Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston
Newman.
Newman had been raised in the thrills-free province of Newbury, 60 miles west of London, and attended art school in the marginally more engaging city of Winchester and near to the capital in Watford, which had London pretensions without its credibility. Newman thought he’d be an illustrator, but admits, ‘I wasn’t very good. I was at art school to join a band.’ After being asked to sing in an end-of-term performance by the college audio-visual technician, Bruce Gilbert, Newman had found his vocation, adding pop nous and oblique lyricism to the Wire formula.
When the band had fractured, Wire’s manager Mike Thorne had approached Martin Mills at Beggars Banquet, who used some of the Gary Numan profits to fund Newman’s album A–Z. Newman didn’t arrive at 4AD via his Wire bandmates or even Beggars, but after meeting Peter Kent at a party. Kent had, in turn, introduced Newman to Ivo, knowing they’d have much in common: both were the same age (twenty-seven), they both loved Spirit and the late British folk rock singer-songwriter Nick Drake – to Newman’s surprise, ‘as I thought nobody else knew him then’. The musical conversation had turned to an instrumental record that Newman had in mind, and Ivo was happy to have another Wire representative on board. ‘I liked Colin, and I’d loved A–Z, which to me was the great lost fourth Wire album. And I thought he would do something good again. And he did.’
On Newman’s side, Ivo felt he’d benefit from having access to the independent charts. ‘That was one of his lines,’ Newman recalls, ‘and I’m sure it was true. But that wasn’t why I made the record. I wanted to do an alternative to a “song” record.’
Newman recorded all twelve impressionistic tracks – titled ‘Fish One’ to ‘Fish 12’ – of Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish by himself (except for ‘Fish Nine’, which featured Wire drummer Robert Gotobed). ‘It was ahead of its time,’ he feels. ‘People would later do the same with sequencers and sampler, fiddling with varispeeds, flying stuff in off different tapes, building music by layers and extemporised in the studio.’
There was an appreciation for Newman’s ‘wealth of nuance in such a stripped structure’, according to NME, in a review that concluded by noting ‘surreal dreamscapes whose icy beauty is unusually attractive’. But the only instrumental, filmic exercises that had more than a limited esoteric appeal came from former Roxy Music synth magus – and inventor of ambient music – Brian Eno. Singing Fish was too rarefied to compete.
‘It upsets me greatly that what Colin did on 4AD is written out of our history,’ says Ivo. ‘But not as upset as when it happened to Dif Juz.’
Few bands set an agenda that would be barely acknowledged at the time, and yet emulated by so many in years to come, as Dif Juz. While Colin Newman had been experimenting without voices, the London-based quartet was instrumental from the off, laying the groundwork for what became known as post-rock during the mid-Nineties, a genre that eschewed the rhythm and blues-based recycling of rock’n’roll cliché for a more striking, freeform approach. Shorn of words, Dif Juz’s only point of view was an exploratory fusion, which pinpointed 4AD’s willingness to allow artists to exist in worlds only of their own making.
The saga of Dif Juz is uniquely mesmerising if only for what came after – or what didn’t. So total is the disappearance of the band’s creative hub, guitarists and brothers Alan and David Curtis, that not even their former bandmates Richie Thomas and Gary Bromley know of their current whereabouts. Neither does the band’s music publisher, who cannot send royalty cheques without personal details. There isn’t one lead online either. When 4AD released the Dif Juz CD compilation Soundpool in 1999, a website had temporarily appeared displaying the words, ‘By us about us’ and ‘more soon’. Since Dif Juz was imbued with mystery, from its name to its sound and song titles, it all has a rational, if sad, logic.
