How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (9 page)

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.’

At the end of February 1980, just six weeks after ‘Falling and Laughing’, Postcard released Josef K’s single, ‘Radio Drill Time’ along with the second Orange Juice single ‘Blue Boy’. ‘I don’t think we had any expectations of the original pressing of “Radio Drill Time”,’ says Ross, ‘because “Falling and Laughing” hadn’t really done anything. But when Postcard released “Blue Boy”, the label started to get a lot of attention and none of us had any kind of long-term plan. No one to do with Postcard had any careerist attitude – we were nineteen or twenty years old.’

In early 1980 the brightness and ramshackle flamboyancy of Postcard sounded both vibrant and like something of an intervention. ‘We were outsiders in whatever the music scene was in Scotland,’ says Ross. ‘In Edinburgh you had the guys who did Regular Music who ended up managing Simple Minds. They were kind of old pre-punk guys who’d been social secretaries at their student union and they suddenly realised they could make a lot of money putting on gigs. It was the same in Glasgow, all the established music people there looked down their nose at Postcard and thought they were weird, sort of poofy and crap.
We were always apart from all that; it was great when we started being successful.’

Releasing ‘Radio Drill Time’ and ‘Blue Boy’ together meant that Postcard’s profile had been given a boost. Journalists wanted to talk to the brains behind the operation and Horne delighted in rising to the occasion, settling into the role he felt he was born to play: the erudite hustler looking down his nose at the pop world, just when its dominance is within his grasp. Using the Warholian technique of leaving long gaps before answering a question and distancing himself from the whole interview process altogether, Horne got to work. In a Postcard feature with Paul Morley in
NME
, Horne was introduced as ‘a lad [who] is angry all his waking life’. Ensuring Postcard’s pop ambitions were not to be confused with those of his elder contemporaries, Horne poured scorn on the rest of the independent establishment. According to Morley, Horne was ‘an insolent whizkid equivalent to Wilson, Last and Travis, he has a very grudging respect for Fast, Factory and Rough Trade. [Horne] snarls in disgust at the grubby, hippie state the independent market has degenerated into.’ And Collins, who was interviewed alongside Josef K, was happy to point out the creative differences in Orange Juice, bemoaning his band mate McClymont’s taste. ‘David is into Eno and Kraftwerk,’ he said, ‘who personally I can’t stand’ – dismissing the sacred cows of the post-punk canon with the wave of a hand.

But Horne’s attitude also managed to ruffle the feathers of his own acts. ‘Edwyn and Alan were very close and tight and I got on well with them,’ says Ross. ‘It caused a schism early on in Josef K in a way, because Paul and Alan the drummer didn’t really like Alan Horne.’ Promotional trips to London aside, Horne didn’t like to stray from the comfort zone of West Princes Street. The roles of manager, label boss and band member were all starting to blur as Collins began to realise that it was increasingly difficult, according
to whatever codes and rules he and Horne had dreamt up on any given day, to differentiate between Postcard and Orange Juice. The rest of Postcard’s roster were consequently feeling more than a little disengaged from their label’s ethos and activities. ‘Malcolm Ross and Josef K will always say, “Everybody felt that we were playing second fiddle to Orange Juice,”’ says Collins, ‘and you can understand that, because they definitely were.’

‘Alan and Edwyn did a lot of fighting,’ says Maxwell. ‘They were the front men of Postcard.’ But they continued to spend inordinate amounts of time playing mind games with the idea of what Postcard and Orange Juice really was. ‘They’d say things like, “We want to make records like sheep” – that just sounded mad,’ says Maxwell. ‘You had to have your head in a certain place to understand what they were saying.’