technician and photography librarian at Watford College of Art and Design, just north of London.

Gilbert, Conway and fellow student Colin Newman were playing together as Overload: ‘I intimated that I played bass, which wasn’t strictly true, but I owned one and had ideas,’ Lewis recalls. Ideas were enough for Gilbert, and after Conway had gone her own way, and Newman had met drummer Robert Gotobed (a former Oundle public schoolboy) at a party, Wire’s four components were assembled. Though Wire had made its recording debut on EMI’s Live At The Roxy WC2 compilation, the band was older and more taken with experimental art and design than their punk peers. Over three trailblazing albums (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154), Wire had redrawn rock’s boundaries with all the abstract ideas their inquisitive minds could muster.

After their trilogy, Wire decided to subvert the traditional four-piece band unit. ‘Bruce and I had become interested in the idea that the studio was the instrument, and we wanted to work with different people to see what might happen,’ Lewis recalls. ‘We formed Dome to connect with our art background – installation, performance art, video. Rock music wasn’t the be-all and end-all of our lives.’

Initially, Dome took their experimental songs to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade, who suggested they release it themselves; Dome 1, Dome 2 and Dome 3 subsequently appeared on the duo’s Dome imprint. Seeking to finance a soundtrack they’d written for a performance piece by the artist Russell Mills, the pair approached Ivo, who eagerly took the chance to work with such respected and influential artists. A twelve-inch single, ‘Like This For Ages’, was released in 1980 under the new alias of Cupol, a reference to the dome-style cupola inspired by Arabic mosaics. On one side, the title track’s shorter, mechanical clangs were layered behind Lewis’ urgent vocal; on the other was the 20-minute instrumental ‘Kluba Cupol’, a slowly evolving mosaic of percussive electronica inspired by seeing the legendary Sufi ‘trance’ Master Musicians of Joujouka play in London.

‘It was nothing to do with Wire, but it was a damn good record,’ Ivo reckons. ‘Was I disappointed? Yes and no: Graham and Bruce were doing what they were doing. Though I didn’t realise until I met Wire that they didn’t sell many records, maybe 20,000 each. We struggled to sell 5,000 with Cupol.’

Ivo’s relationship with the duo quickly led to a more musically satisfying liaison. Gilbert and Lewis had met a young singer-songwriter Matt Johnson through their friend Tom Johnson (no relation), a cartoonist who was playing bass in Matt’s band, The The, while acting as its manager.

Over the past thirty years, Matt Johnson has defied categorisation in any given era, trend or sound, concentrating on a pensive, brooding, progressive fusion of soul, rock and pop. With nine studio albums made by varying line-ups, Johnson has also embraced soundtracks, film itself, and most recently book publishing as Fifty First State Press, with the 2012 book Tales from the Two Puddings. This was not Matt’s story but that of his father Eddie, who ran Stratford pub The Two Puddings for thirty-eight years. The site has been revamped and renamed, another casualty of merciless town planning.

In its heyday, says Johnson, The Two Puddings was, ‘one of east London’s busiest and most fashionable music houses’. The large backroom staged regular shows: ‘The sound was continually drifting up through the floorboards, and during daytime closing hours, my brothers and I would play the equipment the groups had left set up. It’s quite possible the first guitar I ever played belonged to The Who’s Pete Townshend or The Kinks’ Ray Davies.’

The Beatles’ White Album was Johnson’s treasured album: ‘There was something so warm, inventive and free about it. I still marvel at its diversity and originality.’ He was only eleven when he formed a covers band, Roadstar, and by fifteen had left school to work at Music De Wolfe in central London, a family-run studio specialising in soundtracks. Johnson admits to a very brief flirtation with punk, but believes most British punk was drab and derivative. ‘And the way they dressed identically and yet crowed on about wanting to be different cracked me up. The real weirdos, of course, were the ones who tried to look normal to fit in. So I became part of the “long Mac brigade” and found my spiritual home within post-punk.’

Johnson had begun selling home-made cassettes of a suitably off-kilter solo album, See Without Being Seen, before being introduced to Gilbert and Lewis. Johnson shared common ground with the duo, and with Britain’s synth pioneers, such as Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, who, he says, ‘epitomised everything punk had promised but failed to deliver. It’s an incredibly rich, inventive and diverse time in British music history that’s been overlooked.’

Lewis was impressed by ‘the unusual harmonics of Matt’s voice, his ambition and drive’. However, Lewis also says that he and Gilbert had only gone down to the studio, ‘in an unofficial capacity’, while The The recorded its 4AD debut single ‘Controversial Subject’, and its B-side ‘Black & White’. But, as Ivo notes, ‘the sound was heavily manipulated by Graham and Bruce, very much like Cupol and Dome records’.

Gilbert and Lewis’ studio of choice was Blackwing, housed in a deconsecrated church in Southwark, just south of the Thames. Ivo discovered that its owner, Eric Radcliffe, ‘was an incredibly smart scientist with a musical background. It was inexpensive, and Eric let us do what we liked.’ Blackwing was to become 4AD’s home from home for years to come.3

Peter Kent agreed that ‘Controversial Subject’ was good enough to release, and Johnson began piecing together an album. Ivo enjoyed the rough, raw sound of the single, and as a fan of demos with a similar fresh energy, decided to pull tracks from the increasing pile of demos that had caught his and Kent’s attention. As Ivo says, ‘I had a feeling that every independent single coming out was worth listening to, so I had a pride in everything we released during that time.’ A spare Modern English track, ‘Home’, was added to a twelve-inch EP that became 4AD’s first compilation and the label’s sole attempt at showcasing a batch of demos. As Ivo says, ‘Presage(s) was hardly prescient of what was to come. It wasn’t an original idea either; Factory had released the Earcom compilation. But it was fun to do. I designed the dreadful sleeve, which featured Steve Webbon’s naked arse on the back cover. But there was no intention of working with the groups.’

