The story of Orange Juice: a song that arrives in an adolescent rush and leaves in a hurry

“I liked disco, I liked the O’ Jays. I liked The Isley Brothers' Summer Breeze. Sheila B Devotion's Spacer. Bowie, glam, silly pop rock. Everything apart from heavy metal." - Edwyn Collins

Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice, Hotel Metro, Aberdeen, 1981. On the night, Edwyn suggested the eye-patch was the result of a tussle with some neds, though he has also suggested he had conjunctivitis. Photo: Alastair McKay

I had a great time recently at one of Frets Concerts’ special We Could Send Letters nights at the Strathaven Hotel. As very few people know, Orange Juice’s first single, Falling and Laughing was recorded in Strathaven, and - along with Bobby Bluebell (of The Bluebells) - I was given a guided tour of the now empty premises by Douglas MacIntyre, the polymath who runs Frets and the label Creeping Bent, as well as authoring the definitive oral history of Scottish post-punk, Hungry Beat (along with Grant McPhee and Neil Cooper).

The Frets concert was about fanzines. I was privileged to share a stage with Bobby and Jordi (who keeps the DIY tradition alive with her home-made fanzines and trading cards about Scottish pop of a certain vintage). I was there to talk about Alternatives To Valium, so I made a micro-fanzine about Orange Juice, drawn from various interviews I’ve done over the years. It’s in the Hungry Beat oral format. In true post-punk style, I’ve added a couple of bits from the printed edition, which means that both this and that are limited edition collectables. 

The cast list is: Edwyn Collins (singer/guitarist, Orange Juice), Steven Daly (drummer, Orange Juice), David McClymont (bass, Orange Juice), Malcolm Ross (guitarist, Josef K/Orange Juice), Robert Forster (singer/guitarist, The Go-Betweens), Ken McCluskey (singer, The Bluebells). 

Edwyn Collins: “I bought Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Rick Wakeman, and the Six Wives of Henry VIII, in Dundee. My first group, was called Onyx. I was 15, I played the banjo ukulele,  but I got chucked out.  

I got the Burns guitar when I was 16. I got it for £20. A 15 watt WEM amp, a valve amp, with the Burns Nu-Sonic guitar, from the Mad Buyer at the Barras. It sold everything. 

Steven Daly: “The Nu-Sonics were basically a bedroom group rehearsing at the bass player’s house. This is before David McClymont joined. It was Edwyn and James [Kirk], and we had a drummer that we were trying to keep on side. He wasn’t a hippie. He had short hair – but he liked Pink Floyd. We had to promise him that we would go in certain directions that we had no intention of following, cos he was quite a rich kid and had a mini-ballroom set up in his house where we could rehearse. But that didn’t work, so somebody had to play the drums, and that was me. Before that, in the Nu-Sonics, I was singing.” 

Edwyn: “I remember when I was 18 walking along this beach [at Brora in Sutherland], thinking ‘time to develop, that’s not good enough, it’s crap.’ This was the Nu-Sonics. It was sub-standard. I was 17 when I wrote Blue Boy. It’s crude, the chorus is crude, but I was thinking ‘I’m 17, I need to get better than this. Let’s think.’”

David McClymont: “I was in 2nd year doing an illustration course at the printing college in Glasgow and Edwyn had just started. I was disappointed with college – I thought I’d go and meet some fantastically interesting people and it’d change my life. I saw Edwyn carrying a Vox guitar amplifier around college, and I thought ‘I’m gonna have to talk to that guy’. I asked him if he was in a group, and we got talking. I thought this was the kind of person I wanted to meet – because I had come from a small coastal town – Girvan. They were the Nu-Sonics at that point, and their bass player had left, and Edwyn said ‘Do you want to be in the group, you probably could be.’ I said ‘I don’t really play any instrument’ – but I had played around on my brother’s guitar, so I knew basic chords. Edwyn was like: ‘That’s all you need, I’ll show you’” 

Edwyn: “I liked disco, I liked the O’ Jays. I liked everything. The Isley Brothers, for example, Summer Breeze.  Sheila B Devotion, Spacer, produced by Chic. Bowie, glam, silly pop rock. Everything apart from heavy metal.”

