Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD

Ivo’s cohort in forming a record label now lives in the Chicago suburb of Rogers Park, two blocks from Lake Michigan’s urban beach. It’s his first ever interview. ‘I’ve always considered myself as a bit player on the side,’ says Peter Kent. ‘I know people who are just full of themselves, but I’m more private. And being a Buddhist, I like to live in the present rather than regurgitate the past.’ But he is willing to talk, after all. ‘It’s nice to leave something behind,’ he concedes.

Kent didn’t hang around for long in the music business, partly by choice but also due to illness (he has multiple sclerosis). Among other part-time endeavours, he works as a dog sitter, which would give him and Ivo plenty to chat about. But during the time that they worked together, Ivo says, he knew nothing about Kent’s private life.

Born in Battersea, south-west London, his family’s neighbour was the tour manager of the Sixties band Manfred Mann, which gave the teenage Kent convenient entry to London’s exploding beat music boom. Kent says he DJed around Europe while based in Amsterdam, ‘doing everything that you shouldn’t’. He adds that, ‘A friend was a doctor of medicine in Basle, who’d make mescaline and cocaine. Peter Kent isn’t my real name; Interpol and the drug squad were looking for me at one point. It’s a long story.’

Kent also says that British blues vocalist Long John Baldry was his first boyfriend before he dated Bowie protégé Mickey King who he first met, alongside Bowie, at the Earls Court gay club Yours or Mine. After returning from Amsterdam, Kent appeared to calm down when he started managing Town Records in Kings Road, Chelsea, next door to fetish clothing specialists Seditionaries, run by future fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. He also ran a market stall-cum-café in nearby Beaufort Market, next to future punk siren Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex fame. By 1976, Kent had opened his own record shop, called Stuff, in nearby Fulham but it didn’t make a profit and so he took the manager’s post at Beggars Banquet’s Earls Court branch. The label’s office, and Ivo’s desk, was upstairs.

The origins of 4AD are contested. Kent says an avalanche of demos had been sent in the wake of Tubeway Army’s success: ‘Part of my job was to listen to them with the idea of forwarding the good ones to Beggars. I also said it was a great idea to start a little label on the side, and Martin said that’s what Ivo also wanted to do.’

Martin Mills recalls Ivo and Peter Kent approaching Nick Austin and himself with a plan, while Ivo sticks to the story he told Option magazine in 1986. ‘We’d regularly rush upstairs to convince Martin and Nick that they should get involved with something like Modern English, as opposed to what they were involved with. Eventually, Beggars got fed up with us pestering them and said, “Why don’t you start your own label?”’

Whatever the story, Mills and Austin donated a start-up fund of £2,000. Kent got to christen the label, choosing Axis after Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love album. ‘Ivo and I clicked as people,’ says Kent. ‘It was like I was Roxy Music and he was Captain Beefheart, but we appreciated where each other was coming from. He was mellower; I was more outgoing. But I wouldn’t say I ever knew him well.’

‘Ivo and Peter were a good double act,’ recalls Robbie Grey, lead singer for Modern English, one of 4AD’s crucial early signings. ‘They were similar in their background too, neither working class, so straight away you were dealing with art college types.’

Steve Webbon: ‘Peter was great. Very tall, dry sense of humour. And he had all these connections. He wasn’t as into music as Ivo, he was more into the scene. He’d go to gigs while Ivo would more listen to your tape.’

Ivo: ‘Peter was so important to 4AD from the start. Most of the early stuff was his discovery. While I was running around servicing the other shops, he was the go-getter. He knew people. I liked everything enough to say yes, but I didn’t know what I was doing.’

One part of the plan was for Axis to play a feeder role for the Beggars Banquet label, so that those artists with commercial ambition could make use of Beggars’ distribution deal with Warners. Another idea was to launch Axis with four seven-inch singles on the same day: ‘To make a statement, and to establish an imprint,’ says Ivo. ‘Other independent labels at that point, such as Factory, were imprints. It meant something.’

