Books shaped Josef K as much as music: Kafka, obviously, but also Camus, Hesse, Dostoyevsky, and Knut Hamsun. “Reading gave me so many ideas for lyrics,” says Haig. “In those days I never thought about politics for one second, I was only trying to project thoughts about the human condition. Orange Juice were into a different kind of literature. Edwyn would be reading Catcher in the Rye while we’d be reading The Trial. That explains a lot about the difference between the bands!”
Critics loved Josef K’s literate lyrics and their music’s weird mix of poise and frenzy, but despite the rave reviews, Alan Horne himself was never very sure about the band. “Alan had this vision for Orange Juice all along, to turn them into a great pop band, but he found Josef K far too abrasive and dark,” admits Haig. “He wanted us on the label to add some cred and widen its output. But the cockroach became too fat on a diet of Kafka and press clippings!”
Josef K quickly found themselves at the epicenter of an Edinburgh scene populated by postpunk bibliophiles. “There was a certain period in Edinburgh when all the New Wave bands were into reading,” chuckles Haig. “Davy Henderson from the Fire Engines, Ross Middleton from Positive Noise, Richard Jobson from the Skids, you’d always see them with a book in their pocket.” The city’s postpunk literati haunted a pub called the Tap of Lauriston, which was directly opposite Edinburgh’s art college. Josef K weren’t much for drinking, though. Ross, Haig, and Weddell stuck mostly to soft drinks. Only Torrance would have a pint, or several. It was as though all the band’s banished rock ’n’ rollness was concentrated in the body of their drummer. “At gigs we’d leave the rider untouched but Ronnie would stuff all the beer in his drum case bags,” recalls Haig. Torrance’s appearance also stuck out like a sore thumb. “Josef K had this band camaraderie thing and we’d all wear long gray raincoats, except for Ronnie, who’d sometimes upset us greatly by wearing yellow trousers and pointed blue suede shoes. Ron was into the whole rock ’n’ roll trip. He’d even get groupies. We never got groupies.”
Josef K, says Ross, “didn’t like laddishness or sexism. If girls came back to the dressing room to talk, we wouldn’t be trying to get off with them or anything like that.” Orange Juice were just the same. “We were a cute band dressed in an interesting style, so we had girls following us, but I don’t think we took advantage,” recalls Daly with a hint of wistfulness. “I remember opportunities to take advantage and not doing it. It seems absolutely ridiculous in retrospect! We were pretty naïve lads.” In an early Sounds feature on Postcard, Dave McCullough tagged the label’s sensibility as “New Puritan,” a term borrowed from Mark E. Smith. Orange Juice, Josef K, and Aztec Camera all frowned on drugs and excessive drinking. “We were quite puritanical,” says Ross. “We didn’t smoke dope or believe in getting drunk. Speeding a little bit was acceptable. Amphetamine related to the mod thing of being in control and alert. I wanted some kind of dignity.”
As part of their antirock stance, Josef K never played encores. “I always used to find encores patronizing,” says Ross. “The roadies would come on to pack up the guitars, but if you clapped loud enough the band would come on again. That was the kind of ritual that Postcard wanted to change.” Haig also refused to indulge the audience with banter or pleasantries. “Instead, Paul taped intros to the songs that we’d play over the PA,” chuckles Ross. “We were into all these Brechtian alienation techniques.” Haig recalls barely being able to bring himself to utter the word “gig” because it was too disgustingly rock ’n’ roll. “I preferred to say ‘concert,’ but you couldn’t really say that when you were playing just a wee venue.”
Josef K’s antirockism was surpassed by the second great Edinburgh group of this era, the Fire Engines, who famously played sets that lasted only fifteen minutes. “What’s the point in getting the audience bored?!” demanded singer Davy Henderson in NME. “Where’s the value there?! Is it the amount of time you’re on, or the amount of excitement you get out of it?” Yet another Scottish group inspired into existence by the prickly guitars of Subway Sect, the Fire Engines added Beefheart barbs and Contortions jolts to create a sound of itchy energy. On their archetypal tune “Discord,” high-toned bass and loping drums create a nervous, hyperactive funk. The guitars throw out electric sparks like live wires that are cut and writhing, and Henderson yelps like a pixie version of James Brown at his most agitated.