A sunbathing Webbon had been captured while on holiday with Ivo; on the front was a repeated image of a child against a lurid lime green backdrop – not exactly 4AD’s finest piece of artwork. Musically too, Presage(s) is only a footnote in the 4AD story, an experiment that was never repeated. The EP appears not to have been reviewed at the time. ‘At its best,’ All Music Guide concluded many years later, ‘these bands sound like second-rate versions of flagship acts like Bauhaus … at its worst, these bands sound just plain bad, like failed art school experiments.’

For all its drawbacks, Presage(s) remains a fascinating document of several musical tributaries of the day, and the demo nature adds an endearing naivety. Of Ivo’s two favourite tracks, the floating, haunting mood of C.V.O.’s ‘Sargasso Sea’ was surely down to co-producer – and German krautrock legend – Conny Plank, while Last Dance’s turbulent ‘Malignant Love’ was a messily inspired Banshees revision. Of the rest, Spasmodic Caress’s ‘Hit the Dead’ (like Modern English’s ‘Home’) had a sinewy Wire-like tension and Psychotik Tanks’ ‘Let’s Have A Party’ had a spiky urgency. Red Atkins’ finale, the music hall turn ‘Hunk Of A Punk’, was simply the most bizarre and – in retrospect – unsuitable track that 4AD ever stuck its logo on.

‘That was completely and utterly Peter. I thought it was silly,’ says Ivo, referring to the two-minute track by Red Atkins, a.k.a. forty-five-year-old Frank Duckett, a home studio enthusiast that, for reasons still unknown, had penned a daft homoerotic ode (‘yes he’s a hunk of a punk and you know that he’s my kind of man’). Peter Kent’s verdict? ‘It’s hilarious.’

A 1982 interview in the British fanzine Blam! confirmed that the Spasmodic Caress track wasn’t actually a demo, but a third re-recording after the first two were deemed ‘shit’ and ‘absolutely terrible’, by singer Pete Masters. Promised what drummer Chris Chisnall called ‘a single of our own’, the Colchester quartet nevertheless had to suffice with Presage(s). Kent did find them support slots to Bauhaus and on a Modern English/In Camera bill, but the band’s next release wasn’t until 2004’s self-released posthumous compilation, Fragments Of Spasmodic Caress.

It was a good thing 4AD wasn’t staking its reputation on Presage(s) because, like three-quarters of the Axis clan, most of these bands went the same ignominious way – but then ‘presage’ did mean a sign, warning or omen that something typically bad will happen. In 1980, Psychotik Tanks self-released ‘Registered Electors’ (subsequently added to Presage(s)’ digital download version) but nothing more; Atkins would only ever release one more EP (including the original, and a second version, of ‘Hunk Of A Punk’), and that was twenty-five years later. Both Last Dance and C.V.O. would never release another record.

One of the most anonymous artefacts in the 4AD catalogue was followed by one of its most prized, with Ivo’s A&R antennae finely attuned this time. If Bauhaus supplied the foundation and Rema-Rema had shown what heights could be scaled, The Birthday Party was the real beginning of 4AD’s inexorable climb. It’s been so long since the band was on 4AD, it’s generally forgotten that this is where Nick Cave first landed outside of his native Australia.

Hailing from Melbourne, the capital of the south-eastern state of Victoria, The Birthday Party had only been on British soil for a handful of months when Ivo first saw them live in 1980. According to founding member Mick Harvey, the band were in a state of flux, aware that they were having to start again at the bottom of the ladder, as they’d had to in Melbourne five years earlier when they were known as The Boys Next Door.

As Harvey recalls, the band had outgrown their home city and set their sights on conquering the northern hemisphere, taking the usual Antipodean route to London. Given the quintet’s original, discordant brew of rampant blues, garage rock and Stooges-style punk, London had never seen anything like The Birthday Party. The reverse was equally true.

‘I don’t feel that way anymore, but I originally developed an intense, blind, boiling hatred for England,’ Cave told me in an interview for the Dutch magazine OOR in 1992. ‘Everything was so mediocre. All the bands were weak and limp-wristed, and I was so pissed off.’

Harvey is more ambivalent about the experience. ‘Yes, it would have been horrible for an unemployable drug addict,’ referring to singer Cave (and guitarist Rowland S. Howard, who died of liver cancer, aged fifty, in 2009). ‘It wasn’t the same experience for the rest of us, but London was a pretty tough, draining place. It felt severe and a bit hopeless.’

Swapping Australia’s relative stability, sunshine and wide open spaces for the bitter resignation and winter blues of Britain only drove Cave and the remaining Party members to more agitated states, though they didn’t persist with the kind of songs that attempted to address Melbourne’s own stifling conservatism, such as ‘Masturbation Nation’. It was one of the few original songs by The Boys Next Door, formed by teenage friends Harvey, Cave and (drummer) Phill Calvert, one half of a school band at Caulfield Grammar that had split off to form a new union with bassist Tracy Pew after school was out in 1975. The band had mostly churned out covers of rebel anthems from the glam and punk songbooks, but Howard’s addition in 1978 brought a choppier, scything style of play and a bluesy, expressionist mood to match Cave’s increasingly oblique lyrics.

