Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Blackwing was still the preferred choice for 4AD’s London-based acts, though Colin Newman preferred Scorpio Sound in central London, where he hoped to begin another solo album, this time of songs. But Beggars Banquet was less keen: ‘I’d got a good advance for A–Z and it hadn’t sold as many as they’d wanted,’ Newman recalls. ‘Beggars also wanted me to tour, which I didn’t. Because I wasn’t playing ball, they wouldn’t give me another advance.’ But Ivo was eager for a record of Newman’s off-kilter, Wire-style pop, and after agreeing a more modest budget, the album was finished, and even featured three-quarters of Wire, with Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert among the guests.

  If A–Z was the missing fourth Wire album, Not To was the fifth, and represented yet another diversion from the cornerstone sound of 4AD’s sepulchral origins. But the label’s reigning masters of foreboding were hardly down and out. A concert by The Birthday Party at London’s The Venue in Victoria had been recorded in November 1981, and though it would have been a bigger money-spinner as a whole album, the band didn’t think the recording was good enough to be released in its entirety, only picking four tracks (including a cover of The Stooges’ ‘Loose’) for a budget-priced EP. In reality, it was a mini-album since the band had had the idea to feature the evening’s support slot, Lydia Lunch.

  From Rochester in the northern part of New York State, by her own admission, Lydia Anne Koch was a precocious child. She told 3:AM magazine that, when she was just twelve years old, she’d informed her parents that she needed to attend ‘rock concerts until well after midnight, for “my career”’. By fourteen, she was taking the train to Manhattan with ‘a small red suitcase, a winter coat, and a big fucking attitude’. At nineteen, she was fronting Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, a prominent part of America’s own post-punk response, known as No Wave, an experimental enclave marked by dissonance, noise and jazzy disruption. Lunch’s confrontational howls chimed with The Birthday Party’s own, and after she’d attended the band’s third New York show in October 1981, a budding friendship led to Lunch being added to the Venue bill with an impromptu backing band that included Banshees bassist Steven Severin.

  The vinyl’s Birthday Party side was called Drunk On The Pope’s Blood; the title of Lunch’s side, the 16-minute The Agony Is The Ecstasy, nailed the essence of the semi-improvised atonal festival of dirge. A month after its release in February 1982, The Birthday Party once again returned to Britain after another profitable summer’s break in Australia, both touring and recording a new album. Only this time, bassist Tracy Pew had had to remain behind, detained in a labour camp for three months following a drink-driving offence. His deputy was Barry Adamson, bassist for Manchester new wave progressives Magazine, who had befriended The Birthday Party after marrying one of their Australian friends. Bottom of the bill at The Venue was a band playing only their third show – Cocteau Twins. ‘Talk about being propelled into it,’ says Guthrie.

  The Cocteaus had returned to Blackwing to record an album, which Ivo had scheduled for September, leaving time and space for a series of less pivotal 4AD releases. Daniel Ash was the next escapee, after David J, from Bauhaus, collaborating with school friend (and Bauhaus roadie) Glenn Campling for a four-track EP, Tones On Tail, whose unusual rhythm and ambience was more Cupol than Bauhaus. ‘I was pleased that Daniel contacted me about something outside Bauhaus, and I liked him, and said yes,’ Ivo recalls. ‘No offence to Daniel, but for me, it’s one of the least essential of 4AD releases.’

  Ivo considered In Camera’s latest release to be one of the more essential of 1981, certainly among the band’s own records. But the band’s three-track Peel session, which had been recorded at the end of 1980, was named Fin because it was their epitaph. The 11-minute ‘Fatal Day’ suggested a band at the peak of its powers, but like Dance Chapter, In Camera had fallen apart after one seven-inch single and EP, finding that ethics had become an insurmountable barrier.

  A fear of compromise had eaten away at the band’s soul. Contracts were the first issue. ‘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 m
aking 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 talk to Ivo about another project, but we drifted apart. I don’t feel close to those records I did on 4AD, or that part of my life.’

  Newman also admits to other frustrations with Ivo: ‘He didn’t want me to produce his bands, even though I’d produced an album for [Irish art rockers] The Virgin Prunes that had done really well. And I think I’d have been more honest with his bands than he would have. I think he had his eye on producing himself.’

  Ivo does recall a conversation with Newman about production, but says the only outside producer in 4AD’s first three years was Hugh Jones. ‘Most bands wanted to produce themselves and we didn’t have the budgets that Colin was used to with EMI and [Wire producer] Mike Thorne. It’s lovely to fantasise about what, say, the Mass record would’ve sounded like had they been interested in input and Colin had been keen to get involved.’

