Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston
‘We signed one [for the EP], which wasn’t a very good deal,’ says Andrew Gray. ‘But what terrified us was that if we sold x amount of units, Beggars could nab us, as they’d done with Bauhaus, and we’d have had to strike up new friendships.’
Ivo says they shouldn’t have been worried. ‘In Camera wasn’t a group to make the same transition as Bauhaus. We were only doing one-off contracts by that point. Beggars had decided very quickly to let young, or independent, people get on and work.’
Other personal pressures were present as well. There was an intensity to In Camera’s mission: David Scinto recalls one drunken moment when he and bassist Pete Moore did a blood-brothers ritual, ‘Pete with a knife, me with a Coke can ring. That was nasty. But that’s the sort of thing you did.’ So no decision was ever taken lightly. When Ivo had requested an album, and Moore and drummer Jeff Wilmott felt ready, Scinto decided they needed more songs while Gray was again ‘terrified’ a producer might corrupt the band’s fiercely protected sanctum of unity. ‘Any ideological flaws,’ says Gray, ‘meant we couldn’t carry on.’
‘For the band,’ Scinto muses, ‘we’d tried to remove our egos. But ego drives you on. I guess we didn’t have the ego to fight for the band.’ Scinto certainly lacked the ego of a frontman, a rock star. ‘I would have given anything to be a rock star!’ Wilmott laughs. ‘But we’d all sat back and let things happen, rather than drive things ourselves. We almost expected 4AD to do the work. Most gigs were arranged by Peter [Kent], and we should have been gigging every other night. We were jealous of Bauhaus’ relationship with their tour manager, who pushed and assisted them in achieving their goals. But I still wouldn’t change a thing about how we interacted. In Camera was more like an art club than a band.’
The variety of personalities trying to make headway in post-punk times – art school experimentalists, musical terrorists, career opportunists, politically driven ideologists – ensured that most independent labels of any stature would represent a menagerie of interests. For every aesthetically rigid In Camera, there were more pliable types like Modern English, who happily accepted Ivo’s suggestion of a producer for their next album who, says Mick Conroy, ‘could make more sense out of us’. Hugh Jones had produced Echo & The Bunnymen’s panoramic 1981 album Heaven Up Here, which was widely admired by both Ivo and Modern English. Jones provided an instant reality check. Conroy recalls asking him what he thought of their songs: ‘Hugh replied, “There aren’t any”.’
But Jones says he was still attracted to the project. ‘I liked bits of Modern English’s music, but more, I just liked them, which is my chief criteria, along with having chemistry with an artist. I also thought I could contribute a lot.’
Jones had engineered Simple Minds and Teardrop Explodes albums before stepping up to produce the Bunnymen; all had been major-label commissions. Ivo was, he recalls, ‘the first record company person I’d met that didn’t come across as brash’. The pair also bonded over favourite albums: for example, both believed The Byrds’ Notorious Byrd Brothers was a contender for the best album ever made. In the process of working with Modern English, Jones says he introduced them to the delights of British folk rock luminaries Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, and American pop-soul prodigy Todd Rundgren, to give them an insight into chorus-led songwriting and arranging.
Out of it came a distinctly altered Modern English. When Ivo had reckoned that pop bands were unlikely to approach 4AD, he wasn’t expecting it would come from inside the 4AD camp. The band named the album After The Snow: ‘Mesh & Lace had been a very cold, angry record,’ says Robbie Grey.
Just as Echo & The Bunnymen and Orange Juice had bypassed punk’s disavowal of music of a radically different hue by respectively resuscitating The Doors and The Byrds, After The Snow had adopted a broader, defrosted outlook. There was even a flute on ‘Carry Me Down’. ‘Ivo thought Gary’s guitars sometimes resembled The Byrds, whereas he’d previously sounded like he was kicking a door in!’ says Conroy. ‘I think making the album in the Welsh springtime meant that we ended up sounding like the countryside.’
