by Alex; Ogg
It was a troubled birth – the records came back from the printers in shoddy form, with the covers compromised and the vinyl suffering noticeably poor pressing quality. On top of which the press release they sent to the trade publication Music Week announcing the investiture of Axis was met with a phone call from an established label of the same name. A hasty deal was struck whereby they could sell off the remaining stock they’d had pressed, on the understanding that they then rename the company. Short of time, they chose 4AD – inspired by a promotional flyer for the original Axis label where the designer had added the legend ‘1980 – Forward’. “I think we must have been inspired by Factory,” ponders Watts –Russell. “I mean, the mere fact that we called the label Axis. Thank God there was another label with that name. We didn’t know what we were doing at all, but thank goodness that got changed.”
The four Axis singles hardly flatter the label’s legacy. Only Northampton art rockers Bauhaus’s ‘Dark Entries’ [who had gravitated to the label from Small Wonder] would have a significant impact. The Fast Set’s ‘Junction One’ was the work of David Knight, a later collaborator with The Shock Headed Peters, Danielle Dax and Cherry Red’s Five Or Six. But neither their effort nor the Bearz’ ‘She’s My Girl’ (whose David Lord would later work with Tori Amos), nor Shox’s ‘No Turning Back’ (whose Jacqui Brookes would re-emerge, briefly, on Beggars as a solo artist), excited much interest. “Pretty clueless, really!” admits Watts-Russell. “It was like, we’re going to start a label, he’s pretty good, I like his ideas, someone’s got some studio time we can use for nothing, and he’s going to do a T-Rex cover – that sounds good! The first singles we had pressed up, and at least for a year after that, you’d stick em in the back of your car, drive to the Rough Trade shop, they’d have a listen and say, we’ll take 200 of this, 200 of that – and they’d write you a cheque! That was so important. Their ability to pay cash up front enabled the individual, person, or label or artist, to get an income to be able to consider funding the next release.”
As 4AD established itself during 1980, there would be two further singles and also debut album In The Flat Field before Bauhaus transferred to the main Beggars imprint. In the interim there were singles by the likes of Rema Rema, In Camera, Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis of Wire and, belatedly, Modern English. “No offence intended towards Bauhaus at all – they were probably solely responsible for our solvency in that first year,” says Watts-Russell. “But in some ways, I always think 4AD started with the Rema Rema EP. It was the first record to appear on that label – though we repressed ‘Dark Entries’ on 4AD. Pre, the Charisma label, had paid for the EP but weren’t going to put it out, because one song contained the line ‘And you fuck just like Jesus Christ’. And ironically we didn’t put that track on the EP because Rema Rema didn’t want it included. But when I heard those songs and met them, that’s when I realised this was real and serious. I felt it was as good as anything that was coming out at the time. Those people, those individuals, they were extraordinary. Mark Cox is still my closest friend. To this day they’re exactly the same – that true attitude that came from punk.” They also shared his convictions about quality and value. “I responded more to the attitude of – a single is two good songs, an album is ten or 14 good songs – it’s not a-sides and b-sides and flogging albums made up of three singles and some bad tracks. That was a no-brainer. I love and respect music, and respect those that respect their public. Those principles from the early days are still ideals I hold today.”
Rema Rema had split up by the time they contacted Watts-Russell. “That’s a fairly important thing. Nick and Martin had said, ‘Here we are, start a label’, and they presented us with contracts that they’d used to sign artists to Beggars. I was sitting with Nick for the first time, watching him negotiate a lifelong publishing deal with these writers – Rema Rema – who were a group that were never going to write again. It was a stuck in the mill thing: this is the contract we use, we’ll make it work for them. It was seeing that, and seeing Peter’s enthusiasm and ambition, seeing how rapidly that grew. And also starting to realise one could work with something of the calibre of that EP. There was no way I wanted it to be a stepping stone to Beggars Banquet, which was part of Warners as far as I was concerned. I love Martin – don’t ever, ever let anything come across other than my love and respect and gratitude towards that man – but that sowed the seeds for what happened.”