Factory’s first release, A Factory Sampler, had featured four bands, including Joy Division and Sheffield’s electronic pioneers Cabaret Voltaire. Axis’ first quartet, simultaneously released on the first business day of 1980, wasn’t quite as hefty. Nor did it include Brian Brain, which would have instantly given the label a newsworthy angle, or another mooted suggestion, Temporary Title, a south London band that used to rehearse in Beggars’ Fulham basement, whose singer Lea Anderson was a ‘floating’ Saturday shop assistant across the various Beggars Banquet shops. Instead, out of the pile of demos emerged three unknown entities, The Fast Set, Shox and Bearz, and one band that had released a single on east London independent Small Wonder: Bauhaus, who was to save Axis from the most underwhelming beginning.

The single given the honour of catalogue number AXIS 1 was The Fast Set’s ‘Junction One’. London-based keyboardist David Knight was the proud owner of a VCS3 synth, popularised by Eno, whose demo was played in the Earls Court shop by his friend Brad Day who worked there on Saturdays. ‘Peter Kent said if I wanted to record an electronic version of a glam rock track, he’d release it on this new label,’ recalls Knight. ‘The Human League had covered Gary Glitter’s “Rock And Roll”, and there were lots of other post-modern, semi-ironic interpretations around. I knew T. Rex’s “Children Of The Revolution” had only two chords, which suited me. Peter put me in a studio to record it, but he needed another track, which I knocked out on the spot, which became the A-side. I don’t know why.’

At very short notice, Knight and three cohorts played a show at Kent’s request. Budding film director John Maybury (best known for his 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil) projected super-8 images on to them and named them The Fast Set, because the quartet were so immobile on stage. Maybury also designed the cover of ‘Junction One’. The Fast Set’s synth-pop had a bit of early Human League’s sketchy pop but not its vision or charm. ‘For starters, I was no singer,’ says Knight. ‘My vocals were appalling!’

AXIS 2 and AXIS 4 were demos that had been posted to the Hogarth Road shop. ‘She’s My Girl’ was by Bearz, a quartet from the south-west of England that wasn’t even a band, says bassist Dave Gunstone. ‘The singer John Goddard and I had an idea to make a record – we liked the new wave sound, but we didn’t even have songs before we booked the studio. We found a drummer, Mark Willis, and David Lord produced us and played keyboards. I was a signwriter for shops and vans then – and you can hear I’m not a musician. But Ivo called to say he was interested in signing us. We went up to see him and Peter – to be in the office with Gary Numan gold discs on the walls, it was dream come true.’

They called themselves The Bears until Ivo (who says it would have been Peter Kent) pointed out other bands had already used the name, ‘so he said “stick a z on the end”,’ says Gunstone. ‘Neo-psychedelic vocals over an attractively lumpy melody’ (NME) and ‘nostalgia pop’ (Peter Kent) are fair appraisals of the song, given the dinky Sixties beat-pop and Seventies bubblegum mix, while the B-side ‘Girls Will Do’ was tauter new wave.

Shox were also hopeful of a stab at success via the new wave conceit of a misspelt name – though the photo on the cover of vocalist Jacqui Brookes and instrumentalists John Pethers and Mike Atkinson in one bed was horribly old school. The most prominent British weekly music paper, New Music Express (NME) also approved of ‘No Turning Back’: ‘Fresh and naturally home-made, like The Human League once upon a time’. Peter Kent’s comment, ‘I have no memory of it whatsoever’, also hits the mark.

AXIS 3, ‘Dark Entries’, was an altogether different story. Peter Kent recalls being in the Rough Trade shop. ‘I was buying singles for Beggars Banquet, and Geoff Travis was there, playing some demos. I heard him say he didn’t like it, and I said, “Excuse me?” Geoff said I could take it. The energy was unbelievable, and the sound was so different from everything else around. Forty-eight hours later, I was in Northampton to meet Bauhaus.’