Horne desperately wanted the Fire Engines for Postcard, but so did Bob Last of Fast Product, which was actually based in Edinburgh. Like Horne, Last believed that independent culture was in danger of becoming a ghetto. He encouraged his bands, such as the abrasive but poppy local outfit the Scars, to sign to major labels. Despite (or perhaps because of) the similarity in outlook between Horne and Last, there was a bristling rivalry between Postcard and Fast Product. Horne was all set to release a Fire Engines live tape on his projected sublabel, I Wish I Was a Postcard, but Last moved quickly and whisked the band into the studio to record the launch release for his new label, Pop:Aural. “I dissolved Fast and started Pop:Aural because I wanted to experiment with being more commercial,” says Last. Just like Horne, he wanted to see if it was possible to get onto the proper pop charts while remaining independent.
The Fire Engines’ Lubricate Your Living Room, the debut release for Pop:Aural, wasn’t exactly pop music, though. For a start, it was mostly instrumental, give or take the stray chants and nonverbal shrieks of excitement from Henderson. It wasn’t exactly a single or an LP, but a deliberately unclassifiable release. Despite featuring nine tracks stretched across a 33 rpm twelve-inch single and selling at the budget price of two and a half pounds, Lubricate was not the group’s first album, as Henderson stressed. Rather it was a sort of dub remix of the debut LP before it actually existed. “[It’s] like our songs with the words taken away and the lengths extended. It was Bob Last’s idea and he wanted to use us and we were quite into being used in this type of way.” Echoed in the track title “Get Up and Use Me,” Last’s governing concept was useful music, as opposed to “art” for passive contemplation. “Background beat for active people,” Lubricate was the hyperkinetic opposite of chill-out music or Eno’s series of ambient albums, something you’d play to vibe yourself up before you went out for the evening.
On its release in January 1981, Lubricate was a critical smash and a big independent hit, but the Fire Engines’ wonderfully frangible music fell a long way short of the chart-infiltrating pop Last envisioned for Pop:Aural. “The Fire Engines were a transitional thing because they weren’t glossy,” he says. For the next single, “Candyskin,” Last hired half a dozen string players to add a hilariously incongruous symphonic patina to the group’s jagged sound. “The Fire Engines were so abrasive you could get away with using a string section without it being kitsch. But after a while, I told them they couldn’t go on doing what they were doing because it’d just be less of the same. So they reinvented themselves as Win, a proper pop group.”
The Associates—Edinburgh’s greatest group of this period—were the city’s real-deal pop proposition. Unlike Josef K or Davy Henderson’s mob, they would actually, eventually, go all the way. Singer Billy Mackenzie had a multioctave voice and the supernatural glow of a born star. The band’s multi-instrumentalist/music director Alan Rankine was gorgeous, his dark, sultry looks making for perfect visual chemistry with Mackenzie’s pale, vaguely aristocratic cast. “Malcolm Ross and I went to see the first-ever Associates gig in Edinburgh at the Aquarius Club,” recalls Haig. “They looked amazing. They all had red silk shirts on. We started to become friends because Josef K and Associates played together so many times. Billy became my absolute soul mate, off his head but in a good way.”
Before the Associates, Rankine and Mackenzie earned a good living as members of cabaret ensemble Mental Torture. At their hotel residencies they performed campy remakes of showbiz standards (“Shadow of Your Smile” became “Shadow of My Lung”) and original songs such as the Rocky Horror–like “Not Tonight Josephine.” Shortly aft
er they’d first met, Mackenzie moved in with Rankine and they started writing loads of songs. “Bill was a fizzing mental flatmate,” says Rankine. “One time he absentmindedly put the plastic kettle on the gas oven and it melted all over the cooker.” Mackenzie buzzed with a sort of innate speediness. “You could always tell there was something unsettled deep within him. Bill could never just switch off, unless it was watching a wildlife documentary on TV. He saw animals as pure, having this grace and nobility he admired, something he didn’t see in humans. With animals, there was no agenda, no bullshit.”
Rankine and Mackenzie decided to give up entertaining middle-aged hotel patrons and have a stab at full-blown art pop. As the Associates, they developed a sound based around their mutual appreciation for the more eccentric end of glam (Roxy Music, Sparks), disco, and movie scores. “We shared a massive love of the grandeur of film soundtracks,” says Rankine. “We cataloged the whole thing, worked out what the composers were doing to play on people’s emotions with no lyrics, and then we put those tricks and that language into what we were doing. We threw in everything but the kitchen sink. When we recorded, we never had enough time or tracks.”