David: “I’d come to college with longish hair,. Punk didn’t really mean anything to me. I was going to Todd Rundgren concerts. There was nobody that looked like Edwyn that I had ever seen. He looked like a fish out of water. He looked like someone that was really interesting, who it would be great to know. He was wearing a pair of straight grey flannel pants, like you’d wear at school, a pair of black Oxford shoes, which nobody wore, and I think he was wearing a tartan shirt and an anorak with a hood. And he was tall and lanky, and he really stood out. People would stare at Edwyn. There was a lot of aggression, which I think he fed off and enjoyed. He enjoyed being different. Him being in a band – I think he did see it as quite confrontational, and at the time it was. Just wearing a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses was enough to get your head kicked in.”

Edwyn: “I would get chased in Sauchiehall Street for wearing straight trousers. In the 1970s in Glasgow, unless you were over 50 or a pensioner everyone was wearing bags or flares. It was enough to wear straight trousers or drainpipes to be called a punk rocker, and have shortish hair. The way we saw punk was slightly elitist. We were always looking for the next thing, and it seemed to be moving incredibly fast. Once you got identikit punk bands in Glasgow, we had to do as much as possible to distance ourselves.” 

Steven: “We were pop fans, without any pretension or artifice. Edwyn went to discos when he was in school. Me and James were much more isolated – what would have been indie kids ten years later – reading NME. But Edwyn definitely went to clubs in Glasgow where people would have razors in their shoe and all that good shit. He went out there and bought George McCrae, Rock Your Baby. Me and James had more of a rock sensibility, but liked a lot of pop music.”

Malcolm Ross: “We were hanging about waiting to go to a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert at Clouds in Edinburgh. It was when the Scars supported them – so we got there really early and were hanging about outside, and fell into conversation with Steven Daly.  We swapped phone numbers, and a few days later I got a phone call from Edwyn – saying what groups do you like? It turned out we liked the same groups – the Lovin' Spoonful, Television, the New York Dolls, and Edwyn said, well we’re doing a gig at the Glasgow Art college, do you want to come through and do it with us? Back then you had the pre-punk bands that were playing Stones-style rock, or you had the punk bands, who were using fuzzboxes, In Glasgow you had the synthesiser bands,  but we (Josef K and OJ) both had a clean guitar sound and were using the Velvets primarily as a blueprint.”

Orange Juice, Hotel Metro, Aberdeen, 1981. Clockwise from Top left: James Kirk, Edwyn Collins, Steven Daly, David McClymont. Photos: Alastair McKay

Steven: “Chic and Sister Sledge played back to back nights in Glasgow and I could only afford to go to one. I think it was Chic. I went with a friend of mine, and he said a little while ago that we were the only straight people in the audience. I don’t remember it that way, but he’s probably right. 

“Edwyn could actually play that stuff on the guitar. There’s a direct connection between Live 69, the Velvets, and Nile Rodgers’ guitar. If you play Rock and Roll, or some of the Velvets extended tracks, the rhythm section isn’t as powerful as Chic but if you listen to the way the guitar is taut, and gets stretched out on this groove – that’s very much like Chic, a kind of hypnotic things. Edwyn could straddle that. He was the best musician of all of us. What was that song? Yes Sir I Can Boogie, by Baccara! There was a sort of meta thing in it, where it says, “Yes sir, already told you in the first verse” and I think Edwyn used that. 

David: “The flat where we set up Postcard was my flat initially and Alan Horne ended up moving in there.  I lived with him in the flat for a while. Alan was great. He was the kind of person you could love and hate 50 times in the same day. He was fantastic and then on other times he could be a monster. 

Steven: “We were pretty fully formed aesthetically before we met Horne. He had a few records at the fringes that we might not have liked. He was more of a Bowie gentleman. And he was running a reggae night at a club with a friend of his. It was a money making thing: they were students, but they looked down on students, and this was a way to rip them off. It was a bit of a prank. But Alan had those records that filled in a blank. Also his flatmate, Brian  Superstar, had a lot of records, and he had the one video player among anyone we knew. He also came up with ‘The Campaign For Real Rock’. Brian was very jaded West End Glasgow with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. ‘Of course, the Campaign for Real Rock aren’t going to like that’, which Edwyn used as a song title 20 years later.”  

