How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (10 page)

A Postcard act that definitely felt second fiddle were Aztec Camera, who were the first act to leave the label. The band, more or less a solo vehicle for the songwriting and guitar prodigy, seventeen-year-old Roddy Frame, released two singles on Postcard in 1981, ‘Just Like Gold’ and ‘Mattress of Wire’. Both showcased Frame’s talents as a songwriter and a precocious arranger and guitarist. Such refined talent in a teenager didn’t go unnoticed and Frame didn’t have to look far to find new home. Travis, clearly seeing the potential that he thought had been lacking in ‘Blue Boy’, instantly transferred Aztec Camera to Rough Trade and Seymour Stein, as was his wont, picked up the North American rights for Sire. Australia’s Go Betweens followed suit and quickly joined Aztec Camera on Rough Trade, where, in a way Horne would doubtless approve of, if through
speed-gritted
teeth, both bands formed the vanguard of Rough Trade’s first push for mainstream crossover growth.

Burying his head away from Postcard’s unmanaged finances, Horne realised that his hand-crafted stable of artists had a future
that might not involve him. Whatever the state of Postcard’s
non-existent
accounts, the speed with which events had turned was remarkable. Not only had the bands been through the white heat of Postcard’s rapid trajectory – ‘Josef K played our first and last gig in 1981,’ says Ross – Horne’s ideas were being repeated.

A new generation of Scottish bands had quickly fallen in line with the Postcard version of confidence and pop music. ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’ had set new groups of teenagers on a path that would take them further, on major-label budgets, than any of the Postcard bands had managed.

‘I didn’t really pay much attention to Altered Images or any of those bands at the time,’ says Ross. ‘When I first saw them, they really wanted to be the Banshees. Then the idea Edwyn and Bob Last both had, of validating pop music – suddenly the penny dropped for them and they went from these black-clad Goths to pastel-shaded pop.’

Maxwell noticed Horne becoming less assured as events started to turn against Postcard. ‘Edwyn was a great foil for Alan, because Edwyn was a real quick-decision maker for Postcard,’ says Maxwell. ‘Edwyn was very decisive and trusted his instincts and judgement implicitly and was quite happy to stand or fall by it, which Alan wasn’t really. Postcard was very introspective. They were terribly down on themselves most of the time.’

Orange Juice, long courted by the majors, considered leaving Postcard. ‘Alan went on with Postcard in a desultory way,’ says Collins. ‘First to go was Aztec Camera, because he didn’t look after them properly and so Postcard more or less stopped. None of us realised what we had with Postcard.’

‘You look back and think, God, the label could have really gone on to establish itself, but it wasn’t to be,’ says Ross. ‘The original plan just before the label folded was for an Orange Juice LP to come out, then an Aztec Camera LP.’ The one album Horne
managed to release on Postcard was Josef K’s debut,
The Only Fun in Town
. The band had scrapped an earlier attempt at a debut,
Sorry For Laughing. The Only Fun in Town
sounded jaded compared to the band’s rush of singles, as if their energies had been spent keeping up with Horne’s mood swings rather than focusing on making a record. It was released finally in 1981 when Postcard had more or less stopped functioning and the original impetus had faded into the reality of trying to run a small business.

‘If Alan had released
The Only Fun in Town
and waited for the royalties to come in, Postcard could have gone on to become a Factory, Mute or Domino,’ says Ross. ‘Alan had no business sense; he was great at talking to people and promoting it when he was in the right mood. But he never kept proper accounts, so in the end you had to keep an eye on things to make sure the money came through. To get our money back for the Josef K album we had to go to Rough Trade to get all the sales figures to work it out. Alan would sell a few records then he’d have the money in his back pocket. It was all very chaotic.’

Orange Juice and Horne were as argumentative and
combustible
as ever and struggling to agree on the next move. ‘Steven Daly wanted to go to a major,’ says Collins. ‘There was a lot of confusion, mainly because of the fighting that went on, which was a constant stream of backbiting and bitching. It was the bitchiest label you could ever have imagined.’