‘We incorporated punk and new wave into our sound, but we weren’t interested in being The Damned,’ Harvey recalls. ‘We were more Pere Ubu, Pop Group, and The Cramps. By 1979, we’d found our own direction.’

That year’s debut album Door, Door was followed by a change of name, to The Birthday Party, and of location, to a squat in west London’s budget-conscious Antipodean stronghold of Earls Court. ‘We arrived in London on a wing and a prayer, completely unknown,’ says Harvey. ‘It was difficult to get gigs, and we spent a lot of time working out how to.’

The Birthday Party was the first band Ivo signed after seeing a concert, and there wasn’t to be another for eleven years. He’d seen them by chance, at their second ever UK show, at north-west London’s Moonlight Club; he’d gone to watch The Lines, whose manager was Steve Brown, Ivo’s travel companion from the Moroccan trip. German synth duo D.A.F. was top of the bill; the Australians had played first. Ivo was captivated by the uncompromising dynamic sound, especially Harvey’s Farfisa organ sound on ‘Mr Clarinet’, though, he noticed, ‘nobody else was paying any attention to what someone described to me as “some bunch of Aussie weirdos”.’

It turned out that Daniel Miller had been paying attention. Miller, who had started Mute Records to release his own records (The Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’/(‘Warn Leatherette’), had expanded the label by signing D.A.F., and was responsible for The Birthday Party opening the show. ‘We’d gone to see Daniel because he’d sunk money into getting D.A.F., and also Depeche Mode, going,’ recalls Harvey. ‘Daniel was very encouraging but said he couldn’t take on anything else. But Ivo expressed great interest. We’d heard of 4AD, and it was obvious that we weren’t a commercial prospect, so we knew his interest was genuine.’

Harvey invited Ivo down to The Birthday Party’s next show; afterwards, Ivo discovered that his favourite song in their set, ‘The Friend Catcher’, had been recorded back in Melbourne, and 4AD could have it for a single. ‘The band came into the shop with the tapes and a grainy black-and-white photo of a cake they’d bought and stuck a candle in, and that was the artwork,’ Ivo recalls. ‘There weren’t many great sleeves in that first year.’

In September 1980, the band recorded a session for BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who had given Bauhaus the same accolade. In October, 4AD released ‘The Friend Catcher’ though not the album that had been recorded in Melbourne before moving to London (the Australian label Missing Link released it in November 1980), as The Birthday Party preferred to concentrate on their new material, fuelled by the hardships of London and the bile of their response.

PR Chris Carr set to work promoting ‘The Friend Catcher’, starting with a slew of live reviews. ‘The initial reaction was, “What’s with the stupid name?”’ Carr recalls. ‘I told journalists that The Birthday Party was a Harold Pinter play, and they’d say, “I know, but it’s still a stupid name for a band.” It was like some unwritten rule.’

Carr could see that part of the problem lay with 4AD itself, being associated with the vehemently disliked Bauhaus. ‘In those days, your roster was your advertising and it took a long while for 4AD to get the same kudos that Mute or Factory had,’ Carr says. ‘People didn’t like Bauhaus’ artistic pretensions and Modern English, for example, were seen as too fey for what was going on around them, and so they could never get established.’

With a proven audience and earning power back home, and an album to promote, The Birthday Party returned to Australia in late November for the summer. Funded by Missing Link, they began recording a new album. In the meantime, 4AD had just released its first ever album.

Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field had been recorded at London’s Southern Studios: ‘It was like a bunker, which made things very intense,’ recalls David J. ‘We had formed in isolation, and the album reflected that we felt like outsiders.’ The sound of the album mirrored the claustrophobic conditions, and without any objective input from 4AD, who respected the band’s wishes to go it alone, they’d failed to record a defining debut. It had a defining opener in the stentorian ‘Double Dare’, but this was the licensed Peel session version as they hadn’t managed to match its quality by themselves. ‘The album wasn’t that good a representation of Bauhaus, unlike their singles, which were always great,’ says Ivo. ‘The situation over “Double Dare” underlined what was wrong.’

The album showed that Bauhaus was not to be swayed by criticism. ‘Terror Couple Kills Colonel’ may have changed tack but the album tracks ‘St Vitus Dance’ and ‘Stigmata Martyr’ could not have been a more resolute renewal of goth tendencies, with Murphy in the central crucified role. Their resolution was rewarded when In The Flat Field topped the independent charts and reached number 72 on the national UK chart. This was despite an unusually vindictive reaction from the music press. ‘Nine meaningless moans and flails bereft of even the most cursory contour of interest,’ said NME. ‘Too priggish and conceited. Sluggish indulgence instead of hoped for goth-ness,’ claimed Sounds.

That Sounds wanted more ‘goth-ness’ was an irony that Bauhaus’ fragile ego was unable to appreciate. ‘We really had our backs to the wall,’ Haskins Dompe recalls. ‘We got slammed for the Bowie influence, and the press also felt we were really pretentious. It took me twenty years to accept we were, to a degree, but at the time I wouldn’t hear of it. It was us against the world.’

