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. Lewis: ‘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.’
Peter Murphy: ‘We didn’t want to be consigned to an independent music ghetto, to be sub-Ivo kids; we wanted to be massive. Anyway, as 4AD progressed, Ivo started to magnetise the centre of what became known as 4AD, and then once Vaughan got a hold of the artwork, everyone looked the same to me. Fuck that!’
David J: ‘We were crafting what we saw as dark pop singles, and live we put on a show, not traditional but theatrical, while Ivo was going more experimental and introverted. He had told me that Bauhaus was becoming too rock’n’roll for the label, and not obscure enough. Daniel and Peter would take the piss out of Ivo because the music and the sleeves were becoming too obscure, to the extreme, like an in-joke. We wanted to be on Top of the Pops and have hit singles – but on our own terms. So there was a natural parting of the