Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Amid this bear-baiting stood Alan Horne, shortly to set up Postcard Records, who was probably unique in detecting Collins’ star quality at this early juncture. The band reminded him of the detached cool of the Velvet Underground, and he quite fancied himself as the Warhol-esque lynchpin that could stitch a Factory scene together. But by the time he’d arranged to release the Nu-Sonics’ debut single, they’d transformed themselves into Orange Juice in May 1979. The switch came in order to distance themselves from punk’s increasingly macho rhetoric: “Calling ourselves Orange Juice,” Collins later recalled to Brian Hogg, “was part of the sense of mischief which, in essence, describes our career. It sounded absurd in the context of punk.”

  Horne, a fanatical musical archivist and avowed snob, was one of the true mavericks of the early independent movement. The blithely sarcastic leader of a cadre of self-confessed elitists, he offered a ready clash with Geoff Travis’s urbane, communal hippie ethos. Horne, conversely, was stubborn, caustic and dismissive as part of a convincing act of studied misanthropy. According to Dave Cavanagh’s My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, he had overcome his original shyness by reinventing his persona while touring Europe, returning to Glasgow as a combative figure, turning self-doubt outwards and projecting immeasurable piety, assurance and disdain. For example, he published his own fanzine, Swankers, which featured a cartoon strip, Carnage At Auschwitz, with the singular intention of upsetting his flatmate Brian Taylor, then also a member of proto-punks Oscar Wild. Horne invested one of his student grants in the latter’s career, which lasted but one gig. But just when it seemed he would never find substance for his arrogance, he chanced across Collins.

  Weaving in and out of the same narrative were Josef K. An extension of guitarist Malcolm Ross, singer Paul Haig and drummer Ron Torrance’s former band TV Art, they’d changed names when original bass player Gary McCormack left to join The Exploited (to be replaced by former roadie Davie Weddell). After Ross met Orange Juice’s Steven Daly at a gig, they began co-ordinating joint performances; Josef K hosting Orange Juice in Edinburgh with a reciprocal arrangement in Glasgow. In July 1979 A ten-song demo was recorded at Mike’s studio in Edinburgh, and mailed to the likes of Radar, Rough Trade and Arista. Eventually Daly, who had walked out of Orange Juice due to personality conflicts with Horne, offered them the chance to record their debut single, ‘Chance Meeting’. Released on Daly’s new label Absolute, it was again recorded at Mike’s, and produced by Nobby Clark, original singer of the Bay City Rollers. “Absolute was set up to release ‘Chance Meeting’,” notes Haig. “It had nothing to do with rejection from other companies [as has been reported]. In fact, I seem to remember that we had extended interest from Arista, but we decided not to follow it up.” Absolute would also release the sole single by The Fun Four, Daly’s new band.

  Horne was both surprised and impressed, surmising that if Daly could achieve all this, there was no reason why he couldn’t. So he made efforts to build bridges, offering to drive Daly to the pressing plant while coercing him into rejoining Orange Juice. Daly eventually acquiesced, after The Fun Four’s single, ‘Singing In The Showers’, did nothing. Horne, alongside Collins and Orange Juice bass player Dave McClymont, founded Postcard as a means of pressing Orange Juice’s debut EP, ‘Falling And Laughing’, in February 1980.

  Horne undertook absolutely no due diligence in establishing the label, nor did he feel much like venerating his elders, be they major labels or the new breed of independents. Yet Fast was such a pivotal influence, even he couldn’t deny it. And it showed. The label ident; a kitten beating on a drum, was taken from a 18th century Louis Wain picture, symbolic of the kind of tooth-achey sentimentality and Tartan kitsch that accompanied boxes of shortbread foisted on tourists. The label was actually set up as a co-operative. £500 was raised for the purpose, with Collins and McClymont providing half of that sum. The ‘Falling And Laughing’ EP was cut at John McLarty’s studio, beneath a tailor’s shop in Paisley (recording expenses less than £100). Lovesick, gauche, naïve and thrilling, 963 copies were pressed, 800 including a bonus flexidisc of ‘Felicity’ (originally intended to accompany a fanzine called Strawberry Switchblade which they’d abandoned “because it was shit”).