The demise of Postcard didn’t go unnoticed. Among its many supporters in the press,
The Face
, which had launched within a month of Postcard, had covered the label and bands in depth and, in Orange Juice’s forward-looking mixing of styles, recognised a kindred spirit. The magazine covered the label’s end with a feature that assessed the impact the loss of Postcard would have on the early Eighties pop landscape:

With Orange Juice the last to leave, Horne now found himself in the invidious position of having started a cultural revolution that he had no say in, let alone control of. He also had very little to show for his efforts.

Horne bravely talked up the dissolution as only he knew how, insisting the next generation of Postcard signings would be joining Orange Juice in licensing their releases to whichever major was best suited to their needs. The Postcard grinning cat logo would, Horne assured anyone who would listen, take pride of place. ‘I think the independent thing was going to kill us if we’d kept on trying to plug away at it. We’d have ended up being the guinea pigs to try and break the system and it would probably have broken us.’ If Horne couldn’t admit it to himself, he had made a painfully accurate assessment of Postcard’s fate.

With no cash flow and reluctant to try his luck in the London industry, Horne had nevertheless dreamed up the next phase of Postcard in his head. Along with the upbeat Celtic pop of the Bluebells and a pianist neighbour of his, Malcolm Fisher, whose Postcard releases were to be credited as The French Impressionists, Horne had intended to release a single by the Jazzateers, a young Glasgow band whose quiffed lead singer Paul Quinn had a rich, almost Vegas-era Elvis baritone, and a striking stage presence to match. The Jazzateers came to nothing, releasing a posthumous single on Rough Trade they had recorded for Horne. Quinn regrouped and quickly turned the band into Bourgie Bourgie, one of the many bands swept
up in the major-label A&R rush to Glasgow that saw them alongside Altered Images, Del Amitri, the Lone Wolves and the Bluebells, pushed towards the charts with varying degrees of success. Bourgie Bourgie managed only two singles before being dropped. Their second single, ‘Careless’, featured a highly entertaining video, bearing all the hallmarks of Horne’s dry wit, in which the band, monochrome and dressed like extras in a lost Jacques Tati movie (from his hitherto unknown Glaswegian pop period), escape from a mental hospital.

In Paul Quinn Horne was sure he could see a route back to the entry point he’d secured with Postcard. ‘Alan was thinking about Paul Quinn all the time,’ says Collins. ‘He was trying to get Paul Quinn’s career on the go. Alan Horne basically kept saying to me, “You can’t sing, you should be Paul’s whipping boy, you should just give up, get used to it.”’

Collins and Orange Juice signed to Polydor and moved down to London and were duly followed by Quinn and Horne, who entertained vague thoughts of approaching the majors but whose confidence was in bits. Grace Maxwell, whose home had become something of a headquarters for the dispersed Postcard family in London, witnessed Horne and Collins’s attempts to find Horne a new direction and deal. ‘All Alan wanted was the fun of the sparring partner,’ says Maxwell, ‘and that was the meaning of life, really, to Alan. Edwyn said, “Phone up Roger Ames at London and ask him to give you a label.” Edwyn did an Alan impersonation, Alan then had a meeting with Roger and, lo and behold, he ends up with a new label, Swamplands. Orange Juice were in Polydor and Alan was next door down in the basement with London Records and the rallying call at that time was, “Transfer to Swamplands, transfer to Swamplands.”’

Swamplands released even fewer records than Postcard. Horne, having secured a deal, was determined to regroup in
London and enjoy himself in fine style, with his own office at the heart of the West End’s music business. London Records A&R department was run by Roger Ames, an executive with a degree of creativity and mischief that was lacking in many of his contemporaries. Scoring hits with the likes of Bananarama, Bronski Beat and Blancmange, London was quite possibly the oddest environment for Horne to find himself in, and one in which he duly thrived. Thrived, that is, by equipping his office in his own inimitable style and spending as little time as possible at work. ‘Alan had an office and a salary and all of that’, says Collins, ‘along with a dentist’s chair and futons, at the point when futons were very exciting.’

