was equally layered: a 1949 photo of two imposing Nuban tribesmen in Sudan taken by British photographer George Rodger that Mick Allen had doctored by drawing a tiny red rose between one of the men’s fingers.
Despite Rema-Rema’s short-lived promise, Ivo felt he’d learnt a valuable lesson. ‘I understood punk much more after meeting Rema-Rema. They were real individuals, not aggressive, but they’d get in your face and argue their point. They believed in themselves, so you supported that even more than their music. Those people deserved support.’
To that end, Ivo hired Chris Carr, a freelance PR who was promoting bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure, to work on the Rema-Rema EP. Carr says he doesn’t recall any reviews in the music press, which was disappointing for a record of such steely adventure, but without a band, what were its chances? But Carr says he was keen to continue working with Ivo. ‘He wasn’t remotely interested in what the majors were doing, only in developing the punk ethos, where punk meets art, and not for commercial gain. But it was hard to finance records at that time and Ivo would release demos if they were good enough. Though you could only keep releasing records if they got reviews.’
By comparison, Peter Kent had more old-fashioned ambitions: ‘I wanted to be commercial,’ he says. ‘To have money to spend on bands.’ It would have been very interesting if, as Kent claims, Duran Duran – soon to become costumed New Romantic flagwavers alongside Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant – had been available. ‘We nearly signed them,’ says Kent. ‘I played their demo to Ivo, who really liked it, but they’d just signed to EMI.’
Ivo denies ever having heard any Duran demos, but says that journalist Pete Makowski (who had commissioned Ivo to write two album reviews for the weekly music paper Sounds before Axis/4AD had begun) had played him demos by The Psychedelic Furs. ‘I liked it, but the band had already signed to CBS,’ he says. Looking back, the Furs and Duran’s ambitions would have clashed with 4AD’s developing ethos. Much more aligned was a young band that could combine the commercial aspirations that Kent sought with the musical spirit that Ivo understood.
The Lepers were a down-the-line punk band from Colchester in Essex fronted by singer Robbie Grey (who called himself Jack Midnight) and guitarist Gary McDowell (a.k.a. Justin Sane). Bassist Wiggs and drummer Civvy were soon respectively replaced by Mick Conroy and Richard Brown, but they’d already changed the band name to Modern English before Stephen Walker arrived, whose keyboards accelerated the shift to post-punk. ‘Punk’s fire had gone out, so we started listening more to Wire and Joy Division,’ says Grey. ‘Ivo could see what could become of us with a bit of development.’
Wire and Joy Division were two of the best, and most creative, bands to provide an alternative to punk rock’s single-speed, two-chord setting. London-based Wire were punk’s most artfully oblique outsiders, yet they also wrote clever, melodic pop songs. Manchester’s Joy Division had transcended their punk roots as Warsaw and taken on a more rhythmic and haunting shape, embodied by its enigmatic, troubled singer Ian Curtis. Post-punk was a sea of possibilities.
With a sense of adventure, Modern English had followed Mick Conroy’s older brother Ray to London where he was squatting in Notting Hill Gate, near Rough Trade’s offices. Grey describes a time of sleeping bags in the basement, meagre unemployment benefit, suppers of discarded vegetables from the street market, and bleeding gums as the price they had to pay, but out of it came the debut single ‘Drowning Man’ on the band’s own label, Limp. A Wire-like hauteur over a blatant Joy Division pulse was too slavish a copy, but after Peter Kent had booked Modern English to support Bauhaus at central London’s Rock Garden in March 1980, he and Ivo saw just enough reason to commission another single.
‘Their demo had stood out, but initially, Modern English weren’t great live,’ recalls Ivo. ‘They couldn’t win over an audience like Bauhaus, who were fantastic on stage. And like Bauhaus, the British music press didn’t enjoy Modern English. Coming from Colchester, they weren’t necessarily considered cool but they weren’t, thank God, the kind to hang out with journalists anyway. The first time I saw Gary, he had a huge stegosaurus haircut!’
The band’s 4AD debut ‘Swans On Glass’ was a lashing version of the Wire model of nervous punk-pop. Ivo’s faith in Modern English highlighted the gulf between his intuitive belief in raw talent and Beggars Banquet’s nose for commerce. ‘Martin [Mills] might not have seen what Ivo saw,’ says Conroy. ‘We were still pretty ropey then. The Lurkers, for example, had songs. We just had bits of music stuck together.’
Nevertheless, Beggars Banquet still wanted to sign the band to a long-term label and publishing deals. But unlike Rema-Rema, Modern English shared Mills and Nick Austin’s commercial instinct: ‘A five-year contract gave us the chance to grow,’ says Grey.
Ivo: ‘Long-term contracts were unnecessary, but Peter and I were just two employees for Beggars Banquet Limited, trading as 4AD. But I learnt quickly, and up to 1988, Modern English was the last band we signed long term without doing one or two one-offs with the artist first. Martin could see that even without deals, Bauhaus had immediately started making money for us.’
Bauhaus’ quotient of gothic camp was turned down several notches by its second single for 4AD. ‘Terror Couple Kills Colonel’ showed a stripped-down restraint for a similarly curt lyric inspired by newspaper headlines about the German terrorist unit Red Army Faction. It wasn’t as successful as ‘Dark Entries’, reaching 5 in the independent chart and not hanging around for as long; if the press didn’t like goth, there was a swell of public support for the sound. The band played a thirty-date tour and retired to record their debut album, confident enough to produce it themselves.
As Ivo began to mentor Modern English, so Peter Kent’s relationship with Bauhaus strengthened when he became the band’s tour manager.2 ‘Peter was charming and witty with great taste, though we discovered he had a very fragile ego,’ David J recalls. ‘Ivo was very interesting too, with sartorial style. He wore exquisite shirts buttoned up to the top, and you’d discover how knowledgeable he was about music, and what good taste he had as well. To me, he was the ultimate hipster.’
The next arrival at 4AD didn’t seem like an obvious fit for either Ivo or Kent, though it was the latter who introduced In Camera, surely the toughest, bleakest sound on 4AD, that came from one of the toughest, bleakest parts of 1980 London.
In Camera’s singer, David Scinto, sits in the downstairs bar of nineteenth-century art nouveau landmark the Theatre Royal in Stratford, one of the few survivors of the regeneration that has swept through this part of London’s East End. The Olympic Games of 2012 was held only a few minutes away, where former barren stretches of land used to be. But other landmarks have been wiped away, or buried, in the name of modernisation and the area’s former industrial working-class heart has been re-clad in shopping-centre glass and steel. ‘It’s no longer the Stratford I knew,’ says Scinto.
Scinto cuts a burly stature now, but during In Camera’s time, he was a lean, intense figure, who called himself David Steiner after James Coburn’s character Sergeant Rolf Steiner in Sam Peckinpah’s torrid war movie Cross of Iron. He’s more than a movie buff, he’s a bona fide screenwriter, having co-written two acclaimed films, Sexy Beast and 44 Inch Chest, that psychologically dissected a particularly East End kind of gangster. ‘I keep trying music, and acting too, but I always come back to writing,’ he says. ‘Always have done, since I was a kid.’
Born to Maltese immigrants, Scinto was captivated by funk, soul and soundtracks, from Mission Impossible to Ennio Morricone’s work. ‘But then punk did to me what it did to others, a complete inspiration. I fear my options without punk could have been unbearable. Just before punk hit, I was fifteen, and my friend and I were going to rob a shop. I had a replica pistol, but as we walked towards the
