by Martin Aston
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 bought “Dark Entries” and “Swans On Glass”, so I knew who 4AD were. Back then, Ivo had a little ponytail; I’d never seen a picture of Eno at that point and I imagined that Ivo was what Eno looked like! I wasn’t far off. He was arty, genuine, and very interested in us.’
Ivo: ‘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 circles). An upbringing in an East End pub would have borne witness to the volatility of crowds and Johnson says the summer riots across Britain that spring and summer, from London to Birmingham and Liverpool in protest at Margaret Thatcher’s economic squeeze on industry, employment and taxes, fed into the album’s levels of stress. Likewise the assassination attempts on the Pope and US President Ronald Reagan, specifically on ‘Song Without An Ending’.
In its own way, standing apart from all other singer-songwriter records of the time, Burning Blue Soul wasn’t much less of an oddity than Dif Juz, and with few exceptions, the UK press was very cool (and Peel again didn’t bite despite initially supporting ‘Controversial Subject’), at least to start with. ‘Ivo and I really believed in Burning Blue Soul,’ says Chris Carr. ‘And we couldn’t understand why it wasn’t clicking with people. It took six months to get a review, but when we did, that’s when The The took off, and I’d get calls from journalists asking for a copy of the album. I asked Ivo for more stock, and he said, “Fuck off, they can buy it back from Record & Tape Exchange, where they’ve sold their original copies”.’
Johnson says how much he enjoyed his time at 4AD, but another figure took control of his career in a way Ivo would have categorically avoided. The singularly named Stevo, the founder of the Some Bizzare label and a committed student of Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s method of major label-fleecing, had become Johnson’s
manager and solicited a very sizeable offer from CBS, which was raised by competing bids by other majors. ‘There was no advance for Burning Blue Soul and no royalties for quite some time, so I was always broke,’ Johnson explains. ‘At certain times of your life, it is very hard to resist these kinds of siren calls. In some ways, I regret not staying on 4AD for another couple of albums. Ivo warned me against CBS – he said it was too soon for me to make the switch and that I could fulfil myself on 4AD. He was extremely gracious and didn’t guilt-trip me about it. I’ve no regrets as I was with CBS [which turned into Sony] for eighteen years and I was allowed a huge amount of artistic freedom, but I sometimes wonder how it would have panned out if I’d stayed with 4AD. Ivo was one of the big influences on my career.’
‘I don’t remember being disappointed,’ says Ivo. ‘I was totally committed to the idea of one-off contracts, and if someone didn’t want to be with 4AD, that was fine by me. But I wish we’d stayed in touch for longer because I really enjoyed Matt.’
Johnson: ‘One last example of Ivo’s integrity was that when I decided to change the artist title of Burning Blue Soul from Matt Johnson to The The (when the album was re-released in 1984), Ivo didn’t want to, despite the fact that it would result in more sales as it would be stacked with my other The The albums. He insisted we put a disclaimer on the cover to explain that it was my decision to change the name. Can you imagine a major label resisting selling more copies on a point of principle?’
Points of principle, however, were a mark of the times. Commerciality meant selling out; integrity and authenticity were the presiding philosophies. After playing shows with The Birthday Party and In Camera, Dance Chapter had also recorded at Spaceward, producing the prosaically named Chapter II EP, inspired by the pursuit of beliefs that eventually led Cyrus Bruton to the spiritual comfort of the Bhagwan community. Parts of Chapter II, particularly the clotted tension of the eight-minute ‘Attitudes’, matched the first Dance Chapter single. The track tackled, says Bruton, ‘how prejudices build walls, kill love and create pain, which was obvious but I felt it needed to be said in a song’. ‘Backwards Across Thresholds’ and ‘She’ addressed desire and relationships while ‘Demolished Sanctuary’ tackled the suffocation of individual needs within the crowd.