‘The zeitgeist was dark and intense, but I thought “gothic” was the antithesis of Bauhaus,’ claims David J. ‘We felt more eclectic, with influences like dub and early electronics like Suicide, Can and disco. Out of our peers, we felt most empathy with Joy Division. When [Joy Division singer] Ian Curtis said he liked Bauhaus, it meant a lot. He came to see us play and told us he had our singles.’

Retrospection has been kinder to Bauhaus. Simon Reynolds, author of the seminal post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again, claimed that Bauhaus were the exception to the rule that goth bands ‘didn’t live up to the image’. Reynolds also favourably compared Bauhaus’ early singles to Joy Division. ‘If we had dressed like Gang of Four or Joy Division we wouldn’t have been hated,’ Pete Murphy told Stool Pigeon writer John Doran in 2008. ‘And there was a really strong homoerotic element to what we did – a glamorous element; a very Wildean element.’

Ivo didn’t care either. He dismissed labelling and ideas of what was perceived as cool or not – all that mattered was music and an artist’s self-belief. ‘I never understood the gothic association,’ he says. ‘If people think the music was dark, that’s fine by me. I was just responding to things I enjoyed, that I emotionally connected to, that had possibilities.’

‘The music fitted Ivo’s character, dark and personal,’ says Martin Mills. ‘The pop world was on a completely different shelf.’

Disappointed by the Bauhaus album, Ivo was also struggling to fall for Rema-Rema’s successor, Mass: ‘I liked them enormously as people, but musically, they were an anomaly.’ With Max departing alongside boyfriend Marco Pirroni, the remaining nucleus of Mick Allen, Mark Cox and Gary Asquith found a drummer who was already looking for them: Danny Briottet, a schoolboy who would hang out in Beggars’ Ealing shop. ‘Danny said he really liked Rema-Rema, and to tell them that he’d like to be their drummer,’ says Ivo. ‘The next thing I know, Mass had formed and Danny – who couldn’t play drums! – was in. Was he going to ruin it?’

‘The one thing about Mass I don’t like is the stiff drums,’ says Asquith, who nevertheless went on to form Renegade Soundwave with Briottet (who proved to be a much better programmer than drummer). ‘And we didn’t have Marco’s brilliance. But Mick was a great bassist. And the source of songs was just as good.’

Cox had been Marco’s number one fan but could see Mick Allen had come into his own. ‘Picture this super-slim guy with unkempt hair, kind of quiet, who had flowered into this multi-faceted personality. And our sound was completely uncompromised. We wouldn’t mould anything for anyone.’

Mass’ 4AD debut was a seven-inch single that rivalled In Camera for dark and personal, with a side serving of bleak. ‘You And I’ followed in the eerie slipstream of Rema-Rema’s ‘Fond Affections’, laced with an organ drone, background cries and only an occasional tom-tom roll to lend momentum. The thick bass pulse, layered vocal extortions and thumped drums similarly recalled the old band but the feel and mood was more leaden, without the same degree of liberation. Not even John Peel was on side. ‘He thought it some of the most consciously morose music he’d ever heard,’ Cox sighs. And, as Ivo recalls, ‘Peel’s support made all the difference in those days.’

Mass was the perfect example of a band driven by a fearless self-will, in the truest sense of punk’s do-it-yourself mentality. As they walked on stage for their first show, third on the bill to Bauhaus at the University of London, Cox recalls Asquith facing the audience and announcing, ‘I fucking hate students!’ At the Moonlight Club, Ivo remembers Mass receiving no applause after a song and Asquith yelling, ‘We’ve never been loved!’ But at the same show, Ivo adds, ‘I was mesmerised by Mick crooning “You And I” quite beautifully.’

‘We used to call Mass “Mess” because they lacked direction,’ says Richie Thomas, whose instrumental band Dif Juz had supported Mass at central London’s Heaven nightclub. ‘But they had a really interesting look: Germanic, like Bowie circa Low, but upmarket. Gary looked edgy and dangerous, like a tightly coiled spring.’

At least Mass had style. Modern English had a guitarist with a stegosaurus haircut, but fortunately their second single ‘Gathering Dust’ showed a noticeable progress in dynamics, structure and impact. ‘It’s one of the most underrated of post-punk anthems,’ Ivo reckons, who gets credit from the band for his contribution.

Mick Conroy: ‘Ivo was quiet at the beginning of our relationship, probably because he was focused on 4AD. But he got stuck in to “Gathering Dust”. The studio was as much an adventure for him as us. For example, he really liked Steve’s synth noises, which Steve couldn’t easily control, so Ivo had the idea to put it all through an Eventide harmoniser.’

Ivo: ‘Fucking hell! It was my first taste of influencing a recording, and I loved it. But the only reason I got a producer credit was that the band were practically asleep under the desk, and the engineer had to get approval from someone, so I’d say yes to things.’

After the haphazard art direction of 4AD’s early sleeves, including the unsuitably fey figurine on the cover of ‘Swans On Glass’, Modern English – and 4AD generally – needed art direction as well. ‘Ivo told us that someone was coming in with his portfolio,’ recalls Conroy.

An exquisitely designed house in Epsom, Surrey, from the furniture and ornamental bric-a-brac to the shelves of hefty art books, framed posters and wooden sculptures – this has to be the property of an artist. The drawers of big, elegant wooden plan chests dotted all over reveal copious sheaves of artwork: proofs of record sleeves, posters, adverts, most of it vintage, all evidence of a rich body of work.

