1. Blue Boy
Like their heroes the Velvet Underground, Orange Juice were one of those bands whose potential was only ever partially realised, but whose fearless originality bore an influence on guitar music that was thoroughly disproportionate to the number of records they sold. Without Orange Juice’s assembly of Chic guitars, stomping Motown beats and choruses and mismatched camp clothing – from Davy Crockett hats to Boy Scout shorts and plastic sandals – and you can imagine how all that went down in the macho, very working-class Glasgow music scene of the late-1970s (chants of “Poofs! Poofs! Poofs!” became familiar at gigs) – post-punk would have missed out on one of its wittiest and most tuneful agitators. Without the treacle-voiced, bequiffed and gleefully absurdist ways of singer, songwriter, guitarist and provocateur Edwyn Collins – indie’s original crooner, whose still fruitful solo career has produced more than a few cherished moments of its own – there’d arguably have been no Morrissey, and goodness knows how many young musicians with an instinct for the funny, the dismal, the ridiculous and the profane might have wilted on the vine. As one of four Orange Juice singles released on Glasgow’s legendary and legendarily dysfunctional Postcard Records, August 1980’s Blue Boy was atypical of their early tangled jangle of a sound, but it packed a powerful wallop. It’s a blistering, Buzzcocks-indebted flash of excitable energy beginning with seven seconds of speed-fuelled martial drumming and an opening line that leaves you in no doubt you’re listening to a lyricist of real fluency and wit (“When he spoke, she smiled in all the right places”). Culminating in some fantastically cackhanded and out-of-tune guitar soloing, it’s an indecently exciting piece of punky guitar pop, and as apt a place as any to begin a root through some of the best bits of both Orange Juice and Collins’ oeuvre.
2. Simply Thrilled Honey
With one stroke of his Biro, Collins practically gave indiepop music its entire faux-naive raison d’être. “Worldliness must keep apart from me,” runs the chorus clincher to Simply Thrilled Honey. Rarely has a more eloquent statement been made about music as a harbour from the harshness, the impurities, the compromises of the grownup world. “It’s about a girl who tried to seduce me, but I didn’t want to go to bed with her,” Collins told Sounds: “I find going to bed with someone you don’t love disorientating.” By late 1980, the classic Orange Juice lineup – Collins plus guitarist and co-songwriter James Kirk, bassist David McClymont and drummer Steven Daly – was rapidly making a name for itself, having become a fascination of the London music media. Dating back to Orange Juice’s earliest days, when they were still the Nu-Sonics, Simply Thrilled Honey is packed with disco-fresh chords and the kind of starchy guitar top lines the Jesus and Mary Chain would later hotwire on a ride to the upper echelons of the album charts. How many other bands could get away with a chorus punctuated by the Johnsonian exclamation: “Ye gods!”
3. Louise Louise (original version)
Recycled for the 1982 album Rip It Up, Louise Louise had first been committed to tape in much more raggedy and charming form in May 1981, at the Hellfire Club in Glasgow, on the demos that were later released as Ostrich Churchyard, the definitive document of the band’s early years. For this crumpled Velvetsy ballad, Collins goes full caramel-voiced crooner, as he variously woos and taunts the titular Louise – who seems to be having none of it – to a backing of knitted trebly guitars, barbershop harmonies, a shuffling beat and a fabulously fuzzed-out guitar solo. “I’m doubled up on bended knees / Tell me darling tell me please” he begs, despite acknowledging that his melodramatics aren’t clever, nor likely to make her change her mind. “Have a wonderful birthday, dear,” he mopes sarcastically, before a snotty adjournment that could practically be Orange Juice’s mission statement: “I’ll spoil your party with a punky sneer.”
