Tag: orange juice

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Ford Escorts

Craig McAllister

Nothing will ever prepare me for the speed of the passing years quite like a memory linked to music. A quick brain-frying calculation tells me that March 1994 was over 28 years ago. Twenty! Eight! Years! That this happened almost three decades ago yet is still fresh and ripe in the memory is testament to the power of pals and music and the inter-linked way in which my brain (and possibly yours too) relates everything in life to some musical reference point or other.

Primal Scream were playing in Ayr, the end of the same week, as it happens, when Give Out But Don’t Give Up was released. Not quite the epoch-defining masterpiece of its predecessor Screamadelica, the gig was nonetheless sold out to the point of being over-sold. Long-starved of decent touring acts, half of the county, and roughly 95% of every Ayrshirite under 25 was in attendance, rammed in, shoulder to shoulder and desperate to hear what may well have been the country’s greatest ‘underground’ band at the time. We were ‘Scream veterans (naturally), having seen them at least three times previously around Screamadelica, although as much as anyone might like to claim otherwise, none of the five of us had been hip enough to have seen them play Vikki’s in Kilmarnock, a venue so compact it would make King Tuts feel like an arena in Kansas.

Ayr Pavilion though was a good venue; smaller than the Barrowland, more clubbier in feel, with a balcony ripe for Quadrophenia-style derring-dos and a nicely sprung dancefloor on which to zone out and get down to the Scream Team’s E-fuelled and vaporised MC5 jams. That huge acid-fried sun logo hung from the back of the stage and Screamadelica material still featured heavily in the set – I mean, why wouldn’t it? – with Denise Johnson taking just as much and possibly even more of the vocals than the stick-thin Bobby Gillespie who, at one point, pointed to my Keef ‘Stones Slay The States‘ t-shirt and gave me a fat, flat, tongue-out gesture of solidarity and acknowledgement.

Bobby shaking his perfect Jeff Beck crow’s nest mop and breaking into a mile-wide smile before making a real-live Stones logo just for me isn’t though the first thing that springs to mind whenever I think of Primal Scream in Ayr.

Nope.

It’s Orange Juice.

We all went, the five of us, in Derek’s Escort. As usual, I was squashed in the middle of the back seat between two of my larger pals, who moaned all the way to Ayr that there was no fuckin’ room for three of us in here, Derek. Stopping at the petrol station, Derek shook us loose for spare change – if that doesn’t date this story, nothing will – filled the car and off we went. One of our party had returned from the forecourt with a magazine liberated from a shelf that I certainly couldn’t have reached, your honour, even on tip toe, and this different sort of Escort was flung around between us, pages torn loose and stuck to the dashboard, the windows and Derek’s sunvisor without his asking. Har-de-har har! You can imagine. We were in our early twenties. It was the era of Loaded. And Loaded. We wanted to be free, we wanted to have a good time, we knew not what we were doing. Shameful harmless fun. Wince.

Derek was in charge of the tunes. He had a box of cassettes under the passenger seat and one was already in full flow by the time he picked me up. Some Velvet Underground. Some Jungle Brothers. Lloyd Cole and The Commotions. Urban Cookie Crew’s The Key, The Secret. Derek loved that. A carefully considered mix of classic and contemporary for discerning listeners such as us. As we pulled away from the petrol station, the snaking, Eastern-tinged 12 string riff of Orange Juice‘s Breakfast Time wandered on.

Orange Juice – Breakfast Time

Ripped up Rip It Up label

“Tune!” shouted Derek and cranked the volume that wee bit higher. The bassline boinged its way across the car’s plastic interior, rattling the windows, shaking close-ups of vulvas and nipples loose and free.

“Breakfast time!” sang Colin in his best Edwyn-voiced impression. “Brrrreakfast time! The hands that tell me, five to nine!” Hands tapped on cold, hard, door cills, dashboards, anything, in unison to its cod-reggaed offbeat. Heads subtly nodded. Feet no doubt tapped. I played hi hat with my fingers on my thighs and joined Colin in the chorus? bridge? I’m never sure. “…souls entwine! Souls entwine! Souls en-twiiinne!” D’you know that bit in Wayne’s World when they all start singing individual lines and then headbang to Bohemian Rhapsody? Yeah, well, it was nothing like that. We were far too cool for that sorta shit.