Ivo: ‘If Peter did go to Northampton, that was another thing that he didn’t tell me! I first met Bauhaus in the Earls Court shop where Peter had intercepted the tape they were intending to deliver to Beggars Banquet. Peter came to find me in the restaurant over the road and insisted I come back immediately to listen to it and meet the band.’

According to Bauhaus’ singer Peter Murphy, ‘Peter said, “I’m having you lot”. Ivo didn’t want us. That’s what Peter said at the time. Ivo’s a mardy bugger! And really sarcastic [laughs]. But when we walked into the Beggars office, Ivy [Murphy’s affectionate nickname for Ivo] was working there, and he looked at us after hearing the music and said yes!’

Via a Skype connection to Turkey’s capital Istanbul, where Murphy has lived since marrying his Turkish wife and following the Islamic belief of Sufism, the former Bauhaus singer still looks sleek and gaunt, his celebrated ‘dark lord’ persona intact. Traffic whirs away in the background, but it cuts out when Murphy puts on ‘Re-Make Re-Model’ from Roxy Music’s epochal 1972 album debut, presumably to set the scene for our conversation, by showcasing Bauhaus’ roots in both glam and art rock.

‘I was fifteen,’ Murphy begins, ‘and I didn’t know if it was male or female, but I saw this pair of testicles peaking out under a Kabuki outfit, and it was the most erotic moment. It felt angelic.’ The photographic object of his affection was David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust leotard. Roxy Music’s synthesiser magus Brian Eno, says Murphy, ‘was maybe even more magical, awesome in that raw, lo-fi way, the drums on his solo records so flat and thick and stocky, with none of that fucking reverb bollocks that Ivo would swamp things in!’

The Bauhaus siblings, David and Kevin Haskins, both now live in California – David J, as the bassist calls himself, is in Encinitas, 95 miles from Kevin Haskins Dompe (he’s since bolted on his wife’s maiden name) in Los Angeles. Both willingly testify to a similarly shared epiphany – July 1972, when Bowie – in the guise of Ziggy – sang ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. ‘I was hooked, and I knew I had to do this myself.’

There’s one missing voice – guitarist Daniel Ash. Though he lives in California as well, he hasn’t communicated with any of his former bandmates since the band’s 2008 album Go Away White. Ash, the others say, prefers tinkering with his beloved motorbikes over any remembrance of the past.2

Playing guitar, David J had graduated from his first band, Grab a Shadow, and having encouraged Kevin – still just thirteen – to learn the drums, they’d joined Jam, a hard rock covers band. ‘And then punk happened,’ says Haskins Dompe. ‘David took me to The 100 Club to see the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Banshees. The next day I cut off my hair and wore my paint-splashed polyester pyjamas to art school.’

After the demise of the pair’s short-lived punk band The Submerged Tenth, David J had bumped into fellow art school student Ash, who he’d known since kindergarten. ‘We clearly had a connection,’ says David. ‘We both loved dub reggae, and Bowie.’ Haskins and Ash subsequently formed The Craze, which, Haskins Dompe says, ‘played new wave power-pop, which Daniel didn’t like, so that ended’. Ash asked Haskins Dompe to join a new band fronted by Ash’s old school friend Peter Murphy, but excluding David J. ‘Daniel felt David’s ideas were too strong, but he relented,’ says Haskins Dompe. ‘I could see the chemistry between them.’

David J had watched the others rehearse. ‘They were so streamlined and stark, and Peter had such charisma, and looked amazing. They had a bassist, but his looks and personality didn’t fit, so I joined.’

Peter Murphy: ‘David was sensitive, smart, self-interested, a dark horse. Kevin could be narky and uppity, but he was our sweet angel. I was very overpowering but we were respectful of each other, though there was a lot of unspoken, repressed tension.’