The owner of the artwork, the man responsible for a lot of the surrounding designer detail, is as integral to the 4AD story as Ivo. There for the long run, he worked on endlessly bewitching, beguiling and beautiful images from his own warped imagination and those of his close collaborators; images that have been exhibited nationally and internationally, published in books and catalogues, and with countless dedicated designers and illustrators pledging allegiance to a body of work they claim irrevocably changed their lives.

This is also a man who, for one particular sleeve image, stripped down to his underpants in a suburban London flat, strapped on a belt of dead eels and enacted a fertility dance for the camera. To say Vaughan Oliver is a character is an understatement. Everyone who ever worked for, or released a record on, 4AD during its first twenty years, has their Vaughan story. He might as well get his version in first.

‘The first thing I ever wrote on a toilet wall,’ he says, ‘were the words “To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy”. So said French photographer Robert Doisneau, and it struck me as the perspective that I come from. To keep things open to interpretation.’

In the spirit of Doisneau, Oliver shouldn’t really recount the inspiration behind the belt of dead eels, but it’s too good to resist. ‘It was a reaction to an all-girl band, called The Breeders, their album title Pod and the vibrant colours I was getting from the music,’ he explains. ‘To me, it needed a strong male response. The eels are phallic, but I’d seen an image of a belt of frankfurters that stuck in my mind, so I developed that. When it came to shoot it, I couldn’t get anyone else to do the job, so I did it. There was blood everywhere … but I knew one of the shots would work!’

Oliver hails from County Durham in the Wearside region of north-east England. According to Tim Hall, who joined 4AD in the mid-1990s, ‘Vaughan is brilliant and mad, he likes a drink, and he was sometimes a big, scary Geordie! [Oliver would like to point out that he is proud to be a Wearsider, a subtle geographic distinction.] The first thing he said to me was, “Do you know who I am; do you know my work, my reputation?” He was just checking that someone who was joining 4AD understood its legacy.’

‘That doesn’t sound like me,’ Oliver contends. ‘People didn’t always hear the irony and the humour in what I’d say.’

This helps explain why Oliver’s recent talk to an audience in Edinburgh about his career, work and inspiration was entitled What’s in the Bucket Daddy? ‘A bucket is a universal symbol, up there with the wheel,’ he explains. ‘There’s humility to a bucket, but put a logo on it and it clashes. The collision of the glamour of a logo and the bucket’s humility is funny to me. In 1995, we had an exhibition, and me and [business partner] Chris Bigg were discussing the death of vinyl and the record sleeve, and we thought it would be funny to have under each exhibition piece a bucket with a melted piece of vinyl, like it was thrown away.’

In the days when vinyl was the unparalleled medium and the scope of the twelve-inch format allowed room to create as well as describe, Oliver attended Ferryhill Grammar School. ‘Sanctuary was the art room, where we’d talk about art, girls, football and music,’ he recalls. The lurid, sexual glamour of Roxy Music’s album sleeves, Roger Dean’s sci-fi landscapes and the surreal creations of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell’s design group Hipgnosis were his early key inspirations: ‘They all used their imagination, rather than put a band on the front. It opened me to ideas.’

Rather than a foundation course in art, Oliver naïvely applied to the nearby Newcastle Polytechnic to study graphic design, ‘Even though I didn’t even know what “graphic design” meant,’ he says, ‘until I read the dictionary definition the morning of my interview. I just hoped the course would lead me to sleeve design.’

Oliver was also fortunate to have a wildly creative course tutor in Terry Dowling: ‘He showed me the idea of inspiration being all around. He elevated the banal for me, by showing me stuff that was on his wall, things like pasta alphabets, stuff that he’d take from the street. It was a new way of seeing, a new kind of beauty. He basically changed my mind.’

Although painfully shy, Oliver nevertheless moved down to London in 1980 and quickly found work at the design agency Benchmark, where he worked for clients such as model kit manufacturers Airfix. Benchmark also employed fellow designers Alan McDonald and Mark Robertson, who were friends of Peter Kent; Robertson had designed the original Axis and 4AD logos and the ‘Swans On Glass’ cover for Modern English. When Ivo wanted more art direction for ‘Gathering Dust’, Robertson happened to be abroad and Oliver was sent in his place.

‘The door cracked open,’ Ivo recalls, ‘and this head just came in, curly hair and a short back and sides, brown flying jacket, and a beetroot blush of a face.’

It helped Oliver’s case that his portfolio included a silhouette of a 1967 photograph by Diane Arbus, of a seated naked couple in a deeply suburban living room. Modern English had used the very image for a mock-up, sticking the image inside a TV screen (their debut single had featured a cracked TV screen with the band logo inside). Oliver simply placed the TV screen/logo between the silhouetted couple, gave it a radiant red and black contrast, and hey presto. ‘We leapt at it,’ says Mick Conroy.

In 2011, Guardian’s ‘50 key events in the history of indie music’ put the cover of ‘Gathering Dust’ at number 23, in between ‘Joy Division’s Ian Curtis commits suicide’ and ‘Depeche Mode take their baby steps’, and four places below, ‘Bauhaus invent goth’. ‘The sleeve,’ wrote Michael Hann, ‘was nothing special, aside from the fact it was designed by Vaughan Oliver, commencing a relationship between Oliver and the 4AD label that rivalled that between Peter Saville and Factory Records. Oliver’s sleeve designs – abstract, dreamlike, elegant – seemed to be a perfect visual representation of the label’s music, which was often, unsurprisingly, abstract, dreamlike, elegant.’