When the song finished, Derek rewound, overshot the mark, and landed instead on the last half minute of De La Soul’s Magic Number. Now every time I hear Breakfast Time, it’s inextricably linked to a snippet of De La Soul’s daisy-aged hip hop. Funny how it works, isn’t it? By the third time of rewinding though, Derek was able to land the starting point right on that opening guitar riff – “Check that ya dobbers!!” – and we’d all be off and grooving once more. Breakfast Time was the soundtrack to the entire journey from that petrol station in Dreghorn to Ayr…and back. Without exaggeration, we must’ve listened to it 17 times or more.

The achingly hip – the kinda people who saw, possibly even supported, Primal Scream at Vikki’s – point to Orange Juice’s Postcard output as being the high watermark of their undiluted quality. Sensible folk will highlight You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever and point out that, despite being on a major label, it’s the album the band always wanted to make. The smart folk though will direct you to Rip It Up, the second album and parent to The Hit Single of the same name. Falling somewhere between the brass and rhythms of The Jam’s Gift album and the ambitious mass-market appeal of dazzling guitars married to raggedy-arsed soul, it took Orange Juice from the margins to the mainstream.

It’s just as well they looked so goddamned wonderful on the cover. Malcolm Ross sits with a lovely, yellowing Strat, a shiny leather jacket and a defined jawline so sharp it might cut your finger if you hold the record sleeve in the wrong place. Sharp indeed. Edwyn is wearing not one but two perfectly-contrasting stripy t-shirts and cheap, Asda-priced Raybans. And he looks a million dollars for it. Young, self-assured, film-star handsome. Such smooth skin.

His hair – it was always his hair – is beautiful; a collapased quiff mixed with RAF bomber pilot side shed and sheen. ‘Can I have an Edwyn, please?‘ you might’ve asked George at Irvine Cross as you sat down and his scissors clickety-clickety-clicked in 100 mph readiness. And he’d have told you no, it was impossible, no-one gets to have hair as great as Edwyn Collins; not you, not that guy who’s up after you, not even even Nick Heyward, who was clearly keenly listening and looking. Maybe it was the fact that his name was another word for ‘steal’, but he now had his winning blueprint for Haircut 100 and Smash Hits and teenage girls’ walls and a ubiquitous chart success that would somehow elude the masters. Despite the lack of success, Orange Juice had both style and substance. Talking of substance, what about that Primal Scream gig? I’d forgotten all about that. Oh, as the featured song goes, how I wish I was young again.

Cover Versions, Get This!, Hard-to-find

Cultured

Craig McAllister

Two Sevens Clash by Culture is, to me, ubiquitous with the John Peel show. I’m probably distorting fact with reality through the wonky prism of time, but I’m sure he played it regularly throughout the mid ’80s. Entry-level reggae, if you like, for roots ‘n radicals explorers wanting to dig deeper than Bob Marley, Two Sevens Clash is everything that’s great about the genre; it’s cavernous, it features a head-nodding groove and it’s sweet ‘n soulful. You knew that already though.

Before they went by the one word moniker, Culture were known as The Cultures and cut Trod On. Released in 1977, Trod On foreshadows the constituent parts that made Two Sevens Clash such a great record at the end of the same year.

The Cultures – Trod On

It features a steady Eddie one-and-two-and-three-and-four rhythm, all concrete bass and chicka-chicka offbeat guitar, a toasting singer (Ranking Trevor) backed by some lovely falsetto vocals (that’ll be The Revolutionarys, you’d have to think) and a horn refrain that carries the whole track from beginning to end. With its ricocheting rim shots and vapour trailing vocal-ocal-ocals, the extended version above nicely skirts the outer limits of dub. It’s a great wee record.

As happenstance and kismet would have it, Trod On‘s earthy groove found its way east to 185 West Princes Street, Glasgow. Or to be more precise, it found its way east to the ears of Orange Juice, resident happening band at Postcard Records, the label that championed the sound of young Scotland and whose maverick supremo Alan Horne resided in the 2nd floor flat at that very address. 

