Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD

It’s very unlikely the Warners corporation would ever have considered housing its record companies in the rabbit warren of rooms and corridors that made up 15–19 Alma Road in Wandsworth, south-west London, where Martin Mills’ Beggars Banquet and associated labels have their offices. A suitably alternative, homespun space for the world’s most successful independent label group, Mills’ lawyer James Wylie once described the label’s operation as, ‘a Madagascar off the continent of Africa that is the music business, part of the same eco-system but with its own microclimate’.

Not even the success of Adele, signed to Beggars imprint XL, whose 2011 album 21 is the biggest selling album in the UK since The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper in 1967, has encouraged Mills to move – nor his half of a recent $27.3 million dividend based on his profit share. Mills also owns half of the Rough Trade and Matador labels, and all of 4AD. Mills – and Ivo – moved here in 1982, when more than 25 million sales would have been a ridiculous, stoned fantasy.

Born in 1949, Mills was raised in Oxford, and he stayed on to study philosophy, politics and economics at the prestigious Oriel College. Piano lessons had come to nothing when The Beatles and the Brit-beat boom arrived, though Mills says he favoured ‘the rougher axis’ of The Rolling Stones and The Animals, just as he enjoys live music much more than recordings, making him the opposite of concert-phobe Ivo. ‘I cared about music above anything else,’ he says, but when he failed to get a positive response to job requests sent to every UK record label he could find an address for, his upbringing demanded common sense. While taking a postgraduate degree in town planning, he shared a flat in west Ealing with Steve Webbon.

But he found he couldn’t give up on music. Scaling back his ambitions, Mills then began a mobile disco with a friend from Oxford, Nick Austin, who was then working for his father’s furnishing company. The pair named their enterprise Giant Elf (a riposte to J. R. R. Tolkien’s already iconic The Hobbit) before Mills claims they needed a new name after receiving too many hoax calls alluding to Giant Elf’s supposed gay connotation. A subsequent team-up with a friend’s mobile disco, called Beggars Banquet, provided the means.

Mills also drove a van for Austin’s father while signing on for unemployment benefit – ‘a desirable scenario back then,’ he smiles. But the benefit office forced him into a full-time job, and for two years, Mills worked for The Office of Population, Census and Surveys (managing the statistics for the Reform of Abortion act) but he landed a job at the Record & Tape Exchange, a well-known record shop trading in second-hand records in Shepherd’s Bush, not far from Ealing.

Soon, Mills and Austin were discussing running their own second-hand record shop, which would sell new records too. Each borrowed £2,000 from their parents and, in 1974, opened Beggars Banquet in Hogarth Road, Earls Court. ‘It was a buzzing, backpacker type of place, with lots of record shops,’ says Mills. ‘But we’d stay open later than the others, until 9.30pm, selling left-field undergraduate stuff, west coast psychedelia, folk and country, but also soul, R&B and jazz-funk. We brought in Steve Webbon, who knew about record retail. By 1977, we had six shops.’

Beggars Banquet had given Ivo a job, and in a reversal of roles, he became Webbon’s assistant after the latter had moved to the Ealing branch. But so much of music, culture, and record retail was fundamentally shifting. The first real wave of opposition to the stagnating scenes of progressive, hard and west coast rock was the neo-punk of Iggy and The Stooges and the New York Dolls, which soon triggered a new wave of stripped-back guitars, centred around the CBGB’s club in the States (Patti Smith, Television) and the wilder exponents of so-called ‘pub rock’ in the UK (Doctor Feelgood, The 101ers). The first wave of London-based independent labels (Stiff, Chiswick, Small Wonder) sprang up to meet a growing demand, while Jamaican reggae imports were also rising. Not far behind was the new Rough Trade shop in west London’s bohemian enclave of Notting Hill Gate, whose founder Geoff Travis was to bolt on a record label and a distribution arm.

Beggars Banquet’s first expansion was as a short-lived concert promotions company. ‘We saw the opportunity for artists that people didn’t know there was demand for,’ says Mills, beginning with German ambient space-rockers Tangerine Dream in 1975 at London’s grand Royal Albert Hall. Only a year later, Mills says he saw a palpable shift in audience expectations while promoting the proto-new wave of Graham Parker, whose support band The Damned was the first punk band to release a single. ‘Punk turned our world upside down. No one wanted the kind of shows in theatre venues that we’d been promoting. People wanted grotty little places, so we stopped.’