At every Birthday Party gig or 4AD show over the next couple of years, Ivo remembers, ‘Vaughan talking into my ear about building an overall identity for the label and, ultimately, a trademark, and me giving him a job! It had already occurred to me because of what Peter Saville had done for Factory, providing a continuity that people would come to trust.’

Oliver: ‘I’d bump into Ivo at gigs. I had got my foot in the door and wouldn’t take it out! I was obsessed with the idea of working for an independent label and I would have told Ivo he needed a logo and consistency, to express identity. The role models were [German jazz label] ECM and before that, [American jazz label] Blue Note. Ivo got the idea straight away. In my mind, he wasn’t into selling units; he loved the music and wanted people to hear it, and he cared so much about it that he wanted to package it properly.’

At the time, Oliver was only retained on an occasional basis, as the later pattern of outsourcing to one designer had yet to be cemented. Knowing what Oliver added to 4AD, it’s easy to see in retrospect what was missing from the label’s early records. Take the next 4AD release: an album housed in overlaid grey squares. It was an accurate mirror of the music’s electronic ambient murk, but the artwork had no enticement or intrigue to draw in potential purchasers.

The album, 3R4, was released under the name B.C. Gilbert/G. Lewis: ‘The name changes were helpful for our own sense of what things were,’ Graham Lewis explains. It comprised two very brief instrumentals, both called ‘Barge Calm’, and two much lengthier works, ‘3.4 …’ and ‘R’, respective Lewis and Gilbert solo pieces. Anyone who appreciated the films of Russia’s visionary, impressionist director Andrei Tarkovsky, or animation specialists Stephen and Timothy Quay (who had illustrated posters for the Dome 1 and 2 albums), could see the same forces at work in these potential soundtracks: they dripped mood and texture, ominous and otherworldly.

It was just as well that Ivo wasn’t driven commercially, since 3R4 slotted neatly into the ‘Difficult Music For Tiny Audiences’ category (also in a sleeve of overlaid grey squares). Compare this to the following 4AD release, with Peter Kent in the A&R seat. Bauhaus’ new single was a cover of glam rock icons T. Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’, deftly reworked as stark, strutting rock-disco. It seemed to say that if Bauhaus could have credibility, they could be loved, or they could at least be rock stars. It couldn’t have been a more blatant chart-bothering tactic, not until, that is, they released a cover of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ in 1982.

Ivo: ‘The band had changed since I’d first met them. They used to play “Telegram Sam” as an encore, and they said they’d never record it. But in less than a year, it was a single.’

As mentioned earlier, 4AD’s original intention had been to provide bands for Beggars Banquet if it made commercial sense. Both band and label could see this was the way forward. ‘4AD had been the perfect label for us,’ says David J. ‘They understood what we were about, they were very supportive, and people respected us because they respected 4AD. But it went as far as it could.’

Peter Murphy: ‘We didn’t want to be consigned to an independent music ghetto, to be sub-Ivo kids; we wanted to be massive. Anyway, as 4AD progressed, Ivo started to magnetise the centre of what became known as 4AD, and then once Vaughan got a hold of the artwork, everyone looked the same to me. Fuck that!’

David J: ‘We were crafting what we saw as dark pop singles, and live we put on a show, not traditional but theatrical, while Ivo was going more experimental and introverted. He had told me that Bauhaus was becoming too rock’n’roll for the label, and not obscure enough. Daniel and Peter would take the piss out of Ivo because the music and the sleeves were becoming too obscure, to the extreme, like an in-joke. We wanted to be on Top of the Pops and have hit singles – but on our own terms. So there was a natural parting of the ways When Ivo suggested we move to Beggars, we didn’t have to think twice.’

Ivo: ‘Within a year, Bauhaus had released four singles, and an album, and gone from being spat on by Magazine fans to headlining [London venue] the Lyceum. They needed the push and resources available to them at Beggars. If we’d fought to keep Bauhaus, for me it would’ve involved far too much chatting with video makers and worrying what the next single would be.’ Ivo also counters David J’s claim he was keen on obscurity: ‘I can’t say I ever consciously looked for anything obscure, but I may well have been put off by something too mainstream.’

4AD’s next release bridged the gap between obscurity and the mainstream, between Ivo and Peter Kent’s tastes and hopes. Ivo recalls Dance Chapter turning up at Hogarth Road, the week that Ian Curtis killed himself. Joy Division’s talisman was already a totemic leader, and the shock of his death was almost like the aftermath of the Che Guevara scenario, the loss of a spiritual leader. In the shop, Ivo recalls a girl sobbing at the counter after hearing the news. ‘Out of that, we got to wondering who would fill Ian’s shoes. Soon enough, Peter buzzed me from downstairs, saying, “Remember that conversation? Well, they’ve just walked in”.’

‘I read something on the internet along those lines, but that wasn’t verbalised to me,’ says Dance Chapter’s vocalist Cyrus Bruton. ‘Ian Curtis was Ian Curtis, and no one could step into those shoes. I never even entertained the idea.’

