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.
‘Their demo had stood out, but initially, Modern English weren’t great live,’ recalls Ivo. ‘They couldn’t win over an audience like Bauhaus, who were fantastic on stage. And like Bauhaus, the British music press didn’t enjoy Modern English. Coming from Colchester, they weren’t necessarily considered cool but they weren’t, thank God, the kind to hang out with journalists anyway. The first time I saw Gary, he had a huge stegosaurus haircut!’
The band’s 4AD debut ‘Swans On Glass’ was a lashing version of the Wire model of nervous punk-pop. Ivo’s faith in Modern English highlighted the gulf between his intuitive belief in raw talent and Beggars Banquet’s