The battle of wills that marked Bauhaus to the end produced the necessary sparks at the start. Written only weeks after David J joined, the band’s debut single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ was a cavernous, dub-enhanced nine-minute drama with the epic mantra, ‘undead, undead, undead,’ in honour of Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor most famous for his 1931 portrait of Dracula. ‘We surprised ourselves, because it was ambitious and didn’t follow anyone else,’ says David J. Every major label (and Stiff) declined to release it, before the fledgling London independent label Small Wonder stepped in. ‘Theirs was the only response that didn’t think the track was too long.’

Thirty-four years on, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ remains Bauhaus’ signature classic; it hung around the new UK independent singles chart (launched two weeks after Axis) for two years. It also helped spawn a genre that proved to be as contentious for the band as it was for the future 4AD. It’s said that the term ‘gothic’ was used by Factory MD Tony Wilson to describe his own band Joy Division, but it was also applied to the ice queen drama of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Soon enough it would be shortened to ‘goth’, and wielded as a pejorative term, to describe an affected version of doom and angst.

The problem was, as Ash said, goth came to define bands with ‘too much make-up and no talent’. Bauhaus were undeniably talented, but Murphy had a habit of shining a torch under his chin as he prowled across the stage. This was fine by Kent: ‘I wanted more than people just standing there on stage, and Peter was already one of the best frontmen,’ he says. Murphy relishes the memory of a Small Wonder label night at London’s Camden Palace, ‘me in a black knitted curtain and jockstrap,’ he recalls. ‘We scared the fuck out of everyone that night, all these alternative über-hippies moaning about everything. After punk, everybody ran out of things to moan about.’

Actually, the opposite was true. Post-punk had plenty of targets to kick against in 1980 and its bristling monochrome was a suitable soundtrack to the economic and social depression of an era presided over by the hate figure of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher: tax increases, budget cuts, worker strikes, nuclear paranoia, Cold War scare-mongering and record post-war levels of inflation (22 per cent) and unemployment (two million). But goth bands didn’t articulate social injustice or political turmoil. This version of disaffection and dread was more Cabaret, an escape from the gloom, with lots of black nail varnish. Bauhaus’ ‘Dark Entries’, for example, was inspired by the decadent anti-hero of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. ‘A story of great narcissism and esoteric interior,’ says Murphy. ‘A rock star’s story.’

Axis’ founders didn’t appear driven by causes or campaigns either. Ivo didn’t favour political agitators such as The Clash or Gang of Four, but more the open-ended oblique strategies of Wire or the acid psychodrama of Liverpool’s Echo & The Bunnymen. In fact, Ivo felt that the name Axis had unwanted political connotations. ‘Peter [Kent] may have been thinking of Hendrix but, for me, Axis related to [Nazi] Germany, like Factory and Joy Division. It was a stupid name.’

It was a stroke of fortune that the label was forced into changing its name before the imprint, or the association, stuck. An existing Axis in, of all countries, Germany, read about the launch of the UK version in the trade paper Music Week; the owners allowed all the remaining stock on the UK label to be sold before they had to find a new name. ‘4AD was grasped out of the air in desperation,’ says Ivo.

A flyer that freelance designer Mark Robertson had laid out to promote the launch of Axis worked on the concept of a new decade and a new mission. In descending order down the page was written:

1980 FORWARD

1980 FWD

1984 AD

4AD

‘What I loved about 4AD was that it meant nothing,’ Ivo recalls. ‘No ideology, no polemic, no attitude. In other words, just music.’

1 After starting 4AD, Ivo did import copies of Chrome’s second album Half Lip Machine Moves before introducing the band to Beggars Banquet, which released the band’s next three albums, starting in 1980 with Red Exposure.