Bruton currently lives in Berlin, with a community that follows the teachings of the late Indian spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He moved to Germany in 1985, between extended visits to India and, he says, ‘I never looked back.’ The same can be said of his short tenure as a singer, as he hasn’t made music for almost three decades, though he has DJed at various communes. His main concern, he says, is offering ‘public satsangs’, meaning spiritual teachings.

Heralding from Leeds in Yorkshire, Dance Chapter was on a tour of London’s independent labels with their demo cassette when they walked into the shop. Born in Woking, south of London, to mixed-race parents, the young Cyrus, like Marx Cox and Graham Lewis before him, had primarily been a fan of black music swayed by punk rock and what he calls its ‘anyone-can-do-it rules’. ‘I wanted to be hands-on and form a band,’ he says. He soon joined forces with school friends Stuart Dunbar (bass), Andrew Jagger (guitar, later replaced by Steve Hadfield) and Jonnie Lawrence (drums). Choosing the name Dance Chapter showed Bruton was an unusually questioning teenager: ‘A chapter is a collective,’ he explains. ‘We were punk, but I wanted something more about dance and celebration.’

Bruton says Dance Chapter, ‘were pretty focused, given we were four young men who liked to drink and take other things’. 4AD was a natural target: ‘They were one of the cutting-edge labels around and it already felt that was the level to reach.’

The self-produced debut single ‘Anonymity’ is another buried treasure from 4AD’s early era, closer to Joy Division’s first incarnation Warsaw than the finished article, with a similarly tense, interlocking energy. Bruton was an unusually melodic singer, and his repeated lyric, ‘a piece of recognition is all I ask, bring me flowers’, was delivered with a palpable yearning. ‘We were striving for something that you want to get from the outside world,’ Bruton explains. ‘But if you can’t get it, then you can only give it to yourself. Even if it’s only flowers!’

The B-side ‘New Dance’ revealed a more existential valediction. ‘I was speaking of knowing that falling down is the only way to truth,’ says Bruton. ‘That pain and insecurity is needed so an authentic expression can then come through. It was about vulnerability, and the need to find expression, to join together. People needed guidance, which wasn’t as forthcoming as it should have been.’

This was the kind of poignant struggle and musical euphoria that could have had an impact on the same level as Ian Curtis and Joy Division – you could see what Peter Kent had meant when he first heard them. But Ivo was unconvinced. ‘Peter wasn’t right about the Joy Division bit,’ he says, ‘and I can’t say Dance Chapter were a great band because I only saw them play twice. But they had some gorgeous songs, and I loved Cyrus’s voice.’

Perhaps if Kent had stuck around, he could have mentored the young and questioning Bruton. But as 4AD’s first year drew to a close, the risk of a split vision between 4AD’s two A&R sources – who might not truly believe in the other’s choices – was quashed when Kent decided he’d change tack.

Neither Ivo nor Peter Kent remembers their relationship getting fractious, even though they were both hugely opinionated. ‘Ivo could be a little bit bitchy, and headstrong,’ Gary Asquith recalls, ‘and no one wanted to play second fiddle, least of all Peter.’ Asquith and Kent had become close friends in a short period of time. ‘Peter was a strange cat,’ Asquith contends. ‘Geminis I’ve known have their own agenda, and they never seem to be happy. He was a very curious person, but he didn’t know what he wanted, and he constantly moved on to the next thing. I think he found it hard to live with himself.’

‘My attention,’ Kent says, ‘was elsewhere than 4AD.’

Besides promoting shows (such as his regular Rock Garden slot The Fake Club), Kent was tour-managing Bauhaus and doing some A&R for Beggars Banquet: his first signing there was the London jazz-funk band Freeez, who broke into the top 50 at the first attempt. But most importantly, Kent had met Billy MacKenzie at Heaven: ‘We’d gotten on like a house on fire, so I said I’d come and work with him and Alan.’

Alan Rankine was MacKenzie’s creative foil in The Associates, one of the greatest bands of that era. Both men were sublimely gifted, precocious and fairly uncontrollable Scottish mavericks, and totally up Kent’s alley. Overtly Bowie-influenced (their 1979 debut single was a cover of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, cannily released just six weeks after Bowie’s own version), they weren’t just dashingly handsome but fashion-conscious too. The pair had released an album, The Affectionate Punch, on Fiction, an offshoot of the major label Polydor, but they were open to new offers. The Associates’ increasing experimental daring, combined with an arch playfulness, would have considerably brightened up 4AD’s procession of brooding young men who, to paraphrase Ian Curtis, had ‘weight on their shoulders’.

Steve Webbon: ‘Peter was exuberant and camp, mischievous, while Ivo aligned himself with the introverts, all the miserable ones!’

Kent had certainly sensed the same schism. On tour with Bauhaus in the States for the first time, he had familiarised himself with the demi-monde underground scene. Back in London, he told Ivo he wanted to license two singles from Chicago’s Wax Trax label: the punk-trashy ‘Born To Be Cheap’ by Divine – People magazine’s ‘drag queen of the century’ and star of John Walters’ cult transgressive-trash films – and ‘Cold Life’ by Ministry, a new, edgy synth-pop band (yet to turn into fearsome industrial-metal). When Ivo resisted, ‘that’s when I realised we had a different idea of where 4AD was heading,’ Kent recalls. ‘I wanted us to be more eclectic and diverse. So I slipped away from 4AD.’4

‘I’m glad Peter didn’t stay,’ says Ivo. ‘Can you imagine Divine on 4AD? The best way to describe it is, I don’t like being around people but Peter thrived in those situations, like being backstage after a show. He wanted everything at the label to grow, whereas I found anything beside the finished album was unnecessary. My head is filled with ecstatic memories of the live experience, but the part that’s always meant most is the one-on-one relationship between the listener and a recorded piece of work, the artefact that will stand for all time.

