Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston
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