What Was The Thing About Josef K?

A new biography prompts a reappraisal of the cult Edinburgh group

Josef K’s second last concert; at Valentino’s, Edinburgh. Photo: Alastair McKay

Apple bush, apple tree, back to eternity. 

I’ve been thinking, I’ve been wondering. 

What was the thing about Josef K?

What was their influence? 

Was their contribution to Postcard Records underrated? Where do they fit in? Did they ever fit in, or was not fitting in their whole thing? 

I’ve been thinking. 

Josef K were bookish, but not uniquely so. There was a lot of bookishness around in the time and place of Josef K - the Edinburgh of 1980ish - and the foremost musical writers of the time were always shoehorning half-digested theory into their reviews. 

I’ve been wondering. About aloofness, because there was nobody cooler than Josef K. That coolness wasn’t just about haircuts - Josef K had those - but distance and alienation. They had rules, because in the uncertain dawn of the thing that wasn’t yet called post-punk, a distrust of show business was a given. Josef K’s answer to this was to play no encores, and to say almost nothing. Hopped-up on Brechtian head-mash, masking shyness, they abandoned talking altogether, employing taped introductions to their songs. 

I’ve been dreaming about Josef K, and how different they were from Orange Juice, though they shared bills and a record label - even a record sleeve - and had a secret yen for disco, and the neurotic chopping of funk guitars. It’s a given now, though it wasn’t then, that the important musical revolution of the 1970s took place in the discotheque. Back then, only girls and guitarists admitted to liking Chic, but girls are always right. The boys’ way of liking disco was to lurk in a darker corner of the building, so - as well as Chic - those splintered guitars were coloured by a spectrum of Jameses (Brown, White and the Blacks, Blood Ulmer) while also shading the shadows of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. You can talk about Talking Heads, and you should, but Television’s Marquee Moon is a box of endless darkness, a Rubik’s cube on which all the squares are midnight blue. 

I’ve been thinking about pop stars, and how the whole 1980s music press hosted a great wave of scene-making in which the currency was derision, and the joy of music was subjugated to the ego of the writer. The Facebook page for fans of Postcard Records recently served up a deranged review of Josef K’s first and only album, The Only Fun In Town, and it reads like something created by that predecessor of artificial intelligence, accidental stupidity. Inhabiting the role of Critic As Idiot is Dave McCullough of Sounds, whose job it was to be less impressive than Paul Morley in the NME. He finds The Only Fun In Town to be “too conscious … and in a way not conscious enough.” The record has “an impossible and impassable inscrutability.” He quotes Alain Robbe-Grillet to no good effect, and concludes his one-star review with the meaningless observation: “Kafka would be ashamed, not to say laughing.”

There is a new book about Josef K by Johnnie Johnstone. It is called Through The Crack In The Wall, and it delivers a jolt of electricity to the myth of the group. I haven’t stopped playing Josef K records since I read it, and there can be no greater compliment. What’s refreshing is Johnstone’s perspective. He treasures the thing he missed, tries to unpick the mysteries of Josef K, and creates even more. To give one example, he compares Josef K’s funereal anthem, It’s Kinda Funny, to an Orange Juice song, not something that has occurred before. I hear it now as a close cousin of Orange Juice’s In A Nutshell with that tremulous uncertain chorus, when previously it sounded like an existential ballad in the style of Joy Division. 

Here too, there is a surprise. Johnstone quotes singer Paul Haig explaining that It’s Kinda Funny was a reaction to the death of Ian Curtis.  Yet Haig has also stated the opposite. “The only thing that makes me think of Joy Division is the bassline,” Haig told me a few years ago. “When I was doing the bass-line I felt I was influenced by Hooky and Joy Division. I wasn’t thinking of Ian Curtis at all. It might have been in there, subconsciously. But I certainly didn’t sit down to write a song about that.” 

Does it matter? Not so much. These songs have a life beyond the author’s intention. Some listeners may find it useful to hear a tribute to Curtis.  This interpretation prompts a further speculation: what would Josef K have sounded like if they has been produced by Martin Hannett? Haig’s career after Josef K included Something Good, the best hit record New Order never had. There’s a kinship there. 

Then again, Paul Morley, the rich man’s Dave McCullough, got the electronic band Propaganda to record the Josef K song Sorry For Laughing, and the result was a pudding of 1980s’ over-production. The mystery of the original song, it’s scratchy energy, the blunt poetics of the words - are obliterated because by that point in the 1980s, music had grown louder, fatter, more boastful. There is a hollowness to Josef K’s Sorry For Laughing. Propaganda’s effort is merely empty.  

So. At the launch event for Through A Crack In The Wall at Rough Trade West in London, Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross was asked for the highpoint of his time with the band. He recalled a gig supporting Edinburgh comrades Scars at the Venue in Victoria, London. The first song was to be Alice Cooper’s, Apple Bush, with Malcolm’s wife Syuzen Buckley on vocals, and the band lined up onstage, unsure of what to expect. “The curtains opened,” Ross recalls, “and everybody was packed down the front, because we were the support  band. Everyone started cheering, and we all just looked at each other like, fucking hell…  right, this is … yeah. That was just a great moment.” 

“Apple bush, apple tree

Back to eternity

Cut you a path with a chance you may fall.”