‘Some people, within bands and the music industry, thrive on the idea of being involved in rock’n’roll. Doesn’t [future Creation label MD] Alan McGee say the only reason he got into the music business was to get rich, take drugs and fuck women? I don’t even like being around people enough for that to have an appeal. I guess I was the nerdy one at home with headphones on scanning the album sleeve.’

It all worked out neatly, as Bauhaus and Kent departed at the same time. 4AD’s first year of business concluded by it being made a limited company, no longer dependent on funds from the Beggars’ mothership after the release of In The Flat Field. There was one more 1980 release to come: In Camera’s IV Songs EP had been recorded at Blackwing with Eric Radcliffe assisted by junior engineer John Fryer, who captured a feeling of weighty oppression. The opening track ‘The Conversation’ (another film reference) was a particularly solemn instrumental, and the bass line of ‘Legion’ was another echo of Joy Division, just like ‘The Attic’ was an echo of Warsaw’s primitive dynamic, reduced by In Camera to an even starker, flatter sound.

‘The production values were nearer to our live sound; meatier drums and more avant-garde than the PiL and Banshees influences,’ suggests Andrew Gray. ‘We, and Ivo, were really happy with it.’

IV Songs was more proof that Ivo was content to put out records that were committed, passionate and uncompromising, though, looking back, the cumulative effect of the catalogue – Red Atkins notwithstanding – was fifty shades of black. The gloom was claustrophobic. Where was the light and shade, the fuller spectrum of humanity? ‘Musically, that was the era,’ Ivo argues. ‘And to paraphrase [American pianist] Harold Budd, I was suspicious of anything that is enjoyed by the masses. I don’t think pop artists would have come to 4AD in any case.’

Colin Newman, the next Wire member to strike a deal with Ivo, thought 4AD had its limitations at the beginning. ‘Everything was in black and white. And I didn’t think most of the records Ivo had released were that good. Cherry Red was a similar label: sketchy, a bit homemade, mawkish and interior-looking. Bauhaus was the exception.’

‘Back then, I didn’t know what I was doing on any level,’ Ivo admits. ‘Peter and I were learning what running a label involved. We were lucky that Bauhaus effectively funded the next year. I’ll always be proud to have released their records, and eternally grateful too, because without their speedy success, despite the British press, 4AD might have struggled to pay for albums the following year. It started a trend that continued for a decade; each year, I was lucky enough to start working with at least one key band or artist. One album a year did pretty well and allowed us to keep going.’

Towards the end of 1980, Ivo did his first interview with Lynnette Turner, who ran the Station Alien fanzine. ‘She said, “I just want to get to you before anyone else does”. She knew something was stirring.’

There was more stirring than just music: ‘Lynnette and I pretty much fell in love at that first meeting and ended up living together for the next two years,’ says Ivo. This came after another upturn in his life; Beggars had suggested that he should stop working in the shop and concentrate full-time on 4AD: ‘It was the first time I’d ever felt truly, giddily happy,’ he recalls.

But with Ivo left in sole charge, without Peter Kent’s man-about-town demeanour and his greater potential for playfulness, how dark and personal might 4AD become?

1 Of all Axis’ lesser-known luminaries, Bearz producer and keyboard session player David Lord has done the best, as an engineer/producer for artists such as Peter Gabriel, Tears For Fears, Peter Hammill, Tori Amos and Goldfrapp. David ‘Fast Set’ Knight became a studio-based collaborator (and lover) of British singer-cum-performance artist Danielle Dax. However, Shox vocalist Jacqui Brookes fronted the synth-pop band Siam and released a solo album, Sob Stories, for major label MCA.

2 Kevin Haskins Dompe: ‘Peter Kent tour managed us when we got an offer to support Magazine. We didn’t know that Peter was gay, and he booked the band into gay bed and breakfasts around the UK. One had Playgirl centrefolds stuck on the walls! We had some funny interludes. All of us wore make-up then and flirted with our feminine side, so after the gig, with all our gear on, down in the bar … the clientele made some assumptions! There were bums pinched. Peter found it very funny.’

3 Daniel Miller, who ran Mute Records, also regularly used Blackwing – from his electronic-pop pastiche Music For Parties under the alias Silicon Teens to sessions for his two most popular acts, Depeche Mode and Yazoo, whose debut album title Upstairs At Eric’s referred to Blackwing’s owner Eric Radcliffe.

4 Beggars Banquet gave Peter Kent financial backing to start a new label that he called Situation 2 (Bauhaus’ original management company was called Situation 1). The label’s first releases were an astounding run of Associates twelve-inch singles (later compiled on Fourth Drawer Down), one a month, for five months. ‘I can’t think of a better and more original introduction to a label than Peter releasing those Associates singles in that way,’ Ivo reckons. ‘It was crazy, because what would have happened if one was a hit? Would you release the next single?’ Kent ran Situation 2 for only a year before he started managing Associates and signed them to Warners. At the end of 1982, illness forced Kent to live a quieter life. He moved to Spain to open a restaurant, though he later worked for Brussels-based independent label/distributor Play It Again Sam before relocating to Chicago.