Of Dictator Hall and an out-of-place primitive folk art drawing to the side of a colour photograph of the earth. ‘I stubbornly wanted to do the cover myself,’ he admits. ‘The photo of the globe cost Ivo a lot more than Vaughan!’ It was more expensive, actually, than the album’s recording budget, which illustrated 4AD’s commitment to packaging.
Currie thinks The Man On Your Street would have fared better if Oliver had taken over, giving it an identifiable 4AD cachet: ‘We were an anomaly on 4AD. I was deliberately trying to undermine their image, to show 4AD could go to other places. I think Ivo was flummoxed by our brash, alienating irony and a narrative music hall sensibility that was at odds with him, and we didn’t have that sense of beauty that he liked. It also had this Puckish, communist streak, and I don’t think we saw eye to eye politically. But I’m very grateful to Ivo. It was a terrific adventure.’
Currie also saw Ivo’s patronage and 4AD’s early achievements as part of a watershed era for British music. ‘It was the first generation of record label bosses who were creative themselves, and trying to shape a sensibility. Though in the end, I found it easier dealing with old-fashioned record labels that were just a marketing department and a bank!’
As Momus, Currie thrived, but The Happy Family didn’t. ‘Ivo wasn’t interested in another album, nothing was happening in Scotland, and I felt guilty about being the band’s dictator, even though the others wouldn’t write their own parts. The more we rehearsed, the worse we sounded, so I returned to university before moving to London.’1
If Ivo’s intuition had failed him on this occasion, his next discovery was another maverick mould-breaker in the Happy Family tradition, albeit in a radically different form. Coming at the end of the year, it finally put paid to the idea that 4AD was a repository of Stygian gloom – even if the title of Colourbox’s debut single was ‘Breakdown’.
From his home in the Regency seaside town of Brighton on England’s south coast, Martyn Young seems to have as many reasons as Robin Guthrie to consider his past in a someone regretful light. The fact is he is the driving force behind the only act in UK chart history never to have attempted a follow-up to a national number 1 single. In fact, Young and his younger brother Steven haven’t released one piece of original music since Colourbox’s spin-off project M/A/R/R/S scaled the charts with ‘Pump Up The Volume’.
Not that Young cares: he admits that he never truly wanted to make music to begin with, preferring the technical aspects of music, the manuals and the mixing desk; a boffin at heart rather than a musician, who has spent his ensuing years computer programming and studying music theory. In any case, he now has twins (two years old at the time of writing), and though his first course of anti-depressants (he and Ivo have exchanged emails about brands and effects) have lifted him, he doesn’t imagine he will make any more music. Given its association with depression, anger issues, creative blocks, writs and extreme food diets, why would anyone choose to return?
Young was born Martyn Biggs, which, he says, ‘sounded like “farting pigs”, so I used my mother’s maiden name of Young’. Home life was dysfunctional; his father had been sent to prison before Martyn was a teenager. At school in Colchester in the East Anglia region, he was two years above his brother Steven and Ray Conroy (whose brother, Modern English bassist Mick, was a year below them). Young’s musical path is familiar: a Bowie obsession led to a wider appreciation of art and progressive rock before punk’s conversion. ‘It immediately made me want to play guitar,’ he says.
Young says his first band, The Odour 7, was only a half-hearted teenage exercise, but the following Bowie/Devo-influenced Baby Patrol released a single, ‘Fun Fusion’ on Secret Records. ‘We were particularly crap and I destroyed every copy of the single I could find. I’m singing and the lyrics are so embarrassing. But I was still young.’
After dyeing his hair following Bowie’s blonde/orange rinse, Young was labelled a ‘pouf’ by his father and told he couldn’t sleep in the same room as his brother. ‘So I started squatting with Modern English in London.’ In this new world, Young borrowed a synthesiser and drum machine and spent a year unlocking their secrets. His next move was a band with Steven (known as Scab because of the scabs on his knuckles that he kept picking, Ivo explains) and Baby Patrol’s Ian Robbins; Colourbox was the title of an animated film from 1937. Mutual friends introduced female vocalist Debian Curry and the quartet recorded a demo that included ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Tarantula’. As Ivo recalls, Ray Conroy – acting as the band’s manager – came to Hogarth Road in 1980 to give the more dance-conscious Peter Kent the Colourbox demo, ‘because why would 4AD put out a dance record? I guess Peter wasn’t around, so Ray played me the tape. I liked “Breakdown” but I loved “Tarantula”. It’s such a sad song.’
Musically, ‘Tarantula’ resembled the moody cousin of Yazoo’s synth-pop ballad ‘Only You’, but unlike Yazoo singer Alf Moyet, Debian Curry’s cool delivery reinforced the withdrawn mood at the song’s core: ‘I’m living but I’m feeling numb, you can see it in my stare/ I wear a mask so falsely now, and I don’t know who I am/ This voice that wells inside of me, eroding me away …’
‘I’ve only recently come to understand that I’ve always suffered from depression,’ Young says. ‘I used to think my strange mood swings were caused by something like food, so I’d try and eat raw salad for months. But anti-depressants mean I’m no longer wallowing in misery and pent-up negativity.’
Ivo and Martyn Young’s bond wasn’t just musical, but personal, united by their shyness and sadness. ‘Ivo had a reputation for being dour, but he wasn’t with us,’ Young recalls.
Ivo: ‘I really liked Martyn. He looked like he was chewing gum and smiling at you at the same time, which was charming. Scab was younger and quieter, and the best drum programmer I’d ever met.’
Steve Young was also a good pianist and arranger, with Ian Robbins making a trio of strong contributors to the Colourbox sound. They were also interested in the new electro-funk sound that had succeeded disco as the prevailing club soundtrack in America’s clubs and street scenes, led by Mantronix and Afrika Bambaataa, which filtered into ‘Breakdown’, making the A-side of Colourbox’s debut single a brighter and more pulsing affair than its flipside ‘Tarantula’.
The single stood at odds with 4AD’s last release of the year, a compilation title released by Warners’ Greek office that was named Dark Paths, which undermined the fact that Ivo had begun to shed the gothic image. Only seven acts were selected: Bauhaus, Rema-Rema, Modern English, Mass, Colin Newman, Dance Chapter and the David J/René Halkett collaboration. In fact, over three years, 4AD had released more than fifty records by thirty acts; a pattern that Ivo recognised was unsustainable in the long run.
‘It took a few years for me to find my focus, and my confidence, and to get a feel for what the label might become,’ he recalls. ‘And to be absolutely happy to not have many releases. The less, the better, I thought! I was constantly counting our artists, and if we had more than six, I’d get nervous. But that hadn’t been possible in the first few years. We had no long-term contracts, no real careers. Besides Modern English, everyone was contracted record by record.’
The haphazard nature of 4AD’s development – the one-offs, the artful projects, the short shelf life of bands that promised much more, and both Bauhaus’ defection and Modern English’s slow progress – confirmed that Ivo really had no game plan to speak of. Things could either lead nowhere in particular or could build to something tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In any case, Ivo had imagined 4AD would only be an interlude in his life, though it wasn’t true, as an offhand comment of Ivo’s had claimed, that the four in 4AD stood for the number of years he anticipated it would last.
But