The label’s early roster remained slightly lopsided, however. “Modern English was something both Peter and I had liked,” explains Watts-Russell. “In Camera was Peter more than I. Graham and Bruce, that thing was both of us, maybe more me, because I developed a relationship with them. The The was totally me. The Presage(s) thing was a compilation that was bits and pieces of all of us. The fact that [novelty track] ‘Hunk Of A Punk’ was on there shows a huge separation between me and Peter. Pete thought it was funny, I just thought it was fucking stupid. The Birthday Party was me. Mass was three members of Rema Rema, that was natural for both of us, because we’d become very fond of them as people. Dance Chapter was both of us. I clearly remember being upstairs, a day after Ian Curtis had died, or very close to that day. I was upstairs and Peter buzzed up. ‘You know how we were talking about how someone was going to walk in and fill Joy Division’s shoes?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I think they’ve just walked in!’ Lovely as they were, I don’t think that was the case!”
Modern English’s second single, ‘Gathering Dust’, helped secure 4AD’s legacy by introducing graphic designer Vaughan Oliver, whose work became – almost in symbiosis with the music – the aesthetic identity of the label. Especially so after he teamed up with photographer and old school friend from Ferryhill, County Durham, Nigel Grierson for Modern English’s Mesh & Lace album – the official debut of the famed 23 Envelope design team. Thereafter 4AD sleeves became, with little exaggeration, fine art, using the LP sleeve as canvas – working in sympathy with each artist to the extent that their creations often added an extra layer of meaning and wonder to the music itself. And often, it has to be said, revealing an innate ability to turn the everyday and the unremarkable into something unseemly and subversive. As Kim Deal of the Breeders would later point out when confronted with projected cover art that included Vaughan’s own body parts, “That man is a pervert”.
The meeting with Oliver was, according to Watts-Russell, sheer serendipity. “A friend of Peter’s, Alan McDonald, was a graphic designer, and I think he worked with The Associates later on. Alan said, ‘Oh, I’m too busy, work with my friend Mark Robinson. So Mark had designed the original blue 4AD logo, and had done a flyer that the 4AD name cropped up from. A play on words. And he’d done Modern English’s ‘Swans On Glass’, and a few months down the line we had another Modern English single. Mark was going to America and couldn’t do it – he said ‘I’ve got a friend called Vaughan. Get in touch with him.’ I called him up, and Vaughan came in that evening after work to see me. Modern English had been using a Diane Arbus photograph, of a naked man and woman, sitting on a sofa with a seal between them. They’d replaced the seal with a television, with the broken screen saying Modern English on it. They wanted to use that image somehow. Vaughan came in and ridiculously, he had in his portfolio a variation on the theme of that very same image – just using silhouettes. What was the chance of that? That’s how I met him. He did that sleeve and slowly over the next year or two of getting him a bit more involved with things, and also getting to know him – many a Monday night at the Venue where we got to put on anything we wanted pretty much once a month – Vaughan was always in my ear about logo, label identity, trust, brand name – hammering away at me. At the time I didn’t have the confidence myself to feel it was right to foist that on every artist we worked with – but having an appreciation of Vaughan’s talents, and growing with everything I did, that became more appropriate. He was my first employee and came to work with me in 1983.”
The The also recorded their first record for 4AD, tho
ugh the label’s next substantial breakthrough came with Australian imports the Birthday Party’s ‘The Friend Catcher’. “I’d gone to see the Lines opening for DAF up at the Moonlight,” Watts-Russell remembers. “DAF were on Mute. I got there earlier and there was this group playing. I seemed to be the only person who liked them, and I really, really liked them, I loved the Farfisa organ that Mick Harvey was playing. I was asking round, and someone said Daniel [Miller; Mute head] told them to come down and play. I called Daniel the next day and he gave me a phone number, I called up and I started to be very enthusiastic in a very naive way. I said I particularly liked the keyboard playing, And it was Mick I was talking to, which I didn’t realise. He said, ‘We’re playing tomorrow night at the Rock Garden, why don’t you come along?’ I went along and they were really, really good. I went into that little cubby-hole at the back of the Rock Garden that’s a dressing room, said I thought you were fantastic and that my favourite song was ‘The Friend Catcher’. Mick said, ‘Oh, we’ve recorded that, do you want to put it out?’ It was as simple as that. Peel had already been playing ‘Mr Clarinet’ and ‘Happy Birthday’, which they’d released themselves, and I later re-released. He’d probably given them a couple of sessions, certainly one, by then.” Wasn’t he amazed that Mute didn’t pick the band up? “Not really, because it felt like I was the only person who enjoyed them that night at the Moonlight.”
