"The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty," says Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie in Facing the Other Way: The 4AD Story, Martin Aston’s sprawling and excellent new book about the legendary British record label. Of the effects pedals he began building in the early ’80s, Guthrie adds, "I was trying to make my guitar sound like I could play it."
If punk was about doing it yourself—getting the most mileage (and volume) out of your basic abilities—Cocteau Twins were a quintessential punk band, and by extension, 4AD was a quintessential punk label. Neither is viewed as such, and that’s understandable. Guthrie’s music with his former wife and Cocteau Twins partner, singer Elizabeth Fraser, is the epitome of ethereality, and the punkest 4AD ever got was with its early signees, Bauhaus and the Birthday Party. But as Aston—a veteran British music journalist who’s penned books about Björk and Pulp—makes clear, the fundamental virtue is the same: following a vision wherever it may lead.
Formed in 1979 by two English record-store employees, Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent, 4AD spun the success of its early, dark post-punk roster into a much broader palette in the ’80s—one that encompassed the pan-ethnic swoon of Dead Can Dance; the Yankee quirk of Throwing Muses and the Pixies; and even the reverence of This Mortal Coil, Watts-Russell’s collaborative studio project. It was the last group that gave the label its first British hit, a cover of Tim Buckley’s spectral "Song of the Siren", performed under the TMC banner by Guthrie and Fraser. Modern English’s "I Melt With You" followed, as did M/A/R/R/S’s "Pump Up the Volume"—multimillion-selling singles that defined the poles of 4AD’s appeal, from sumptuous post-punk pop to groundbreaking house. With the Pixies’ elevation to alt-rock sainthood in the early 90s, 4AD remained committed to championing smaller, stranger bands, although—Pixies aside—a certain earnestness remained the label’s through line, up to and including current 4AD acts like the National and Iron & Wine.
Facing the Other Way tells the 4AD story with depth and scope, but the book is just as much a biography of Watts-Russell. Reticent and intuitive, he led 4AD into the realm of labels such as Factory—4AD’s closest contemporary in sound and vision, at least in the early ’80s—that turned a record company into something akin to a subculture. It wasn’t all Watts-Russell; graphic designer Vaughan Oliver was just as responsible for the label’s mystique via his visionary, hypnotically Dada-esque cover art. It was branding, sure, but in a way that was neither cynically postmodern or glibly pop-art. Like most of 4AD’s music, it didn’t shout. It lay there, half-hidden, beckoning.
Ultimately 4AD succumbed to the same compromises and corporate consolidation that befell many of its peers. But as Facing the Other Way illustrates, its legacy continues to inspire. It’s hard to imagine a challenging, oblique band like Deerhunter having a more apt home than 4AD, and it’s equally hard to imagine young, well-curated indie labels like Sacred Bones existing as such without 4AD’s influence. Aston paints a panoramic context in this regard, dwelling on the label’s many tangents (post-punk, goth, world music, shoegaze, alternative rock, indie pop, folk) while keeping an eye on how that teeming patchwork—much like the harmonics of a heavily-modulated Cocteau Twins chord—coalesce into a shimmering whole.
Facing the Other Way is not without flaws: Occasionally it gets bogged down in contracts-and-licensing minutia, and the segues from past-tense narrative to present-tense interviewing are sometimes arbitrary and jarring. Overwhelmingly, though, the book is an exquisite reflection of 4AD itself—extravagant, atmospheric, and rich in texture and timbre. In one of many chapters on Cocteau Twins, Guthrie humbly sums up his towering, vastly influential aesthetic as "beautiful noise"—the same phrase used by director Eric Green as the title of his upcoming shoegaze documentary, which features Cocteau Twins prominently. But beautiful noise is more than just a sound. While it’s true that 4AD has been responsible for some of the most charismatic cacophony in recorded history, it’s the tension between celestial aspirations and fleshly fragility that’s the true dynamic behind the band, the label, and a sizeable chunk of the best music made—noisy or not—over the past 30 years. As Aston elegantly conveys in Facing the Other Way, beautiful noise can be an ideal for living as much as listening.