Orange Juice had barely learned to walk when they stumbled upon (trod on?) Trod On. In need of a flip side to accompany the frantic knee tremble of their debut single Falling And Laughing, the band set about deconstructing The Cultures’ mid-paced groover and appropriated the horn refrain to their own ends.

Orange Juice – Moscow Olympics

Like all early Orange Juice tracks, when the band was still learning how to play together, and doing so in full view of the listener, Moscow Olympics fairly gallops along on a rickety bed of enthusiasm and wide-eyed self belief.

Amazingly/inspiringly, it sounds no different to the dozens of rehearsal room tapes that were recorded down the years in the bands I played in; ghetto blaster facing the wall and ‘record’ depressed in the hope it might magnetise some of the magic swirling in the air (sometimes it even did) but if you are able to focus between the the gaps in the scratchy ‘production’ and the faraway racket of drums (played somewhere near Sauchiehall Street while the other three apparently thrash it out over on Argyle Street), you’ll hear that Davy McClymont’s bass line on this recording is fantastic, a proper tune within a tune. The horn-aping guitar line is supremely confident too, never out of time or tune, and with nary a bum note to be heard.

The boys are on fine form, with drummer Daly and svengali Horne (Alan Wild, indeed) enthusiastically barking, yelping and football-chanting ‘Moscow!‘ at all appropriate points. It might only be the b-side of their first single, but despite the knees-out-the-new-school-trousers approach, the shambolic seeds of something special are being sown right before your very eyes and ears. It’s there in the interweaving guitar interplay and disco hi-hats; cheeky and Chic-y.

Being Orange Juice of course; arch, wry and post-punk rule breakers, they stuck two versions of the track on the b-side. Just for good measure. Because they could. And why not?

Orange Juice – Moscow

My dad’s old SLR camera, with its Moscow Olympics logo, used to fascinate me.

 

 

Cover Versions, Peel Sessions

This Is A William Shatner Number

Craig McAllister

David Gedge introduced The Wedding Present’s breakneck run-through of Orange Juice‘s Felicity with those words, delivered in a perfectly-sighing, world-weary Yorkshire brogue. I first heard TWP version on Tommy, the album released in the wake of George Best‘s success, a stop-gap of odds and sods and radio sessions – Felicity came from a Peel Show – that would keep the growing fanbase happy and dipping into their pockets until the second album proper was ready. For reference, think Hatful Of Hollow at a hundred miles an hour. “William Shatner?” I pondered. “What on earth does Star Trek have to do with The Wedding Present?”

Well, nothing, as was plainly obvious to everyone but me. Shatner’s Captain James T Kirk was the lead character in Star Trek. James Kirk also happened to be the name of the lead guitar player in the definitive line-up of Orange Juice. It was quite the epiphany when I joined the dots on that one. “Aaah,” I mused, safe in the glow of triangulation. It’s the simple things that matter.

It must’ve been great to have been in Orange Juice in 1981 and 1982. Just a hop and a step on from punk, these leaders of a brave new open-minded world channelled the sublime- Velvets/Buzzcocks/Chic with the ridiculous – Davy Crockett hats/Boy Scout shorts/open-toed sandals and white socks with no fear of ridicule. Bands these days, with their marketing strategies and social media channels and Spotify demographics might take all of this for granted, but believe me, Lewis Capaldi and Foals and Blossoms, it wasn’t always thus. Orange Juice had the reference points and the in-jokes and the fantastic haircuts. The world was theirs for the taking. By the time of You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, they’d outgrown Postcard Records but hadn’t yet fiddled around with the magic ingredients in their sound, so that first album rattled and rolled majestically. The cover of Al Greeen’s L.O.V.E.…Edwyn’s incredibly tender In A Nutshell…the Motown by way of Mount Florida Falling & Laughing…. it really was the sound of young Scotland.