  As Newman suggests, Ivo did take a more active role in Cocteau Twins’ debut album. Garlands was recorded at Blackwing, with Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer engineering and Ivo given a co-producer credit alongside the band. Guthrie recalls they had quickly regarded Ivo as a mentor: ‘He was very intelligent, one of the first grown-ups we’d met, with a car and a flat; we didn’t know anyone like that! He was switched on to music, and he was listening to us! We were enthralled by him.’

  Ivo, however, downplays his role. ‘I might have suggested an extra guitar part, or sampling a choir at the end of “Grail Overfloweth” in the spirit of [krautrock band] Popol Vuh’s music or sampling Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but it was minimal stuff. I also suggested, stupidly, extending the start of “Blood Bitch”. But I was there because someone had to say yes or no, and the band lacked the confidence to do so.’

  Elizabeth Fraser was an especially vivid example of deep-set insecurity. Back in Rennes, Guthrie paints a picture of a girl who left home at fourteen, with Sid Vicious and Siouxsie tattoos on her arms, self-conscious to an almost pathological degree. In the mid-1990s, after becoming a mother and having therapy, Fraser told me about the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth, from within her own family. In 1982, she was still a teenager, her issues still fresh and unresolved, and facing not just decisions about her life but being judged on her creativity.

  ‘When we mixed the album, you’d isolate an instrument or voice to concentrate on it,’ says Ivo. ‘Whenever we’d solo Liz’s vocal, she wouldn’t let it be heard, or she’d have to leave the room. She had very low self-esteem. On stage, she’d wear a very short mini-skirt and bend over, showing her knickers, and she’d strike her bosom. She was a striking presence on stage, doing all this stuff with her fingers, and you’d see the pain on her face.’

  Guthrie later told the NME that Garlands sounded ‘rather dull compared to what we know we’re capable of’, but it was a promising start. ‘In the same way as 4AD hadn’t yet proved its individuality, the Cocteau Twins didn’t with their first album,’ says Ivo, but both label and band could be proud of creating an uncanny and original template with such extraordinary potential. Garlands may have drawn some comparisons to Siouxsie and the Banshees, but it had its own enchanted and anxious tension. Heggie’s trawling bass and Guthrie’s effects-laden yet still minimalist guitar was rooted to a drum machine that occasionally lent a quasi-dance pulse. It gave Fraser a restlessly inventive backdrop for her melodic incantations and lyrical disorder, for example: ‘My mouthing at you, my tongue the stake/ I should welt should I hold you/ I should gash should I kiss you’ (‘Blind Dumb Deaf’) and, ‘Chaplets see me drugged/ I could die in the rosary’ (‘Garlands’).

  The sleeve dedication to Fraser’s brief singing cohort followed suit: ‘Dear Carol, we shall both die in your rosary: Elizabeth.’ There were thanks to Ivo, Yazoo’s Vince Clarke, who lent the band his drum machin
e, and Nigel Grierson, whose photo graced the cover. Robin Guthrie disliked the Banshees comparisons, so it’s good he didn’t know the original inspiration behind the photo, which Grierson says the band selected from his portfolio; it had been part of a college project on alternative images for Siouxsie and the Banshees’ own album debut The Scream. ‘I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t want it, and I wasn’t asked,’ Guthrie counters. ‘It looked really gothy, and we had enough trouble with that as it was, with our spiky hair! We quickly got a goth audience but we never wore black nail varnish.’

  Ivo disputes Guthrie’s statement that the band weren’t consulted; Grierson suggests that the trio’s chronic shyness meant they never articulated their own views or verbally disagreed. The mercurial Guthrie takes another view: ‘[The band appreciated] everyone was helping us make this record, but the underlying attitude was, what do you know about art? You never went to art school. You’re not an aesthete, you’re from Scotland.’

  But Ray Conroy confirms Grierson’s summary. ‘Cocteau Twins would stay at my flat. I was their translator; they were so shy and timid,’ Conroy explains, adding: ‘Liz had her head shaved all round the side, with a long ball on top of her head, like a pancake or a bun had landed on there. With Robin and Will, it was all about hairspray! Boots unperfumed. And the amount of speed they did! A ton of it. It was all part of the fun.’

  Yet amphetamines didn’t loosen anyone’s tongues. Chris Carr was entrusted with the duo’s first press coverage. ‘Liz and Robin were so incredibly shy, I thought that if anyone was to interview them, could the journalist hear them speak? How could we overcome this? But Ivo had faith. And he knew that, musically, something was there.’