Both Rankine and Mackenzie shared the view that during the progressive-rock era of 1967 to 1975, the art of classic song craft had died, having been smothered by exhibitionistic instrumental virtuosity. Ironically, Rankine was one of the postpunk era’s great guitarists. “There was a definite period around 1979–81 where, because of the setup in bands—just guitar, bass, drums, vocal—it was the guitarist who virtually carried the can for all the sound textures in the group,” says Rankine. “I was just trying to use the most basic effects, like the Roland Space Echo turned up full, to make the biggest sounds I possibly could, just to back up the grandeur of what Bill was trying to do vocally. You’ve got to remember, he had no backing vocals harmonizing with him. I tried to make a wall of sound without sounding like punk thrash. Postpunk was all about the creeping back in of degrees of subtlety, giving the song a chance to breathe.”
The Associates’ sound mixed postpunk modernism (the ice-swirl spires of Rankine’s guitar) and the more postmodern traits of New Pop. In the Associates’ case, that meant flashbacks to the stylized romance of bygone forms such as prewar torch songs, postwar musicals, Sinatra-style crooners, and existentialist balladeer Scott Walker’s orchestrated solo albums. Mackenzie’s towering vocals conjured up a lost era when the malady of love was expressed in epic proportions, when singers luxuriated in grief. “There was a hell of a Germanic thing going on in our music too,” says Rankine. “Billy got that from Kraftwerk. He liked the starkness. A lot of Bill’s vocal melodies are not rhythmic. They’re stately, they’ve got a dignity to them. He was very conscious that he didn’t want to get into things that were too obviously rhythmic, because that would have been too Americanized. It’s only in retrospect, when you’ve got a whole body of work, that you notice, ‘Wait a minute, how come we haven’t got one song that’s really groovy, and with some overt sexuality to it?’”
And yet the music was erotic in its textured sensuousness, while Mackenzie was nothing if not a highly sexual being. “It’s the weirdest thing. I knew Bill was gay from the moment I met him in 1976, but it really didn’t cross my mind again,” says Rankine. “When we were recording, Bill would sometimes disappear from the studio for six hours at a time and I’d think to myself, maybe he’s off walking around getting ideas for lyrics or just clearing his head. But for all I know he was out cruising for six hours!” Mackenzie was actually more omni-sexual than “gay” in any strictly defined sense. Or as Rankine puts it, “He’d shag anything with a pulse! But the serious side of that was that this was a guy who was constantly questioning himself. He was striving for the third sex.” Mackenzie himself confessed, “I’m the type of person who sees beyond genders. I don’t have many emotional boundaries or hang-ups about who I like, where I like, when I like…. I can swing with the best of them.”
For their self-released debut single, the Associates covered Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging.” Their version came out in late 1979, only months after the original left the charts. As a way of announcing themselves to the world, it neatly combined hubris and homage, simultaneously sparring with and paying tribute to Bowie, one of the biggest influences on Mackenzie’s vocal style. The single caught the ear of Fiction Records, the New Wave subsidiary of Polydor and home of the Cure. In August 1980, just as the music press buzz about Scotland was building, Fiction released the debut Associates album, The Affectionate Punch. The striking cover image showed Mackenzie and Rankine as athletes hunched together at the start of a running track. It was a “clean,” healthy, faintly Nietzschean image expressing the singer’s belief that music, bodily movement, and physical fitness were closely related. “Bill had been a very good runner, I had been a very good tennis player,” recalls Rankine. “So that imagery was related to trying to be…not superior exactly, but rising above the shit and nonsense of rock ’n’ roll and the music business.”
