Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston
‘Dif Juz had this husband-and-wife management, who brought me the tapes, and I really, really liked it. They were an interesting bunch. Gary had been at school with [Mass drummer] Danny Briottet, and he did the best Robert de Niro impression! He looked a bit like de Niro too.’
‘Ivo wanted us to make an album, but we didn’t want to be in debt, so we agreed on an EP, to see how things went,’ says Thomas. ‘Ivo was willing to take a chance and let us produce ourselves. The engineer said, “You can’t do that, you can’t move things around on the [mixing] desk, the EQ and faders”. I replied, “Is there a rulebook that says so?” I was adding reverb, making it quieter, and the guy started getting into it and suggested tape loops, extra echo and other effects.’
Recorded at Spaceward studio in Cambridge, ‘Hu’, ‘Re’, ‘Mi’ and ‘Cs’ made up the four-track EP Huremics, an imagined word that hinted at something indefinable, like the music, which stretched between rock, dub and ambient. Today, Dif Juz would be lauded by the tastemakers of the blogsphere, but in 1981, not even John Peel got it. ‘And as you know, you’ve got nowhere to go without Peel,’ says Ivo. ‘They never got off the ground.’
Undeterred, Dif Juz released a second EP, Vibrating Air, only months later. Thomas recalls rehearsals taking place religiously every Sunday: ‘We’d smoke pot and jam for hours, making the music we wanted to hear because no one else was.’ Recorded at Blackwing with John Fryer, who was now engineering a succession of 4AD recordings, the four new tracks were called ‘Heset’, ‘Diselt’, ‘Gunet’ and ‘Soarn’, all anagrams, spelling out These Songs Are Untitled. It was a dubbier affair than Huremics, setting it even further apart. ‘Dif Juz was ahead of its time, like so much of Ivo’s A&R,’ says Chris Carr. ‘Look at what happened to Modern English, and to Matt Johnson. Ivo went where others would eventually go. His view was, it may take time but it will flourish.’
Modern English had also been visitors at Spaceward and subsequently upped their game after Mesh & Lace with ‘Smiles And Laughter’, a sharper and sleeker single that restored Ivo’s faith: ‘The sound was again appropriate,’ he says. Yet Carr still found it hard to raise the band’s press profile. ‘Modern English were caught between two stools, on the edge of experimentation, but with a pop angle. Independent music was beginning to take off on radio, and while Daniel Miller employed radio pluggers for bands like Depeche Mode, Ivo wouldn’t do the same. He wasn’t willing to play that game. It was a judgement call, but also financial.’
Among Mute’s growing stable of synth-wielding acts, from cutting edge to pop, Depeche Mode gave the label daytime radio exposure and a profile that didn’t depend on John Peel or the music press. Ivo wasn’t even looking for pop acts, and pop acts weren’t looking for 4AD. Not that the label wasn’t a repository of great singles, such as The Birthday Party’s ‘Release The Bats’, recorded after the band had returned to London, and the perfect lurching anthem to make the most of the band’s burgeoning popularity.
The single topped the independent charts for three weeks in August. With the lyric concluding, ‘Horror bat, bite!/ Cool machine, bite!/ Sex vampire, bite!’, Nick Cave may have intended a withering parody of the goth theatrics he’d witnessed close up on tour with Bauhaus, but ‘Release The Bats’ is considered a genre classic, making number 7 (one place behind ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’) in NME’s ‘20 Greatest Goth Tracks’ list in 2009, claiming, ‘Here was a compelling sonic template for goth’s lunatic fringe.’
A month later, in September 1981, The Birthday Party made their maiden voyage to the USA. It was literally a riot by all accounts, with interrupted and cancelled shows, blood spilt and audiences riled. According to band biographer Ian Johnston, at the band’s US debut in New York City, Cave weaved the microphone lead around a woman’s throat and screamed, ‘Express yourself’, and the next night, he repeatedly beat his head on the snare drum (both shows got cancelled). It was followed by a debut European tour and a short UK tour, where the hostility didn’t let up. Ivo was starting to have doubts. ‘The shows were very exciting but it had got too rock’n’roll for me, too grubby. I’m not interested in violence and someone on stage kicking a member of the audience in the face.’
