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1 Did I Dream You Dreamed About Me?
2 Piper at the Gates of Oundle
6 The Family That Plays Together
7 Dreams Made Flesh, but It’ll End in Tears
8 The Art Shit Tour and Other Stories
9 Le Mystère des Delicate Cutters
11 To Suggest is to Create; to Describe is to Destroy
12 With Your Feet in the Air and Your Head on the Ground
13 An Ultra Vivid Beautiful Noise
16 A Tiny Little Speck in a Brobdingnag World
17 America Dreaming, on Such a Winter’s Day
18 All Virgos are Mad, Some More than Others
19 Fuck You Tiger, We’re Goin’ South
20 Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
21 As Close as Two Coats of Paint on a Windswept Wall
When a fan of 4AD, and of the British independent label scene of the Eighties in general, heard I was writing this book, he asked me, ‘Is there much drama in the 4AD story?’
True, the story of 4AD doesn’t feature a TV presenter-cum-entrepreneur who starts a record label whose most iconic frontman commits suicide and initiates a Che Guevara-style cult; nor does it involve the decision to invest heavily in a nightclub that goes on to become an epicentre of the biggest dance music boom in UK history, rejuvenating both youth and drug culture, the combined legacy of which soon enough bankrupts said label.
That would be the suspenseful saga of Manchester’s Factory Records, 4AD’s principal peer in the world of pioneering, inventive and maverick independent labels. For both labels, the visual aesthetic was as crucial as the music, yet, in many ways, south London’s 4AD, formed in 1980, was the anti-Factory: its spearhead, Ivo Watts-Russell, was more of a recluse than a media-savvy self-promoter, and 4AD had no recognisable ties to the zeitgeist – nor to any cultural trend, in fact. All of that, Ivo felt, was irrelevant; only the artefact mattered – the music and its exquisite packaging. In the mid-Eighties there were constant references to ‘the 4AD sound’: a beautiful, dark, insular style. If the 2002 fictionalised film about Factory Records was called 24 Hour Party People, what might a film about 4AD be titled – Eight Hours Chilling, and Then Bed?
But whilst 4AD’s story may be less sensational and populist than Factory’s, it is equally gripping, the label’s A&R vision being that much greater, and its subsequent cast of characters even more fascinating and beguiling. Under Ivo, 4AD’s vision chimed with a rare era in British pop history when there was a sizeable market for innovation and experimentation. The artists he was drawn to were trailblazers, outsiders whose unique perspective invariably included a troubled, sometimes irreconcilable relationship with the mainstream (scoring the UK’s first independently released number 1 single was as much the beginning of the end for 4AD as it was the start of a new era), and with each other, like a dysfunctional family – and that includes the staff at the record label.
Like the motion of the swan’s legs beneath its ineffably elegant glide across water, below the surface of 4AD’s dazzling and enigmatic artwork and music the human drama unfolded. 4AD’s journey began as a shared discovery of a new world of sound and opportunity