4. Falling and Laughing
This was the defining track of Orange Juice’s youth, a machismo-inverting limpwristed discopunk anti-anthem, stained by tears of both the sad and the ecstatic kind. As the first Orange Juice studio-recorded single proper, and the hallowed artefact that would first start to gain them and their label interest (not to mention notoriety) throughout the British music industry, Falling and Laughing came on strides from its rushed, shrill, boomy and frankly rubbish-sounding early Postcard incarnation, with a much lusher and more robust reworking for their debut album, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever. The bones of the song, a Collins/Kirk co-write, are consistent across both versions – quicksilver chords so choppily fast they needed two pairs of hands to strum them, a groove pinched from ELO’s Last Train to London and a lyric which, like Simply Thrilled Honey, seeks to conceptualise shyness as some grand act of principled abstention. “You might say / That we should build a city of tears,” sings Collins in a chorus never exactly destined to be sung on football terraces. “All I’m saying / Is I’m alone and consequently / Only my dreams satisfy the real need of my heart / I resist.” The four-to-the-floor end coda, which finds Collins spluttering about taking “the pleasure with … the pain pain pain pain pain pain pain”, lands like the punchline to a tragically funny joke.
5. Felicity
Orange Juice’s transfer to Polydor did not see the fulfilment of their early promise. The magic was starting to wane, and even by 1982 they felt behind the times, their shtick having been shamelessly, if slickly, plundered by knockoffs such as Haircut One Hundred. But by positing a more polished take on the Postcard sound, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever – which was funded by Rough Trade, and originally slated as a Postcard release (it even had a catalogue number) – stands the test of time, and is certainly the finest of the four Orange Juice albums. Felicity is comfortably one of its standout tracks, a two-and-a-half-minute head rush of frothy guitars, whimsical whistle blows and ringing piano capped with a fabulously gauche Collins vocal. Written by guitarist James Kirk – which explains the weird William Shatner reference at the start of the Wedding Present’s frantic cover version – it had first been released, in a live version, on a 1979 flexi-disc. But the later album version is the definitive one. Winding up with world-weary “wo-ah-woahs”, Felicity is an ode to illusory pleasure and – a familiar Orange Juice trope – sticking steadfastly to one’s principles (“Within remain unchanged / The things for which we strive”), concluding with a foot-stamping, sardonic refrain of “happiness, happiness, happiness”. It’s just that.
6. Rip It Up
So important a song that Simon Reynolds titled his history of post-punk after it, Rip It Up (“and start again”) was not only Orange Juice’s only Top 40 chart hit, but in many ways represents the high-water mark of an entire heterogeneous movement in clever, witty, arse-kicking music that stormed the battlements of rock tradition. By 1983 after four Polydor flops, the band had a new lineup comprising Collins, McClymont on bass, Josef K’s Malcolm Ross on guitar and Zimbabwean Zeke Manyika on drums. But they had all but given up on hope of a breakout single. With its Chic-inspired scratchy guitar riff and squelching Roland TB-303 synthesiser bassline – the first such use of the soon-to-become iconic device in a noteworthy song, and thus an accidental ancestor to acid house – out of nowhere, Rip It Up stormed to No 8 in March 1983, a success Collins put down to “regaining something of the old Postcardian positivism”. Throwing shade on the “humdrum” state of the early 80s music scene, it’s a classic Collins mixture of rock’n’roll retroisms, arcane wit and cheeky hubris: refrains do not come much more gloriously arch than “I hope to God I’m not as dumb as you make out”. Capping it all off is a neat little lyrical and musical quote of Buzzcocks’ Boredom and a wailing sax solo. Orange Juice had finally become proper pop stars – albeit for a short while. It didn’t help that they were banned from Top of the Pops after a visibly inebriated McClymont fell off the stage live on air.
