The Ned Wood Archive

Boys stood upon their chairs to make their point of view

In some ways that summer was the end of an era; in some ways it was the beginning of a new age. I come back thinking about the Teardrop’s album and the Bunnymen tour and the Joy Division twelve inch and while I was away, Pall has discovered a new gold dream: the sound of young Scotland. Things were looking up. There was revolution in the air. As if there wasn’t enough magic stuff flying around, even more wonderful rocknroll had emerged.

He’d got into this band called Boots for Dancing. Like I said, this lot were a dance band. They’d been the support for the Human League back in May. I’d thought they’d be the sort of thing Pall would play. And now he’d found them. And now he was playing them. First it wasn’t easy, changing rock and roll and minds. However, it was the sort of stuff everyone started playing a bit later on – like Fire Engines when they took off a few months after. That stuff. Dancing and singing and moving to the grooving. They all came from that centre of musical excellence on the other side of the Meadows. Same as the Gang of Four and the Mekons and the League and the Flowers and Drinking Electricity and the Scars. Pop Aural, formerly known as Fast product. You should collect them all. Boots for Dancing were a mix of various local musos. The sound of young Edinburgh. Various Rezillos came and went. A Josef K. A Flower. That sort of thing. Peel played them too. Of course he did. Lay down the boogie and play that funky music ’til you die.

Then there were the Associates. They were real dance, no punk about it. They were two Dundee lads who met up in Edinburgh. They’d already made a very beautiful, very simple, and very soulful version of Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging that came out in 1979, just after Bowie’s single. I remember Bowie’s track being played when I went up to Edinburgh for the interview, so that was the beginning of May. The Associates version was right after that. Cheeky! It’s criminal but not really surprising that no one heard the Associates’ version at the time. If you see a copy, buy it. It’s worth whatever you have to pay for it.

Then Pall got the album that they released that summer of 1980 while I was away. They were very much a dance band with a suggestion of later Roxy or Bowie – not just Boys Keep Swinging, but the pretentious almost operatic stuff both Ferry and Bowie attempted. What Bowie would maybe sound like if he teamed up with Nile Rodgers. Or probably more like Russ Mael from Sparks to be honest … but Billy McKenzie wasn’t pretentious. He could sing better than any of ’em.

But the best of Pall’s finds, the one I was most jealous of, was Orange Juice – Blue Boy. And he got the blue label copy but I could only ever find the brown label version. Orange Juice were a Glasgow band who eclipsed all of the Edinburgh bands, even Visitors and Flowers. They played a ramshackle mix of styles – a wee bit dance, a wee bit punk, a wee bit Byrds, a wee bit Buzzcocks … more than a wee bit Velvets; tentatively played, tentatively sung, each song different but always recognisable as the mighty OJs. A bit slapdash, a bit anarchic, a bit archaic, but at the same time just right. And so much imagination in the numbers. Not just a melody repeated to death like some of their contemporaries, but bundles of ideas, a neat tune here, a memorable riff there. Loads of invention. And always with Edwyn Collins’ witty tongue in cheek lyrics, both the ridiculous and the sublime, like it’s all a great big massive joke, like he’s cocking a snook at the rest of contemporary culture.

They were on Postcard records which had this great picture of a kitten playing the drums as the label. Josef K were on Postcard too. You gotta get all of that stuff too. They started using the phrase “The Sound of Young Scotland” on the records. I think that was maybe a bit later. We all debated what that meant. What does young Scotland sound like to you? What would young England sound like? Pall said that was a stupid question. The press was fond of saying things like “The Mersey Sound” or “The Manchester Sound”. All they really meant was that a few folk from a certain area knew each other and played in bands with each other and ended up influencing each other. OK, maybe the Teardrops and the Bunnymen were not worlds apart, but you wouldn’t say they sounded like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark or Walkie Talkies. And then there was that whole stupid “This year’s Sheffield” lark meaning that if anyone from anywhere other than Sheffield sounded like the Human League’s Dignity of labour EP, then that was the new Sheffield. The really surprising thing was that in 1979 the Oswaldtwistle Sound was all the rave in the press, but the public didn’t catch on until Oasis started doing all those old Oswaldtwistle cover versions.

Some of the gang went to see Orange Juice at Valentinos or somewhere. I couldn’t go cos I was doing my day job off someplace else. I heard that the band were dead shy and hid behind their fringes. Someone said the two of them were like Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder. You could even see Edwyn Collins with a big teddy bear.

So there you go. There’s the sound of Young England.

Anyway, the real question is: what is a snook and how do you cock one?