  They were placed in the boot of Horne’s dad’s Austin Maxi as Collins and he undertook the long drive to London. They made their way directly to the Rough Trade counter, who took 300 copies. Small Wonder in Walthamstow took another 100. A week later they would return, banging on the doors of every record label they could think of, and introducing themselves personally to John Peel. “Alan marched into the foyer in Broadcasting House and just demanded to see him,” Collins would tell Julian Henry. “Alan is a bit arrogant, and when Peel appeared he just said to him, ‘All these Liverpool groups you’re playing are shit. Glasgow is the next place where it’s going to happen.’ Then we heard Peel on the air saying how he’d just been confronted by a truculent youth who said that the Liverpool thing was over, and then he proceeded to play Echo And The Bunnymen. Peel didn’t like our record, he only played it once.”

  Travis recommended that Horne press up another 1,000 copies of ‘Falling And Laughing’, but Horne spurned his advice. Instead, he put Orange Juice back to recording, using Castle Sound studios in Edinburgh on the advice of Bob Last. He also booked in Josef K, whom he’d now enticed to the label. Adapting the old Motown slogan ‘The Young Sound Of America’ to ‘The Sound Of Young Scotland’ was a deliberately disingenuous gambit rather than any attempt to foster a regional identity – though Horne’s reverence for Motown was genuine. His vision was a label combining the gravitas of Motown, Atlantic or Stax (revered singles from those labels were kept in a fetishised ‘box’ at his flat), with the elevated cultural pomposity of Andy Warhol’s Factory. There were even discussions about whether or not they should record in mono for added period charm. He was, with just one single under his belt, unapologetically shooting for the stars. “Music should always aim for the widest possible market,” Horne would inform Paul Morley in October 1980 for an NME article that characterised him as ‘an insolent whizzkid equivalent to Wilson, Last and Travis’. “The charts are there. That’s where you need to be.” Morley had a job stemming the tide of self-idolatry. “I consider that we’re the only punk independent because we’re the only ones doing it who are young. Everybody else has come from the back of a record shop or are businessmen.”

  Horne made the return journey to London clutching the tapes for ‘Blue Boy’, Orange Juice’s second single, utilising a Vox organ borrowed from Alan McGee’s band Newspeak, and Josef K’s debut ‘Radio Drill Time’. Travis had agreed to a licensing and distribution deal, on the provision that ‘Blue Boy’ measured up to ‘Falling And Laughing’. Travis wasn’t immediately impressed, which outraged Horne, firm in his conviction that ‘Blue Boy’, which he and the band had laboured over intensively, was conclusively the finest single of the year. There never had been any love lost between the two parties, and with this rejection, Horne exploded. Later, sat in a café with Collins, he ran into the road in open invitation for cars to run him over. “We left the offices very downhearted and Alan seemed to go into a crazed depression and started wandering about in the middle of the road, saying ‘Let them run me over, let them kill me,’” Collins later told Julian Henry. “I said, ‘Look, Alan, give me the masters, I’ll phone around some of the major record companies and see if I can get us a deal that way.’ So Alan said, ‘Take the masters. Betray me. But that’ll cost you £25,000.’ He was insane.”

  Horne skulked back to Scotland to release the singles himself, using money borrowed from his parents for the pressing and a dual-purpose, reversible sleeve. Each was coloured in with fluorescent crayons to keep costs down. Luckily, Horne had found a further ally in Dave McCullough of Sounds, who travelled north and wrote a two-page feature on Postcard. But Travis now changed his mind. He resurrected the original 50-50 pressing and distribution deal. Horne, sensing blood, negotiated him all the way down
to a 85/15 split. There was a further tariff in that he’d have to overcome his personal objections to Horne’s demeanour. But ‘Blue Boy’ was extraordinary. As Brian Hogg would write: “It was ‘Blue Boy’ which emancipated Scotland’s pop, providing undreamed of directions and hope to new, aspiring musicians. After it nothing could be the same again.”

  The focus on Orange Juice over Josef K was deliberate. “Josef K were pawns,” Horne would later tell Hogg. “There to make the label seem more solid and bring Orange Juice more attention. I felt I could build excitement by creating this package around them.” The label’s third signing, meanwhile, was a one-off release by Australians the Go-Betweens, after their ‘Lee Remick’ single impressed Collins and Horne. The latter claimed the discovery came when he was browsing the ‘G’ rack in Rough Trade, looking for Vic Godard singles. Go-Between Robert Forster revised the myth slightly in an interview with Alastair McKay of The Scotsman in 2003. “[Horne is] an inventive person in terms of his memories. I’m happy he was in the Rough Trade shop, but I’m pretty sure he was there with Edwyn, and Edwyn steered him away from Vic Godard towards the Go-Betweens.” Forster would become well-versed in Horne’s McLarenesque/Warholian antics. “I remember there was an article done on us while we were in Glasgow, for the afternoon paper. All of us were on Alan’s front steps in order to have a photograph taken. I was standing there with Orange Juice, and him, and a few other people. The photographer was just about to take the photo and Alan, from nowhere, whipped out a tambourine and put it right in front of his face, exactly like Warhol on the cover of the first Velvet Underground album. It was amazing, I had never seen that tambourine before, and there it was, bang in front of his face.”

