Orange Juice - Pop postcards from Scotland

In the March 2008 issue of the British music monthly Mojo, you can find an article titled “Indie Top 50”, one of the many lists that British magazines compile with a slightly obsessive mania, and which were brilliantly mocked by Nick Hornby in his novel “High Fidelity”. It's interesting to note, however, that on the podium of the most important British indie bands, in second place right after the Smiths, and just ahead of the Jesus And Mary Chain (names that, together with My Bloody Valentine right behind them, amount to a sacred trinity for the average indie-rocker), sits a decidedly less famous record, namely You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever by Orange Juice. The cover, with a pair of dolphins leaping out of the water into a brilliant blue sky, conveys a naive exuberance that clashes head-on with the retro melodrama of “This Charming Man” and with those sullen-faced Reid brothers: it's therefore worth taking a closer look.

In truth, anyone who listened to music in the Nineties remembers this band's leader very well: he's Edwyn Collins, the man who was all over MTV with a charmingly kitsch and anachronistic track like “A Girl Like You”, around 1994. Let's skip past the melancholy of those cameo appearances in the ineffable circus of globalized music television (by now, in any case, scaled back and almost forgetful of its own dominance through the 1980-2000 period) and pick the story back up from the beginning: we're in Glasgow, Scotland, and it's 1979.

That's quite a leap back in time, certainly, but what will guide us and keep us anchored to the present is a 2005 record, the compilation The Glasgow School, born out of that renewed interest in Orange Juice also reflected in the Mojo article, and a valuable testament to the band's brilliant early days.

The band was born from the union of Edwyn Collins (vocals and guitar), already a member of the punk group Nu Sonics, with James Kirk (guitar), Steven Daly (drums) and David Mc Clymont (bass), and made its first public appearance at the Victoria Cafè at the Glasgow School of Art on 20 April 1979. Frontman Collins had just come of age, but was already a minor local star, a “pop icon”, with a fringe-over-the-eyes look that would set a trend, and a warm, over-the-top vocal style. They were spotted by Alan Horne, who first took it upon himself to become their manager, then, in keeping with the punk ethic of “do it yourself”, also in 1979 founded an independent record label, Postcard Records, to put out their earliest work. The first vinyl record it released would be none other than Orange Juice's debut, “Falling And Laughing”, in April 1980.

Postcard's motto, “The sound of young Scotland” - a playful riff on Motown's own slogan - would, over time, become reality, given that the label would go on to release the debuts of Joseph K (also in 1980) and Aztec Camera, as well as the Australian Go-Betweens. With Horne, the band, following the success of their first single, released three more well-received singles with both the public and critics, before going on to record an LP in May 1981. Due to Horne's financial collapse, however, the album was never released, and Orange Juice signed with major label Polydor to re-record most of that material under the title You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever. The compilation The Glasgow School brings back to the public all the material recorded for Postcard, that is, the early singles and the songs recorded for the aborted LP debut, thus offering an overview of Orange Juice's entire “indie” period, the one for which they are still remembered today.

To understand what kind of music we're talking about, some clarification is needed. Today, the term indie-rock identifies something quite specific: an independent attitude, distorted guitars, minimalism, a love of Pavement, and so on. Back then, it was about emerging from the scorched earth left behind by punk, and, in a climate of general distrust toward classic, familiar musical forms, there were really only two options left: either take the path of genuine experimentation (the one taken by those post-punk bands whose ideas would flow into various forms of electronic music), or look backward, in defiance of futurist claims about erasing the musical past, taking what one liked best and recombining it into a new synthesis.

Orange Juice's ingredients would be Talking Heads (with their jittery take on funky and disco rhythms), the Velvet Underground, the jingle jangle style of Sixties psychedelia (the Byrds), soul, the Beatles, and even the traditional songwriting school known as Tin Pan Alley. It's a tactic not far removed from the one that would later make the Smiths famous in England and R.E.M. in the US: reviving Sixties pop-rock through the modern, catchy forms of new wave.

Don't think, however, that we're describing these bands as backward-looking - quite the opposite: the spirit of Eighties British indie was fiercely oppositional, positioned as a form of resistance against the climate of social dismantling put in place by Thatcher and the Conservatives, through forms of grassroots organizing and activism that led fans of John Peel's broadcasts and old rock vinyl to found new labels everywhere, giving a voice to young people who didn't see themselves reflected in the “establishment” pop of Spandau Ballet and company.

But there's something else at play too: after years of murky post-punk and after the death of Ian Curtis, the public was perhaps craving something more vital and naive. Hence the birth of a guitar-driven pop that doesn't forget the lesson of Joy Division, but combines it with the musicality of Television (who had reinvented rock guitar just a few years earlier) and tempers it into a more romantic, sensitive synthesis, suited to those nice vinyl-obsessed kids crowding into improvised, small, unlikely venues.

Orange Juice is a synthesis of all this - “This is the sound of happiness”, as their Felicity would put it, a celebration of being young, of a golden moment still remembered twenty-five years on.

The first single, “Falling And Laughing”, features a pulsing bass and a clattering guitar giving life to an ecstatic, sun-drenched take on Talking Heads, alongside Collins' charming crooning, in a thoughtful spell that breaks loose in the end into an energetic rock coda. “Blue Boy” is probably the band's most straightforwardly rock track, with an exuberant chorus and a reckless guitar solo. The B-side “Lovesick” matches that energy, evoking almost a folk-rock version of the Clash. The third single, “Simply Thrilled Honey”, is more overtly jingle jangle and builds a growing tension, one destined to break free only in the riffs of an ecstatic closing coda, worthy of the sunniest New Order. The fourth single, “Poor Soul”, driven by energetic drum rolls, closes out a run of increasingly successful tracks that saw the band become a cult phenomenon and allowed Horne to invest more and more in them, after they'd initially been forced to share studio time with rivals Joseph K.

