The 4AD 1982 playlist on Spotify.

In a shocker, not everything from 1982 is available on Spotify. The Birtday Party/Lydia Lunch split isn’t, but I’ve substituted some other live Birthday Party tracks. The Lunch track isn’t available at all.

And the We Means We Starts single (with a different version of Not To) by Colin Newman is also AWOL.

Tsk, tsk!

If anybody from 4AD is reading this: If you have the rights to these tracks, could you fix it? I mean, you have the rights to the other Birthday Party songs, and it’s the only recording of them doing Loose, I think?

Colin Newman I’m not sure about.

Anyway anyway! 1982! 4AD! What can I say? Let’s see…

1982 is very much a continuation of what 4AD was doing in 1981: We get more Wire spin-offs (Colin Newman); The Birthday Party’s final album, some spin-offs (Rowland Howard), and a live album; a Bauhaus spin-off (Tones on Tail); general oddity in The Happy Family (later to morph into Momus); and…

WE GET THE FIRST COCTEAU FUCKING TWINS ALBUM!!1!

Without Cocteau Twins and the cachet they brought, I think it’s doubtful that I would be writing this blog post about 4AD now, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Cocteau Twins were one of the tent poles of British independent music in the 80s, and inspired a gazillion bands. It’s the sound that inspired a whole new genre of music, and it sorta started here.

Only sorta, because Garlands, their first album, is an outlier. It has a much harder, colder sound than what would follow, but it had a certain something, and that certain something was Elizabeth Fraser; a vocalist you can’t help being stunned by upon hearing for the first time.

Ironically, 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell signed them based on a demo tape that didn’t feature her vocals, so he must have been pretty awe-struck when he finally visited them in the studio and heard what they’d made. I mean, just imagine: You signed up some pretty good post-punk geezers, and then you realise that you’re about to release an album that’s heart-palpitatingly good. Everything is going to change forever!

Which reminds me… Quite a few bands release one good album and then they futz around for a while, and then they disappear. That’s not the story with the major bands on 4AD, for the most part: Seldom are their first albums their best. It’s true for Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, The Wolfgang Press, Modern English, Lush, Pixies perhaps (well, debatable).

You can either say that this means that Ivo has a tendency to push bands into the studio before they’re ready. Or you can say that Ivo had a marvellous nose for talent. He could sniff out talent and let them work at it until masterpieces rolled out a couple of years later.

Or perhaps a mix of the two.

1982

	CAD201 Colin Newman — Not To Lorries, Don’t Bring Me Reminders, You Me And Happy, We Meet Under Tables, Safe, Truculent Yet, 5/10, 1, 2, 3, Beep Beep, Not To, Indians!, Remove For Improvement, Blue Jay Way
	JAD202 The Birthday Party / Lydia Lunch — Drunk On The Pope’s Blood / The Agony Is The Ecstacy Pleasure Heads, King Ink, Zoo-Music Girl, Loose, The Agony Is The Ecstacy Not included in the playlist.
	BAD203 Daniel Ash & Glenn Campling — Tones On Tail A Bigger Splash, Copper 45/33 rpm, Means Of Escape, Instrumental
	AD204 The Happy Family — Puritans Puritans, Innermost Thoughts, The Mistake
	BAD205 In Camera — Fin The Fatal Day, Coordinates, Apocalypse
	CAD206 Modern English — After The Snow Someone’s Calling, Life In The Gladhouse, Face Of Wood, Dawn Chorus, I Melt With You, After The Snow, Carry Me Down, Tables Turning
	CAD207 The Birthday Party — Junkyard She’s Hit, Dead Joe, The Dim Locator, Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow), Several Sins, Big-Jesus-Trash-Can, Kiss Me Black, 6″ Gold Blade, Kewpie Doll, Junk Yard
	BAD208 Modern English — Life In The Gladhouse Life In The Gladhouse, The Choicest View
	AD209 Colin Newman — We Means We Starts We Means We Starts, Not To Not included in the playlist.
	BAD210 Rowland S. Howard / Lydia Lunch — Some Velvet Morning Some Velvet Morning, I Fell In Love With A Ghost
	CAD211 Cocteau Twins — Garlands Blood Bitch, Wax And Wane, But I’m Not, Blind Dumb Deaf, Shallow Then Hallo, The Hollow Men, Garlands, Grail Overfloweth
	AD212 Modern English — I Melt With You I Melt With You, The Prize
	BAD213 Cocteau Twins — Lullabies Feathers Oar-Blades, Alas Dies Laughing, It’s All But An Ark Lark
	CAD214 The Happy Family — The Man On Your Street The Salesman, Letter From Hall, The Luckiest Citizen, Revenge!, The Courier, The Man On Your Street, A Night Underground, Two Of A Kind, March In Turin
	AD215 Colourbox — Breakdown Breakdown, Tarantula

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

Here’s the link: 4AD 1981 on Spotify.