  An international signing at this juncture seemed a reflection of the stature Postcard had suddenly acquired. Horne’s tiny second floor tenement flat at 185 West Princes Street had become the hub of the Glasgow music scene. And Horne – an outsider by nature – felt both valediction and disgust. But mainly valediction. “Horne just loved being this kind of Andy Warhol figure,” recalled journalist Billy Sloan, “with his retinue of beautiful people hanging around him, sneering at everybody and just being totally dismissive of every other band, not just in Scotland, but across the world.” It was quite something indeed. Glasgow, mythologised (with some degree of accuracy) as the ‘hardest city’ in the UK had suddenly bequeathed the arts a record label that was setting an agenda which was not only coy but self-consciously camp. The credo of punk was that vocalists should sing in authentic regional accents. Collins’ use of an English upper class vernacular (‘Simply Thrilled Honey’, ‘Felicity’) with a nod to the phrasing of his beloved Al Green, allied to the foppish haircuts and outlandish dress sense, were more of an invitation to violence than any assemblage of grunts, leathers or denim ever could be. Meanwhile, the label’s sound – trebly, almost bereft of bass – conveyed a sense of shimmering, brittle artifice. Justin Currie of Del Amitri encapsulated the obliteration of machismo Postcard stood for perfectly in the documentary Caledonia Dreamin’. After spotting Edwyn Collins from the top deck of a bus, “I wrote ‘I love Edwyn’ on my schoolbag in fourth year and got called a poof.”

  In 1981 Rough Trade organised a two-night showcase for Postcard at the Venue in Victoria. The impetus behind the label and its bands was staggering. Prompted by McCullough’s piece, in what would become a customary cavalry charge by the London print media once it was decided an area was ‘hot’, the long neglected Scottish music scene was now the subject of feverish journalistic and A&R interest. Bidding wars broke out as a clutch of Scottish bands broke through in the wake of Postcard (The Bluebells among the beneficiaries), with Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice cited as the figureheads. Only that brave new world was about to fall apart for Alan Horne.

  As per Horne’s designs, Orange Juice were Postcard’s leading lights, but Josef K were also a critical success. Yet their debut album, Sorry For Laughing, was shelved. Twelve tracks were recorded, again at Castle Sound, and scheduled for a January 1981 release before Horne told the press he’d decided it was ‘too clean and well-produced’. “That was our verdict,” contends Haig. “We decided the finished mastered tracks were lacking a raw/brittle cutting edge. This had also happened on the single version of ‘It’s Kinda Funny’.” The claim was made that 2,000 or 3,000 copies were pressed but were to be destroyed. It was bunkum; only 20 test pressings exist, along with proof sleeves. Mystery continues to surround events, however. “It’s possible there was a conscious effort made,” says Haig, “without our knowledge, during the mastering process of the record, to ‘bland out’ the tracks a little, in order to make them more commercially acceptable.”

  Michel Duval’s Les Disques du Crépuscule then released Josef K’s finest moment, ‘Sorry For Laughing’, the reworked title-track from their debut, in April. Horne reconsidered his strategy. Their second attempt at recording a debut album, The Only Fun In Town, was released in the summer of 1981. “’Sorry For Laughing’ was more of an attempt to produce something approaching a pop record,” admits Haig. “The Only Fun In Town was a return to the fragmented, angular sound that was the essence of Josef K live.” But it didn’t sell as well as anticipated. And expectations were indeed high, with Josef K touted in some quarters as heirs apparent to Joy Division. In the event, former supporter Paul Morley complained of a “bungled” production, while others carped at the 30-minute running time, with much of the material already available. The band’s original claim in interviews that they would split up after releasing their debut album had come back to haunt them, albeit after they’d recorded it twice.

