Facing the Other Way Page 7

  In September 1980, the band recorded a session for BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who had given Bauhaus the same accolade. In October, 4AD released ‘The Friend Catcher’ though not the album that had been recorded in Melbourne before moving to London (the Australian label Missing Link released it in November 1980), as The Birthday Party preferred to concentrate on their new material, fuelled by the hardships of London and the bile of their response.

  PR Chris Carr set to work promoting ‘The Friend Catcher’, starting with a slew of live reviews. ‘The initial reaction was, “What’s with the stupid name?”’ Carr recalls. ‘I told journalists that The Birthday Party was a Harold Pinter play, and they’d say, “I know, but it’s still a stupid name for a band.” It was like some unwritten rule.’

  Carr could see that part of the problem lay with 4AD itself, being associated with the vehemently disliked Bauhaus. ‘In those days, your roster was your advertising and it took a long while for 4AD to get the same kudos that Mute or Factory had,’ Carr says. ‘People didn’t like Bauhaus’ artistic pretensions and Modern English, for example, were seen as too fey for what was going on around them, and so they could never get established.’

  With a proven audience and earning power back home, and an album to promote, The Birthday Party returned to Australia in late November for the summer. Funded by Missing Link, they began recording a new album. In the meantime, 4AD had just released its first ever album.

  Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field had been recorded at London’s Southern Studios: ‘It was like a bunker, which made things very intense,’ recalls David J. ‘We had formed in isolation, and the album reflected that we felt like outsiders.’ The sound of the album mirrored the claustrophobic conditions, and without any objective input from 4AD, who respected the band’s wishes to go it alone, they’d failed to record a defining debut. It had a defining opener in the stentorian ‘Double Dare’, but this was the licensed Peel session version as they hadn’t managed to match its quality by themselves. ‘The album wasn’t that good a representation of Bauhaus, unlike their singles, which were always great,’ says Ivo. ‘The situation over “Double Dare” underlined what was wrong.’

  The album showed that Bauhaus was not to be swayed by criticism. ‘Terror Couple Kills Colonel’ may have changed tack but the album tracks ‘St Vitus Dance’ and ‘Stigmata Martyr’ could not have been a more resolute renewal of goth tendencies, with Murphy in the central crucified role. Their resolution was rewarded when In The Flat Field topped the independent charts and reached number 72 on the national UK chart. This was despite an unusually vindictive reaction from the music press. ‘Nine meaningless moans and flails bereft of even the most cursory contour of interest,’ said NME. ‘Too priggish and conceited. Sluggish indulgence instead of hoped for goth-ness,’ claimed Sounds.

  That Sounds wanted more ‘goth-ness’ was an irony that Bauhaus’ fragile ego was unable to appreciate. ‘We really had our backs to the wall,’ Haskins Dompe recalls. ‘We got slammed for the Bowie influence, and the press also felt we were really pretentious. It took me twenty years to accept we were, to a degree, but at the time I wouldn’t hear of it. It was us against the world.’

  ‘The zeitgeist was dark and intense, but I thought “gothic” was the antithesis of Bauhaus,’ claims David J. ‘We felt more eclectic, with influences like dub and early electronics like Suicide, Can and disco. Out of our peers, we felt most empathy with Joy Division. When [Joy Division singer] Ian Curtis said he liked Bauhaus, it meant a lot. He came to see us play and told us he had our singles.’

  Retrospection has been kinder to Bauhaus. Simon Reynolds, author of the seminal post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again, claimed that Bauhaus were the exception to the rule that goth bands ‘didn’t live up to the image’. Reynolds also favourably compared Bauhaus’ early singles to Joy Division. ‘If we had dressed like Gang of Four or Joy Division we wouldn’t have been hated,’ Pete Murphy told Stool Pigeon writer John Doran in 2008. ‘And there was a really strong homoerotic element to what we did – a glamorous element; a very Wildean element.’

  Ivo didn’t care either. He dismissed labelling and ideas of what was perceived as cool or not – all that mattered was music and an artist’s self-belief. ‘I never understood the gothic association,’ he says. ‘If people think the music was dark, that’s fine by me. I was just responding to things I enjoyed, that I emotionally connected to, that had possibilities.’