Orange Juice – Felicity

Felicity made itself known towards the end of side 2. The key word for it is collapse. From the wobbly woah-woahs onwards, it’s never more than a beat away from potential disaster. The guitars, brilliantly-shimmering and sparkling are forever a half-trip and stumble from being an unlistenable out of tune mess. The timing is slightly off, the game backing vocals admirable, the frothy enthusiasm of the four players clear for all to see, but when they clatter their way into the galloping key change near the end, it’s the four to the floor disco beat that keeps it all together, striving to maintain the semblance of musicality that helps Felicity come to a still-standing stop.

Look closely and you’ll see Edwyn’s magnificent, blow-dried quiff teeter on the verge of limp collapse, wrung out and hung out to dry. Look closer still (around the 2:15) mark) and you might even spot David Gedge forming yer actual Wedding Present. And who could blame him?

And then listen again. Really listen! Listen to the slo-mo piano line at the start. Zoom in on that bouncing bass line. Pay attention to those well thought-out guitar lines. The tremelo! The triple-string riffing! The referee’s whistle that was so de-rigeur in early 80s New York dance records! Even in a light years-away Glasgow tenement, Orange Juice clearly had a collective finger on the pulse. Then there’s Edwyn’s joyous James Brown cop near the end. “Take me to the bridge now!” he shouts with dizzy abandon. It’s a proper jangling racket, Felicity. The sound of happiness, as Collins sings, but also the sound of fishermen’s stripy t-shirts and pleated waists and eyebrows forever-arched; feisty and fey, young punkish enthuisasm bottled forever. Sexy, as Gedge remarks at the end of his band’s version. Sexy.

The Wedding Present – Felicity

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Teenie Credit

Craig McAllister

Mabon Lewis “Teenie” Hodges is possibly not the first name you alight at when thinking about guitar heroes, yet he’s responsible for creating some of the most instantly recognisable riffs in soul music. In an era when all the focus, all the spotlight shone on the name; Isaac Hayes, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Al Green etc etc, Teenie Hodges played out the groove in the background with a fluid anonimity that should by rights have seen him carved up there on the Mount Rushmore of soul alongside the singers he helped elevate to greatness.

Teenie began playing at the age of 12, when he and his two brothers played in their father’s band. From there, he came to the attention of legendary producer/arranger Willie Mitchell and Teenie and his brothers left life on the road to form the famed Hi Rhythm house band at Hi Records. The band would play on all the label’s releases, creating a sound and an identity that was instantly recognisable. It’s mainly his work with Al Green that he’s known for. Amongst others, Teenie co-wrote Here I Am (Come And Take Me) and Take Me To The River with the Reverend, his soulful, steady rhythm guitar underpinning two head-nodding accepted classics.

Al Green – Here I Am (Come And Take Me)

It’s the subtle flourishes and signature riffs that differentiate Hodges from other players of the era. Perhaps it was Al Green’s lack of ego that allowed his guitarist to express himself, or perhaps Green knew raw talent when he heard it, but either way, Green left plenty of space in his music for Hodges to step to the fore. Listen to any number of Green classics  – Let’s Stay Together or I’m Hooked On You or How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? for example -and you’ll spot Hodges gently arpeggiating triplets cascading in the background. His playing on the Bee Ges’ cover is particularly lovely.

Al Green  – How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?

Now and again, Hodges would write an all-out classic riff. Let’s Stay Together and L.O.V.E. (Love) benefit from intro riffs that define the very essence of soul music. What’s soul music? someone might ask. Point them in the direction of these tracks and it’ll all become clear.

Al Green – L.O.V.E. (Love)

Hodge was Green’s musical director by the time of the Al Green Is Love LP and his horn arrangements, understated keys and gentle riffs define the album. L.O.V.E. is a cracker. Green rightly takes centre stage, offset by a gently cooing trio of backing singers. The music allows the vocals to be the focal point but if you can look past Green’s heartfelt vocal delivery and focus your attention on the guitar playing you’ll be in awe of an incredible piece of music. I’ve tied many a finger in knots trying to get the notes and chords down pat. That’s the easy part. Hodges’ feel for the music is just terrific. I doubt it’s something I’ll ever quite get to.