A Beggars Banquet record label came next. The Fulham branch turned its basement into a rehearsal space for punk bands, one being London-based The Lurkers. A shop named after a Rolling Stones album was now primed to put rock ‘dinosaurs’ such as the Stones to the sword. Fulham branch manager Mike Stone had doubled up as The Lurkers’ manager. ‘Every label had a punk band now, and no one was interested in the band,’ says Mills. ‘So we released the first Lurkers single [‘Shadows’] ourselves. We had no clue how to, but we found a recording studio and a pressing plant in a music directory and we got distribution from President, who manufactured styluses.’

John Peel was an instant convert to punk, including The Lurkers, who sold a very healthy 15,000 copies of ‘Shadows’ on the new Beggars Banquet label. The profits funded Streets, the first compilation of independently released punk tracks. That sold 25,000, as did The Lurkers’ debut album Fulham Fallout.

Nick Austin spearheaded the talent-spotting A&R process. ‘He’d have ten ideas, and one was good, the rest embarrassing,’ says Steve Webbon. Subsequent Beggars Banquet acts such as Duffo, The Doll and Ivor Biggun (the alias of Robert ‘Doc’ Cox, BBC TV journalist turned novelty songsmith) were fluff compared to what Rough Trade and Manchester’s Factory Records were developing. ‘We were a rag-bag in the early days,’ Mills agrees. ‘A lot was off-message for punk. But our fourth release was Tubeway Army, after their bassist walked into the shop with a tape.’

Tubeway Army, marshalled by its mercurial frontman – and Berlin-era Bowie clone – Gary Numan, would catapult Beggars Banquet into another league, with a number 1 single within a year. But Numan’s demands for expensive equipment for the band’s first album, and other label expenses, stretched the company’s cash flow, and Mills says that only Ivor Biggun’s rugby-song innuendos (1978’s ‘The Winker’s Song’ had reached number 22 on the UK national chart) staved off near bankruptcy. Mills and Austin were businessmen, not idealists, so when they had to find a new distributor (the current operators Island had had to withdraw due to a licensing deal with EMI), they got into bed with the major label Warners. The licence deal meant that Beggars Banquet wasn’t eligible for the new independent label chart that would launch in 1980, but it did inject £100,000 of funds. ‘It was an absolutely insane figure,’ says Mills. ‘How could Warners expect to be repaid?’

The answer to repaying Warners was Tubeway Army’s bewitching, synthesised ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and its parent album Replicas, which both topped the UK national chart in 1979. So did Numan’s solo album The Pleasure Principle, released just four months later. The Faustian deal effectively meant that Beggars Banquet became a satellite operation of Warners, even sharing some staff. ‘We’d become something we hadn’t intended to be,’ says Mills. ‘One reason we [later] started 4AD was that it could be what Beggars Banquet had wanted to be: an underground label, and not fragmented like we’d become.’

While working in the shop, Ivo had only been a part-convert to the punk revolution. ‘I liked some of The Clash’s singles but their debut album was so badly recorded, it didn’t interest me at all. But I’d seen Blondie and Ramones live, and I quickly came to enjoy punk’s energy and melody. But I didn’t need punk to wipe away progressive rock. I’d been listening to what people saw as embarrassing and obscure country rock – no one was interested in Emmylou Harris or Gram Parsons back then. But I just loved voices, like Emmylou, Gram and Tim [Buckley].’

Of the new breed, Ivo preferred the darker, artier, and more progressive American bands such as Chrome, Pere Ubu and Television, who had very little in common with punk’s political snarl and fashion accoutrements. Steve Webbon, however, appeared to more fully embrace the sound of punk and its attendant lifestyle. ‘Those customers that were still into the minutiae of country rock were very dull,’ he recalls. ‘And that music had become more mainstream and bland. I spent the Seventies on speed: uppers, blues, black bombers. It must have been wearing for Ivo.’

Ivo had been forced to take charge on those days when Webbon disappeared to drug binge or during his periods of recovery. Ivo himself dipped into another torpid period of indecision. ‘Being behind the shop counter, with these children coming in every night, their hair changed and wearing safety pins, was exciting, but it got pretty boring too. So I left again.’

This time, Ivo flew to find the Holy Grail – to California. His brother Perry was taking Latin American studies at the University College of Los Angeles and could provide a place to stay. When Ivo’s visa ran out after just a matter of months, he again went back to the devil he knew; Beggars Banquet rehired him to train managers across all its shops. But after just one hour in the job, he quit again: ‘I felt like a caged animal.’