‘David and Alan were nice people. Quiet, reclusive, and great guitarists,’ is the memory of Dif Juz bassist Gary Bromley. The last time drummer Richie Thomas saw the Curtis brothers was in 2002 at his mum’s funeral: ‘They liked my mum. Alan was working as an electrician, and they’d do painting and decorating. They were just different. Your first impression of Alan was of a university graduate, very well spoken, and an intellectual. But he was a working-class kid, like me. David was cool, edgy, interesting, a great sense of humour, amiable, but volatile too. Things could go a bit crazy if he was pushed in the wrong direction. I saw him on stage once; his guitar kept cutting out, so he kicked the amp and punched out the stage light above his head. There was glass and smoke everywhere.’
The other curious aspect to the Curtis brothers, who hailed from Birmingham in the Midlands, was that the classically trained David Curtis was even, briefly, a member of the embryonic version of New Romantic icons Duran Duran (Andy Taylor took his place in the final, famous line-up). Legend has it that Curtis vanished one night, fearing for his safety, after Duran hired local nightclub owners as their managers.
Down in London, the brothers formed the punk band London Pride. Richie Thomas saw them play at the Windsor Castle pub. ‘I told the singer, “Your drummer’s shit”. He said, “OK, give me your number”. After we rehearsed, I joined.’
Raised in the same north-west London area as the Models/Rema/Mass boys – though being younger, he only crossed paths with them years later – Thomas tells a familiar tale of glam, hard and progressive rock habits surrendering to punk. He was just thirteen when he discovered the Sex Pistols: ‘They had so much energy, and when I bought a Damned album, that was it, I was gone.’ He even customised his own clothes, which got him vilified. ‘I always felt like an outcast, with everyone having a go at me,’ he says.
The same year, Thomas began drumming for a local band, Blackout. When he joined London Pride and met the Curtis brothers, he’d hang out at the band’s squat in nearby Alperton. ‘This north London gang had been after me so I went to live there, this druggy madhouse.’ Under the influence or not, Thomas embraced the brothers’ new plans, to make instrumental music, which began with a demo of ‘Hu’ that was re-recorded for the opening track of debut Dif Juz EP Huremics. ‘It sounded completely new and tantalising,’ Thomas recalls, ‘out of the Roxy Music school, but unlike anything I’d ever heard.’
No one is sure of the origins of the band’s name Dif Juz. Was it a variation on Different Jazz? Years later, Ivo heard it was to be spoken with a soft Hispanic accent, like, ‘diffuse’. Thomas’s memory is vague, but he says everyone was stoned at the time. ‘Someone asked about our name, which we didn’t yet have. Something was suggested on the spur of the moment, and later on, someone said, “What was that name again? Was it Dif Juz?” It was onomatopoeic, and it stuck. When people said it meant “Different Jazz”, we’d go along with it.’
Gary Bromley was another admitted stoner, who had also seen London Pride and met the Curtis brothers. Bromley now lives in Louisville, Kentucky (from where his wife hails), but he was raised in west Ealing, where a strong Jamaican community had given him an early taste for reggae and marijuana. Punk was just around the corner: Bromley says he spiked and dyed his hair, and joined a band, Satty Bender And The Gay Boys: ‘Homophobic, I know, but we didn’t know better back then,’ he says. Adulthood arrived alongside post-punk, and Bromley – a regular customer at the Beggars shop – took great interest in PiL bassist Jah Wobble’s adventures in dub. ‘But only after joining Dif Juz did I take the bass seriously,’ he admits.
Dif Juz’s lack of a singer, Bromley says, ‘was down to the necessity of the situation’. According to Thomas, the band auditioned some vocalists, but says, ‘It was hopeless; too much ego going on.’ In any case, a voice would have competed with the brothers’ musical foraging. It didn’t hold Dif Juz back; at only the band’s second show, at the west London pub The Clarendon, EMI’s progressive rock imprint Harvest, which had had a rebirth, made possible by signing Wire, offered to release an album – if they’d accept a producer of the label’s choice. ‘A few labels were interested, actually,’ Thomas confirms. ‘But we didn’t think anyone else would know what to do with our music. We felt very protective of it.’
Ivo attended the following Clarendon show a month later. ‘Word had got out,’ says Thomas. ‘I’d