One determined west of Scotland guitar player who had a good stab at it was Edwyn Collins. On Orange Juice’s You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever LP, the band close side 1 with a sincere though slightly ragged run through of it; Hi horn parts, falsetto vocals and a terrific facsimile of Hodge’s original riff. In a post-punk wasteland where angry young men shouted angry thoughts with angry guitars, it was a brave move by Orange Juice. Forever with one eyebrow arched and never far from taking the opportunity to poke fun at machismo, it’s just perfect, even if the record-buying public thought not. Orange Juice’s brave attempt at L.O.V.E. staggered to the giddy position of number 65. There’s no accounting for taste.

Orange Juice – L.O.V.E. (Love)

Fact

Teenie Hodges made the lion’s share of his money throught his co-writing credit for Take Me To The River. It wasn’t the royalties that came via record sales of Green’s original, nor the countless covers (Talking Heads and Annie Lennox amongst them) that balooned his bank balance. That honour goes to Billy Big Bass, the singing fish that plays the track at the press of a button. The ubiquitous toy ornament that was all the rage 15 or so years ago made more money for Hodges than all his other writing credits added together and certainly helped his 3 wives and 8 children to enjoy the lifestyle they were accustomed to before Hodges death in 2014.

Another fact

Teenie’s nephew is hip hop star Drake.

Hard-to-find

All The Way Fey Bearsden

Craig McAllister

fey

Pronunciation: /feÉŞ/

adjective (feyer, feyest)

  • 3 archaic, chiefly Scottish fated to die or at the point of death.

Orange Juice were the feyest of the fey. Their Velvets-by-Chic approach to music was terrifically exciting; a ramshackle beauty forever teetering on the fringes of falling apart. They remind me of teaching my kids how to ride their bikes. One minute you’re bent double and holding on to a wobbly stabiliser-free frame to stop them bothering the tarmac, the next you’re running behind them silently willing them to not turn round in amazement at what they’ve already managed, but to focus on the road ahead and zig-zag safely to a stop.

orange juice bw

Pick any song at random from the early Orange Juice catalogue and you’ll find the sonic equivalent. At any given moment, things might unravel and the whole thing could come stuttering to an ungracious ending. On some of those records, you can practically see the 4 band members give one another excited nods of encouragement as they play their way out of the first chorus and back to the verse. (If you’ve ever had the good fortune to play in a ‘promising local band‘ (copyright Irvine Times, July 1989), you’ll know exactly what I mean). Not for OJ the mask of distortion that many a youthful band will use to cover up all manner of mistakes. Their almost-to-the-point-of-being-in-tune cheesewire-thin guitars rattling off fancy-pants major 7ths and suspended 4ths were played to sound just as Leo Fender and Friedrich Gretsch intended – clean and ringing and with a nice touch of reverb. For Orange Juice, it was always about the angle of the jangle. But you knew that already.

One of the very finest in a fine, fine back catalogue is (To Put It) In A Nutshell. You’ll find it closing out the end of their debut LP, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever. A perfect set-closer from an imperfect album, In A Nutshell was Edwyn Collins’ first (first!) attempt at a ballad. Another that sounds like it’s about to come undone at the seams, it was originally conceived as a duet with Nico. Shame it never quite came to fruition. Her rounded, one dimensional Germanic  chamber folk vocals would’ve sounded terrific. “I looked deep within my pockets“, “You’re a heartless mercenary“, “Can I pay you in kind?” etc etc. I bet you’re singing them in faux German right now. Even the sh-sh-sh-shoo-doo bits.

orange juice

I empathise with Edwyn – that ‘promising local band‘ once wrote a letter to Michael Stipe asking if he’d like to contribute backing vocals to one of our non-smash non-singles. What the fuck were we thinking? You won’t be surprised to learn he never wrote back, but ever since the demise of REM, I’ve often wondered if he’d still be up for it, 24 years later.

Anyway, back to Orange Juice.

Here’s the earlier Postcard Records version of In A Nutshell:

And here’s a rare instrumental version. Put on a German accent and go all Nico for a few minutes. So audacious, jah?:

orange juice badge

Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Sampled

It’s Chic Co. Time

Craig McAllister

Jeez! Plain Or Pan used to be all about Beta Band outtakes and multiple versions of La’s demos, the odd foosty soul survivor and long-forgotten obscurios by long-forgotten oddballs. It still is, of course, but just not today.