After claiming unemployment benefit for six months, the local job centre forced Ivo to apply for a job as a clerical worker at Ealing Town Hall. He once again turned to Beggars, and Nick Austin – clearly a patient man – re-employed him to do the same training job. In the summer of 1979, Ivo was even allowed an extended holiday, returning to California, where he and his friend Dave Bates first conceived the idea of a record label, and of opening a record shop with a café in Bournemouth on the south coast. Both operations were to be named Freebase (friends of Ivo’s had claimed they invented the freebasing technique of purifying cocaine). Ivo even went as far as registering the name: ‘Thankfully, it never happened. Imagine being behind a company called Freebase. In any case, the shop and café was pure fantasy.’

Ivo’s first thought for the Freebase label was to license albums by the San Francisco duo Chrome, purveyors of scuzzy psychedelic rock/electronic collage. Instead, the band’s creative force Damon Edge suggested Ivo should buy finished product from him instead, which he was unable to afford.1

The next opportunity came after Alex Proctor, a friend from Ivo’s Oundle days who was working at the Earls Court shop, passed on a demo. Brian Brain was the alter ego of Martin Atkins, the former drummer of Sex Pistol John Lydon’s new band Public Image Limited (or PiL). Ivo had recommended his tape to Martin Mills, who didn’t show any interest. ‘But then I got talking to Peter Kent, who was managing Beggars’ Earls Court branch,’ Ivo recalls.

Ivo’s cohort in forming a record label now lives in the Chicago suburb of Rogers Park, two blocks from Lake Michigan’s urban beach. It’s his first ever interview. ‘I’ve always considered myself as a bit player on the side,’ says Peter Kent. ‘I know people who are just full of themselves, but I’m more private. And being a Buddhist, I like to live in the present rather than regurgitate the past.’ But he is willing to talk, after all. ‘It’s nice to leave something behind,’ he concedes.

Kent didn’t hang around for long in the music business, partly by choice but also due to illness (he has multiple sclerosis). Among other part-time endeavours, he works as a dog sitter, which would give him and Ivo plenty to chat about. But during the time that they worked together, Ivo says, he knew nothing about Kent’s private life.

Born in Battersea, south-west London, his family’s neighbour was the tour manager of the Sixties band Manfred Mann, which gave the teenage Kent convenient entry to London’s exploding beat music boom. Kent says he DJed around Europe while based in Amsterdam, ‘doing everything that you shouldn’t’. He adds that, ‘A friend was a doctor of medicine in Basle, who’d make mescaline and cocaine. Peter Kent isn’t my real name; Interpol and the drug squad were looking for me at one point. It’s a long story.’

Kent also says that British blues vocalist Long John Baldry was his first boyfriend before he dated Bowie protégé Mickey King who he first met, alongside Bowie, at the Earls Court gay club Yours or Mine. After returning from Amsterdam, Kent appeared to calm down when he started managing Town Records in Kings Road, Chelsea, next door to fetish clothing specialists Seditionaries, run by future fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. He also ran a market stall-cum-café in nearby Beaufort Market, next to future punk siren Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex fame. By 1976, Kent had opened his own record shop, called Stuff, in nearby Fulham but it didn’t make a profit and so he took the manager’s post at Beggars Banquet’s Earls Court branch. The label’s office, and Ivo’s desk, was upstairs.

The origins of 4AD are contested. Kent says an avalanche of demos had been sent in the wake of Tubeway Army’s success: ‘Part of my job was to listen to them with the idea of forwarding the good ones to Beggars. I also said it was a great idea to start a little label on the side, and Martin said that’s what Ivo also wanted to do.’

Martin Mills recalls Ivo and Peter Kent approaching Nick Austin and himself with a plan, while Ivo sticks to the story he told Option magazine in 1986. ‘We’d regularly rush upstairs to convince Martin and Nick that they should get involved with something like Modern English, as opposed to what they were involved with. Eventually, Beggars got fed up with us pestering them and said, “Why don’t you start your own label?”’

Whatever the story, Mills and Austin donated a start-up fund of £2,000. Kent got to christen the label, choosing Axis after Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love album. ‘Ivo and I clicked as people,’ says Kent. ‘It was like I was Roxy Music and he was Captain Beefheart, but we appreciated where each other was coming from. He was mellower; I was more outgoing. But I wouldn’t say I ever knew him well.’

‘Ivo and Peter were a good double act,’ recalls Robbie Grey, lead singer for Modern English, one of 4AD’s crucial early signings. ‘They were similar in their background too, neither working class, so straight away you were dealing with art college types.’