  ‘The music fitted Ivo’s character, dark and personal,’ says Martin Mills. ‘The pop world was on a completely different shelf.’

  Disappointed by the Bauhaus album, Ivo was also struggling to fall for Rema-Rema’s successor, Mass: ‘I liked them enormously as people, but musically, they were an anomaly.’ With Max departing alongside boyfriend Marco Pirroni, the remaining nucleus of Mick Allen, Mark Cox and Gary Asquith found a drummer who was already looking for them: Danny Briottet, a schoolboy who would hang out in Beggars’ Ealing shop. ‘Danny said he really liked Rema-Rema, and to tell them that he’d like to be their drummer,’ says Ivo. ‘The next thing I know, Mass had formed and Danny – who couldn’t play drums! – was in. Was he going to ruin it?’

  ‘The one thing about Mass I don’t like is the stiff drums,’ says Asquith, who nevertheless went on to form Renegade Soundwave with Briottet (who proved to be a much better programmer than drummer). ‘And we didn’t have Marco’s brilliance. But Mick was a great bassist. And the source of songs was just as good.’

  Cox had been Marco’s number one fan but could see Mick Allen had come into his own. ‘Picture this super-slim guy with unkempt hair, kind of quiet, who had flowered into this multi-faceted personality. And our sound was completely uncompromised. We wouldn’t mould anything for anyone.’

  Mass’ 4AD debut was a seven-inch single that rivalled In Camera for dark and personal, with a side serving of bleak. ‘You And I’ followed in the eerie slipstream of Rema-Rema’s ‘Fond Affections’, laced with an organ drone, background cries and only an occasional tom-tom roll to lend momentum. The thick bass pulse, layered vocal extortions and thumped drums similarly recalled the old band but the feel and mood was more leaden, without the same degree of liberation. Not even John Peel was on side. ‘He thought it some of the most consciously morose music he’d ever heard,’ Cox sighs. And, as Ivo recalls, ‘Peel’s support made all the difference in those days.’

  Mass was the perfect example of a band driven by a fearless self-will, in the truest sense of punk’s do-it-yourself mentality. As they walked on stage for their first show, third on the bill to Bauhaus at the University of London, Cox recalls Asquith facing the audience and announcing, ‘I fucking hate students!’ At the Moonlight Club, Ivo remembers Mass receiving no applause after a song and Asquith yelling, ‘We’ve never been loved!’ But at the same show, Ivo adds, ‘I was mesmerised by Mick crooning “You And I” quite beautifully.’

  ‘We used to call Mass “Mess” because they lacked direction,’ says Richie Thomas, whose instrumental band Dif Juz had supported Mass at central London’s Heaven nightclub. ‘But they had a really interesting look: Germanic, like Bowie circa Low, but upmarket. Gary looked edgy and dangerous, like a tightly coiled spring.’

  At least Mass had style. Modern English had a guitarist with a stegosaurus haircut, but fortunately their second single ‘Gathering Dust’ showed a noticeable progress in dynamics, structure and impact. ‘It’s one of the most underrated of post-punk anthems,’ Ivo reckons, who gets credit from the band for his contribution.

  Mick Conroy: ‘Ivo was quiet at the beginning of our relationship, probably because he was focused on 4AD. But he got stuck in to “Gathering Dust”. The studio was as much an adventure for him as us. For example, he really liked Steve’s synth noises, which Steve couldn’t easily control, so Ivo had the idea to put it all through an Eventide harmoniser.’

  Ivo: ‘Fucking hell! It was my first taste of influencing a recording, and I loved it. But the only reason I got a producer credi
t was that the band were practically asleep under the desk, and the engineer had to get approval from someone, so I’d say yes to things.’

  After the haphazard art direction of 4AD’s early sleeves, including the unsuitably fey figurine on the cover of ‘Swans On Glass’, Modern English – and 4AD generally – needed art direction as well. ‘Ivo told us that someone was coming in with his portfolio,’ recalls Conroy.

  An exquisitely designed house in Epsom, Surrey, from the furniture and ornamental bric-a-brac to the shelves of hefty art books, framed posters and wooden sculptures – this has to be the property of an artist. The drawers of big, elegant wooden plan chests dotted all over reveal copious sheaves of artwork: proofs of record sleeves, posters, adverts, most of it vintage, all evidence of a rich body of work.

