LITMIR.BIZ

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instantly been championed by the press in a manner withheld for the more heavyweight and less conceptual 4AD.

      Ivo appreciated Josef K’s ‘It’s Kinda Funny’ but saw 4AD ‘as an alternative to Postcard’, though he says he understood Postcard’s dedicated following. Ivo would not have deviated from obeying his A&R instincts for a similar concept or status, yet it’s a curious coincidence that 4AD’s next find – via a demo – involved members of Josef K and a spindly, hyper-literate Postcard-ian pop that broke the conventional 4AD mould.

      The Happy Family wasn’t the most satisfying or productive vehicle for the band’s singer-songwriter Nick Currie – or Momus, the alter ego he subsequently chose for his solo guise, after the Greek god of satire and mockery. Having lived in London, Paris, Tokyo, New York and Berlin over the years, Currie’s current home is Osaka, Japan, where he continues to fashion spindly, hyper-literate albums but in a electronic/folk fusion he calls ‘analogue baroque’. He also writes novels and essays, teaches the art of lyric writing and gives, he says, ‘unhelpful’ museum tours.

      Currie was born in Paisley, to the west of Glasgow, a centre of printed wool manufacture that gave its name to the Indian pattern so popular among Sixties flower children. Currie was no hippie or drop-out, taking an English Literature degree at Aberdeen University while leaving time to study John Peel’s radio show at night. At a gig in Glasgow, he’d given Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross a demo with instructions to pass it on to Alan Horne at Postcard, but Ross kept it, and after Josef K’s surprise split, Currie found himself in a band with Ross, Josef K bassist Dave Weddell and local drummer Ian Stoddart.

      Currie christened the quartet The Happy Family. ‘It was tongue in cheek,’ he declares. ‘I already had a concept for an album, about two children in the [German terrorist organisation] Red Brigade who assassinated their lottery-winning fascist of a father.’ The anticipated album would be called The Man On Your Street: ‘It was about totalitarianism, the idea that your street equals the whole world, with fascism as a global threat, and mapping that with the oedipal dynamics of the family. My mother had just run off with a wealthy accountant with very conservative views. I was working through the break-up of my actual happy family.’

      Currie hoped that his perception of Josef K’s ‘star power in the press’ would rub off on The Happy Family – ‘People were shocked by Josef K’s early demise and interested in what would come out of it,’ he says. Ivo admits he was one of them: ‘I never had any intense involvement with any of the band, but Nick was a smart fellow, and I liked his concept.’

      Currie agrees that he and Ivo never bonded. Both men were shy, though Currie’s droll, intellectual way of compensation was more Alan Horne than Ivo. At their first meeting, Currie suggests, ‘To Ivo, I probably looked extremely young, skinny and chinny, and not like a pop star.’ Such criteria weren’t deal-breakers at 4AD, so Currie is probably more accurate when he adds, ‘I was probably an opinionated and prickly kind of fellow’, which also described Ivo to a point. But Currie did feel some connection: ‘Ivo was kindly and avuncular, a very good teacher and indoctrinator, with a very strong aesthetic, and he knew all this music.’

      Currie also got a glimpse early on of Ivo’s home when The Happy Family stayed at his flat: ‘It was awful, suburban hell on the outside but aesthetic and tidy inside, painted lilac and everything filed away beautifully, with fine art coffee table photography books like Leni Riefenstahl in Africa and Diane Arbus. He drove us around in his BMW – the cheapest model [only leased, Ivo says], but still a BMW. So he resembled a playboy entrepreneur to me. But in his mild English way, he talked about his childhood on the farm. I said, “That’s great, all the family together like that”, and he looked at me strangely, like it was my ideal and not his.’ Which was true: a happy family wasn’t how Ivo remembered his past.

      Before any album was recorded, Ivo wanted to release a Happy Family single. A three-track seven-inch headed by ‘Puritans’ was recorded at Palladium Studios, ‘a weird pixie-like place in the hills outside Edinburgh, a bungalow with a studio inside,’ Currie recalls. Ivo didn’t know it but Palladium would soon become as crucial to 4AD’s fortunes as Blackwing, handy for any local Scots and for bands that needed a residential wing for extended visits. Palladium was cheaper than Jacob’s Studios, and run by Jon Turner, a musician whose accomplishments were far in advance of any 4AD artist – he’d even regularly backed Greece’s psychedelic hero turned MOR entertainer Demis Roussos.

      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

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