2 For all his protestations about ditching the past, in March 2013 Ash announced an event he called Truth Be Told, to be staged in Las Vegas over one weekend in May. Comprising music, Q&A sessions, parties, accommodation and food, with tickets starting at $2,000 to be sold by auction, the weekend included a private concert in a Las Vegas mansion, with material spanning Ash’s career, from Bauhaus and his Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets bands to solo material. This followed a similar twice-the-price Miracula Sessions in 2012. Maybe those spare bike parts are very expensive, though Ash planned to donate an unspecified amount of his proceeds towards creating a music rehearsal space for children in the Los Angeles area.

chapter 3 – 1980 (2)
1980 Forward

(BAD5–BAD19)

The spirit of rebirth behind the change of name from Axis to 4AD was underlined by the need for fresh blood, given that The Fast Set, Bearz and Shox would never again record for 4AD. Sales of Bauhaus’ ‘Dark Entries’ meant that 4AD would re-press the single another three times, while Shox’s ‘No Turning Back’ was temporarily given a Beggars Banquet catalogue number (between the changeover from Axis to 4AD) for a second pressing before the band vanished. Dave Gunstone’s dream was quickly over when Ivo informed Bearz that their new demos weren’t good enough. The Fast Set would resurface, but only once, in 1981, with a second T. Rex cover, ‘King Of The Rumbling Spires’, on the first compilation of synth-pop, released by a new independent label, Some Bizzare, in 1981. But while the album’s new inductees Depeche Mode and Soft Cell were to use Some Bizzare Album as a springboard to superstardom, David Knight retired The Fast Set.1 Even the revolutionary Do It Yourself opportunities of the punk and post-punk movements bred more frustrated failures and dead ends than established breakthroughs.

Conditioned by the pre-punk era of beautiful artwork and hi-fi, Ivo also embarked on raising the quality of the packaging and sound after judging the production company that Peter Kent had employed for Axis: ‘They were among the worst-sounding vinyl I’d ever heard, in really poor-quality sleeves.’

This spirit of rebirth was to be reinforced by 4AD’s official debut release. Ivo had been doing his round of the Beggars Banquet shops and had returned to Hogarth Road: ‘Peter was behind the counter with all of Rema-Rema. When I heard their music, I knew it was a sea change for 4AD.’

On the seventh floor of a council-block flat overlooking the hectic thoroughfare of Kilburn in north-west London, Mark Cox not only remembers the first time he met Ivo, but the last – the pair remain friends thirty-three years on, and he is the only former 4AD musician who visits Ivo in Lamy. But then Cox knows all about staying the long course. He’s lived in this flat for three decades, and recently tackled the contents of a cupboard for the first time in two of them, where he discovered a Rema-Rema cassette that brought on a rush of nostalgia. ‘We only ever released one EP, you see,’ he sighs. One of the potentially great post-punk bands was over before it had even begun.

Cox grew up further out, in London’s leafy and stiflingly conservative suburb of Ruislip, near the famous public school of Harrow. Cox himself ditched his educational opportunities at another public school in the area, snubbing the exam that could have led to university qualification. Two weeks into an apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery, he was on tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees, American punks The Heartbreakers, and Harrow’s own punk ingénues The Models.

At school, Cox had found himself at odds with his schoolmates’ preference for hard rock, preferring Seventies funk and Jamaican dub, and like most every proto-punk, Bowie and Roxy Music. While fending off the attention of bullies for his skinhead haircut, he had bravely ventured into the still-underground society of London’s gay nightlife, whose liberated clubbers had thrown the nascent punk scene a vital lifeline. ‘You could wear different clothes, dye your hair and wear make-up there,’ Cox recalls. ‘And everyone was having a good time.’

Cox first met Susan Ballion, the newly christened Siouxsie Sioux, at Bangs nightclub, and seen, up close, John Lydon/Johnny Rotten at Club Louise. But he’d actually befriended Marco Pirroni, who’d played guitar in the impromptu stage debut of the original Banshees and then started The Models with singer Cliff Fox, bassist Mick Allen and drummer Terry Day. Cox was employed as The Models’ roadie – he owned a car while the rest of the gang couldn’t even drive – and even occasionally become a fifth Model on stage, in his words, ‘making noise on a synthesiser over their pretty songs’.

