as they phrased it in ‘King Ink’, this was a world of, ‘sand and soot and dust and dirt’.
Ivo may not have cared that 4AD’s releases weren’t making an indelible impression, or that the bands were often petering out, but if Bauhaus’ previous success had paid for the label’s next handful of releases, what might pay for 1981’s next batch? What he did have, finally, was a 4AD artefact that he could build into something – and how ironic that Ivo’s interest in The Birthday Party had been lit by that old-fashioned instrument, the Farfisa organ. The UK music press unreservedly embraced Prayers On Fire: ‘A celebratory, almost religious record, as in ritual, as in pray-era on fire, a combustible dervish dance, and another Great Debut of ’81,’ claimed NME’s Andy Gill.
‘The Birthday Party started to swing it for 4AD,’ says Chris Carr. ‘One by one, through word of mouth, journalists got on board.’ With John Peel already on side, Ivo recalls, ‘Birthday Party gigs started getting very well attended, very quickly. And the more frenzied audiences became, the more frenzied Nick Cave became.’
The band and singer alike were being driven on an axis of disgust, keeping itself one step removed from the UK scene the band despised. They might have been secretly impressed by the jazz/dub/punk verve of Bristol’s The Pop Group, but frequent comparisons to the Bristol band had annoyed Nick Cave so much that he studiously avoided mentioning them in interviews. He referred to Joy Division as ‘corny’, only talking up Manchester’s ratchety punks The Fall and California’s rockabilly malcontents The Cramps, whose singer Lux Interior had mastered the unhinged, confrontational performance. Mick Harvey admits he’d enjoyed Rema-Rema and Mass, but says that though he liked Bauhaus as people, ‘I just didn’t get them musically. Being preposterous was part of their charm, but Peter running around with a light under his face, I was just laughing. You couldn’t take them seriously.’
Nevertheless, The Birthday Party had a pragmatic core and set off on tour around the UK with Bauhaus in June. The Haskin brothers’ testimony to their rakish support band’s penchant for alcoholic breakfasts confirmed the Australians were willing to act out the fantasies implied by their songs, as each city and town was taken on as an enemy to be conquered. Yet in Cambridge, the support act joined the headliners for a show of solidarity during the encore of ‘Fever’.
‘It was good exposure for us,’ says Harvey. ‘Some of the audiences hated us – they just wanted to see Bauhaus – but others got us. By the end of 1981, we’d gone from playing to 300 people to 1,500. 4AD was helping on a daily basis, though not so much with funds, which Ivo didn’t have. We ran things ourselves as we’d done back home.’
But Ivo willingly offered friendship. Mick Harvey wasn’t spending his down time trying to score, unlike some other Birthday Party members, and he and his girlfriend Katy happened to live around the corner from Ivo’s west London flat in Acton, not far from the old Ealing shop, so they would periodically visit him and girlfriend, Lynnette Turner. It gave Harvey the opportunity more than most to see Ivo from a closer and more personal angle. ‘He had an underlying sensitivity that was inscrutable to me,’ Harvey recalls. ‘Australians tend to blurt stuff out, but the English tend to not let on about what they think or feel, until you get to know them well, and sometimes not even then. Ivo was very forthcoming about ideas, but you could sense something in there that bothered him, that nagged away, that he found difficult to put somewhere. The depressive tendencies, I could sense, were being covered with him getting on with everything and by his enthusiasm. He was very earnest and it was obvious how incredibly important the music was to him. It defined him.’
The Birthday Party only needed 4AD as a production house, while bands such as Modern English needed mentoring. As the youngest in a big family, perhaps Ivo enjoyed adopting the older, wiser role in a relationship, and he was far more knowledgeable about music than Modern English, even though he couldn’t play a note. But Ivo didn’t feel qualified to bring out a musicality in a band the way a producer could, and so following a Peel session for the band, he paired them with Ken Thomas, who had midwifed two Wire albums and similarly quintessential post-punk landmarks by The Au Pairs and Clock DVA.
