girls to pose naked!’ Grierson grins. ‘But the masculine figures gave the work another edge.’
After college, Grierson secured a work placement at album art specialists Hipgnosis, where he was mentored by co-founder Storm Thorgerson. ‘Storm was an inspiration, though he was heading in a more conceptual, less impressionistic direction than my own work was beginning to take,’ says Grierson. But while Oliver took full-time work, Grierson changed tack to a photography degree at London’s Royal College of Art; he later took a film degree but photography remained his preferred medium. At the RCA, he conceived of images ‘from the viewpoint of imagination over reproduction, more concerned with the inner world, in my head. The work Vaughan and I did was all about the “feel”, and an abstraction, reflecting the feel of the music itself. An “idea” often recedes into relative insignificance in the finished cover.’
Visual influences that Grierson and Oliver shared included vintage Polish poster design, artist – and Gilbert and Lewis collaborator – Russell Mills, and the Quay brothers Stephen and Timothy, who, Grierson feels, were ‘purveyors of the dark and intriguing’. He recalls, ‘We were a generation of people brought up on monster movies, and Hammer horror films on TV every Friday night, which I’m sure had a profound effect on our childish imaginations that manifested in the dark, macabre yet romantic feel of much of Eighties popular culture – and not just goths.’
Grierson’s approach to music took the same course, as his tastes shifted from rock to country and swing, ‘forever searching for something new’, before punk and post-punk was fully embraced, especially Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Germanic atmosphere’. A few months after moving to London, Grierson had met Ivo at Oliver’s suggestion. Grierson instantly approved of 4AD’s core roster, bands like Modern English. ‘And I must have ended up seeing The Birthday Party ten times – they were the best thing I’d ever heard, so hostile and breathtaking, especially live.’
Ivo used two of Grierson’s photographs for the front and back of the Sort Sol single but the sleeve for Mesh & Lace was the first venture under a new partnership that Oliver and Grierson christened 23 Envelope. ‘It was in opposition to the egotistical way advertising agencies used a list of surnames,’ Oliver explains. ‘23 Envelope was more fun, a lyrical bit of nonsense, which also suggested a studio with a number of people and a broad palate of approaches. I didn’t want to get known for a certain style. How naïve we were!’
Mesh & Lace’s surreal composition benefited from Modern English giving Grierson the same freedom as Ivo had given the band. ‘To describe the image as sexual is too blunt,’ Grierson argues. ‘I agree the fish is a phallic suggestion, but the lace is simply feminine, and I was into [British figurative painter] Francis Bacon and movement in photos. So there’s this slightly strange context and a whole bunch of influences.’
It would have been interesting – if not a ramping up of the homo-erotica – if Oliver had managed to see through his original idea for the album’s working title, Five Sided Figure. ‘Vaughan had this drawing of a fifty-pence coin with five blokes around it with their knobs hanging out on the table,’ Mick Conroy recalls. ‘I don’t think we’d have gone with it!’
Ivo remains unconvinced by the finished cover. ‘I don’t think Nigel would argue that it worked. But 23 Envelope’s work was done on faith, and my ignorance. Vaughan and Nigel brought character and taught me how to look at things, to position things, and to contrast between fonts. But at that point, besides Modern English, all the artists 4AD worked with were doing their own artwork.’
What might 23 Envelope have imagined, for example, for the B.C. Gilbert/G. Lewis seven-inch single ‘Ends With The Sea’? The duo’s chosen seascape, the water flattened and calm at the edge of the sand, was restful but a far too literal interpretation. Just like the pair’s Cupol intro ‘Like This For Ages’, the new single was more of a song than soundscape, its nagging little melody buffeted by some electronic undertows, which converged to a mantra for the flipside ‘Hung Up To Dry While Building An Arch’.
‘Ends With The Sea’ was a reworking of ‘Anchor’ from the duo’s improvised Peel session. ‘We asked Ivo, “Can we make a single? We have this top song”,’ recalls Lewis. ‘But we couldn’t recapture it in the studio.’ This was becoming a pattern for post-punk artists, whose energies and ideas were more suited to short, sharp turnarounds, not deliberation. The single turned out to be the ex-Wire men’s 4AD swansong, as Gilbert and Lewis began a project with Mute Records’ founder Daniel Miller, and gravitated towards his label, but Ivo values their short residency at 4AD. ‘It’s easy to dismiss those works as just doodling, but they were a really important part of the freedom people had, after punk, to experiment. Bruce and Graham showed a lot of bravery.’
Mass was a classic illustration of this ingrained liberation. Peter Kent’s last task at 4AD had been to organise the band’s debut album, Labour Of Love, recorded at The Coach House studio owned by Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. ‘Mass took a very loose approach to recording and there was a lot of improvisation,’ Kent recalls. But not, it seems, to positive effect. ‘There were a couple of good tracks but overall the album was disappointing.’
‘A collection of great ideas but poorly executed,’ is Mark Cox’s similar conclusion. ‘Part was down to our attitude that we wouldn’t be produced, or let anyone in. Wally Brill, who had produced the Rema-Rema EP, took his name off it after an awful row.’
There was certainly no middle ground with Labour Of Love. Its shivering, dank and claustrophobic aura was the fulcrum of 4AD’s ‘dark and intense’ origins, a take-no-prisoners expression of borderline madness, from the opening ten-minute track’s musical embodiment of howling rain and fog. Mick Allen’s first declaration, which arrived four minutes in, was, ‘help is on its way’.
‘Mass frightened people,’ claims Chris Carr. ‘We had some press support early on from the greatcoat brigade, writers like Paul Morley, but it was too heavy for general consumption.’
Even so, the NME ignored Labour Of Love for four months, and then accused Mass of being one of the countless Joy Division imitators: ‘They parade angst, guilt and all the other seven deadly sins and just leave it at that: a charade … this album represents one emotion, one dimension, one colour, that of greyness.’
The album only struck a chord in America. Punk/new wave authority Trouser Press Guide called it: ‘dark and cacophonous, an angry, intense slab of post-punk gloom that is best left to its own (de)vices’. On its eventual CD release in 2006, the website Head Heritage claimed Labour Of Love was ‘the Holy Grail of British Post-Punk’, but also highlighted why Mass were hard to swallow: ‘… drums sounding like things being thrown downstairs, and a bitter and plaintive Cockney vocal by Michael Allen barely masking severe disappointment and contempt.’
According to Cox, ‘something dark and serious lay at our core. It wasn’t encouraging. Gary told me his relationship with Mick was often tense, and went off to Berlin and sort of didn’t come back. And Danny followed Gary.’
‘Mick and I were both stubborn, and things had started to fracture and stagnate,’ says Gary Asquith. ‘Looking back, I still held a lot of disappointment with Rema-Rema, which had been the most important stage of my sordid career so far. Mark was desperately hanging on to Mick, and it felt like time to go our separate ways, to see what happened. Berlin had a great little club scene, and I was hanging out with this all-girl group, Malaria.’
Back in London, says Cox, ‘Mick and I were still making sounds, but the energy fell apart. Mick needed to stop smoking spliff, which he eventually did. But he had a bad acid trip, which I think left a bit of a legacy.’
The night of his LSD misdemeanour, Allen had turned up at Ivo’s home, showing that even a renegade such as Allen trusted in Ivo’s company. ‘He was a strange, sometimes awkward, shy fellow,’ Allen recalls, ‘but I liked him. I saw Ivo as an older brother, and we’d talk about music in the same way, though I’d take the piss out of what he listened to! He was obviously from a certain background, and we were working class, but we connected.’
Mass’