How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

‘I hung about at the stage door like you do when you’re a teenager,’ says Collins, ‘asking if I could help with the equipment. The Slits and Subway Sect were an astonishing proposition. Subway Sect’s guitarist, Rob Symmons, had a Melody Maker guitar. The sound made a big impression, as did The Slits because they couldn’t play but made a really charming noise.’

  The White Riot tour had also called at Edinburgh and been seen by Malcolm Ross, a teenager who, along with school friend Paul Haig, had begun messing around with the idea of starting a band. ‘We were all at school together,’ says Ross. ‘We’d started jamming in 1977. I don’t think any of us would have made records if it hadn’t been for punk. I’d seen the White Riot tour, and Subway Sect was the one that stood out for me, the whole thing, the way they dressed as well.’

  Along with creating a thrillingly feedback-saturated pop noise, Subway Sect eschewed the torn T-shirts and leather of punk. Instead they wore a subdued assemblage of v-neck sweaters, desert boots and shirts, often dyed grey. The band had an unaffected onstage gait that completed the look: a cross between a ’68 enragé and a postman from a GPO film unit documentary winding down his shift at the sorting office. The blurring intensity of the sound and the second-hand tank tops and guitars would leave a huge impression on anyone who saw Subway Sect during their first year of touring. Ross could, however, detect one influence within Subway Sect’s monochromatic, brittle sound. ‘They were very much inspired by Television and so were we. Of all the groups that put out records in ’77, Television was the one that really connected. Paul Haig and I decided to try and play guitar together because we both bought Marquee Moon and before them it was the Velvet Underground. Alan Horne used to talk about how Postcard was completely inspired by the VU.’

  Collins, Kirk and Daly drew a line in the sand and started again; the new band would ignore what was happening around them and invent a new world of their own. ‘We had a whole load of new ideas,’ says Collins, ‘and we thought that the name Orange Juice would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb amidst all the punk names. I didn’t think of any of the connotations the name would have with freshness, or anything like that. Steven liked it because he thought there was a psychedelic thing going to happen, and he thought, wash away the acid trip with orange juice. I wasn’t thinking of that. Alan liked it. We were briefly a three-piece, and I asked David McClymont to join as a bass player and Alan thought he was perfect. He thought he was like a little girl.’

  As Collins, Kirk, McClymont and Daly made plans for the newly configured Orange Juice, Horne recognised the need to stay one step ahead and decided that he would not only manage the band, but start a label to release their wares: Postcard Records.

  For a record company that in its lifetime released only a handful of 7-inch singles and a stillborn album, Postcard’s legacy and influence is almost unquantifiable. In his third-floor tenement flat at 185 West Princes Street in the West End, while he and Collins filtered through their tastes to fix a Postcard aesthetic, Horne was equally interested in maintaining as high a level of cattiness as possible.

  Orange Juice understood the need to elicit a reaction from the prevailing orthodoxy of Glaswegian punk, so took to the stage looking gauche and fey. Collins’s boyish baritone carried the courage of its convictions, revelling in its triumph of hope over experience in hitting the high notes. The rhythm section of McClymont and Daly, while hoping to sound like Chic, sounded exactly what it was, two boys in their early twenties thrilled at the idea of trying to sound like Chic.

  As well as sounding charmingly insouciant and giddy from its self-consciousness, Orange Juice had developed a look that put its unorthodox individuality stage front. Collins would take to the stage in cavalry boots and a Davy Crockett hat, his fringe almost long enough to collide with his toothy grin. The rest of the band, in sports jackets and checked shirts, looked like country and western intellectuals who were enjoying the idea of being in a group while also coming to terms with their second-hand equipment. While it was provocative to the punk neds down at the front of the stage shouting abuse, it had an infallible warmth and charm. ‘I bought the boots and the Crockett hat in a shop in Edinburgh,’ says Collins. ‘We were deliberately camping it up and feying it up in order to provoke, and of course the audience duly responded with “Poofs poofs poofs”.’

  After a particularly challenging gig at Glasgow Technical College, Collins, Horne and the rest of the band were wheeling a borrowed Vox Continental organ up Byres Road when they were set upon by youngsters out on the street looking for some late-night thrills – and who were deeply unimpressed by Orange Juice’s attitude and appearance. ‘Alan Horne ran away,’ says Collins. ‘I got beaten up. James Kirk said to me, “That, Edwyn, is the definition of grace under pressure,” then the police arrived and found it all very confusing and looked at us very suspiciously. And of course, Alan loved all that.’

