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

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it–/ He out 4AD’d 4AD!’ Sadly, it never reached Ivo, or he never realised the sheet was inside before selling it. The EP, with sheet of paper still inside, was eventually bought in a second-hand store and its purchaser revealed the limerick in an online blog.

       The Family That Plays Together

      (BAD301–MAD315)

      The conversion of a large dry cleaning and laundry service gave the Beggars Banquet and 4AD labels the chance to leave the Hogarth Road shop for a standalone office. Alma Road was a street of Victorian houses in London’s south-western borough of Wandsworth, an anonymous suburb six miles from central London’s entertainment hub where every major record label occupied office blocks or stately mansions. The Slug and Lettuce pub was conveniently located on the opposite corner of the road from their building, at number 17–19.

      Alma Road also symbolised the difference between 4AD and its independent label peers. Mute was based over in the west London enclave of Westbourne Grove, near to Rough Trade’s shop and label, deep in the heart of Notting Hill, the heartland of West Indian immigration, reggae, Rock Against Racism, carnivals, riots and streets of squats, a thriving low-rent bohemia that had made the bumpy transition from the hippies to the punks. Wandsworth had its less salubrious quarters but carnivals and riots were in short supply.

      With room to breathe, and enough funds, Ivo also took on his first employee: Vaughan Oliver, who had previously been designing in a freelance capacity. Ivo knew design and packaging was part of 4AD’s identity, a visual language that gave 4AD an extra dimension of distinction. He could also see that many of 4AD’s artists were producing sub-standard images when left to their own devices.

      It was a mutual admiration society between the two figures; strongly opinionated, stubborn and deeply involved with their particular line of work. ‘Ivo had this whole world of musical knowledge that enthralled me, and I looked up to him, and adored him, from the start,’ Oliver recalls. ‘And I think he had a secret admiration for me, educating him visually.’

      Ivo: ‘Vaughan singlehandedly opened my eyes to the world of design. In his portfolio, he had samples of Thorn EMI light bulb sleeves. It hadn’t occurred to me that behind every object, utensil or drainpipe was a designer and I never saw the world in the same way again. Maybe I didn’t show it at the time, caught up in the sheer business and joy of watching this thing called 4AD blossom, but it was a privilege that I still cherish, sitting four feet away from this outpouring of creativity. Nigel [Grierson] was around a lot too and Vaughan and Nigel at full throttle was an experience to remember.’

      The friendship was firmly based around work: ‘We didn’t talk about anything but music, and we didn’t have a drink together – Ivo didn’t go to pubs,’ Oliver says. ‘Whereas one reason I took the job was the pub over the road!’

      As Ivo discovered, Oliver was not one to dirty his hands with anything but ink. ‘I seriously expected Vaughan, like any other employee when they later joined, to help unpack the van when it arrived with records. But you’d always have to track him down. I saw very early on, for example, that he’d take two weeks to design, by hand, each individual letter for the Xmal Deutschland logo. Design was a full-time job for Vaughan.’

      Oliver’s first task as staff employee was The Birthday Party’s new four-track EP, The Bad Seed. The band had handled its own artwork to date, with mixed results, and Oliver was forced to work with supplied ideas: the band’s four faces and realistic illustrations of their core subjects, a heart wrapped in barbed wire, a cross and flames. The contents were much more inspiring, ‘Deep In The Woods’ tapping a newly smouldering vigour (perhaps because, for the first time, Rowland S. Howard didn’t write anything on a Birthday Party record), though Cave’s opening gambit – ‘Hands up who wants to die!’ – on the thrilling ‘Sonny’s Burning’ was as much a self-parody as anything he could accuse Peter Murphy of.

      The Bad Seed had been recorded in West Berlin after the quartet had decamped there two months after Junkyard’s unanimously strong reviews. Though Ivo considers the EP the band’s ‘crowning glory’, the cost of maintaining The Birthday Party overseas was prohibitive. ‘Ivo was disappointed but pragmatic about not being in a position to provide financial support,’ recalls Mick Harvey. ‘That’s when we switched over to Mute. They’d had worldwide hits with Depeche Mode and Yazoo and were pretty cashed up.’

      As one band departed 4AD for Germany, taking their testosterone-fuelled fantasies with them, so a band departed Germany for 4AD, bringing a jolt of oestrogen, but with as much energy and discipline. If anyone thought Ivo’s penchant for dark paths had diminished, Xmal Deutschland would make them think again.

      Living again in her native Hamburg after several years in New York, Xmal’s founding member and singer Anja Huwe has abandoned music for painting, but she describes herself as a synesthete (a stimulus in one sensory mode involuntarily elicits a sensation in another) who paints what she hears. ‘I had a wonderful time playing music, and achieved everything I wanted,’ she says. ‘But colour is my ultimate music.’ It’s why she turned down the chance to go solo when Xmal Deutschland finally split in 1990. ‘Music was art to me; I didn’t want to be a pop star,’ Huwe says. ‘I knew the price would have been me. It’s why 4AD was perfect at the time. I saw it as a platform or a nest. People there understood what we did.’

      Huwe was destined to be a model, but she turned down an offer to move to Paris when she was seventeen after visiting London in 1977 and seeing The Clash and the all-female Slits at the London Lyceum. ‘The bands were our age, whereas even Kraftwerk felt like old guys to us,’ she recalls. ‘I also saw Killing Joke and Basement 5 on that trip, bands that had this fantastic mix of punk, ska and reggae. I started buying this music, cut my hair very short, and started seeing every band I could in Hamburg.’

      The original Xmal Deutschland line-up had joined forces in 1980. ‘We weren’t in either punk or avant-garde camps, and we had a keyboard. No one could label us,’ says Huwe. That didn’t stop the German press from trying: ‘We were repeatedly told we sounded more British than German. A friend recommended we move to London, which wasn’t meant in a nice way. But we thought, why not?’ Once there, their black garb, nail varnish and song titles such as ‘Incubus Succubus’ (the second of two singles that had been released in Germany) had Xmal tagged as goth. ‘That drove us nuts. The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission – that all came later.’

      A foothold in London was established after sending 4AD a rehearsal tape. ‘It was the label we wanted, because of Bauhaus and The Birthday Party,’ says Huwe. ‘Our English wasn’t that good, and we were aliens really. But Ivo respected what we did.’

      Ivo says he had instantly enjoyed what he heard: ‘They were boiling over with energy, and Manuela Rickers was an incredible, choppy rhythm guitarist. I flew to Hamburg and agreed to an album.’

      Xmal Deutschland became 4AD’s first European act, but didn’t record anything until their line-up settled on Huwe, Rickers, Scots-born keyboardist Fiona Sangster, new drummer Manuela Zwingmann and the first male Xmal member, bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock. The German contingent found London a marked contrast to Hamburg, where people had ‘health insurance, affordable apartments and heating’, says Huwe. ‘Many British bands we met were very poor, and desperate for success. I spent a summer with Ian Astbury [frontman of Beggars Banquet’s similarly goth-branded Southern Death Cult), spending his advance. He’d say, I will be big one day, a pop star, and he did everything he could to get there. That wasn’t our goal.’

      That was clear from Huwe’s decision to sing almost entirely in German, which she saw as a much harsher language than English and which suited the band’s pummelling mantras and Huwe’s chanting style. ‘I was like Liz Fraser,’ she recalls.

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