Ivo was on more comfortable ground with 4AD’s next single, an oddity that came from a meeting between Bauhaus’ David J and René Halkett, the only surviving member of Germany’s original Bauhaus school of Modernist craft and fine arts founded in 1919. David J had recorded the octogenarian Halkett in the summer of 1980, at the latter’s cottage in Cornwall, supporting his frail voice with a cushion of electronics, upbeat on ‘Amour’, soothing on ‘Nothing’. Despite Bauhaus’ shift to Beggars Banquet, David J had stayed in contact with Ivo: ‘I told him about the project. He heard it just the once and said he’d release it on 4AD. It was where Ivo was heading with the label: off-the-wall, arty projects.’
Bauhaus’ profile would have ensured enough sales to pay for something so left-field, but as Ivo notes, ‘It was a lovely thing to do. The single could be described as dreadfully pretentious but who gives a fuck? Halkett was a nice man, and it meant a lot to him that David wanted to do this.’
Ivo’s affection for his friends, even those that had left 4AD, was clear, and delivered much more satisfaction than sales-based decisions. 4AD was growing into a little family, and Ivo recalls he felt like an older brother to Matt Johnson during the making of his debut album Burning Blue Soul. ‘I was shy and introverted, then, still a teenager,’ Johnson concurs. The relationship had strengthened when Johnson was unhappy with new demos he’d recorded with Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, and had turned to Ivo, who got more involved with the recording.
As Johnson recalls, ‘I was recording a couple of tracks at a time, in different studios with different engineers and co-producers. Ivo wasn’t there for a lot of it and his role was more as an executive producer, but he became far more hands on with a couple of tracks at Spaceward [studios]. He’d suggest ideas but wasn’t precious about them. I liked that he’d test you to make sure you believed in what you were doing. If he thought differently, he’d strongly argue his case, but ultimately he’d ensure power resided with the artist. He liked working with artists who had a clear vision and self-belief and saw his role as facilitating unusual projects no other labels would take a chance on.’
Given free rein, Burning Blue Soul was raw and adventurous, with an unusual blend of bucolic British psych folk and Germany’s more fractured krautrock imprint, bearing only distant traces of the sophisticated blend of subsequent The The records. The opening instrumental ‘Red Cinders In The Sand’ was almost six minutes of ominous churning, and even calmer passages such as ‘Like A Sun Rising Through My Garden’ sounded infested with dread. Johnson’s vocals were often electronically tweaked, boosting the alienation. Johnson recalls: ‘It was considered the most psychedelic album in many years when it came out.’ (No doubt aided by the sleeve design’s heavy debt to Texan psych pioneers The 13th Floor Elevators’ album The Psychedelic Sound of …) ‘In reality,’ Johnson concludes, ‘it was almost virginal in its innocence, and unlike some albums I made afterwards, it was made on nothing stronger than orange juice.’
‘It’s an unusual record, a real mish-mash that works,’ Ivo rightly asserts. ‘Maybe Matt hates it now, but I’d like to think we had a lot of fun, in the studio and driving back and forth. Watching Matt work was fantastic; he was so fast, and he had that wonderful voice, like [Jethro Tull’s] Ian Anderson.’
Actually, Johnson reckons Burning Blue Soul still sounds great: ‘It was made for all the right reasons; I was just a teenager when I wrote and recorded it so there was not only a fair degree of post-pubescent anxiety but a real purity and unfettered creativity. I didn’t know the rules of songwriting then so I wasn’t bound by them, but I was able to put into practice a lot of the studio techniques I’d learnt at De Wolfe. It’s also the only album where I play all the instruments. So I’m proud of it.’
The post-pubescent anxiety that Johnson describes gave Burning Blue Soul a rare burst of politicised anger to match In Camera’s David Scinto ( coincidentally, both hailed from Stratford, though had different social