  The owner of the artwork, the man responsible for a lot of the surrounding designer detail, is as integral to the 4AD story as Ivo. There for the long run, he worked on endlessly bewitching, beguiling and beautiful images from his own warped imagination and those of his close collaborators; images that have been exhibited nationally and internationally, published in books and catalogues, and with countless dedicated designers and illustrators pledging allegiance to a body of work they claim irrevocably changed their lives.

  This is also a man who, for one particular sleeve image, stripped down to his underpants in a suburban London flat, strapped on a belt of dead eels and enacted a fertility dance for the camera. To say Vaughan Oliver is a character is an understatement. Everyone who ever worked for, or released a record on, 4AD during its first twenty years, has their Vaughan story. He might as well get his version in first.

  ‘The first thing I ever wrote on a toilet wall,’ he says, ‘were the words “To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy”. So said French photographer Robert Doisneau, and it struck me as the perspective that I come from. To keep things open to interpretation.’

  In the spirit of Doisneau, Oliver shouldn’t really recount the inspiration behind the belt of dead eels, but it’s too good to resist. ‘It was a reaction to an all-girl band, called The Breeders, their album title Pod and the vibrant colours I was getting from the music,’ he explains. ‘To me, it needed a strong male response. The eels are phallic, but I’d seen an image of a belt of frankfurters that stuck in my mind, so I developed that. When it came to shoot it, I couldn’t get anyone else to do the job, so I did it. There was blood everywhere … but I knew one of the shots would work!’

  Oliver hails from County Durham in the Wearside region of north-east England. According to Tim Hall, who joined 4AD in the mid-1990s, ‘Vaughan is brilliant and mad, he likes a drink, and he was sometimes a big, scary Geordie! [Oliver would like to point out that he is proud to be a Wearsider, a subtle geographic distinction.] The first thing he said to me was, “Do you know who I am; do you know my work, my reputation?” He was just checking that someone who was joining 4AD understood its legacy.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like me,’ Oliver contends. ‘People didn’t always hear the irony and the humour in what I’d say.’

  This helps explain why Oliver’s recent talk to an audience in Edinburgh about his career, work and inspiration was entitled What’s in the Bucket Daddy? ‘A bucket is a universal symbol, up there with the wheel,’ he explains. ‘There’s humility to a bucket, but put a logo on it and it clashes. The collision of the glamour of a logo and the bucket’s humility is funny to me. In 1995, we had an exhibition, and me and [business partner] Chris Bigg were discussing the death of vinyl and the record sleeve, and we thought it would be funny to have under each exhibition piece a bucket with a melted piece of vinyl, like it was thrown away.’

  In the days when vinyl was the unparalleled medium and the scope of the twelve-inch format allowed room to create as well as describe, Oliver attended Ferryhill Grammar School. ‘Sanctuary was the art room, where we’d talk about art, girls, football and music,’ he recalls. The lurid, sexual glamour of Roxy Music’s album sleeves, Roger Dean’s sci-fi landscapes and the surreal creations of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell’s design group Hipgnosis were his early key inspirations: ‘They all used their imagination, rather than put a band on the front. It opened me to ideas.’

  Rather than a foundation course in art, Oliver naïvely applied to the nearby Newcastle Polytechnic to study graphic design, ‘Even though I didn’t even know what “graphic design” meant,’ he says, ‘until I read the dictionary definition the morning of my interview. I just hoped the course would lead me to sleeve design.’

  Oliver was also fortunate to have a wildly creative course tutor in Terry Dowling: ‘He showed me the idea of inspiration being all around. He elevated the banal for me, by showing me stuff that was on his wall, things like pasta alphabets, stuff that he’d take from the street. It was a new way of seeing, a new kind of beauty. He basically changed my mind.’

  Although painfully shy, Oliver nevertheless moved down to London in 1980 and quickly found work at the design agency Benchmark, where he worked for clients such as model kit manufacturers Airfix. Benchmark also employed fellow designers Alan McDonald and Mark Robertson, who were friends of Peter Kent; Robertson had designed the original Axis and 4AD logos and the ‘Swans On Glass’ cover for Modern English. When Ivo wanted more art direction for ‘Gathering Dust’, Robertson happened to be abroad and Oliver was sent in his place.

