by Martin Aston
As it turned out, Guthrie did speak up in interviews, and was hardly shy; more headstrong and even comical. ‘How can we be stars when we’re so fat?!’ he asked NME journalist Don Watson. Guthrie also expressed shock at Garlands’ extended occupancy in the independent charts despite ‘hardly any reaction from the press,’ he claimed. John Peel’s role could never be underestimated.
The interview made up in part for the fact that NME hadn’t reviewed Garlands, though Sounds praised, ‘the fluid frieze of wispy images made all the more haunting by Elizabeth’s distilled vocal maturity, fluctuating from a brittle fragility to a voluble dexterity with full range and power’. Even so, Guthrie felt the trio were much better represented by the sound – and art – of the Lullabies EP that followed just a month after the album. For this, Grierson chose two complementary images of a dancer and a lily, illustrating an elegant beauty over any overt angst and darkness. ‘At least they asked us about that one,’ Guthrie concedes.
Lullabies’ three tracks – ‘Feathers-Oar-Blades’, ‘Alas Dies Laughing’ and ‘It’s All But An Ark Lark’ – were written specifically for the EP, and initially recorded at Palladium where Jon Turner’s newly purchased and expensive Linn drum machine added a crispness and a drive to the Cocteaus’ base sound. Overdubs were added in London, the petrol for the trip from Grangemouth paid for by shows in Bradford and Leeds along the way.
A measure of how quickly Cocteau Twins’ popularity grew is that all three Lullabies tracks made John Peel’s annual Festive Fifty listeners’ poll. Added to The Birthday Party’s unnerving charisma, Cocteau Twins’ mercurial charm upped 4AD’s profile and credibility. According to John Fryer, ‘NME would review 4AD like, “another shit record on 4AD”, but after the Cocteaus, it was, “this amazing label that signed this amazing band; the future of music”.’
‘You knew something was happening,’ Chris Carr agrees. ‘And Ivo had great faith in Cocteau Twins. They weren’t out there like Mass, but left of centre enough for things to develop. There was a new wave of music journalists arriving, and discovering their own music, and from here on in, 4AD started being taken more seriously. You could identify Ivo’s vision, his mission statement. He knew what he wanted to sign, and it wasn’t going to be the next whatever, but things that had their own individual fingerprint. And everything had to be as right as possible, down to the artwork. His vision was different. It wasn’t sexy but people were getting seduced.’
This growing profile included a newly expanding audience in the States, where this strange, enigmatic parade of records housed in often oblique artwork, culminating in Garlands and Lullabies, had struck a chord.
‘My friend Leo said, “If you like David Sylvian and Japan, you need to hear Cocteau Twins”,’ recalls Craig Roseberry, a New York-based producer, DJ and record label owner who was a deeply impressionable teenager at the time. ‘Garlands was fantastic, and I asked another friend who worked in a record store if he had more records on 4AD. He mentioned Modern English and Bauhaus. I bought “Dark Entries”, and after that I needed everything on 4AD. I’d heard all this British music at [New York club] Danceteria, yet nothing on 4AD sounded like anything else.’
Fronted by David Sylvian, Japan’s sound was austere and romantic, a world unto itself. Roseberry found 4AD similarly fascinating: ‘It defied definition, but evoked the same feeling, what I’d call an “other otherness”. It was an esoteric version of music like Siousxie and the Banshees, music to the left of what was already left of centre. By then, I’d discovered lots of art, like Bauhaus and Dada. I understood from 4AD artwork, which was just as left field, that 4AD was coming from an art aesthetic more than simply music. It was informing me how to see the world.’
Roseberry began collecting every 4AD release, right back to Axis. ‘It was something to obsess over, even more than with Prince or David Sylvian. It was more obscure and niche and when you found it, you cherished it because it seemed to appear out of nowhere. It had such mystique. But what struck me the most was the catalogue numbering! So I had to own it all, and file everything in sequence. 4AD was more than a record label or art house; it became a culture.’
The attention to cataloguing aided the collectability of 4AD (the prefixes extended to DAD, GAD and HAD). It was all part of the bespoke detail that set independent labels apart from the majors. It created an identifiable culture that had grown big enough to support its own distribution system and trade magazine. The Cartel was a new association of independent regional UK distributors, which was partly funding the monthly title The Catalogue, which was based in the Rough Trade distribution offices, with listings and features covering the ever-expanding alternative movement of labels and artists.