  Camping it up in Glasgow, despite Horne’s delight at the provocation, was proving to be not without its perils. ‘I mean, it was quite hard to be gay in Glasgow in 1980,’ says Collins. ‘Almost impossible. I remember, there was one gay bar but you had to keep your head down.’

  All this campness was no less in your face than the Glaswegian hard-man archetype – it was practically its feminisation – so much so that it struck a nerve. Along with Collins and Horne’s switchblade wit and uncompromising way with a put-down there was, behind the charm, something confrontational about Postcard and Orange Juice’s gaucheness.

  As Orange Juice took a step into the unknown and began recording their debut single, Horne and Collins’s ideas for Postcard began taking shape. On Postcard, singles would feature photography on the sleeve of their first pressing, subsequent repressings would be housed in a uniform pastel beige in-house sleeve which would be stickered with Caledonian imagery: clansmen in kilts, tins of shortbread and lochs at sunset. The Postcard logo would be a grinning cat and, completing this détournement of nationalist boosterism would be the label’s mission statement: ‘Postcard Records, The Sound of Young Scotland.’ These tongue-in-cheek signifiers were as much an expression of Horne’s supreme yet deeply fragile self-confidence and sarcasm as of Postcard’s irreverent sense of playfulness.

  Instead of the monochromes or scratchy xerox and biro aesthetics of the singles filling up the back room of Rough Trade, here was sly, stylish fun, openly willing to embrace such exiled ideas as wit and naivety. This sentiment was particularly echoed in Orange Juice’s music: a chiming mix of the Sixties and the contemporary sleekness of chart disco, cherry-picked to bounce off attempts at conveying late teenage soulfulness. ‘I liked the Byrds, the Velvets, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival. We were big on the Lovin’ Spoonful and all Stax stuff,’ says Collins. ‘We already knew about all of that by the time we started Orange Juice.’ Alongside such sleekly escapist chart staples as the O’Jays’ ‘Love Unlimited’, for the first time since punk, Postcard, via Orange Juice’s willingness to open up to their influences, was happy to allow in the past.

  All the labels that had started around the energies of punk had been preoccupied either with the future or the insistent now of the present. Mute, Factory, and Industrial had developed an aesthetic based on the austerity of clean lines while Rough Trade, taking its cue from Spiral Scratch’s photostatted presentation of the facts, had the aura and cut-and-paste energies of a fanzine in vinyl form. Fast Product’s imagery codified the DIY impulse, setting it in a playfully theoretical context – pictures of gold discs on the front of the Mekons’ ‘Where Were You?’ – that revelled in its high design values. Zoo, though awash with a romanticism that looked in all directions, shared the greyish raincoat hue of post-punk, and in Echo & the Bunnymen had a band with that most modern of instruments, a drum machine. Postcard, with its sporrans and cat’s whiskers, was asking the listener, before they even put the record on, to forget all that. This was a Warholian pop art commentary on commodification and culture, Glasgow West End style, on a budget and with a truckload o
f attitude.

  In his high-ceilinged room in Princes Street, taking up space next to the stereo, tucked behind a tailor’s mannequin upon which he kept his sunglasses, Horne had a battered suitcase full of 7-inch vinyl, a treasure chest full of the mythic properties of the 45-rpm single whose contents were laid out in rows. ‘He had original presses of things like Big Star’s “September Gurls” on Ardent,’ says Collins, ‘Sue, Motown, Stax, red label Elektra, all lined up.’

  Horne’s box of 7-inches was both a meticulously curated time capsule of the past and an index to a possible future. The contents would be reconfigured into a celebration of melody and attitude that played with form in a pop context, borrowing equally from black and white music as long as it had a distinct personality and style at its core. If ‘indie’, that most indefinable catch-all, has a source, it is here, in a suitcase next to Horne’s Dansette in his rooms on the third floor of a Glasgow tenement. Once Postcard was up and running, even though it fell hundreds of thousands of miles short of its ambitions of being a label that would take over the charts, it would start a vital and immediate rush to take shiny guitar pop to number one. Forget punk, this was the counter-revolution.

