Showing posts with label New Wave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Wave. Show all posts

Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice: New Wave Romantics on Postcard Records

"We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time."--Edwyn Collins in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds 

Orange Juice were a post-punk outfit from Scotland early 1980s. A New Wave band into reading. Proto-New Romantic British pop in an indelibly Scottish jangle pop indie record label style. Edwyn Collins' style, OJ's nerdy Lothario front guy. Sort of Brian Ferry as a "New Puritan." And another post-punk vocal original. 

Orange Juice were the feature band on Postcard Records, a Glasgow indie label that put out 12 singles and an album between 1979 and 1981. The album featured label mates Josef K, named after a character in Kafka's The Trial, and true to form sounding like Gang of Four agit-funk with a literary bent. 

Postcard were dedicated in general to "The Sound of Young Scotland" with a romantic literary bent, in spite of or because the label's boss, Alan Horne, was something of a parochial Spinal Tap-like eccentric petty tyrant band manager type. Postcard also put out records by Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens (notably not Scottish) and for a few years there were a promising post-punk enterprise from the north country of Great Britain. 

Orange Juice joined The Undertones on tour in the fall of 1980. What a hot double-bill that would have been!

At any rate, after one good album, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982), a couple more iffier album propositions, pioneering the C86 jangle pop sound but unable to score the chart hits they wanted, the OJ's called it quits in 1985 but Edwyn Collins finally scored a couple of proper Top 40 hits in the 1990s as a solo artist. Here's one:  

"The Magic Piper (Of Love)," Edwyn Collins (1997)



"Vaporized," X-15 (1981)

 


First song on Seattle Syndrome Volume One (1981), a compilation of local bands representing an awkward post-punk moment in local history. X-15 actually formed in Bellingham, a college town a couple hours north. But they were a thing at Gorilla Gardens, an underground club in Seattle in the '80s. The collection covers punk, post-punk, New Wave, No Wave, and various electronic art party experiments. "Vaporized" sets the bar high as the opening track: Bowiesque New Wave punk rock with a crazy-wild glam-punk thespian-jock vocal. Shoulda coulda been a big chart hit, up there with The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1979) or the Vapors' "Turning Japanese (1980). Nonetheless, has the esteemed honor of kicking off in style a period compilation of various artists, probably hated at the time by the hardcore punk bands, but holds up well if you ask me: Nerdy, funky, funny, some proto-Goth, some New Wave noir, hot and cool. But, anyway you slice it, "Vaporization" is a peak. 

PRT