The Catalogue’s Australian-born founding editor Brenda Kelly had first discovered 4AD while working at Melbourne’s alternative radio station 3RRR. ‘The Birthday Party was a key and radical Melbourne band, and any label that signed them had to be interesting, but what first attracted me to 4AD was Cocteau Twins,’ she says. ‘All of the four big UK independents – 4AD, Rough Trade, Factory and Mute – had maverick qualities, but, more so even than Factory, 4AD was special because it created an atmosphere around beauty. It was art for art’s sake. The artwork gave 4AD the most clearly articulated and uncompromising identity, which was crucial to the independent movement at that time – things were more complex and subtle than “do it yourself”.
‘People forget that art is a part of youth culture rather than just a succession of trends or an attitude, and such a consciously arty label like 4AD meant the independent scene was enriched and broadened. It created a space for bands and labels to build a roster and create a strong identity and base for their bands. Some independent labels, particularly 4AD, didn’t talk much about the politics of independence, but Ivo understood and supported the space that independent distribution created.’
If enough people responded with the same belief and support as Kelly and Roseberry, 4AD had a fighting chance of creating something bigger than an esoteric cult. If there could be songs that US or UK mainstream radio responded to, there might even be hits, to match Depeche Mode at Mute or New Order at Factory. Modern English were 4AD’s best hope, and in the major label tradition, a second single was plucked off After The Snow after the album had been released.
‘I Melt With You’ had a simple structure, breezy timbre and matching chorus, which Sounds writer Johnny Waller described as, ‘a dreamy, creamy celebration of love and lust’. Yet the single barely broke the indie top 20. The video showed 4AD’s inexperience in catering to a broader demographic: ‘It was one of the most awful we ever did,’ Ivo recalls. ‘It was filmed in a dingy basement with two hired dancers, and Robbie bleeding from a scab after a cat had scratched his face.’
If Modern English’s new identity had lost John Peel’s patronage, The Happy Family never had the DJ on side to begin with. This was despite the fact that Peel had always supported Josef K, and line-up changes increased the number of former Josef K personnel; though Malcolm Ross and Ian Stoddart had left (the former, to join Orange Juice), their respective replacements were Josef K roadie Paul Mason and drummer Ronnie Torrence. New keyboardist Neil Martin made five).
Nick Currie recalls that The Happy Family had effectively ambushed Peel at the BBC Radio 1 offices, to hand over the debut album, The Man On Your Street. ‘I saw [Altered Images singer] Claire Grogan in the lobby, who Peel was famously besotted by, and when John emerged, my first words where, “Oh, we just saw Miss G”, with a saucy grin on my face. He looked really embarrassed, as if he’d been consorting with her. It was embarrassingly awkward. Peel never did give us a session.’ Despite his very public profile, Peel was as shy as Ivo (whose approach in the past had been to send the Cocteaus-besotted DJ his own acetate of Garlands, letting music alone do the talking).
The album didn’t find much press favour either. The album’s brittle, wordy atmosphere was always going to be divisive: Don Watson at NME – reviewing it two months after release –
seemed divided himself, referring to the album’s ‘flat sound that borders on dullness’, but also saying, ‘It barbs your brain with a bristle of tiny hooks.’ Currie says Josef K supporter Dave McCullough at Sounds was more certain: ‘He gave it a bit of a trashing, saying it was too verbose, and the time wasn’t right for the return of the concept album.’
Indeed, The Man On Your Street was the least popular album in 4AD’s early years, selling just 2,500 copies. Currie thinks Ivo wasn’t that keen on the record himself: ‘The song he liked the most of ours was “Innermost Thoughts”, which to me was the musical equivalent of 23 Envelope sleeves, a delicate object, with a fully-flanged bass line that was the hallmark of miserablist bands at the time. But the album had moved away from that style. I’d got sick of all the long raincoats, the Penguin Modern Classics book poking out of the pocket top, the Joy Division scene. [NME’s] Paul Morley was the critic of the time, and he was promoting this new, shiny, happy pop music [meaning the likes of ABC, and also Orange Juice] after turning his back on miserablist Scottish pop. The Happy Family was going with that tide, moving away from 4AD’s aesthetic.’