  The debut Orange Juice single was released by Postcard in April 1980; the original sleeve, breaking with presentational post-punk etiquette, featured a neckerchief-wearing Collins smiling gleefully as he suspended his semi-acoustic guitar over his band mates’ heads. The sleeve’s contents were equally refreshing. The A-side, ‘Falling and Laughing’, had a confidence in its fragility and lightness of touch that ensured that the listener’s natural reaction was to swoon. With its walking bass line, four-on-the-floor drum fills and double-stroked guitar, the song was stylish and infectious on its own terms. Above all by singing ‘Only my dreams satisfy the real need of my heart’, mixing the wistfulness of Noel Coward with the assertiveness of Lou Reed, Collins had introduced a new lyrical style for his generation. For the rest of the decade anyone with a tousled fringe and second-hand guitar would rehearse this combination of the lovelorn and the preoccupied. What Orange Juice’s legions of followers would find harder to replicate was the joy of hearing Collins’s laughter in his voice as he delivers the line ‘So I’m standing here so lonesome’. As well as falling, there was the laughing. Orange Juice’s self-awareness may have been coloured by shyness and inexperience, but it was communicated with the most inviting and inclusive warmth and wit.

  Like the majority of visitors to the counter of Kensington Park Road with a demo tape and a small degree of self-promotion, Horne had hustled a production and distribution deal out of Travis for Rough Trade to handle Postcard. Horne was deeply unsure about Travis, whose Afro and affability, not to say his ultimate control over whether Postcard had a short- or mid-term future, sent him all the wrong signals. Putting his doubts to one side once back in Glasgow, Horne carried on with the daydream of playing out the Warhol Factory charm school approach to managing a creative project: non-stop speed-assisted bitching and an ever hardening approach to who or what was in and who or what was out.

  ‘I took speed and Alan took speed as well for a short time but we didn’t really have the constitution for it,’ says Collins. ‘I was always a lightweight but we really enjoyed it. Steven Daly has this great line: he said, “Instead of concentrating on how we could really grow the label or working out any sort of long-term ambitions, we were putting most of our efforts into thinking up the next best put-down.” So everybody outside of Postcard got put down, inside it as well, we were constantly putting each other down. You had to be really quick off the mark. We functioned on this insidious quick-wittedness.’

  Over in Edinburgh, in the aftermath of Bob Last’s Fast Product, an equally charged, but less intensely personality-driven scene was developing. Much to Horne’s annoyance, a new Edinburgh group, the Fire Engines, an exhilaratingly speeded-up teenage deconstruction of Beefheart, were about to sign to Last’s new label Pop Aural. ‘With Alan it was completely a local rivalry,’ says Last. ‘We would occasionally bump into each other, and he’s never forgiven us the fact that the Fire Engines were our band. In his head, the Fire Engines were one of his finest moments, but the Fire Engines had been hanging around in my flat since they were at school. They were clearly as much influenced by the way the Gang of Four or the Mekons played with ideas as they were by what Alan did.’

  Not to be outdone by Last, Horne concentrated his sights on another new Edinburgh band, Josef K, who, with a small degree of hesitation, agreed to Horne’s suggestion that they should do a single on Postcard. By releasing Josef K’s ‘Sorry for Laughing’, a more uptight, but no less funky, three-minute piece of existential pop than ‘Falling and Laughing’, Postcard ensured that the label could authentically claim to be the sound of young Scotland, not just the sound of young Bearsden Academy Glasgow. It was one of Horne’s shrewdest moves: Edinburgh had a more rapidly expanding cache of groups than Glasgow.

  ‘There was the Scars, Josef K, Fire Engines, Associates,’ says Ross, ‘all of us in Edinburgh.’ Although it wasn’t merely geography that ensured Postcard and Glasgow felt separated from Josef K in Edinburgh. ‘The thing about the four guys in Orange Juice and Alan is, they’re all really clever people,’ he continues. ‘They were hilariously funny sometimes and the next minute they could be very bitchy and nasty. Alan’s mood could change with the wind, and what he thought the label should be doing could change with the wind too … I met Alan through Edwyn and Steven. Alan said that he’d like to make it a label rather than make it a vehicle for Orange Juice; we felt a great affinity for Orange Juice so it felt quite natural. I was very into garage, Nuggets and made tapes of Pebbles LPs. We had less of that Postcard pop aspect, we were more interested in bringing things from psychedelia and the Magic Band into the present.’