Released in 1977, the band’s sole single ‘Freeze’ was poppy enough, but its bristling, scuffed energy was far from pretty. There was evidently more ambition than two-minute bites such as ‘Freeze’. As Cox recalls, ‘Marco showed me you didn’t need to go to college for ten years to play music. I discovered Eno and his exploration of sound. I became interested in rhythm, frequency and vibration.’

When Mick Allen introduced his friend Gary Asquith to the gang, Cox recalls that The Models split into two camps, ‘and one was Mick, Gary, Marco and me’. Though they didn’t know it at the time, they’d become Rema-Rema.

The divisive problem was Cliff Fox: ‘He just wanted to be David Bowie,’ says Asquith, ‘which had become a real problem.’ As Fox pursued his own path, abruptly terminated by a fatal heroin overdose, the remaining four friends combined for a minimal, chugging and quintessentially post-punk tour de force titled ‘Rema-Rema’, named after the Rema machine manufacturers in Poland: ‘It sounded industrial, like Throbbing Gristle,’ Cox explains. Rema-Rema became the band’s name too, signifying the shift from the simple punk dynamics of The Models.

‘Marco wanted to go places, do things,’ says Gary Asquith. ‘It moved fast for everyone.’ Another north London resident, living in Kentish Town, adjacent to the more famous swirl of Camden Town, Asquith still comes across as the same ‘larger-than-life, livewire, I’m-tough Cockney’ that Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party recalls. Asquith admits that he and Mick Allen were typical teen rebels. ‘But no knife crime!’ he claims. ‘And no drugs either – though there were later. But at first, it was food! After rehearsals, we’d descend on Marco’s parents’ house, who being Italians, always stocked the fridge.’

Suitably fuelled, Rema-Rema quickly abandoned the drum machine that was being adopted by every synth-pop band and advertised for a human drummer. Dorothy Prior, known as Max, added Velvet Underground-style metronomic thump to Rema-Rema’s coarse energy, as well as becoming Marco’s girlfriend. With Mick Allen now singing, the band’s demos had drawn interest from the major-affiliated progressive label Charisma, keen to update and rebrand, but the label baulked at Allen’s lyric on the track ‘Entry’, ‘and you fucked just like Jesus Christ’.

Cox says that Rema-Rema – already a fragile coalition – even considered splitting up, but Peter Kent saw the band play and immediately suggested they release a record on 4AD. Four tracks, two studio and two live, were proposed for a twelve-inch EP, Wheel In The Roses. Ivo devised a catalogue system to differentiate between releases: the prefix AD was for a seven-inch single, BAD for a twelve-inch, CAD for an album, and the numbering would identify the year. As the label prepared for the EP, Rema-Rema supported Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire at London’s basement club underneath the YMCA, but their ‘big moment’, according to Asquith, had been supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Human League at London’s art deco palace The Rainbow Theatre; David Bowie was at the side of the stage to watch The Human League, but Asquith says it felt like the bar had been raised and Rema-Rema could garner the same kind of press appreciation as the others. The only problem was that Marco left the band before Wheel In The Roses was even released, and the remaining members were beginning to doubt whether they would continue without him.

Pirroni had been seduced by an offer from the equally ambitious Stuart Goddard who, as Adam Ant, had lost his original backing band to Malcolm McLaren’s new project, Bow Wow Wow (former Models drummer Terry Day was also to join the new Ants). Pirroni remained supportive enough to attend a band meeting with Beggars Banquet, where Ivo recalls Nick Austin insisting anything 4AD signed had also to sign to Beggars’ publishing wing, and for at least five years. ‘This for a band that was no longer together! It was very surreal.’

No deal was struck, but 4AD still released Wheel In The Roses: ‘It still stands out from that era,’ Ivo reckons. ‘Hearing Marco’s rockist guitar, wailing and screeching, but with very controlled feedback, over something that was so post-punk, was very unusual. It carried forward the idea that this little thing Peter and I had started would really mean something.’