But by the end of 1980, with 19 releases under their belts, Kent and Watts-Russell parted company, with Kent given his own Beggars-backed imprint, Situation 2. From now on, 4AD would stand as a separate and unique entity, Bauhaus being the sole artists to have made the planned transition to Beggars. “I’m not really quite sure why Ivo and Peter Kent parted company,” says Mills, “probably because Ivo became very much the dominant character within 4AD, and Peter wanted to do his own thing. When he started Situation 2, again, it was much less musically focused. It had a Ministry single on it, and The Associates were obviously a key band. But it was relatively fragmented. So Peter went off and ran that for a few years.”
Kent was also keen to maintain a link with Bauhaus. “Yes, absolutely,” notes Watts-Russell. “Maybe it reflected on his character that he didn’t just become their manager – he started Situation 2, and one of the first things that was agreed was this series of Associates singles – which was fucking fantastic. It was a coup to get them. The music was brilliant. Then he did actually make that step to becoming a manager. But with 4AD by 1981 – yeah, OK, it’s my label now!”
There was a further important parting of the ways. By 1982, Mills had taken over primary stewardship of Beggars Banquet Group, a situation that continues to this day. “Nick and I didn’t finally split up till 1989,” says Mills, “though we drifted apart for a number of years before then. Nick married Claire Hamill the folk singer, and through her got to meet lots of jazz musicians like Dick Morrissey and Jim Mullen, and got very absorbed in jazz and new age. And that was so at odds with what the rest of the company was that we actually genuinely had musical differences, as a record label rather than as a band. And so we reached an agreement whereby he took some of the company and went his own way and I took the rest and went our way. That was probably the only solution to what had become a very divergent business. And probably an inevitable culmination of what had been growing differences.” But the divorce wasn’t without acrimony. “They were going in different directions and they fell out,” notes Mike Stone. “There was a court case and that was a shame.”
As far as Mills was concerned, Situation 2 handily allowed the company to get into the independent charts, given that Beggars was distributed by Warners. The decision was taken to use Rough Trade and Pinnacle. “The independent chart didn’t matter to a Gary Numan, but it did matter to a Bauhaus,” he reflects. Situation 2’s first release, and initial focus, was on The Associates, but they would eventually transfer to Warners in a kind of reciprocal arrangement as repayment of the major’s investment. “The Associates had always had extra funding from Warners,” notes Mills, “because it was an expensive deal for us, very expensive. So from the outset they always had more control over The Associates than they did over the other artists they distributed – and The Associates were a very needy band, and more and more needed to get brought in. It got to a point where Warners weren’t prepared to do it with us in the middle, and we were also feeling somewhat divorced from the process, as we felt like an unnecessary step in the middle by that point. Which was frustrating, because we loved The Associates and I thought the music they made was absolute genius. But there were three people in the bed and it was one too many. By that point, what we were doing and what Warners wanted from us had diverged to a point whereby, as with every independent-major label association, you want them to believe in everything as much as you do, and of course they can’t. So those frustrations were building up and what needed to be done with The Associates provided a natural opportunity for the rest of the situation to resolve itself. So our licence deal became a distribution deal. So we were funding ourselves and making our own decisions and investments, rather than trying to persuade them. If you were a retailer, you wouldn’t have noticed any difference – you’d have been ordering the same records from the same distributor. But behind the scenes it was very different because we were not relying on anyone else’s money, we were using our own.”
