Facing the Other Way Page 6

  Scinto recalls that, of all the applicants to In Camera’s advert, Gray was the only one to fit the bill. However, Derwin’s flailing Keith Moon-style drums proved to be an awkward fit, so Pete Moore’s friend Jeff Wilmott replaced him as In Camera’s drummer. ‘Jeff looked like one of the Ramones, but he just locked musically with us,’ says Gray.

  Wilmott, who is now a financial IT advisor living on Tierra Verde, an island in Florida’s Tampa Bay, says he only now drums for fun, preferring cave-diving, which makes him something of a rarity in 4AD circles. But in his teens, he and Moore had followed the Banshees all over Britain, and found themselves as the supporting rhythm section to Scinto and Gray’s intense blueprint. Moore also thought up the band’s name. ‘In Camera was a play by Sartre, but we were aware of its courtroom association, and it could be a lens or prism,’ Scinto explains. ‘We liked its in-private feel. We wanted to reach as many people as possible but we felt entitled to our inner sanctum, to put our minds together and see what we’d come up with next.’

  The intellectual rigour reached as far as Scinto’s flattened vocal. ‘Singing suggests a manipulation of the voice, and saying “please like me”,’ he explains. ‘A voice simply suggests an expression. It’s not pretentious; it’s presenting a fact.’ On stage, says Gray, ‘Dave was very upfront and confrontational, in the Ian Curtis vein, dancing across the stage, angular like the music. Pete’s bass was like Mick Allen’s, distorted and hard.’

  ‘Gray,’ says Scinto, ‘used feedback, syncopation before we knew what that meant, and chopped things about. He was brilliant at sound.’

  One of Malcolm McLaren’s associates, Jock McDonald, another former stallholder who had a pitch near to Peter Kent’s at Beaufort Market, was running Billy’s club night at Gossips in Soho. McDonald had heard of this forceful new band, and asked In Camera to support Bauhaus. Peter Kent was impressed enough to visit their dressing room after the show. ‘He burst in, and asked if we’d like to make a record,’ Gray recalls. ‘I was a bit shocked; we’d been going less than six months. Ivo was there too but he was apparently too drunk and obliterated to focus on us.’

  Ivo: ‘Actually, I had a blinding headache that night, and another the following time I saw them. In Camera were very much Peter’s signing, but I grew to like them, and I really, really liked the Peel session we released later on.’

  In Camera’s debut seven-inch single ‘Die Laughing’ blended staccato vocal, guitar frazzle, high lead bass line and martial drum attack. The rhythmic swish of the flipside ‘Final Achievement’ lurched in the direction of PiL’s ‘Death Disco’, as Scinto laced the monochrome sound with oblique images of social dysfunction that he’d witnessed across his patch.

  Scinto says he could see the difference between introvert Ivo and extrovert partner Kent: ‘Peter was more adventurous and outgoing, hanging with the bands.’ As a part-time concert promoter, Kent was bound to mingle with musicians, and one night at a mutual friend’s in Notting Hill, before Axis/4AD had even been conceived, he had got talking to Graham Lewis, one quarter of Ivo’s beloved Wire. ‘I later told Graham about 4AD,’ says Kent, ‘and introduced him to Ivo. They got on like a house on fire, so it was Ivo that ended up working with him.’

  On the phone from Uppsala in his wife’s home country of Sweden, Lewis recalls how Wire was seeking a way out of their EMI deal. Like many of the early punk bands, Wire had signed to a major, which is why independents such as 4AD were so urgently required. Lewis and Ivo – 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’ Whit
e 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’.

  Gilbert and Lewis’ studio of choice was Blackwing, housed in a deconsecrated church in Southwark, just south of the Thames. Ivo discovered that its owner, Eric Radcliffe, ‘was an incredibly smart scientist with a musical background. It was inexpensive, and Eric let us do what we liked.’ Blackwing was to become 4AD’s home from home for years to come.‡

  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 Love’ was a messily inspired Banshees revision. Of the rest, Spasmodic Caress’s ‘Hit the Dead’ (like Modern English’s ‘Home’) had a sinewy Wire-like tension and Psychotik Tanks’ ‘Let’s Have A Party’ had a spiky urgency. Red Atkins’ finale, the music hall turn ‘Hunk Of A Punk’, was simply the most bizarre and – in retrospect – unsuitable track that 4AD ever stuck its logo on.

  ‘That was completely and utterly Peter. I thought it was silly,’ says Ivo, referring to the two-minute track by Red Atkins, a.k.a. forty-five-year-old Frank Duckett, a home studio enthusiast that, for reasons still unknown, had penned a daft homoerotic ode (‘yes he’s a hunk of a punk and you know that he’s my kind of man’). Peter Kent’s verdict? ‘It’s hilarious.’

  A 1982 interview in the British fanzine Blam! confirmed that the Spasmodic Caress track wasn’t actually a demo, but a third re-recording after the first two were deemed ‘shit’ and ‘absolutely terrible’, by singer Pete Masters. Promised what drummer Chris Chisnall called ‘a single of our own’, the Colchester quartet nevertheless had to suffice with Presage(s). Kent did find them support slots to Bauhaus and on a Modern English/In Camera bill, but the band’s next release wasn’t until 2004’s self-released posthumous compilation, Fragments Of Spasmodic Caress.