Currie had also declined Vaughan Oliver’s input, going for his own bizarre mish-mash, a Sixties retro layout that included the subtitle Songs From The Career Of Dictator Hall and an out-of-place primitive folk art drawing to the side of a colour photograph of the earth. ‘I stubbornly wanted to do the cover myself,’ he admits. ‘The photo of the globe cost Ivo a lot more than Vaughan!’ It was more expensive, actually, than the album’s recording budget, which illustrated 4AD’s commitment to packaging.
Currie thinks The Man On Your Street would have fared better if Oliver had taken over, giving it an identifiable 4AD cachet: ‘We were an anomaly on 4AD. I was deliberately trying to undermine their image, to show 4AD could go to other places. I think Ivo was flummoxed by our brash, alienating irony and a narrative music hall sensibility that was at odds with him, and we didn’t have that sense of beauty that he liked. It also had this Puckish, communist streak, and I don’t think we saw eye to eye politically. But I’m very grateful to Ivo. It was a terrific adventure.’
Currie also saw Ivo’s patronage and 4AD’s early achievements as part of a watershed era for British music. ‘It was the first generation of record label bosses who were creative themselves, and trying to shape a sensibility. Though in the end, I found it easier dealing with old-fashioned record labels that were just a marketing department and a bank!’
As Momus, Currie thrived, but The Happy Family didn’t. ‘Ivo wasn’t interested in another album, nothing was happening in Scotland, and I felt guilty about being the band’s dictator, even though the others wouldn’t write their own parts. The more we rehearsed, the worse we sounded, so I returned to university before moving to London.’*
If Ivo’s intuition had failed him on this occasion, his next discovery was another maverick mould-breaker in the Happy Family tradition, albeit in a radically different form. Coming at the end of the year, it finally put paid to the idea that 4AD was a repository of Stygian gloom – even if the title of Colourbox’s debut single was ‘Breakdown’.
From his home in the Regency seaside town of Brighton on England’s south coast, Martyn Young seems to have as many reasons as Robin Guthrie to consider his past in a someone regretful light. The fact is he is the driving force behind the only act in UK chart history never to have attempted a follow-up to a national number 1 single. In fact, Young and his younger brother Steven haven’t released one piece of original music since Colourbox’s spin-off project M/A/R/R/S scaled the charts with ‘Pump Up The Volume’.
Not that Young cares: he admits that he never truly wanted to make music to begin with, preferring the technical aspects of music, the manuals and the mixing desk; a boffin at heart rather than a musician, who has spent his ensuing years computer programming and studying music theory. In any case, he now has twins (two years old at the time of writing), and though his first course of anti-depressants (he and Ivo have exchanged emails about brands and effects) have lifted him, he doesn’t imagine he will make any more music. Given its association with depression, anger issues, creative blocks, writs and extreme food diets, why would anyone choose to return?
Young was born Martyn Biggs, which, he says, ‘sounded like “farting pigs”, so I used my mother’s maiden name of Young’. Home life was dysfunctional; his father had been sent to prison before Martyn was a teenager. At school in Colchester in the East Anglia region, he was two years above his brother Steven and Ray Conroy (whose brother, Modern English bassist Mick, was a year below them). Young’s musical path is familiar: a Bowie obsession led to a wider appreciation of art and progressive rock before punk’s conversion. ‘It immediately made me want to play guitar,’ he says.
Young says his first band, The Odour 7, was only a half-hearted teenage exercise, but the following Bowie/Devo-influenced Baby Patrol released a single, ‘Fun Fusion’ on Secret Records. ‘We were particularly crap and I destroyed every copy of the single I could find. I’m singing and the lyrics are so embarrassing. But I was still young.’
After dyeing his hair following Bowie’s blonde/orange rinse, Young was labelled a ‘pouf’ by his father and told he couldn’t sleep in the same room as his brother. ‘So I started squatting with Modern English in London.’ In this new world, Young borrowed a synthesiser and drum machine and spent a year unlocking their secrets. His next move was a band with Steven (known as Scab because of the scabs on his knuckles that he kept picking, Ivo explains) and Baby Patrol’s Ian Robbins; Colourbox was the title of an animated film from 1937. Mutual friends introduced female vocalist Debian Curry and the quartet recorded a demo that included ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Tarantula’. As Ivo recalls, Ray Conroy – acting as the band’s manager – came to Hogarth Road in 1980 to give the more dance-conscious Peter Kent the Colourbox demo, ‘because why would 4AD put out a dance record? I guess Peter wasn’t around, so Ray played me the tape. I liked “Breakdown” but I loved “Tarantula”. It’s such a sad song.’