I have a long-time love of disco. To these ears, it doesn’t matter that it’s considered kinda naff and uncool, which, when placed next to any amount of other musical bits n’ pieces, it may well be. In the mid-late 70s, when straddled by the ugly, oiky twin-headed monster of glam and punk, it was certainly the musical choice for the straight-laced amongst society. Folk who bought one single a year bought Saturday Night Fever. Folk who bought one single a week owned the entire back catalogues of The Sweet and Sham 69. What I like about disco is the musicality of it all. If the Floyd (man) and Can (man) are head music, disco is most definitely music designed for below the waist. Rock music is, they say, ‘proper’ music. But so is disco! Made on proper instruments and played as well as or even better than the patchouli-smelling long hairs in afghan coats from bygone eras, disco is all about a slick riff, a fluid bassline and a four-to-the-floor, hi-hat enhanced beat that never lets the lyrics get in the way of a good groove.

The difference between rock and disco is that rock music has the virtuosos, the soloists and the guitar heroes. Who’s Pink Floyd’s guitarist? Easy, eh? But if I asked you to tell me who played the slick riffs on Night Fever or Rock Your Baby, chances are you’d be struggling. You could probably have a good stab at naming half the members of Can. But asked to tell me who played the fluid basslines on Car Wash or Young Hearts Run Free and chances are you’d be asking the audience or phoning a friend who answers to the name of Mr Google. Disco, for one reason or other has been ridiculed and put in its place as someway unimportant. Of course there are exceptions to the rule.

Nile Rodgers was developing serious Class A substance abuse at the age most of us are just getting to grips with the technicalities of Eagle-Eyed Action Man. Passed back and forth at a young age from East Coast to West Coast on a succession of Greyhound buses between his drug-addicted prostitute mother and far-off, far-out aunts and uncles on the other side of America, it’s a wonder he thrived at all. But thrive he did. Playing in a variety of  covers acts, reputation enhanced by his ability to read music, fate lead him to Bernard Edwards and eventually Chic were born. It was watching an early Roxy Music show that gave Nile his band’s manifesto: The clothes were as important as the music. The women on the record sleeves would give the band glamourous identity. Chic would be a company. An organization. Singers would come and go, but the core of Rodgers and Edwards would remain the constant. They’d write songs for other artists. They’d discover knew ones. Like an East Coast Family Stone, in sharp suits rather than hippy garb, but fuelled by the same high grade white powders, Chic and their music would rule the world. You know the songs. You know the stories. You can read all about it in Nile’s excellent ‘Le Freak‘ autobiography.

It’s worth noting that the Nile Rodgers’ guitar sound has been appropriated by the musos that form white rock’s guitar untouchables. Edwyn Collins’ blatant homage to the sound can be heard all the way from the opening bars to the fade out of Orange Juice’s Rip It Up (perhaps even more so on the strangulated none-more-80s 12″ mix). Johnny Marr was so enraptured by Nile that he based his guitar line on the second verse of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side on those wee choppy rinky-dink Chicisms. Johnny turned up earlier on in the year playing Le Freak on stage with Nile. And just in case you missed the point, he even named his son Nile. Dance records over the past decade or so, proper dance records, made by machines and everything, often stray close to the Chic sound. Modjo’s Lady for one. Spiller’s Groovejet another. And Stardust’s The Music Sounds Better With You. Chicesque, the three of ’em. Even Da Funk by Daft Punk is built around that clipped guitar sound. Ubiquitous. Is that not what they say?

Here are some of the Chic Organization’s wonderful world-ruling results. Every one features Bernard’s ripe-for-sampling, slap-happy, fluid-as-mercury bassline and Nile’s trademark 3 string rinky-dink guitar, chattering away incessantly in the background like a couple of old ladies clacking their false teeth at one another down the Mecca on a Saturday night. It might just be my favourite sound in music.

