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

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Lyceum. They needed the push and resources available to them at Beggars. If we’d fought to keep Bauhaus, for me it would’ve involved far too much chatting with video makers and worrying what the next single would be.’ Ivo also counters David J’s claim he was keen on obscurity: ‘I can’t say I ever consciously looked for anything obscure, but I may well have been put off by something too mainstream.’

      4AD’s next release bridged the gap between obscurity and the mainstream, between Ivo and Peter Kent’s tastes and hopes. Ivo recalls Dance Chapter turning up at Hogarth Road, the week that Ian Curtis killed himself. Joy Division’s talisman was already a totemic leader, and the shock of his death was almost like the aftermath of the Che Guevara scenario, the loss of a spiritual leader. In the shop, Ivo recalls a girl sobbing at the counter after hearing the news. ‘Out of that, we got to wondering who would fill Ian’s shoes. Soon enough, Peter buzzed me from downstairs, saying, “Remember that conversation? Well, they’ve just walked in”.’

      ‘I read something on the internet along those lines, but that wasn’t verbalised to me,’ says Dance Chapter’s vocalist Cyrus Bruton. ‘Ian Curtis was Ian Curtis, and no one could step into those shoes. I never even entertained the idea.’

      Bruton currently lives in Berlin, with a community that follows the teachings of the late Indian spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He moved to Germany in 1985, between extended visits to India and, he says, ‘I never looked back.’ The same can be said of his short tenure as a singer, as he hasn’t made music for almost three decades, though he has DJed at various communes. His main concern, he says, is offering ‘public satsangs’, meaning spiritual teachings.

      Heralding from Leeds in Yorkshire, Dance Chapter was on a tour of London’s independent labels with their demo cassette when they walked into the shop. Born in Woking, south of London, to mixed-race parents, the young Cyrus, like Marx Cox and Graham Lewis before him, had primarily been a fan of black music swayed by punk rock and what he calls its ‘anyone-can-do-it rules’. ‘I wanted to be hands-on and form a band,’ he says. He soon joined forces with school friends Stuart Dunbar (bass), Andrew Jagger (guitar, later replaced by Steve Hadfield) and Jonnie Lawrence (drums). Choosing the name Dance Chapter showed Bruton was an unusually questioning teenager: ‘A chapter is a collective,’ he explains. ‘We were punk, but I wanted something more about dance and celebration.’

      Bruton says Dance Chapter, ‘were pretty focused, given we were four young men who liked to drink and take other things’. 4AD was a natural target: ‘They were one of the cutting-edge labels around and it already felt that was the level to reach.’

      The self-produced debut single ‘Anonymity’ is another buried treasure from 4AD’s early era, closer to Joy Division’s first incarnation Warsaw than the finished article, with a similarly tense, interlocking energy. Bruton was an unusually melodic singer, and his repeated lyric, ‘a piece of recognition is all I ask, bring me flowers’, was delivered with a palpable yearning. ‘We were striving for something that you want to get from the outside world,’ Bruton explains. ‘But if you can’t get it, then you can only give it to yourself. Even if it’s only flowers!’

      The B-side ‘New Dance’ revealed a more existential valediction. ‘I was speaking of knowing that falling down is the only way to truth,’ says Bruton. ‘That pain and insecurity is needed so an authentic expression can then come through. It was about vulnerability, and the need to find expression, to join together. People needed guidance, which wasn’t as forthcoming as it should have been.’

      This was the kind of poignant struggle and musical euphoria that could have had an impact on the same level as Ian Curtis and Joy Division – you could see what Peter Kent had meant when he first heard them. But Ivo was unconvinced. ‘Peter wasn’t right about the Joy Division bit,’ he says, ‘and I can’t say Dance Chapter were a great band because I only saw them play twice. But they had some gorgeous songs, and I loved Cyrus’s voice.’

      Perhaps if Kent had stuck around, he could have mentored the young and questioning Bruton. But as 4AD’s first year drew to a close, the risk of a split vision between 4AD’s two A&R sources – who might not truly believe in the other’s choices – was quashed when Kent decided he’d change tack.

      Neither Ivo nor Peter Kent remembers their relationship getting fractious, even though they were both hugely opinionated. ‘Ivo could be a little bit bitchy, and headstrong,’ Gary Asquith recalls, ‘and no one wanted to play second fiddle, least of all Peter.’ Asquith and Kent had become close friends in a short period of time. ‘Peter was a strange cat,’ Asquith contends. ‘Geminis I’ve known have their own agenda, and they never seem to be happy. He was a very curious person, but he didn’t know what he wanted, and he constantly moved on to the next thing. I think he found it hard to live with himself.’

      ‘My attention,’ Kent says, ‘was elsewhere than 4AD.’

      Besides promoting shows (such as his regular Rock Garden slot The Fake Club), Kent was tour-managing Bauhaus and doing some A&R for Beggars Banquet: his first signing there was the London jazz-funk band Freeez, who broke into the top 50 at the first attempt. But most importantly, Kent had met Billy MacKenzie at Heaven: ‘We’d gotten on like a house on fire, so I said I’d come and work with him and Alan.’

      Alan Rankine was MacKenzie’s creative foil in The Associates, one of the greatest bands of that era. Both men were sublimely gifted, precocious and fairly uncontrollable Scottish mavericks, and totally up Kent’s alley. Overtly Bowie-influenced (their 1979 debut single was a cover of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, cannily released just six weeks after Bowie’s own version), they weren’t just dashingly handsome but fashion-conscious too. The pair had released an album, The Affectionate Punch, on Fiction, an offshoot of the major label Polydor, but they were open to new offers. The Associates’ increasing experimental daring, combined with an arch playfulness, would have considerably brightened up 4AD’s procession of brooding young men who, to paraphrase Ian Curtis, had ‘weight on their shoulders’.

      Steve Webbon: ‘Peter was exuberant and camp, mischievous, while Ivo aligned himself with the introverts, all the miserable ones!’

      ‘I’m glad Peter didn’t stay,’ says Ivo. ‘Can you imagine Divine on 4AD? The best way to describe it is, I don’t like being around people but Peter thrived in those situations, like being backstage after a show. He wanted everything at the label to grow, whereas I found anything beside the finished album was unnecessary. My head is filled with ecstatic memories of the live experience, but the part that’s always meant most is the one-on-one relationship between the listener and a recorded piece of work, the artefact that will stand for all time.

      ‘Some people, within bands and the music industry, thrive on the idea of being involved in rock’n’roll. Doesn’t [future Creation label MD] Alan McGee say the only reason he got into the music business was to get rich, take drugs and fuck women? I don’t even like being around people enough for that to have an appeal. I guess I was the nerdy one at home with headphones on scanning the album sleeve.’

      It all worked out neatly, as Bauhaus and Kent departed at the same time. 4AD’s first year of business concluded by it being made a limited company, no longer dependent on funds from the Beggars’ mothership after the release of In The Flat Field. There was one more 1980 release to come: In Camera’s IV Songs EP had been recorded at Blackwing with Eric Radcliffe assisted

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