  Josef K had an accessible and detached angularity. Their songs, funky and abstract, in contrast to Orange Juice’s chiming pop euphoria, seemed to twitch unintentionally, a trait they shared with many of their contemporaries in 1981. The Postcard and Orange Juice aesthetic of obsessively referencing the past only went so far with their Edinburgh colleagues.

  ‘In Josef K we certainly bought into a lot less than the others,’ says Ross. ‘We saw ourselves as being forward-looking and modernist. Edwyn and Alan would sit around talking about Lovin’ Spoonful and Creedence. Edwyn would say at the time it was great that Orange Juice had the monopoly on roots music. Everyone else was into experimentation and industrial music.’

  Horne’s catty misanthropy, despite the sense of momentum that Postcard was quickly building, remained unchecked. In fact, the fledgling instances of success that Horne was experiencing, however small, made him worse.

  Into this viper’s den of Elektra 7-inches, fake Ray-Bans and hissy fits came Grace Maxwell, a fiercely bright and engaging Glaswegian, who had moved to London to work in the theatre.

  ‘We all knew Grace,’ says Ross. ‘She lived with a guy called Harry Papadopoulos who was from Glasgow who took a lot of pictures for Sounds at the time, and we first met Grace when Postcard had our great outings to London. We would always stay with her and Harry.’

  ‘I met Edwyn in 1980, when they first were doing those trips to London,’ says Maxwell, ‘before “Blue Boy” came out. When I first met them I used to think, what the hell are they talking about, I thought you just listened to a record and thought, oh I like that, and that was as simple as that. It turns out, apparently, it’s not like that at all. It’s about intense, heated debate. The way Alan dealt with people, his private world and his love of music and his understanding of it all meant he would decide whether someone’s existence was pointless depending on what records they liked and why. Alan and Edwyn would be able to banish people to outer darkness. Especially Alan, he was more or less mental about it.’

  *

  If Postcard was fizzing with attitude at the prospects of the glittering future ahead, Geoff Travis, who, while finding Horne’s confrontational tactics wholly unnecessary had
nevertheless marvelled at ‘Falling and Laughing’, was starting to weary of Horne’s grand designs and speedy attitude.

  Having heard the next Postcard single, Orange Juice’s second release, ‘Blue Boy’, he felt disappointed and, tiring of Horne’s relentless provocations, let Collins and Horne know on their next visit to Rough Trade.

  ‘Geoff didn’t like “Blue Boy”,’ says Collins. ‘It felt like a bad tutorial, “I’m disappointed with you.” We’d been in a cafe and Alan Horne is angry, furious. We went to the park and he was hot with fury. “I’ll just tell you what, we’ll leave these fucking tapes here and just let fate take care of whatever happens to them,’ I said. “No we won’t. I’ll find someone else to put them out. If he doesn’t put this record out, you think we’re going to just give up because we get rejected by an old hippie?” and Alan was outside in the street spinning around, dizzy in the middle of the road. He could have got himself knocked down. He was speechless with fury and rage.’

  Travis in a rare off-moment had missed something on ‘Blue Boy’. The single, aided by radio play secured by Rough Trade’s in-house promo specialist Scott Piering, and glowing reviews across the board, meant that not only did ‘Blue Boy’ sell enough to need several re-presses, but suddenly ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’ was being taken seriously as a commercial proposition. A&R men, seeing Orange Juice being profiled as a new, friendly pop sensation, started flying up to Glasgow in search of the next young thing.

  But the damage between Horne and Travis was irreparable.

  ‘Scott Piering loved “Blue Boy” but Alan never trusted Geoff Travis after that,’ says Collins. ‘He didn’t trust his judgement, didn’t trust his integrity. Postcard carried on with Geoff but Alan, having never really trusted him in the beginning, certainly never trusted him again.’

  Whatever Horne’s feeling about Travis, both Orange Juice and Josef K were beginning to notice that Horne had his own issues with business decisions. ‘You couldn’t trust Alan with the finances really,’ says Collins. ‘There was no notion of anything you call promotional or marketing strategies, no commercial acumen. Alan would say, “I’m too creative, it’s not where my head’s at.” Alan was tight with money but he was also dodgy with money, while on the other hand he was not at all good at making money. His head was always stuck in ideas and arguments and debate about music. Later on he always found it quite difficult to make music as a producer, because he always had an idea in his head of the perfect record and nothing can ever live up to that.’