In the August of 1980, Dave McCullough, a writer on the London music weekly Sounds, travelled north to Glasgow. His destination was 185 West Princes Street, “a derelict tenement block that’s 20 minutes from Glasgow Airport”.

He’d been lured to the city by news of the success of Alan Horne’s Postcard Records label, which had released Falling and Laughing, the debut single by Edwyn Collins’s band, Orange Juice. This was at a time when new Scottish bands were multiplying faster than could be counted: McCullough himself had for months been inundated with cassette tapes by groups such as Positive Noise, Restricted Code, the Alleged, the Flowers, the Fire Engines, Boots For Dancing and Scars.

By the time he arrived in Glasgow, Postcard had released two other singles: Blue Boy, by Orange Juice, and Radio Drill Time, by Edinburgh’s Josef K.

In West Princes Street, McCullough was hugely taken with Postcard, with Horne and Collins. “Orange Juice”, he wrote, “quite simply, must be the most important band to emerge from Scotland since the Skids, and their superb ‘Blue Boy’ (up there, with [Joy Division’s] ‘Love Will [Tear Us Apart]’ and [The Teardrop Explodes’] ‘Treason’ as Year’s Best 45s) matches the achievement of [The Skids’] ‘Charles’. ‘Blue Boy’ is almost folksy, sillily melodic (with 55-year-old men writing in the local papers in awe of it)”.

He also observed of Orange Juice that they were “the most modern of pop bands, they are young, shiny-faced, maddeningly eclectic, they write Real Songs, have a scope that’s larger than any other band I’ve seen, which makes them fall openly into pastiche sometimes; they’re funny, sad, soulful, friendly and influential within their own environs. I can see Orange Juice being a massively successful rock band: I can also sense they would never let that happen, not without a struggle anyway. Orange Juice make me smile and feel good for no obvious reason”.

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A couple of months later, the NME’s Paul Morley, fresh from interviewing Collins and Horne in London, wrote: “Orange Juice compose breathtaking pop that extends the art form still further, and have the look and humour, as well as the songs, to be enormously successful”.

Features such as those by McCullough and Morley encouraged a flow of similar pieces in the music press and helped bring Orange Juice and Postcard to an audience far beyond Glasgow. The label, which adroitly marketed itself as ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’, was an influential part of the city’s music scene in those heady post-punk days.

Orange Juice had started life as the Nu Sonics, a punk group who on the night of January 17, 1978, played Glasgow’s Satellite City, bottom of a bill that also included the reggae group Steel Pulse and a new Glasgow band called Simple Minds. Horne was in the audience that night, and he liked what he heard.

The Nu Sonics shortly changed their name to Orange Juice, and in time, the band took shape, with Collins on vocals/guitar, James Kirk on guitar, David McClymont on bass guitar and Steven Daly on drums. And, as Collins told Morley, they had disparate musical influences.

“I’m interested in all kinds of music, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, disco – I think the O’Jays’ ‘Love Train’ is great”, he said. “David is into Eno and Kraftwerk, who personally I can’t stand. James likes jazz and C&W, his licks are really C&W. When it comes to a group like Creedence [Clearwater Revival], I can just tell intuitively that they were honest and passionate. I think that’s a really good influence, as well as the Velvets.”

“No-one uses C&W at all”, he continued. “It’s ethnic, it’s good. It’s really accessible. And we’re combining it with a lot of other musical styles. What people don’t seem to realise is that if they take one group as a blueprint and try to emulate that, it won’t work. There are so many influences. How many years of popular music have there been…50? You start listening to everything and that’s how you’re going to start new music coming through”.

The first singles released by Postcard – Falling and Laughing, Blue Boy, Simply Thrilled – all received favourable attention in the music press and led to the band recording sessions for John Peel’s radio show. They also toured with the Undertones.

Edwyn Collins on stage at Ayr as part of the Burns & A’ That festival, 2004(Image: Alister Firth)

The debut album, however, was released not by Postcard but by Polydor, one of the major labels that had expressed an interest in the band.