Ivo joined the band for part of the fortnight’s session at Jacob’s residential studios in Surrey – confirming a budget beyond previous 4AD releases. He didn’t try and impose himself. ‘You got carte blanche with Ivo,’ recalls Robbie Grey. ‘He let us roll and evolve.’ Mick Conroy recalls Ivo would say what he liked and what he didn’t. ‘“Grief”, for example, sounded amazing, but apparently not at nine minutes, so he suggested we shorten and restructure it. He wasn’t a person who’d say, “Play G minor after E, play that section four times, move on to the middle eight”. But none of us were amazing musicians anyway.’
Ivo, however, thought the album had the same problem as Bauhaus’ debut; it didn’t capture the energy via the spontaneity of the Peel session. In Modern English’s case, he blames the lack of budget available to hire an engineer familiar with the studio, as he saw that Ken Thomas was unfamiliar with the mixing desk: ‘It wasn’t entirely Ken’s fault by any means,’ he adds.
Teething problems, at least at this stage, were not going to bring a band down, and in any case, the album was recorded mostly live, to keep the desired level of urgency, most notably on the opening ‘Sixteen Days’, which bravely began with an experimental stretch of guitar and sampled voices (about the only audible words were ‘atomic bomb’), and ‘A Viable Commercial’. But with four songs around the six-minute mark, more trimming would have helped, as the band’s dedication to mood building rarely led anywhere. More melodic ingenuity would have helped too: ‘Move In Light’ had the best, perhaps only true hook, to counteract the densely packed arrangements.
That The Birthday Party’s Prayers On Fire was 4AD’s first album of 1981, and it was already April, showed that Ivo – without Peter Kent’s speedy momentum – was pacing himself. But at least the finished Modern English debut album, Mesh & Lace, was scheduled for the same month. Perhaps The Birthday Party had warmed up NME writer Andy Gill, as Mesh & Lace was also favourably reviewed by him, and in the same issue as Prayers On Fire. After establishing that Modern English ‘exist in the twilight zone of Joy Division and Wire – a limbo of sorts as both bands are now effectively extinct’, he acknowledged it was ‘a worthwhile place to be … in some respects, this is the modern, English sound, Eighties dark power stung with a certain austerity’.
Gill also nailed where 4AD had positioned itself by claiming the band had ‘an edge of sincerity which sets Modern English apart from the new gloom merchants’. He summarised Mesh & Lace as, ‘not an essential album by any means, but certainly one of the more interesting offerings at the moment’, adding, ‘And if we must have groups deeply rooted in the Joy Division sound … then I’d just as soon have Modern English as any other.’
If the sound wasn’t uniquely arresting, the cover of Mesh & Lace certainly was. The full-frontal male nude tooting a long horn on the cover of Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field showed 4AD was prepared to be provocative: it’s impossible to imagine such an image in this paranoid age of sex-ploitation. Modern English’s cover star was again male, but partially clothed this time, in a kind of toga, with blurred hand movements that inferred the motion of masturbation to anyone with even a limited imagination, especially, as Robbie Grey admitted, the dangling fish ‘represented fertility’.
In a converted south-east London warehouse very near the Thames River in Greenwich where Nigel Grierson combines home and work, images that will be included in a forthcoming book of photographs line the walls. But though Grierson is also plotting a 4AD-themed book, there is no visible evidence of his role in creating the label’s visual portfolio, alongside his former partner-in-crime Vaughan Oliver.
Grierson also hails from County Durham, and was one year below Oliver at Ferryhill Grammar School. The pair had bonded over music (‘a Jonathan Richman album sealed our special friendship,’ says Grierson), literature (he introduced Oliver to the novelist Samuel Beckett; Oliver later christened his first son Beckett) and sleeve design. Grierson followed Oliver to study graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic, where the pair bonded further over anatomy books – ‘old books,