  The fourth and final act to appear on Postcard Records was Aztec Camera, whose leader Roddy Frame had never quite outgrown his schoolboy crush on David Bowie. “I made a demo tape and sent it to everyone,” Frame would recall to Steve Jelbert of The Quietus, “Rough Trade, Factory – they all turned us down. But not to Postcard, because we read an interview with Alan Horne and he was a horrible man… Then I met Edwyn. Him and Horne came down to see us at the Bungalow Bar in Paisley. The rest is history.” Their debut single, ‘Just Like Gold’, was recorded the night before Frame’s 17th birthday. The sound of young Scotland indeed.

  By the advent of Orange Juice’s fourth single, ‘Poor Old Soul’, tensions between the band and Horne became vicious, prompted, at least in part, by the temptations of major label record offers. Not that there was any kind of unanimity in the band itself over what to do. When Polydor sent scouts to an Orange Juice gig in Leeds, James Kirk wore an undertaker’s coat and refused to plug in his guitar. But Orange Juice did, indeed, finally sign with Polydor, in September 1981, thereby ripping the heart out of Postcard, especially after Horne was frustrated in his attempts to entice Dave Henderson’s Fire Engines, who elected to move to Bob Last’s pop:aural label instead. What could have been the perfect Postcard band in terms of conceptual continuity – Altered Images – decided they were better suited to a major. “As soon as we realised EMI and Columbia were interested in us,” Clare Grogan noted in Caledonia Dreamin’, “there was no way we were going to go to Postcard. We were going to sell out, we were going to sell our souls and be on Top Of The Pops in a year, and that’s what happened.”

  Horne himself took London Records’ shilling and, backed by Roger Ames, founded Swamplands in the mid-80s. But it was an ill-fated venture – arguably because of its reliance on existing rather than new talent – including records by Paul Quinn, Davey Henderson’s new band Win and James King. Or perhaps because Horne ran riot with unsupervised budgets and spent rather too much of his time at lunches and equipping his office with such essentials as a dentist’s chair and stuffed mongoose. Given the money that was squandered on art budgets, missed deadlines, and outrageous expense claims, it’s not hard to see Swamplands as a mini, faux-indie Casablanca.

  Postcard only ever had four acts, their output comprising just over a dozen singles. But there was a level of innovation, and cheek, that distinguishes the label, alongs
ide a dichotomy – for while the artists would sing of their vulnerability and self-doubt, the label itself displayed arrogance on an unprecedented scale. For example, Horne would promote each of his acts by suggesting they were the ‘contemporaneous reincarnation of ’69 Velvet Underground’, simply alternating the date for different acts, while actually sending cut-out pictures of the Warholian legends to Rough Trade after they asked for promotional pictures. “I’m still nostalgic for those times,” Roddy Frame would relate to Mike Pattenden in 1990. “We made some beautiful records. It had the best bands around; Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Josef K – but our problem was that we alienated everyone. I’m sure everyone thought we were poofs – Edwyn with his fringe and Alan going on the radio and saying ‘I don’t like rock music, the only good music with a beat is Tamla Motown!’ I don’t think there was a real man on Postcard, that’s what attracted me to it.”

  Postcard did revive in 1992 to re-release archive Orange Juice material, plus work by Paul Quinn, the Nectarine No. 9 (which saw Horne finally ‘get his man’, in terms of Davey Henderson of the Fire Engines), plus Vic Godard, but then disappeared again. Yet Postcard’s influence was more lasting than its brief sub-two year existence and handful of releases might suggest. It is not difficult to locate where the acorns fell. The condition of being lovelorn was no longer uncool, but once again a natural state of being for teenagers. Those half-dozen records embraced their fumbling efforts in romance, dwelling seemingly eternally in the intensity of the moment. The C86 bands and even The Smiths betrayed a clear debt (not only in sound, but Morrissey’s mocking effeminacy). Josef K and Orange Juice are searingly obvious influences on the likes of Franz Ferdinand, whose Alex Kapranos bought his Postcard singles from the back of Glasgow’s Paddy’s Market. Stuart Murdoch even referred to his Belle & Sebastian as aspirant “sons of Postcard”. “If you were around in Glasgow back in the day,” Shirley Manson of Garbage would tell Word in 2005, “you’d know where that sound originates from, specially Josef K, but it’s all for a new audience and they’re young men with their own unique spin.” Others have been less generous. Horne, meanwhile, lives quietly in Glasgow, refusing to entertain any involvement with the ‘nostalgia industry’.