Wheel In The Roses sounded something like a gang out of A Clockwork Orange expressing itself through music. The opening 35 seconds of gleeful howls and screams prefaced the menacing crawl of ‘Feedback Song’, a combative mood that extended through a pounding ‘Instrumental’ and a live take of ‘Rema-Rema’. A second live song, ‘Fond Affections’, showed a startlingly tender and melodic streak, though the mood was undeniably eerie. The EP’s sleeve image was equally layered: a 1949 photo of two imposing Nuban tribesmen in Sudan taken by British photographer George Rodger that Mick Allen had doctored by drawing a tiny red rose between one of the men’s fingers.

Despite Rema-Rema’s short-lived promise, Ivo felt he’d learnt a valuable lesson. ‘I understood punk much more after meeting Rema-Rema. They were real individuals, not aggressive, but they’d get in your face and argue their point. They believed in themselves, so you supported that even more than their music. Those people deserved support.’

To that end, Ivo hired Chris Carr, a freelance PR who was promoting bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure, to work on the Rema-Rema EP. Carr says he doesn’t recall any reviews in the music press, which was disappointing for a record of such steely adventure, but without a band, what were its chances? But Carr says he was keen to continue working with Ivo. ‘He wasn’t remotely interested in what the majors were doing, only in developing the punk ethos, where punk meets art, and not for commercial gain. But it was hard to finance records at that time and Ivo would release demos if they were good enough. Though you could only keep releasing records if they got reviews.’

By comparison, Peter Kent had more old-fashioned ambitions: ‘I wanted to be commercial,’ he says. ‘To have money to spend on bands.’ It would have been very interesting if, as Kent claims, Duran Duran – soon to become costumed New Romantic flagwavers alongside Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant – had been available. ‘We nearly signed them,’ says Kent. ‘I played their demo to Ivo, who really liked it, but they’d just signed to EMI.’

Ivo denies ever having heard any Duran demos, but says that journalist Pete Makowski (who had commissioned Ivo to write two album reviews for the weekly music paper Sounds before Axis/4AD had begun) had played him demos by The Psychedelic Furs. ‘I liked it, but the band had already signed to CBS,’ he says. Looking back, the Furs and Duran’s ambitions would have clashed with 4AD’s developing ethos. Much more aligned was a young band that could combine the commercial aspirations that Kent sought with the musical spirit that Ivo understood.

The Lepers were a down-the-line punk band from Colchester in Essex fronted by singer Robbie Grey (who called himself Jack Midnight) and guitarist Gary McDowell (a.k.a. Justin Sane). Bassist Wiggs and drummer Civvy were soon respectively replaced by Mick Conroy and Richard Brown, but they’d already changed the band name to Modern English before Stephen Walker arrived, whose keyboards accelerated the shift to post-punk. ‘Punk’s fire had gone out, so we started listening more to Wire and Joy Division,’ says Grey. ‘Ivo could see what could become of us with a bit of development.’

Wire and Joy Division were two of the best, and most creative, bands to provide an alternative to punk rock’s single-speed, two-chord setting. London-based Wire were punk’s most artfully oblique outsiders, yet they also wrote clever, melodic pop songs. Manchester’s Joy Division had transcended their punk roots as Warsaw and taken on a more rhythmic and haunting shape, embodied by its enigmatic, troubled singer Ian Curtis. Post-punk was a sea of possibilities.

With a sense of adventure, Modern English had followed Mick Conroy’s older brother Ray to London where he was squatting in Notting Hill Gate, near Rough Trade’s offices. Grey describes a time of sleeping bags in the basement, meagre unemployment benefit, suppers of discarded vegetables from the street market, and bleeding gums as the price they had to pay, but out of it came the debut single ‘Drowning Man’ on the band’s own label, Limp. A Wire-like hauteur over a blatant Joy Division pulse was too slavish a copy, but after Peter Kent had booked Modern English to support Bauhaus at central London’s Rock Garden in March 1980, he and Ivo saw just enough reason to commission another single.