Musically, ‘Tarantula’ resembled the moody cousin of Yazoo’s synth-pop ballad ‘Only You’, but unlike Yazoo singer Alf Moyet, Debian Curry’s cool delivery reinforced the withdrawn mood at the song’s core: ‘I’m living but I’m feeling numb, you can see it in my stare/ I wear a mask so falsely now, and I don’t know who I am/ This voice that wells inside of me, eroding me away …’
‘I’ve only recently come to understand that I’ve always suffered from depression,’ Young says. ‘I used to think my strange mood swings were caused by something like food, so I’d try and eat raw salad for months. But anti-depressants mean I’m no longer wallowing in misery and pent-up negativity.’
Ivo and Martyn Young’s bond wasn’t just musical, but personal, united by their shyness and sadness. ‘Ivo had a reputation for being dour, but he wasn’t with us,’ Young recalls.
Ivo: ‘I really liked Martyn. He looked like he was chewing gum and smiling at you at the same time, which was charming. Scab was younger and quieter, and the best drum programmer I’d ever met.’
Steve Young was also a good pianist and arranger, with Ian Robbins making a trio of strong contributors to the Colourbox sound. They were also interested in the new electro-funk sound that had succeeded disco as the prevailing club soundtrack in America’s clubs and street scenes, led by Mantronix and Afrika Bambaataa, which filtered into ‘Breakdown’, making the A-side of Colourbox’s debut single a brighter and more pulsing affair than its flipside ‘Tarantula’.
The single stood at odds with 4AD’s last release of the year, a compilation title released by Warners’ Greek office that was named Dark Paths, which undermined the fact that Ivo had begun to shed the gothic image. Only seven acts were selected: Bauhaus, Rema-Rema, Modern English, Mass, Colin Newman, Dance Chapter and the David J/René Halkett collaboration. In fact, over three years, 4AD had released more than fifty records by thirty acts; a pattern that Ivo recognised was unsustainable in the long run.
‘It took a few years for me to find my focus, and my confidence, and to get a feel for what the label might become,’ he recalls. ‘And to be absolutely happy to not have many releases. The less, the better, I thought! I was constantly counting our artists, and if we had more than six, I’d get nervous. But that hadn’t been possible in the first few years. We had no long-term contracts, no real careers. Besides Modern English, everyone was contracted record by record.’
The haphazard nature of 4AD’s development – the one-offs, the artful projects, the short shelf life of bands that promised much more, and both Bauhaus’ defection and Modern English’s slow progress – confirmed that Ivo really had no game plan to speak of. Things could either lead nowhere in particular or could build to something tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In any case, Ivo had imagined 4AD would only be an interlude in his life, though it wasn’t true, as an offhand comment of Ivo’s had claimed, that the four in 4AD stood for the number of years he anticipated it would last.
But while it did last, Ivo could only follow an intuitive, personal path, one that paid no notice to the social and political traits of the staff at the NME who thought large swathes of post-punk had reneged on punk’s revolution. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren – who had continued to ruffle feathers with his new puppets of outrage, Bow Wow Wow – mocked what he saw as a return to, in the words of writer Simon Reynolds, ‘student reverence and cerebral sexlessness’.
But, in light of music’s powerful effect beyond polemic, there was another way to view 4AD’s anti-manifesto. In January 2013, for a profile of Bosnian singer Amira Medunjanin in The Observer newspaper, journalist Ed Vulliamy also interviewed a law professor, Zdravko Grebo, who had begun an underground radio station, Radio Zid, during the Serbian siege of Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo during the Nineties. ‘The point was to get on air but resist broadcasting militaristic songs,’ explained Grebo. ‘Our message was: remember who you are – urban people, workers, cultured people. We thought the situation called for Pink Floyd, Hendrix and good country music, rather than militaristic marches.’