Rather than running around town trying to sign up the freshest new faces on the block, Horne proved his A&R credentials by more or less reconfiguring the Postcard stable on Swamplands. Of its
ten-odd
releases, Swamplands featured either Orange Juice alumni – James Kirk with ‘Memphis’ and Paul Quinn, who along with Collins, in Horne’s most overt tribute to his influences released an excellent twangy version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ – or the former competition, such as the Lone Wolves, whose singer James King had previously released tracks on Fast Product, as had the Fire Engines’ Davey Henderson and Russell Burn, who now called themselves, somewhat optimistically, Win.

With Altered Images, the Bluebells, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions all making sparkling post-Orange Juice pop a going concern at Radio 1 and on
Top of the Pops
, Horne’s timing to relocate his Caledonian pop stable to London could not have been better.

Horne’s main problem, apart from not turning up at the office, was an inability to make decisions and, perhaps more profoundly, to make a clean break with the Postcard agenda of non-stop critiquing and thinking on one’s feet. ‘The logo for Swamplands
was a black leopard, which was meant to be a grown-up version of the Postcard cat,’ says Maxwell. ‘For ever onwards, if Alan made something he’d say, “Is this any good, it’s shit isn’t it?” and he kept doing it and Roger Ames cut him a lot of slack. Roger Ames was an interesting guy, not your average music business guy at all and he thought Alan was a talent. But they had fights. Alan loved having Roger to bounce off, but Roger was in despair with him and would run around shouting, “Horne, Horne!”’

But if Horne was struggling to make a second chance in the music industry work, he certainly hadn’t lost his way with a bon mot. ‘Alan gave Roger Ames a hairdresser’s name,’ says Collins. ‘He called him “Roger of London” and, of course, Roger loved it.’

Ames soon tired of justifying Horne’s presence to his superiors and Swamplands was shut down with a stillborn film project,
The Punk Rock Hotel
, that had been fermenting in Horne and Quinn’s consciousness, slowly gathering dust as it turned into another lost artefact of the wider Postcard legend. ‘It was Alan’s pretend project,’ says Maxwell. ‘He was always going to make this film called
Punk Rock Hotel
and it had a theme tune which was brilliant.’

Collins and Orange Juice were themselves finding life on a major label no less perplexing than Horne. Their A&R at Polydor, Malcolm Dunbar, was a Scot who had signed another bookish songwriter who had tried and failed to ingratiate himself with Horne, Lloyd Cole. Whereas Orange Juice’s debut album
You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever
, barely troubled the charts, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ debut
Rattlesnakes
had gone Top Twenty and become a halls-of-residence staple. Postcard-type music was selling, but none of it was on Postcard. ‘Malcolm Dunbar fell out of love with us’, says Collins, ‘and he liked Lloyd Cole. He liked anything but us by the end of it.’

*

‘Polydor didn’t know what to do with Orange Juice,’ says Malcolm Ross, who had, after a brief period with the band as a
five-piece
, replaced James Kirk on guitar, along with Zeke Manyika replacing Daly on drums. ‘The contract we had with them meant they couldn’t really do anything without our approval,’ he says, ‘so it was all a bit hard.’

For Orange Juice, having the final say over their releases meant their wry attention to detail from the Postcard era was maintained. On the sleeve to the
Rip It Up
album the band changed the name of their record company from Polydor to Holden Caulfield International. In the video for the ‘Rip It Up’ single, the band’s customary raffish debonair style is scrubbed up to match the state-of-the-art studio set. Collins, McClymont, Manyika and Ross duly mince around signature high-end, early Eighties MTV production values: a rotating back projection shifting around them in their futuristic playground.
Intercut
, with the band lip-syncing, are scenes of all four members wandering on Regent Street on a wet and grey January afternoon. Dressed uniformly in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses, the band strut about the pavement as if in Palm Springs. And should anyone fail to understand quite where they were coming from, in the final scene, Collins, Manyika, Ross and McClymont all don wetsuits, flippers and snorkels and try, unsuccessfully, to gain access to a wholesale shop in Chinatown dressed as frogmen.

The video perfectly captures Orange Juice’s position as they valiantly tried to negotiate a major-label career on their own terms: capable of genuine chart pop success, but too intelligent a band to take Eighties pop life seriously. ‘We wanted the video to be really bizarre,’ says Ross. ‘The person making it was trying to humour us, but really they were just trying to make what Polydor wanted, which was to have something that could be shown on TV.’