Working with the 4AD data set brings back memories…

In the early days of the WWW, before Mozilla came on the scene, I had written a 4AD database (called “eyesore”, written in C++) where you could mark what releases you owned, and it would spit out a list of what you needed to buy to get all the songs. The main browser those days was NCSA Mosaic, although I tested a lot with lynx as well.

The main user interface problem was in how you entered the releases you owned. I had a form per release, and there was a pulldown menu where you could say that you owned the 12″ version, for instance. And then a submit button to store the data.

But the problem was then you were then faced with a new page, and had to use the back button or re-navigate to where you were. That’s a pain in the ass.

So I asked on the www newsgroup at the university, “is there a way to just send the data to the server without reloading the web page itself?”, and after explaining what I wanted a few times because this all seemed to outlandish to even consider, a professor chimed in and explained to me something like “no, that would totally break the entire concept of the WWW, because then a URI would no longer be a resource to identify a resource”.

That’s what taught me to never take anything a professor says seriously.

(I wonder, though, whether what I wanted was possible at that time… This was slightly before Mozilla came on the scene with Javascript and other goodies. Like BLINK.)

Anyway.

1981 continues in the vein of the previous year: Still pretty much in the post-punk vein, and with a bunch of singles from bands that 4AD didn’t have an extensive relationship with (Sort Sol, Past Seven Days, My Captains)…

The involvement with members of Wire bears fruit with Colin Newman’s very striking solo album, but the group that really points the way to future greatness is really Dif Juz, with two EPs that represent something quite new and different.

But perhaps the most important development this year are the covers of the Modern English releases: They are the first ones designed by Vaughan Oliver/23 Envelope. For better or worse (I think better, definitely), his visual identity would come to make 4AD a thing in people’s minds over the coming years. It’s a very modest start, though: Those covers don’t really stand out much here.

1981

	AD101 Sort Sol — Marble Station Marble Station, Misguided
	AD102 The Past 7 Days — Raindance Raindance, So Many Others
	AD103 My Captains — Four Track EP Fall, Converse, History, Nothing
	CAD104 The Birthday Party — Prayers On Fire Zoo-Music Girl, Cry, Capers, Nick The Stripper, Ho-Ho, Figure Of Fun, King Ink, A Dead Song, Yard, Dull Day, Just You And Me
	CAD105 Modern English — Mesh & Lace Sixteen Days, Just a Thought, Move in Light, Grief, The Token Man, A Viable Commercial, Black Houses, Dance of Devotion (A Love Song)
	AD106 B. C. Gilbert / G. Lewis — Ends With The Sea Ends With The Sea, Hung Up To Dry Whilst Building An Arch
	CAD107 Mass — Labour Of Love Mass, Why, Ill, Why, Isn’t Life Nice, Elephant Talk, F.A.H.T.C.F., Cross Purposes, Innocence
	CAD108 Colin Newman — Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish Fish One, Fish Two, Fish Three, Fish Four, Fish Five, Fish Six, Fish Seven, Fish Eight, Fish Nine, Fish Ten, Fish Eleven, Fish Twelve, Reprise
	BAD109 Dif Juz — Huremics Hu, Re, Mi, Cs
	AD110 Modern English — Smiles And Laughter Smiles And Laughter, Mesh & Lace
	AD111 The Birthday Party — Release The Bats Release The Bats, Blast Off
	AD112 Rene Halkett / David Jay — Nothing Nothing, Armour
	CAD113 Matt Johnson — Burning Blue Soul Red Cinders In The Sand, Song Without An Ending, Time (Again) For The Golden Sunset, Iceing Up, (Like A) Sun Rising Through My Garden, Out Of Control, Bugle Boy, Delirious, The River Flows East In Spring, Another Boy Drowning
	AD114 The Birthday Party — Mr. Clarinet Mr. Clarinet, Happy Birthday
	BAD115 Dance Chapter — Chapter II Backwards Across Thresholds, Demolished Sanctuary, Attitudes, She
	BAD116 Dif Juz — Vibrating Air Gunet, Heset, Diselt, Soarn
	CAD117 Various — Natures Mortes – Still Lives Mr. Clarinet, Let’s Have A Party, Feedback Song, Die Laughing, Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores, You And I, Like This For Ages, Gathering Dust, Marble Station, Controversial Subject, Raindance, Re

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.