The Affectionate Punch’s windswept never-neverpop garnered a warm critical reception, but sales of the album were modest, and the Associates quickly parted company with Fiction. Mackenzie’s and Rankine’s master plan for 1981 was to make their mark with six singles released in swift succession via the label Situation Two, an imprint of Beggar’s Banquet. Mackenzie announced in Melody Maker, “1981 is going to be the year of singles. [Singles] are a lot more fun and disposable and they’ve got an air of excitement about them.” The singles plan was also a bit of a scam. Now living in London, the Associates desperately needed income. In addition to Mackenzie and Rankine, there was also bassist Mike Dempsey and drummer John Murphy to support. They had wrangled money out of a publishing company to record demos, ostensibly to send to major labels, and used the funds to book ultracheap graveyard shift sessions at a studio. “Nine P.M. Sunday night until nine A.M. Monday morning, only a hundred pounds,” says Rankine. In a fever of chemically enhanced creativity, the Associates went into the studio every Sunday night for ten weeks and worked until nine in the morning. The substantial difference between what the recordings cost and what Situation Two paid for the singles enabled the group to live handsomely. “I must stress there’s nothing illegal about what we were doing!” says Rankine. “It’s just that we weren’t telling Situation Two we were making the singles so cheaply. So it felt like a scam to us.”
The coproducer of the Situation Two singles, Flood (who would later work with Depeche Mode and U2) has spoken of “the element of chaos” surrounding the sessions. Rankine and Mackenzie “were full-on, just hyper-creative and a good laugh. They were pretty fueled and go-faster on the sessions and a lot of ridiculous things went on.” Avid but naïve consumers of drugs, they once ended up in the hospital after recklessly snorting seven grams of speed (they thought it was actually one gram of cocaine). “We were just about dead,” Mackenzie told Melody Maker. “It was the first time I’d taken speed and I didn’t know anything about it. We just seriously overdosed. I was a virgin, pharmaceutically. Freakin’ out, man!” Rankine recalls the two of them being in the same hospital room wired up to EKG monitors for four days. “Bill was opposite me, and me opposite him, so I could see his heart rate readout. And when his went to one hundred fifty-eight, mine would go up in a panic attack. And when he saw my readout, his would go up even further. It was just a vicious circle. Consequently our balls shrank up inside our bodies and our knobs were the size of walnuts.”
The music that the Associates produced during these chemical-addled sessions was psychedelic, not in any literal, flashback-to-1967 way, but in its pursuit of mutated sounds, saturated textures, and unusual instrumentation. “We did things like ‘balloon guitar’ where you fill a balloon with water until it’s the size of a fairly small breast, and then get feedback out of your amp and modulate it by wiggling the balloon directly on the strings,” recalls Rankine. “We got into glockenspiel, xylophones, vibraphone, but using them in a manic way that hadn’t
been done before. We also did vocal treatments. ‘Kitchen Person’ has Bill singing down the long tubing off a vacuum cleaner, while on ‘White Car in Germany,’ some of the vocals were literally sung through a greaseproof paper and a comb!”
One of the Associates’ greatest songs, “White Car in Germany” taps into the un-American “Europe Endless”–ness of Kraftwerk and Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. Mackenzie operatically declaims cryptic lines such as “Walk on eggs in Munich” and “Düsseldorf’s a cold place/Cold as spies can be” over a metronomic march rhythm. There was definitely something Old World about the Associates’ 1981 singles, an ancien régime atmosphere of fading grandeur. “Q Quarters,” another Associates classic, sounds like Hapsburg dub. Its furtive rhythm, broken balalaika riff, echoing footsteps, and dank electronic atmospheres conjure cold war scenarios redolent of The Third Man and The Ipcress File: partitioned cities, deportations, informers, and double agents. “Ooh, that’s a dark song,” says Rankine. “I’ve heard dogs howl to ‘Q Quarters,’ run out the room and cover their heads with their paws! Bill just let rip with the imagery. The line ‘Washing down bodies seems to me a dead-end chore’ comes from his grandma, who had worked in the morgue during the Second World War.”
Beginning in April 1981 and ending eight months later, the run of six singles received rave reviews but none got anywhere near the charts. Yet gathered together on the compilation album Fourth Drawer Down (the title referred to the place the group kept the herbal sedative pills that helped them achieve a warm, pleasantly fuzzy comedown after their manic Sunday-night sessions), the Associates’ 1981 output added up to an astonishing body of work. Mackenzie and Rankine were dissatisfied, though. “At the beginning of last year I thought it was going to be the year of singles,” Mackenzie recollected in an early 1982 interview. “And it was. The thing with our singles was that they got peeled off the turntable halfway through! We want to keep our singles on the turntable this year.” The Associates’ ambition wasn’t going to be sated by being critical darlings and cult favorites. They wanted to be the Bowie or Roxy of the eighties.
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