Chic – Good Times

Norma Jean – Sorcerer (12″ mix)

Diana Ross – Upside Down (original Chic mix)

Sister Sledge – Thinking Of You (Dimitri From Paris mix – officially sanctioned by Chic, it’s a cracker)

Carly Simon – Why (12″ mix)

And the influence of Good Times et al lives on, seemingly forever…

Hard-to-find

Play That Funky Music White Boy

Craig McAllister

We’ll get the confessions, the truth and the cold hard facts out of the way first. I’m too young to appreciate the beauty that was Postcard Records. Way too young. I’m not exactly sure when I first chanced upon the label, but it was certainly long after the last of those few, fey and feisty 7″s had made their way out of Alan Horne’s bedroom and into the world. While it was all going on I was too caught up in the chart music du jour – Madness, Adam & the Ants, Swords Of A Thousand Men, Spurs Are On Their Way To Wembley. Proper stuff like that. Had I actually heard Blue Boy or Just Like Gold I doubt I’d have liked them. And if you’re being honest with yourself as you read this, when you were 11 you wouldnae have liked them either.

Meet The Beatles? Velvet Underground? Byrds?

It was probably an article in the short lived Scottish music publication CUT that first brought Postcard Records to my attention. Being a heady 13 years old, by now I knew my Robert Lloyds from my Lloyd Coles and had an appetite for discovering new things. I knew of Orange Juice of course. Rip It Up had been all over the airwaves, the words ‘One Hit Wonder’ running through it’s jangly core like a stick of sugary sweet confectionary. And I must’ve been aware of Aztec Camera by this point too. Over the years I’ve come to realise that year zero for many of these bands I grew to love began at Postcard. Edwyn and Orange Juice. Roddy and Aztec Camera. The Go Betweens. All began their shiny black plastic lives on the Postcard label. Josef K too, but, eh, we’ll scratch that last lot out. I never gave them a chance/listen until Franz Ferdinand waxed lyrical about them a few years ago. Like I said earlier, we’ll get the confessions, the truth and the cold hard facts outta the way first. I like them now though.

Anyway. The reason for this article is three-fold.

  1. I’ve been meaning to do a bit about Postcard for a while now.
  2. It’s just over 30 years since the first Postcard 7″,  Orange Juice’s Falling And Laughing, was released – there’s a good wee write up about Orange Juice and the pre-OJ Nu-Sonics here.
  3. Over at the Vinyl Villain, on 6th April they’re celebrating Paul Haig day. Paul Haig was lead singer with Josef K (below). But you knew that already.

So with regards to the above, I’ve compiled The Best Postcard Records Album In The World…Ever. Every a-side and b-side ever released on the label, from Orange Juice’s rare as funk debut (even Edwyn Collins doesn’t have a copy) to Aztec Camera’s non-album Mattress Of Wire. And everything in between, from Antipodean brothers in arms the Go Betweens to Edinburgh’s answer to the Glasgow Glamsters, Josef K.  Every track wrapped in eczema-like scratchy guitars, elastic band basslines and vocals just on the wrong side of tuneful. Well. Almost every track. Roddy Frame uses, gasp! – acoustic guitars! He sings in tune! He’s a precocious 16 year old genius. The fucker! It’s the Sound Of Young Scotland y’know!

  

Here’s what you get:

 Orange Juice
Falling And Laughing　/　Moscow / Moscow Olympics　
 Orange Juice
 Blue Boy　/　Love Sick　
 Josef K
 Radio Drill Time　/　Crazy To Exist　
 Go Betweens
 I Need Two Heads　/　Stop Before You Say It　
 Josef K
 It’s Kinda Funny　/　Final Request　
 Orange Juice
 Simply Thrilled Honey　/　Breakfast Time　
 Orange Juice
 Poor Old Soul　/　Poor Old Soul (pt2)　
 Aztec Camera
 Just Like Gold　/　We Could Send Letters　
 Josef K
 Sorry For Laughing　/　Revelation　
 Josef K
 Chance Meeting　/　Pictures　
 Orange Juice
 Wan Light　(unreleased)/　You Old Eccentric　(not on compilation)
Aztec Camera
Mattress Of Wire　/　Lost Outside The Tunnel

 Why the small writing? Pain in the arse, man.

Download includes exclusive Plain Or Pan artwork.

 

Â