Although they would shortly transfer to the main Beggars imprint, initially Beggars’ biggest selling rock band of the 90s, The Cult, had started out on Situation 2, under the lengthier name Southern Death Cult.” The biggest dream we could have in our whole lives at that time was for that magic 7-inch vinyl,” remembers singer Ian Astbury. “I remember we were so desperate to get it so incredibly right. We were pretty unaccomplished as musicians, it was all adrenaline and earnestness. First of all Martin Mills from Beggars Banquet was introduced to us by a guy called Pete McCarthy, a rogue A&R guy. There was quite a few of them running around London at the time. He came and saw us live. And by this time our live reputation had exploded. We were opening for Bauhaus, for Theatre Of Hate, the Futurama festival blah blah. So Martin Mills signed us. Initially we thought we were getting a great deal, but he put us on Situation 2 because he didn’t want us to be on the main label. We were pretty unaccomplished so he wanted to try us out on Situation 2. Well, we didn’t actually sign, it was like word of mouth, a gentleman’s agreement. I don’t think we actually physically signed a contract as Southern Death Cult. I’m pretty sure it was a handshake. So we did that and we recorded with Mike Hedges, who was huge at the time because of the Banshees. So that was a big deal. ‘Fatman’ and ‘Moya’, we felt were our two best songs, so we made it a double a-side. Buzz [Burrows; guitarist] and I did the cover, knocked it up, Xeroxed art, Buzz did an illustration, I did a Xerox graphic. My girlfriend at the time helped me with the logo, which was hand-drawn. Name out of a book. It was totally punk rock, A-B-C 1-2-3, like the fanzines, Sniffin’ Glue, here’s three chords, form a band [a phrase actually taken from an early Stranglers fanzine but widely attributed to Sniffin’ Glue thereafter], that’s what we did.”
Situation 2’s identity eventually became synonymous with other bands that, like Southern Death Cult, followed in the wake of the Birthday Party and Bauhaus; Gene Loves Jezebel, Fields Of The Nephilim, The Bolshoi, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry etc. Essentially, in fact, nearly all of the first rank ‘Goth’ bands with the exception of the Sisters Of Mercy, though practically all of them resented that description. With punk, many of the start-up labels ended up road-sweeping the leftovers. This was the first time that Beggars had been able to establish itself at the forefront of something. “I suppose it was,” says Mills, “and I suppose you’re right. With punk, the majors all had one or two of the great ones, there weren’t any independent labels that had a whole bunch of great punk bands, so you’re right, we did have all the important Goth artists probably other than the Sisters. And I suppose that did give us a certain presence and a certain position, an
d a certain identity.”
For Britain’s premier writer on the Goth movement, Mick Mercer, that is certainly true. But note how for him at least, the Beggars canon could be seen as an inter-linked, cohesive body of work despite the stratification of different labels. “The 1980s was the greatest decade for independent music the UK has enjoyed, as the graph of creative attainment showed a devastatingly steep incline after punk. Inner machinations are always irrelevant to the fan and so Beggars, 4AD and Situation 2 should be seen as one entity, as they stood for the same thing, and shared similar levels of quality. They were, to be technical for a moment, less wanky than Factory, with no sign of their self-indulgence, or any desire to be seen as cool, and they were always considerably more adventurous than the comparatively cozy Creation would turn out to be in the 90s. Beggars and their wily brother and sister labels were simply the best labels we have ever had in this country, with a striking instinct for powerful and oddly vivacious music, and artwork that left an equally strong impression. I have no idea what they have on their roster nowadays, but their achievements through the 80s are undeniable. Look at their back catalogue and there’s an astonishing lack of dross.”
Elsewhere, the Beggars imprint itself also began to evolve. There was the signing of Brit-funk group Freeez, rock-pop thoroughbreds the Icicle Works and The Fall, during one of their intermittent periods of brilliance. “It was all different but compatible,” thinks Mills, slightly disputing Mercer’s logic. “So the labels at that point were all beginning to really acquire an identity – Beggars Banquet and 4AD and so on – which had not been evident early on.”