David: “Alan was a figurehead who was hugely encouraging to the group. He could be the person who would just keep pushing on and say, no we’ll do it ourselves. Before we did our first single, we were saying ‘Why don’t we put out our first single on Zoo records?’ cos they had Echo and the Bunnymen, and Alan was so dismissive. He was like, we’ll do it, and we can do it better than Zoo. In that way he was more of a Svengali figure, but it’s complicated because Alan was a very complex person. He could drive Edwyn crazy. He could be hugely encouraging to Edwyn, but then he could also put him down a lot.  The whole dynamic within the group was insane – we’re talking about a group of the most dysfunctional people ever.  

“Alan spent all the money from the profits of the first Postcard single on fish and chips and knickerbocker glories in the local café.” 

Robert Forster (The Go_Betweens): When we met him, his two heroes were Andy Warhol and Malcolm McLaren, both myth-makers, and that's the way he was. There was an article that was done on us for the Glasgow afternoon paper. They sent a photographer around, and it was just all of us on Alan’s front steps. I was standing there with Orange Juice, and him. The photographer was just about to take the photo then suddenly, Alan from nowhere whipped a tambourine out and put it right in front of his face exactly like Warhol on the first Velvets album. It was amazing. I'd never seen that tambourine before, and there it was, bang in front of his face.

Ken McCluskey (The Bluebells): On meeting Mr Horne for the first time he asked in his overtly camp tone, ‘Which part of Easterhouse are you neds from?’ We had a laugh working with those guys though, and they put us on to a whole bunch of great music. We used to hang around the Postcard flat in West Princes Street. It was an exciting place to be with people making posters and folding record sleeves and listening to Chic or Stax and Nothern Soul records on repeat. Alan and Edwyn were the main driving forces and were three or four years older than us wee guys. If Horne was Andy Warhol to Edwyn’s Lou Reed, Postcard was the Factory.”

Edwyn: “I was quite shy and introspective – as was Alan Horne. Alan grossly over compensated – what he liked about punk was mean-spirited attitude where he could just slag off everyone.  Because we were slightly savvy we realised we weren’t going to make a huge impact in Glasgow alone. For example we’d go to the Third Eye Centre, at the time of Falling and Laughing, and say ‘Could we play here?’ And the guy who was running the place said ‘Do you have any more material, this is really substandard, you can’t really sing or play. I’d just advise you to go away and practice.’ 

“The Scottish establishment didn’t think there was anything in what we were doing, so we used to commute, or hitch, or Alan Horne would borrow his dad’s Austin Maxi and we would go down to London and we’d just knock on the door of Cosmopolitan, or Sounds, or NME, with our singles, or photocopied press releases, and we’d just have  a little spiel, and we’d give the hard sell. When Falling and Laughing came out, we went to Portland Place, the BBC, and Alan Horne practically demanded to see John Peel face to face. At the time there’d just been the Liverpool thing with Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop explodes, and prior to that the Mancunian thing centred round Factory records, and Alan said to Peel, ‘That’s all over now. Get with the times, move further North to Scotland to hear the future’. It wasn’t all bravado – he used to talk himself into it. He could be very convincing, but Peel said ‘A horrible truculent youth badgered his way into Peel Acres’.”

Steven: “It was driven by enthusiasm. There was no such thing as a career in music in Scotland. We probably had records out when we were playing, out of the kindness of someone who worked there, at the Spaghetti Factory. And that was a big event. All the other bands were there, and they knew, but we all had to be squeezed into this tiny basement restaurant. Preposterous. If you’d been in Manchester you’d have had rose petals thrown at your feet.” 

Edwyn: I was striving for something interesting. I found a guitar, and practised daily for months and years, chord shapes and such like. None of that pop star rubbish. I came from an arty background: Myra and Peter, my mum and dad. I came from an art school tradition. For example, the chorus of Blue Boy, it’s interesting. I did discordant music.”

David: Falling and Laughing, to me is a perfect pop song.  I always felt like we hadn’t quite made it - we knew exactly how we wanted the song to be, but musically we weren’t quite there yet. 

Robert: Every couple of years I go back and I listen to the first four Orange Juice singles. They are just amazing. It’s totally undervalued as well, whenever anyone’s writing any sort of rock history of that period. These four records in terms of their influence, their impact, their beauty, and their brilliance is never really truly recorded.”

Alastair McKay and Bobby Bluebell discuss fanzines, punk and Postcard Records with Tony Fletcher on The Fanzine Podcast.