By comparison, The Birthday Party resembled a night in a city gutter. The band had returned from Australia with a virtually complete new album, Junkyard, on which Barry Adamson had played most of the bass given Tracy Pew’s incapacitated status. The artwork by the cult cartoonist and hot rod designer Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth featured his Junk Yard Kid and Rat Fink characters on a journey towards, or from, mayhem, and the album was rife with exaggerated figures such as ‘Dead Joe’, ‘Kewpie Doll’ and ‘Hamlet (Pow Wow Wow)’, and pulp-fiction violence – for example ‘6" Gold Blade’ and ‘She’s Hit’. The band drove the point home with exhilaratingly malevolent moods, with Nick Cave acting the snorting and dribbling despot. If only the Mass album Labour Of Love had managed to articulate their own drama and tension in the same manner.
By having both Modern English and The Birthday Party at the label, 4AD showed it could handle dark and light: from Ed Roth’s craziness to Vaughan Oliver’s graceful design for After The Snow, with dancing horses on a backdrop of crumpled tissue paper inspired by a line on ‘Dawn Chorus’ (‘strange visions of balloons on white stallions’). ‘That was a breakthrough, graphically, my first extensive use of texture to create a mood,’ Oliver says. ‘It was an act of perversity but also of tenderness, given it was tissue paper.’
While The Birthday Party was giving the impression of heading further out of control, Hugh Jones had guided Modern English to a newly minted pop levity. 4AD adapted accordingly, acting like a major label by taking a single from an album before the album was released. ‘Life In The Gladhouse’ was sleek and gutsy with a busy funk chassis, a musical advance but also a commercial retreat, losing the band the post-punk audience cultivated via John Peel without replacing it with a mainstream audience. It reached 26 in the UK independent chart, ten places lower than even ‘Smiles And Laughter’.
The Birthday Party had made no such alterations, plunging further onward, on tour through the UK and Europe with Tracy Pew back in the ranks. It wasn’t a surprise that the wheels were falling off this careering bus, the first instance being the sacking of odd-man-out drummer Phil Calvert, with Mick Harvey taking his place both on stage and in the studio. What’s more, the bus was leaving town for good. The Birthday Party decided they were over Britain, and having met Berlin’s industrial noise fetishists Einstürzende Neubauten, the Australians chose the divided city as its new base.
Ivo had funded new recordings at Berlin’s famous Hansa Studios (where David Bowie had recorded his ‘Heroes’ classic), but before the band departed, Lydia Lunch and Rowland S. Howard (who had formed an alliance and played several of The Birthday Party shows as the support act) offered Ivo a cover of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s 1960s psychedelic oddity ‘Some Velvet Morning’ that they’d recorded in London. 4AD duly released it as a twelve-inch single, with the original ‘I Fell In Love With A Ghost’ on the B-side, and much the better track; Ivo’s fondness for the A-side is perplexing given his love of singing, and given the Lunch/Howard duet features a man who couldn’t sing and a woman who gleefully sang out of tune, desecrating the song’s magnetic allure.
‘Some Velvet Morning’ showed that although Ivo’s own taste might lean towards the extended listening experience of the album format, he remained committed to singles, a collectable and affordable format that could sell in tens of thousands. Following the pattern of Gilbert and Lewis, Colin Newman followed up an album with a new seven-inch, ‘We Means We Starts’. However, he didn’t intend it to be his last 4AD release.
Ivo recalls Wire’s re-formation as the reason it was: ‘I don’t remember turning down more of Colin’s demos,’ he says, though the band’s reunion was still two years off. Newman says he did submit demos to 4AD, which, he says, ‘Ivo didn’t think were pop enough’. But the singer’s dissatisfaction went deeper. ‘I didn’t have a way forward at that point. Independent labels tended to live on a wing and a prayer, and if things work out or not, it’s fine either way. I didn’t feel part of how everything worked at that time, and so I disengaged myself. I’d been to India for fourteen months and I’d had enough of the beast of the music industry. I did vaguely