  It was a good thing 4AD wasn’t staking its reputation on Presage(s) because, like three-quarters of the Axis clan, most of these bands went the same ignominious way – but then ‘presage’ did mean a sign, warning or omen that something typically bad will happen. In 1980, Psychotik Tanks self-released ‘Registered Electors’ (subsequently added to Presage(s)’ digital download version) but nothing more; Atkins would only ever release one more EP (including the original, and a second version, of ‘Hunk Of A Punk’), and that was twenty-five years later. Both Last Dance and C.V.O. would never release another record.

  One of the most anonymous artefacts in the 4AD catalogue was followed by one of its most prized, with Ivo’s A&R antennae finely attuned this time. If Bauhaus supplied the foundation and Rema-Rema had shown what heights could be scaled, The Birthday Party was the real beginning of 4AD’s inexorable climb. It’s been so long since the band was on 4AD, it’s generally forgotten that this is where Nick Cave first landed outside of his native Australia.

  Hailing from Melbourne, the capital of the south-eastern state of Victoria, The Birthday Party had only been on British soil for a handful of months when Ivo first saw them live in 1980. According to founding member Mick Harvey, the band were in a state of flux, aware that they were having to start again at the bottom of the ladder, as they’d had to in Melbourne five years earlier when they were known as The Boys Next Door.

  As Harvey recalls, the band had outgrown their home city and set their sights on conquering the northern hemisphere, taking the usual Antipodean route to London. Given the quintet’s original, discordant brew of rampant blues, garage rock and Stooges-style punk, London had never seen anything like The Birthday Party. The reverse was equally true.

  ‘I don’t feel that way anymore, but I originally developed an intense, blind, boiling hatred for England,’ Cave told me in an interview for the Dutch magazine OOR in 1992. ‘Everything was so mediocre. All the bands were weak and limp-wristed, and I was so pissed off.’

  Harvey is more ambivalent about the experience. ‘Yes, it would have been horrible for an unemployable drug addict,’ referring to singer Cave (and guitarist Rowland S. Howard, who died of liver cancer, aged fifty, in 2009). ‘It wasn’t the same experience for the rest of us, but London was a pretty tough, draining place. It felt severe and a bit hopeless.’

  Swapping Australia’s relative stability, sunshine and wide open spaces for the bitter resignation and winter blues of Britain only drove Cave and the remaining Party members to more agitated states, though they didn’t persist with the kind of songs that attempted to address Melbourne’s own stifling conservatism, such as ‘Masturbation Nation’. It was one of the few original songs by The Boys Next Door, formed by teenage friends Harvey, Cave and (drummer) Phill Calvert, one half of a school band at Caulfield Grammar that had split off to form a new union with bassist Tracy Pew after school was out in 1975. The band had mostly churned out covers of rebel anthems from the glam and punk songbooks, but Howard’s addition in 1978 brought a choppier, scything style of play and a bluesy, expressionist mood to match Cave’s increasingly oblique lyrics.

  ‘We incorpor
ated punk and new wave into our sound, but we weren’t interested in being The Damned,’ Harvey recalls. ‘We were more Pere Ubu, Pop Group, and The Cramps. By 1979, we’d found our own direction.’

  That year’s debut album Door, Door was followed by a change of name, to The Birthday Party, and of location, to a squat in west London’s budget-conscious Antipodean stronghold of Earls Court. ‘We arrived in London on a wing and a prayer, completely unknown,’ says Harvey. ‘It was difficult to get gigs, and we spent a lot of time working out how to.’

  The Birthday Party was the first band Ivo signed after seeing a concert, and there wasn’t to be another for eleven years. He’d seen them by chance, at their second ever UK show, at north-west London’s Moonlight Club; he’d gone to watch The Lines, whose manager was Steve Brown, Ivo’s travel companion from the Moroccan trip. German synth duo D.A.F. was top of the bill; the Australians had played first. Ivo was captivated by the uncompromising dynamic sound, especially Harvey’s Farfisa organ sound on ‘Mr Clarinet’, though, he noticed, ‘nobody else was paying any attention to what someone described to me as “some bunch of Aussie weirdos”.’

  It turned out that Daniel Miller had been paying attention. Miller, who had started Mute Records to release his own records (The Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’/(‘Warn Leatherette’), had expanded the label by signing D.A.F., and was responsible for The Birthday Party opening the show. ‘We’d gone to see Daniel because he’d sunk money into getting D.A.F., and also Depeche Mode, going,’ recalls Harvey. ‘Daniel was very encouraging but said he couldn’t take on anything else. But Ivo expressed great interest. We’d heard of 4AD, and it was obvious that we weren’t a commercial prospect, so we knew his interest was genuine.’

  Harvey invited Ivo down to The Birthday Party’s next show; afterwards, Ivo discovered that his favourite song in their set, ‘The Friend Catcher’, had been recorded back in Melbourne, and 4AD could have it for a single. ‘The band came into the shop with the tapes and a grainy black-and-white photo of a cake they’d bought and stuck a candle in, and that was the artwork,’ Ivo recalls. ‘There weren’t many great sleeves in that first year.’