7. Don’t Shilly Shally
Orange Juice split in 1985, their lack of commercial success having finally caught up with them following the release of their final, non-charting self-titled album in 1984. Collins sought to embark on a solo career but struggled to find a record label, because of his reputation for perfectionism and obstinate lack of interest in the prevailing winds of pop. Enter the last refuge of the scoundrel in late-80s British guitar music. In 1986, Alan McGee signed Collins to Elevation, his major label-backed spin-off from Creation, and released two singles, including this, his debut, produced by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie. Audibly a carryover from the Orange Juice days with its brittle jangling and the waggishly antediluvian language of its title and chorus refrain, with an added element of Americana twang (a black-and-white video saw Collins live out his Eddie Cochran fantasies, while the cover saw his name styled in the Coca-Cola font), Don’t Shilly Shally is an oddly familiar-sounding obscurity that has become a firm live favourite in recent years. Elevation’s shutdown and a falling out with McGee would bring an abrupt end to that short-lived relationship, but the seeds were sewn for Collins’ steady growth as a solo artist. He would bloom with one huge hit eight years later.
8. A Girl Like You
Dut-dah-dut-dah-dut-dada! It’s taken a degree of distance to fully appreciate Wigan Casino soul number A Girl Like You for the massive tune it is. It never helped back in 1995 that it was perhaps second only to the Boo Radleys’ Wake Up Boo! as the most tediously overplayed radio hit of the year. But with its fiendishly fuzzed-out riff, lyrics dripping with teenage lust (he was 36 by now, but still), and a groovy vibraphone motif (played by ex-Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, a key session player across Collins’ solo career) its status as Collins’ most instantly identifiable solo single is well earned. A slow-burning success, A Girl Like You – as since covered by everyone from the Black Keys to Alvin and the Chipmunks – became a huge hit in Europe and the US and returned Collins to the charts for the first time since 1983 and Rip It Up, finally establishing a longstanding cult hero as something close to a household name. It was even deemed worthy of immortalisation “in the club style” in an episode of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s Shooting Stars, leading to a brilliant cameo from Collins himself involving an exploding amplifier and a cautionary word about the folly of not getting a guarantee on expensive Christmas gifts. “Very wise words from a very wise pop singer,” as Vic puts it.
9. Home Again
Collins’ double cerebral haemorrhage in February 2005 was a tragedy as shocking as it was sad, striking down a mere 46-year-old still very much in the prime of his life and career. His miraculous survival, and subsequent rehabilitation and comeback to recording and performing music – even if his speech remained seriously impeded, and he was left unable to play the guitar – is documented beautifully in James Hall and Edward Lovelace’s 2014 film The Possibilities Are Endless. The recording of Collins’ sixth solo album Home Again straddled his illness and long recovery – the tracking was done in the winter of 2004, but mixing wasn’t completed for another two years (there’s a good BBC documentary about its making narrated by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos). While the record doesn’t intentionally recount his journey through those dark days, it’s impossible not to listen to the likes of its wistful title song without thinking about its context. Collins had indeed come home again to music and to his West Heath recording studio by early 2007, to finally complete tracks such as this soulful, gently organ-licked and finger-picked acoustic number about losing touch with one’s roots, involuntary memory and how the faintest, fuzziest trace of a certain song can transport a person back to their youth and their first love for music. “I heard the music ringing, from some clapped out pirate station,” he sings, before his voice swoops upwards. “It was my unholy salvation.”
10. In Your Eyes
It would be three years before Collins released his first post-rehabilitation album. Artists from Johnny Marr to Alex Kapranos to Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame and the Cribs’ Ryan Jarman all contributed to 2010’s superb Losing Sleep. But it fell to rather more obscure Brooklyn indie revivalists and noted Scot-pop enthusiasts the Drums to crown its best song, the utterly life-affirming In Your Eyes. Over a driving Motown backbeat, Collins sings the verses, his lyrics pieced together from his subconscious to tell of the pressures his illness has placed on his relationships with loved ones (“if you see me down, walk away, walk away”), and his wish to one day retreat from the city and its stresses to bucolic seclusion (prefacing his eventual move back to his ancestral homeland of Helmsdale in the far north-east of Scotland). He passes the baton to the Drums’ Jonathan Pierce to voice the sky-arcing choruses. When they harmonise on the middle section (“Back to the country, the scenic life / Where I intend to cut myself off”), before a chiming guitar and reverby keyboard lead a triumphant instrumental passage in wonky unison, the effect is spine-tingling.