You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, which was released in early 1982, divided critical opinion at the time; Sounds, in a noticeably self-indulgent review, was dismissive but NME writer Leyla Sanai was much more sympathetic, noting: “On vinyl, the ascent from Postcard to Polydor has been attained with little loss of appeal. You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever displays a variety of moods, surprising in their diversity, some better suited to the OJs than others”.

On their more usual bubbly and optimistic level, she added: “Falling And Laughing, and Upwards And Onwards are typical gems of light modern pop. If these were played on breakfast radio instead of Soft Cell and ABC, maybe some of us would make it to work on time.”

“All in all, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is a surprisingly strong debut, thankfully not overproduced by Adam Kidron”, she concluded. “Orange Juice are still imperfect, but on this LP, captured at their most disciplined, there’s more fizz than flatness, and no sickly aftertaste. Just how Orange Juice should be”.

There is much to enjoy on the album: the fast, choppy guitar work, the propulsive rhythm section, and songs such as Dying Day (one of Collins’s finest for Orange Juice), Untitled Melody, the version of Al Green’s L.O.V.E. Love, and some witty lyrics by Collins, as in Consolation Prize: “I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn’s/ I was hoping to impress/So frightfully camp, it made you laugh/Tomorrow I’ll buy myself a dress”.

It has often been observed in some quarters, however, that the album was in some ways over-produced. In Hungry Beat, his authoritative book about the Scottish independent and underground scene, author and documentary maker Grant McPhee notes that the production added female backing vocalists, keyboards and a brass section into the frame, straightening the edges that had been evident in earlier demos for the album.

Speaking in 2018 to Davie Scott for BBC Radio Scotland’s Classic Scottish Albums series, Collins said flatly: “I think, with a bit more editing, it could have been a far more concise, better album”. In some ways, he added, the cover of the Al Green song was laughable. “It was just a whim,” he said. “I decided that we’d do it. And what we did was we put on the 45 and played along to it in the same key and when it came to do the vocals, it was entirely outwith my range. And I didn’t really care”.

In the same programme, radio presenter Stuart Maconie acknowledges the sense of optimism and charm embedded in Orange Juice’s songs. “There’s a lot to be said for rock music being dissolute and cynical and all those things, but you hear the early Orange Juice records and they are so kind of wonky and beautiful [that] you cannot fail to be charmed by them,” he commented.

Tensions within the band, however, to Kirk and Daly being let go shortly after the release of You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever.

A second album, Rip It Up, was released towards the end of the year. Its title track reached number eight in the UK and in 2018 lent its name to a popular exhibition in Edinburgh on Scottish rock and pop.

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Orange Juice’s decision to move from Postcard to Polydor was one of the reasons that Horne’s project disintegrated. And though the band themselves never became, in David McCullough’s hopeful phrase, “massively successful”, despite enjoying a respectable degree of chart success, critics have in subsequent decades noted indie music’s huge debt to the band.

As the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis once wrote of Orange Juice: “Visibly influenced by the Byrds and Creedence Clearwater Revival at a time when punk still forbade that kind of thing, and in thrall to Chic when most rock bands thought disco sucked, their sound dragged guitar music further from its bluesy macho roots than anyone had ever dared before”. 

Petridis also observed that they wrote “staggeringly brilliant songs” in Falling and Laughing, Dying Day, and Consolation Prize “and singlehandedly, if unwittingly, invented what came to be known as indie music”. Other critics have noted the band’s influence on such Scottish outfits as the Pastels and Franz Ferdinand.

In 2007, the Guardian ran a series on the theme of ‘1,000 albums you need to hear before you die’. Of Orange Juice and that 1982 debut, it said: “The missing link between Buzzcocks and The Smiths, Orange Juice forged a new kind of forlorn, funk-inflected, romantic guitar-pop, with singer Edwyn Collins a new kind of fey, self-debunking male indie frontman. This follow-up to the groundbreaking jangle-singles for the Postcard label was by turns sad and soaring, but always brilliant”.