Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD - Martin Aston

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born a year apart – found much common ground.

      Lewis’s air force family lived in Germany and the Netherlands but also the English seaside town of Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, where in the early 1960s, he had first experienced rock’n’roll, blasting through giant speakers at a fairground. ‘You’d find strange places between loudspeakers playing different songs, united by a common acoustic, which probably explains my obsession with dub,’ says Lewis. Pirate radio – ‘unmediated, straight out of the sky’ – introduced him to Jimi Hendrix and similar psychedelic voyagers; a cousin gifted Lewis ‘an incredible collection of soul music’, and at art school at the start of the Seventies, Roxy Music and pub rock’s oddballs Kilburn & The High Roads further widened his tastes.

      Lewis’ musical ambitions were temporarily thwarted: ‘I couldn’t find anyone to form this fantastic group, as you were meant to at art school.’ Eventually, through his college friend Angela Conway, Lewis met Bruce Gilbert, an abstract painter working as an audio-visual aids technician and photography librarian at Watford College of Art and Design, just north of London.

      Gilbert, Conway and fellow student Colin Newman were playing together as Overload: ‘I intimated that I played bass, which wasn’t strictly true, but I owned one and had ideas,’ Lewis recalls. Ideas were enough for Gilbert, and after Conway had gone her own way, and Newman had met drummer Robert Gotobed (a former Oundle public schoolboy) at a party, Wire’s four components were assembled. Though Wire had made its recording debut on EMI’s Live At The Roxy WC2 compilation, the band was older and more taken with experimental art and design than their punk peers. Over three trailblazing albums (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154), Wire had redrawn rock’s boundaries with all the abstract ideas their inquisitive minds could muster.

      After their trilogy, Wire decided to subvert the traditional four-piece band unit. ‘Bruce and I had become interested in the idea that the studio was the instrument, and we wanted to work with different people to see what might happen,’ Lewis recalls. ‘We formed Dome to connect with our art background – installation, performance art, video. Rock music wasn’t the be-all and end-all of our lives.’

      Initially, Dome took their experimental songs to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade, who suggested they release it themselves; Dome 1, Dome 2 and Dome 3 subsequently appeared on the duo’s Dome imprint. Seeking to finance a soundtrack they’d written for a performance piece by the artist Russell Mills, the pair approached Ivo, who eagerly took the chance to work with such respected and influential artists. A twelve-inch single, ‘Like This For Ages’, was released in 1980 under the new alias of Cupol, a reference to the dome-style cupola inspired by Arabic mosaics. On one side, the title track’s shorter, mechanical clangs were layered behind Lewis’ urgent vocal; on the other was the 20-minute instrumental ‘Kluba Cupol’, a slowly evolving mosaic of percussive electronica inspired by seeing the legendary Sufi ‘trance’ Master Musicians of Joujouka play in London.

      ‘It was nothing to do with Wire, but it was a damn good record,’ Ivo reckons. ‘Was I disappointed? Yes and no: Graham and Bruce were doing what they were doing. Though I didn’t realise until I met Wire that they didn’t sell many records, maybe 20,000 each. We struggled to sell 5,000 with Cupol.’

      Ivo’s relationship with the duo quickly led to a more musically satisfying liaison. Gilbert and Lewis had met a young singer-songwriter Matt Johnson through their friend Tom Johnson (no relation), a cartoonist who was playing bass in Matt’s band, The The, while acting as its manager.

      Over the past thirty years, Matt Johnson has defied categorisation in any given era, trend or sound, concentrating on a pensive, brooding, progressive fusion of soul, rock and pop. With nine studio albums made by varying line-ups, Johnson has also embraced soundtracks, film itself, and most recently book publishing as Fifty First State Press, with the 2012 book Tales from the Two Puddings. This was not Matt’s story but that of his father Eddie, who ran Stratford pub The Two Puddings for thirty-eight years. The site has been revamped and renamed, another casualty of merciless town planning.

      In its heyday, says Johnson, The Two Puddings was, ‘one of east London’s busiest and most fashionable music houses’. The large backroom staged regular shows: ‘The sound was continually drifting up through the floorboards, and during daytime closing hours, my brothers and I would play the equipment the groups had left set up. It’s quite possible the first guitar I ever played belonged to The Who’s Pete Townshend or The Kinks’ Ray Davies.’

      The Beatles’ White Album was Johnson’s treasured album: ‘There was something so warm, inventive and free about it. I still marvel at its diversity and originality.’ He was only eleven when he formed a covers band, Roadstar, and by fifteen had left school to work at Music De Wolfe in central London, a family-run studio specialising in soundtracks. Johnson admits to a very brief flirtation with punk, but believes most British punk was drab and derivative. ‘And the way they dressed identically and yet crowed on about wanting to be different cracked me up. The real weirdos, of course, were the ones who tried to look normal to fit in. So I became part of the “long Mac brigade” and found my spiritual home within post-punk.’

      Johnson had begun selling home-made cassettes of a suitably off-kilter solo album, See Without Being Seen, before being introduced to Gilbert and Lewis. Johnson shared common ground with the duo, and with Britain’s synth pioneers, such as Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, who, he says, ‘epitomised everything punk had promised but failed to deliver. It’s an incredibly rich, inventive and diverse time in British music history that’s been overlooked.’

      Lewis was impressed by ‘the unusual harmonics of Matt’s voice, his ambition and drive’. However, Lewis also says that he and Gilbert had only gone down to the studio, ‘in an unofficial capacity’, while The The recorded its 4AD debut single ‘Controversial Subject’, and its B-side ‘Black & White’. But, as Ivo notes, ‘the sound was heavily manipulated by Graham and Bruce, very much like Cupol and Dome records’.

      Peter Kent agreed that ‘Controversial Subject’ was good enough to release, and Johnson began piecing together an album. Ivo enjoyed the rough, raw sound of the single, and as a fan of demos with a similar fresh energy, decided to pull tracks from the increasing pile of demos that had caught his and Kent’s attention. As Ivo says, ‘I had a feeling that every independent single coming out was worth listening to, so I had a pride in everything we released during that time.’ A spare Modern English track, ‘Home’, was added to a twelve-inch EP that became 4AD’s first compilation and the label’s sole attempt at showcasing a batch of demos. As Ivo says, ‘Presage(s) was hardly prescient of what was to come. It wasn’t an original idea either; Factory had released the Earcom compilation. But it was fun to do. I designed the dreadful sleeve, which featured Steve Webbon’s naked arse on the back cover. But there was no intention of working with the groups.’

      A sunbathing Webbon had been captured while on holiday with Ivo; on the front was a repeated image of a child against a lurid lime green backdrop – not exactly 4AD’s finest piece of artwork. Musically too, Presage(s) is only a footnote in the 4AD story, an experiment that was never repeated. The EP appears not to have been reviewed at the time. ‘At its best,’ All Music Guide concluded many years later, ‘these bands sound like second-rate versions of flagship acts like Bauhaus … at its worst, these bands sound just plain bad, like failed art school experiments.’

      For all its drawbacks, Presage(s) remains a fascinating document of several musical tributaries of the day, and the demo nature adds an endearing naivety. Of Ivo’s two favourite tracks, the floating, haunting mood of C.V.O.’s ‘Sargasso Sea’ was surely down to co-producer – and German krautrock legend – Conny Plank, while Last Dance’s turbulent ‘Malignant

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