By the time they came to put together their first album, Orange Juice seem to have gained enough confidence to play with the dynamics of their songs without always flooring the accelerator: hence a “Three Cheers For Our Side” that sounds like a lighter-hearted Velvet Underground nursery rhyme, somewhere between their third LP and “Loaded”, including even the “lost” album (large chunks of which had surfaced on the '74 live record). “In A Nutshell” is composed almost as a possible duet with Nico, and is a delicate ballad tinged with soul, like certain outings by a younger, more lovestruck Lou Reed, culminating in yet another ecstatic coda, this time punctuated by faint organ drones. “Satellite City”, on the other hand, brings back rhythm and grit with its funky-soul groove, recalling the frontman's pre-punk listening habits. Here too the pattern of the first single repeats itself, with the singer repeating the song's key line (“you smashed your heart against the rocks”) over a clattering coda.

These are tracks as playful (people would call it “twee pop”) as they are tinged with a delicate emotionality - a case in point is “Consolation Prize”, where Collins obsessively repeats “I’ll never be man enough for you”, earning himself the role of role model for the countless sensitive boys of future indie-rock, in a soundscape where the organ brushes up against the shores of “Blonde On Blonde“. It's the feeling of light that matters here, in a series of fables that seem to correspond to just as many sunny summer days, spent as carefree teenagers under a perfectly clear sky. “Wan Light” (slang for “one light”), written by Kirk, sums up these feelings in a ballad of romantic enchantments destined to burst into life, swept along by a frantic guitar, like one of those breathless teenage sprints run not so much to reach a finish line, but for the sheer joy of feeling alive.

If "Dying Day" is perhaps the clearest evidence of the band's passion for Dylan's 1966 folk-rock (always filtered through Reed's nursery-rhyme sensibility, just listen to the carefree "pa-pa-pa" of the ending), "Tender Object" features a sparkling little rhythm guitar paired with the lyrical counterpoint of a second, Television-style electric guitar, conjuring a new sentimental spell, like a first high-school crush.

Years later, the impetuous sweetness of these songs still seems untouched by time, and stands as an example of the magic that the best pop music can produce: bringing back to life, through music, the lost innocence of childhood and early adolescence. The album, which was meant to be accompanied by the single "Wan Light", would not actually see the light of day until 1992 (under the title The Ostrich Churchyard), when Postcard was revived from the collapse that had brought Collins and co. to a halt in 1981.

All these songs, however, were reused for the first album with Polydor, making up You Can't Hide Your Love Forever in 1982. In the move to a major, the band's music wasn't betrayed (such concerns might raise a smile nowadays, but an indie band signing with a big distributor was a delicate matter back then - just think of the Smiths), even though every track seems to have had its sound polished with a cold veneer of glossy pop. A perfect example is the old "Falling And Laughing", which ends up sporting the rubbery, plasticky rhythm-section sounds typical of Eighties pop, losing some of its nervous energy and rock drive but keeping the ecstatic sunniness that had been the band's true trademark from the start. In this version, the David Byrne-style stammering in the coda is only hinted at by Collins - in short, post-punk is fast becoming a faint memory.

Among the additions, the most significant is "Felicity", the record's true anthem, driven by a folk-rock rhythm that even brings in a piano, recalling the lighter side of Springsteen, with Collins's ecstatic vocal answered by choruses on the refrain, recreating a "Blonde On Blonde" effect (an album Horne apparently worshipped). The record thus brings out the band's pop soul without distorting it too much into commercial terms; its only flaw is that it lacks one great song capable of carrying Orange Juice into pop's pantheon. Granted, in the context of the britpop of ten years later, the band's youthful verve, their jokey stage manner and Collins's charm would have been more than enough to secure a decent hit. Instead, the group, having forced its way out of its own independent niche, found itself in the paradoxical position of having to chase a success that would justify its major-label deal.

Following the tensions caused by this lack of success, Kirk and Daly leave, replaced by ex-Josef K man Malcolm Ross and by Zeke Manyika. The new line-up scores Orange Juice's first and only hit with the 1983 single "Rip It Up", which reached number 8 in the UK charts. The track, propelled by a gurgling bass and a funky little guitar line, has a garish, swaying Caribbean-reggae feel and, with its dreadful sax solo, can be filed among the many summer ditties that infested a year that music history remembers as the apotheosis of lightweight, disengaged pop (also in the charts that year were Bowie's "Let's Dance", Culture Club, and Duran Duran).

With the album Rip It Up and the follow-up The Orange Juice in '84, the band's career veers toward generic pop, as shown by singles like "What Presence?", which still carries a trace of white soul but has lost every shred of rock tension.

In 1985 the band split up, leaving Collins to a rather unremarkable solo career that only found success with the "one-hit wonder" "A Girl Like You" in 1994.

In 2005 the singer was hospitalized after a severe brain hemorrhage, from which he is still recovering today, although he did release the album Home Again in 2007 and has since returned to performing in London.

The release of The Glasgow School in 2005 saw almost the entire UK music press agree on the importance of this band for British - and especially Scottish - independent music: Teenage Fanclub, Delgados, Belle And Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand are among the names who, over the years, carried forward the genuine spirit of Postcard's first records. It's not about keeping a tradition alive for its own sake, but about passing down a craftsman's love of making music - something as small as it is important - from one generation to the next.

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