Steve Webbon: ‘Peter was great. Very tall, dry sense of humour. And he had all these connections. He wasn’t as into music as Ivo, he was more into the scene. He’d go to gigs while Ivo would more listen to your tape.’

Ivo: ‘Peter was so important to 4AD from the start. Most of the early stuff was his discovery. While I was running around servicing the other shops, he was the go-getter. He knew people. I liked everything enough to say yes, but I didn’t know what I was doing.’

One part of the plan was for Axis to play a feeder role for the Beggars Banquet label, so that those artists with commercial ambition could make use of Beggars’ distribution deal with Warners. Another idea was to launch Axis with four seven-inch singles on the same day: ‘To make a statement, and to establish an imprint,’ says Ivo. ‘Other independent labels at that point, such as Factory, were imprints. It meant something.’

Factory’s first release, A Factory Sampler, had featured four bands, including Joy Division and Sheffield’s electronic pioneers Cabaret Voltaire. Axis’ first quartet, simultaneously released on the first business day of 1980, wasn’t quite as hefty. Nor did it include Brian Brain, which would have instantly given the label a newsworthy angle, or another mooted suggestion, Temporary Title, a south London band that used to rehearse in Beggars’ Fulham basement, whose singer Lea Anderson was a ‘floating’ Saturday shop assistant across the various Beggars Banquet shops. Instead, out of the pile of demos emerged three unknown entities, The Fast Set, Shox and Bearz, and one band that had released a single on east London independent Small Wonder: Bauhaus, who was to save Axis from the most underwhelming beginning.

The single given the honour of catalogue number AXIS 1 was The Fast Set’s ‘Junction One’. London-based keyboardist David Knight was the proud owner of a VCS3 synth, popularised by Eno, whose demo was played in the Earls Court shop by his friend Brad Day who worked there on Saturdays. ‘Peter Kent said if I wanted to record an electronic version of a glam rock track, he’d release it on this new label,’ recalls Knight. ‘The Human League had covered Gary Glitter’s “Rock And Roll”, and there were lots of other post-modern, semi-ironic interpretations around. I knew T. Rex’s “Children Of The Revolution” had only two chords, which suited me. Peter put me in a studio to record it, but he needed another track, which I knocked out on the spot, which became the A-side. I don’t know why.’

At very short notice, Knight and three cohorts played a show at Kent’s request. Budding film director John Maybury (best known for his 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil) projected super-8 images on to them and named them The Fast Set, because the quartet were so immobile on stage. Maybury also designed the cover of ‘Junction One’. The Fast Set’s synth-pop had a bit of early Human League’s sketchy pop but not its vision or charm. ‘For starters, I was no singer,’ says Knight. ‘My vocals were appalling!’

AXIS 2 and AXIS 4 were demos that had been posted to the Hogarth Road shop. ‘She’s My Girl’ was by Bearz, a quartet from the south-west of England that wasn’t even a band, says bassist Dave Gunstone. ‘The singer John Goddard and I had an idea to make a record – we liked the new wave sound, but we didn’t even have songs before we booked the studio. We found a drummer, Mark Willis, and David Lord produced us and played keyboards. I was a signwriter for shops and vans then – and you can hear I’m not a musician. But Ivo called to say he was interested in signing us. We went up to see him and Peter – to be in the office with Gary Numan gold discs on the walls, it was dream come true.’

They called themselves The Bears until Ivo (who says it would have been Peter Kent) pointed out other bands had already used the name, ‘so he said “stick a z on the end”,’ says Gunstone. ‘Neo-psychedelic vocals over an attractively lumpy melody’ (NME) and ‘nostalgia pop’ (Peter Kent) are fair appraisals of the song, given the dinky Sixties beat-pop and Seventies bubblegum mix, while the B-side ‘Girls Will Do’ was tauter new wave.

Shox were also hopeful of a stab at success via the new wave conceit of a misspelt name – though the photo on the cover of vocalist Jacqui Brookes and instrumentalists John Pethers and Mike Atkinson in one bed was horribly old school. The most prominent British weekly music paper, New Music Express (NME) also approved of ‘No Turning Back’: ‘Fresh and naturally home-made, like The Human League once upon a time’. Peter Kent’s comment, ‘I have no memory of it whatsoever’, also hits the mark.

AXIS 3, ‘Dark Entries’, was an altogether different story. Peter Kent recalls being in the Rough Trade shop. ‘I was buying singles for Beggars Banquet, and Geoff Travis was there, playing some demos. I heard him say he didn’t like it, and I said, “Excuse me?” Geoff said I could take it. The energy was unbelievable, and the sound was so different from everything else around. Forty-eight hours later, I was in Northampton to meet Bauhaus.’