  ‘The door cracked open,’ Ivo recalls, ‘and this head just came in, curly hair and a short back and sides, brown flying jacket, and a beetroot blush of a face.’

  It helped Oliver’s case that his portfolio included a silhouette of a 1967 photograph by Diane Arbus, of a seated naked couple in a deeply suburban living room. Modern English had used the very image for a mock-up, sticking the image inside a TV screen (their debut single had featured a cracked TV screen with the band logo inside). Oliver simply placed the TV screen/logo between the silhouetted couple, gave it a radiant red and black contrast, and hey presto. ‘We leapt at it,’ says Mick Conroy.

  In 2011, Guardian’s ‘50 key events in the history of indie music’ put the cover of ‘Gathering Dust’ at number 23, in between ‘Joy Division’s Ian Curtis commits suicide’ and ‘Depeche Mode take their baby steps’, and four places below, ‘Bauhaus invent goth’. ‘The sleeve,’ wrote Michael Hann, ‘was nothing special, aside from the fact it was designed by Vaughan Oliver, commencing a relationship between Oliver and the 4AD label that rivalled that between Peter Saville and Factory Records. Oliver’s sleeve designs – abstract, dreamlike, elegant – seemed to be a perfect visual representation of the label’s music, which was often, unsurprisingly, abstract, dreamlike, elegant.’

  At every Birthday Party gig or 4AD show over the next couple of years, Ivo remembers, ‘Vaughan talking into my ear about building an overall identity for the label and, ultimately, a trademark, and me giving him a job! It had already occurred to me because of what Peter Saville had done for Factory, providing a continuity that people would come to trust.’

  Oliver: ‘I’d bump into Ivo at gigs. I had got my foot in the door and wouldn’t take it out! I was obsessed with the idea of working for an independent label and I would have told Ivo he needed a logo and consistency, to express identity. The role models were [German jazz label] ECM and before that, [American jazz label] Blue Note. Ivo got the idea straight away. In my mind, he wasn’t into selling units; he loved the music and wanted people to hear it, and he cared so much about it that he wanted to package it properly.’

  At the time, Oliver was only retained on an occasional basis, as the later pattern of outsourcing to one designer had yet to be cemented. Knowing what Oliver added to 4AD, it’s easy to see in retrospect what was missing from the label’s early records. Take the next 4AD release: an album housed in overlaid grey squares. It was an accurate mirror of the music’s electronic ambient murk, but the artwork had no enticement or intrigue to draw in potential purchasers.

  The album, 3R4, was released under the name B.C. Gilbert/G. L
ewis: ‘The name changes were helpful for our own sense of what things were,’ Graham Lewis explains. It comprised two very brief instrumentals, both called ‘Barge Calm’, and two much lengthier works, ‘3.4 …’ and ‘R’, respective Lewis and Gilbert solo pieces. Anyone who appreciated the films of Russia’s visionary, impressionist director Andrei Tarkovsky, or animation specialists Stephen and Timothy Quay (who had illustrated posters for the Dome 1 and 2 albums), could see the same forces at work in these potential soundtracks: they dripped mood and texture, ominous and otherworldly.

  It was just as well that Ivo wasn’t driven commercially, since 3R4 slotted neatly into the ‘Difficult Music For Tiny Audiences’ category (also in a sleeve of overlaid grey squares). Compare this to the following 4AD release, with Peter Kent in the A&R seat. Bauhaus’ new single was a cover of glam rock icons T. Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’, deftly reworked as stark, strutting rock-disco. It seemed to say that if Bauhaus could have credibility, they could be loved, or they could at least be rock stars. It couldn’t have been a more blatant chart-bothering tactic, not until, that is, they released a cover of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ in 1982.

  Ivo: ‘The band had changed since I’d first met them. They used to play “Telegram Sam” as an encore, and they said they’d never record it. But in less than a year, it was a single.’

  As mentioned earlier, 4AD’s original intention had been to provide bands for Beggars Banquet if it made commercial sense. Both band and label could see this was the way forward. ‘4AD had been the perfect label for us,’ says David J. ‘They understood what we were about, they were very supportive, and people respected us because they respected 4AD. But it went as far as it could.’