Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Martin Aston

the couple in 1986, Perry admitted that his unemployment benefit had initially sustained them and Erikson alike, with odd jobs on top. Showing her propensity to roll up her sleeves, Gerrard also sold houseplants, door to door. What little spare cash they had after buying instruments and seeing concerts was spent on beer, the odd piece of hash and an art-house movie every Sunday. Music was really their sole driving concern. ‘There is so much negativity in London, one is inspired to do something positive here, something untainted,’ Gerrard said that day. ‘You put your ear to the ground, and describe what’s lacking.’

      ‘It was incredibly tough,’ she says today. ‘We’d eat just bread and water sometimes, and the venues we’d play were fashionably filthy and it wasn’t unusual to get food poisoning. But we knew people would love our music if we could just get it out there.’

      One technical tool was a cassette player with built-in drum machine, and on their rickety second-hand bicycles, they took their demo to a select number of independent labels across London. ‘We knew from import copies of the British music press who to approach. Factory was our first choice because of Joy Division – they changed my outlook on music, and their incredibly atmospheric qualities that mirrored Ian Curtis’s wonderful lyrics, and the industrial sound by [producer] Martin Hannett. I knew 4AD from The Birthday Party, though I wasn’t a fan of their big, cheesy American gothic. Bauhaus’ first album, though, was very forward thinking, mixing guitars and percussive rhythms. I only heard Cocteau Twins when we got to London. I’d tape John Peel’s show every night.’

      Yet Ivo initially turned them down: ‘He said he had a full roster,’ recalls Perry.

      ‘Ivo had a bit of a phobia about signing acts,’ recalls Deborah Edgely. ‘It’s a big commitment taking on people’s lives, and he wouldn’t sign long-term deals because then you’d be responsible for their future, and have to maintain a band’s income. These young kids would pitch up, and who was going to look after them? If you have a relationship built on one album at a time, there is less responsibility. You release something and hope for the best and then make a choice whether to carry on.’

      Though both Mute and Cherry Red reacted positively to Dead Can Dance, the trio carried on without signing a deal. A new drummer, Peter Ulrich, was found living in one of the neighbouring tower blocks, and more demos recorded. Perry says Ivo eventually called again: ‘Two tracks, “The Fatal Impact” and “Frontier”, had captured his imagination, and he said he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tape. But he wanted to see us play live.’ 4AD helped by finding them two support slots to Xmal Deutschland. ‘Ivo was so impressed we’d got it together, and really enjoyed it [the gigs],’ says Gerrard. ‘That turned things around.’

      Ivo: ‘It was Lisa’s voice that initially did it, which is odd because of how much I love Brendan’s voice too. Live, they were really powerful and tight, and Lisa was at her most raw. She sang in a non-lyrical way, using her voice almost like a weapon.’

      Ray Conroy remembers meeting Gerrard and Perry in the pub across from the 4AD office: ‘This weird hermit-like bloke with a pointy beard and the willowy, ghostly, porcelain figure that was Lisa. She really had something.’

      ‘Ivo,’ Perry recalls, ‘had a little ponytail, but about seven or eight inches long. I thought he was Buddhist or Krishna.’ Gerrard feels that Ivo was a figure of divine intervention. ‘He provided a way for artists to express themselves in ways they’d never otherwise be able to, and to reach their potential – which is what This Mortal Coil was about. Bands didn’t feel that they were absolutely brilliant, so there was no real conflict or threat. He attracted that kind of energy, of quite shy people, like he was looking for musicians hidden under stones, making this fragile music. Without Ivo, I don’t think I’d have developed my own voice – given our circumstances, I don’t know if I’d have had the strength to keep going. We were so driven to reach our own idea, this passionate purity about the work, and if we’d been confronted by anyone who put us under pressure to do otherwise, we’d have buckled.’

      By November 1983, Dead Can Dance had recorded a John Peel session and a debut album, Dead Can Dance, recorded with new musicians – James Pinker, the band’s New Zealand programmer (and live soundman) and English bassist Scott Rodger (though the departing Paul Erikson was also on the record). Dead Can Dance was instantly gripping, leading with a re-recording of the instrumental ‘The Fatal Impact’ (the title alluded to the colonial invasion of Aboriginal territory), with haunting chants taped off a TV broadcast of the 1964 film Zulu. The equally revamped ‘Frontier’ was an aural equivalent of the New Guinea tribal mask on the album cover, the idea of ‘dead’ wood being brought back to life by the carver representing the spirit behind the band’s name rather than the goth label tied around Dead Can Dance’s neck.

      Of course there was a clear gothic element to Dead Can Dance. Not long after they’d arrived in Britain, Gerrard and Perry had gone on a cycling tour of Gothic cathedrals and their sound was tailor-made for such spaces. But just as much, Perry agrees, the album bore the influence of life from a fourteenth-floor eyrie: ‘Sparseness, darkness, shadows,’ he says. And Joy Division was gothic too, a music debt that the duo paid by the album homage ‘Threshold’.

      The only disappointing aspect of Dead Can Dance was the production, which managed to come through as both dense and thin. Following a now familiar path, Dead Can Dance had been designated John Fryer and Blackwing: ‘Every day a different band or a different album every week, no one had money and we’d turn things round very fast,’ Fryer recalls. However, though Fryer was (unusually for an engineer, says Ivo) willing to give artists room to experiment, Brendan Perry already had years of experience, and they immediately clashed.

      ‘We fell out with John from day one,’ says Perry. ‘We only had two weeks for the entire album, which was really hard work. He thought he knew more about the recording process than we did, and came over arrogant and unhelpful when he should have been a bridge for us to get down what was inside our heads. We told Ivo it wasn’t working, but we couldn’t change it, so as a result, the production was really poor.’ Fryer says he didn’t like Perry’s domination of Gerrard in the studio, and, ‘how we had to replicate what he had played on the demos, but without any of their personality’.