Ivo: ‘If Peter did go to Northampton, that was another thing that he didn’t tell me! I first met Bauhaus in the Earls Court shop where Peter had intercepted the tape they were intending to deliver to Beggars Banquet. Peter came to find me in the restaurant over the road and insisted I come back immediately to listen to it and meet the band.’

According to Bauhaus’ singer Peter Murphy, ‘Peter said, “I’m having you lot”. Ivo didn’t want us. That’s what Peter said at the time. Ivo’s a mardy bugger! And really sarcastic [laughs]. But when we walked into the Beggars office, Ivy [Murphy’s affectionate nickname for Ivo] was working there, and he looked at us after hearing the music and said yes!’

Via a Skype connection to Turkey’s capital Istanbul, where Murphy has lived since marrying his Turkish wife and following the Islamic belief of Sufism, the former Bauhaus singer still looks sleek and gaunt, his celebrated ‘dark lord’ persona intact. Traffic whirs away in the background, but it cuts out when Murphy puts on ‘Re-Make Re-Model’ from Roxy Music’s epochal 1972 album debut, presumably to set the scene for our conversation, by showcasing Bauhaus’ roots in both glam and art rock.

‘I was fifteen,’ Murphy begins, ‘and I didn’t know if it was male or female, but I saw this pair of testicles peaking out under a Kabuki outfit, and it was the most erotic moment. It felt angelic.’ The photographic object of his affection was David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust leotard. Roxy Music’s synthesiser magus Brian Eno, says Murphy, ‘was maybe even more magical, awesome in that raw, lo-fi way, the drums on his solo records so flat and thick and stocky, with none of that fucking reverb bollocks that Ivo would swamp things in!’

The Bauhaus siblings, David and Kevin Haskins, both now live in California – David J, as the bassist calls himself, is in Encinitas, 95 miles from Kevin Haskins Dompe (he’s since bolted on his wife’s maiden name) in Los Angeles. Both willingly testify to a similarly shared epiphany – July 1972, when Bowie – in the guise of Ziggy – sang ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. ‘I was hooked, and I knew I had to do this myself.’

There’s one missing voice – guitarist Daniel Ash. Though he lives in California as well, he hasn’t communicated with any of his former bandmates since the band’s 2008 album Go Away White. Ash, the others say, prefers tinkering with his beloved motorbikes over any remembrance of the past.2

Playing guitar, David J had graduated from his first band, Grab a Shadow, and having encouraged Kevin – still just thirteen – to learn the drums, they’d joined Jam, a hard rock covers band. ‘And then punk happened,’ says Haskins Dompe. ‘David took me to The 100 Club to see the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Banshees. The next day I cut off my hair and wore my paint-splashed polyester pyjamas to art school.’

After the demise of the pair’s short-lived punk band The Submerged Tenth, David J had bumped into fellow art school student Ash, who he’d known since kindergarten. ‘We clearly had a connection,’ says David. ‘We both loved dub reggae, and Bowie.’ Haskins and Ash subsequently formed The Craze, which, Haskins Dompe says, ‘played new wave power-pop, which Daniel didn’t like, so that ended’. Ash asked Haskins Dompe to join a new band fronted by Ash’s old school friend Peter Murphy, but excluding David J. ‘Daniel felt David’s ideas were too strong, but he relented,’ says Haskins Dompe. ‘I could see the chemistry between them.’

David J had watched the others rehearse. ‘They were so streamlined and stark, and Peter had such charisma, and looked amazing. They had a bassist, but his looks and personality didn’t fit, so I joined.’

Peter Murphy: ‘David was sensitive, smart, self-interested, a dark horse. Kevin could be narky and uppity, but he was our sweet angel. I was very overpowering but we were respectful of each other, though there was a lot of unspoken, repressed tension.’

The battle of wills that marked Bauhaus to the end produced the necessary sparks at the start. Written only weeks after David J joined, the band’s debut single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ was a cavernous, dub-enhanced nine-minute drama with the epic mantra, ‘undead, undead, undead,’ in honour of Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor most famous for his 1931 portrait of Dracula. ‘We surprised ourselves, because it was ambitious and didn’t follow anyone else,’ says David J. Every major label (and Stiff) declined to release it, before the fledgling London independent label Small Wonder stepped in. ‘Theirs was the only response that didn’t think the track was too long.’