Orange Juice remained Postcard’s priority, but Horne began filling out the label’s roster with other Scottish talent such as Glasgow’s Aztec Camera and Edinburgh’s Josef K, plus honorary Caledonians the Go-Betweens, who actually hailed from Australia, but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads. Postcard’s sleeves played on tartan patterns and other clichéd Scottish imagery, as if they were a branch of the Scottish Tourist Board. “The Sound of Young Scotland,” Horne called it in a nod to Motown, whose hit factory approach he admired.
Josef K came through Daly, who’d actually quit Orange Juice for a while and started his own label, Absolute. In Edinburgh he’d met Malcolm Ross, guitarist in a band called TV Art. When Daly convinced them that the name was terrible, the group renamed themselves Josef K after the protagonist in Kafka’s
The Trial
. Horne wooed Daly back into the Orange Juice fold by accompanying him on a trip to London to pick up Josef K’s debut single from the pressing plant and take copies to distributors such as Small Wonder. “Orange Juice and Josef K formed a sort of alliance,” says Ross. “They’d support us in Edinburgh, we’d support them in Glasgow.”
Like Orange Juice, Josef K had a clean image (sharp, monochrome suits from thrift stores) and a clean sound. Both groups shared a penchant for the cerebral side of American punk, groups such as Television, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, the Voidoids. “I never saw any of the New York groups as part of rock ’n’ roll, all those moldy old bands with long hair,” says front man Paul Haig. “I much preferred Television’s crisp, clear sound to the blasting of the Clash and the Pistols. Malcolm and I went down to London to see Talking Heads. Nine hours on the bus. Sleeping in a bus shelter. We were half asleep at the actual gig because we were so tired!”
Inspired by
Talking Heads 77
and the brittle clangor of Subway Sect, Josef K tried to get their guitars to sound as “toppy” as they could. Says Ross, “It was just a matter of avoiding distortion and turning the treble up full. We liked playing really fast rhythms, and you needed a really sharp sound for those to work. Using distortion meant you’d lose the effect.” Coiled and keen, barbed and wired, Ross’s and Haig’s guitars caromed off the fastfunk groove churned up by bassist Davy Weddell and drummer Ronnie Torrance. “In the very early days, it was just me playing guitar with Ronnie drumming up in his attic,” says Haig. “Ronnie’d always follow my rhythm guitar and we carried that on into Josef K. He’d never listen to the bass, like drummers are supposed to.” The resulting “strange chemistry” between Torrance’s all-out exuberance and the abrasive flurry of the guitars gave Josef K their frenetic momentum.
Josef K’s disco punk had a similar flustered quality to Orange Juice’s Chic/Velvets rhythm guitar, and Haig’s croon—midway between Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra—was as strikingly un–rock ’n’ roll as Edwyn Collins’s voice, but the overall Josef K sound was harsher and the songs came from a less poptimistic place. Haig was a fragile figure, six feet tall but only 109 pounds. He confesses to being “almost anorexic. I was just depressed and I didn’t eat very much. I’d got obsessed with looking at calories and what I was eating. At that point I was fading away to nothing.” One of Josef K’s best songs, “It’s Kinda Funny,” was inspired by Ian Curtis’s death. “I loved Joy Division and was really freaked out that he could take his own life aged twenty-three,” recalls Haig. “Just the thought of how easy it was to disappear through a crack in the world.” Still, he stresses that “It’s Kinda Funny,” while “not a happy song,” was “saying you don’t have to be depressed about life, you can still laugh about it.”
Throughout the Josef K songbook, Haig sounds high on anxiety, finding a strange, giddy euphoria in doubt. Nourished by an intellectual diet of Penguin Modern Classics and European existentialism, Haig addressed “man’s endless struggle” on songs such as “Sorry for Laughing” (“there’s too much happening”) and “Radio Drill Time” (“we can glide into trance”). On the group’s masterpiece, “Endless Soul,” the singer’s suave croon surfs the fraught glory of Josef K’s guitars as if trying to strike the correct, flattering posture in the face of “the absurdity of being alive in a godless, vacuous universe,” as Haig puts it.
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
use
ful 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 after 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.”