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

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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.

      ‘Punk was cathartic in the sense you could scream and jump, and out of it came a lot of creativity,’ he concludes. ‘But I felt that people needed to have more faith in their own perception, about how to find their way, in relationships, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, handling money, aspirations and rebellion. I was myself trying to find a way through the impressions and inputs. We all were.’

      However, in Ivo’s mind, this struggle had manifested itself in the studio, where he’d driven to survey proceedings. ‘No one seemed in the mood, so I just left,’ he recalls. ‘I’d heard the demos, and anyone who has released records based on demos knows that proper recording can lose something. Chapter II is OK, but there was no real direction, guts or energy. So for those reasons, I started to get involved more in the studio after that. If things were going wrong, at least I’d know why.’

      ‘It wasn’t my impression that things weren’t going well,’ says Bruton. ‘Either way, being on the edge was part of the creative process.’ The problem was, Dance Chapter’s collective spirit was fast dissolving, over money, or the lack of, and personal ambition. ‘We were also going in different directions. Steve [Hadfield] was still studying, and he left soon after the recording. I wasn’t looking to make a career from music, though I’d have gone on. But I didn’t have a way to hold a group together, or rebuild it. Ivo suggested I move to London and see what happened, but by then, I’d reached the places I needed to go, and I had the freedom to look at things in another way.’

      Dance Chapter was the first of 4AD’s artists to fall at the second fence, and again, its four constituents didn’t make inroads into other music. If the band’s demise was a downbeat conclusion to the year, there was enough achievement to end 1981 with a compilation, which Ivo assembled for the Japanese market via major label WEA Japan, which was distributing 4AD in the Far East. Housed in a photo of two wrestling male nudes from one of Vaughan Oliver’s medical journals, Natures Mortes – Still Lives was a personal inventory of 4AD highlights, including the early Birthday Party single ‘Mr Clarinet’ that Ivo had reissued on 4AD, and tracks from Rema-Rema, Modern English, Matt Johnson, Mass, Sort Sol, In Camera, Cupol, Past Seven Days, Psychotik Tanks and Dif Juz. Gathered in isolation, 4AD’s formative years sound distinctive, predominantly original and, with hindsight, undervalued, though only in light of what was to follow.

      In a letter to the American fanzine The Offense towards the end of 1981, Ivo said he thought he was ‘moving away from rock music, even in its broadest sense, as much as possible’. There was even talk of Aboriginal chants. He concluded, ‘I’m confident of change and a very valid and varied output – but my search for something far removed from anything I’ve ever done will continue.’

      Ivo already had something in mind that fulfilled that brief. Driving back home from Spaceward after abandoning the Dance Chapter session, he stuck on a demo that he’d been given at the Beggars shop that week. ‘I got called upstairs and whoever was behind the counter said, that’s Ivo, and this cassette got stuffed into my sweaty hand,’ he recalls. ‘Something was quietly said, and the couple left. When I listened, I immediately enjoyed it. It sounded familiar, like the Banshees, though with a drum machine. And a voice you could barely hear. There was no indication that she was great or bad. But the power of the music made me call them to suggest they make a single.’

      When Ivo called, he discovered his visitors that day, guitarist Robin Guthrie and vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, had come down from Grangemouth in Scotland to see The Birthday Party. ‘We first saw The Birthday Party open for Bauhaus, and we started to follow them around on tour,’ recalls Guthrie. ‘We were just teenagers, and painfully shy, but we started talking to them after shows. Eventually they said, are you in a band? Yeah, we said. They said they’d met these people in London – which was 4AD.’

      Nothing would be the same for 4AD after Cocteau Twins.

       The Other Otherness

      (CAD201–AD215)

      Sorry for the delayed reply. I’ve been somewhat affected, in a truly depressed sort of a way since you came here. Not your fault, buddy, just a barrel load of worms wriggling about in my consciousness which I’m not dealing with too well. Apart from that, well, I’m OK.

      Someone much wiser than me once told me that I had to make peace with my past in order to enjoy the present, but what if one’s past becomes one’s present.

      And that, my friend, is where I am at.

      Worms, Can, Opened.

      (Robin

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