POSTCARD RECORDS

… and photographs, ticket stubs, collages, record sleeves and much more. Welcome to the POSTCARD RECORDS scrapbook: your guide is none other than ALAN HORNE. In a rare and exclusive interview, the label’s mercurial co-founder talks Damien Love through his personal selection of artefacts and ephemera from deep within the label’s vaults. “There was nothing remotely like this malarkey going on back then.”

ALAN HORNE

AS grim as it was, 2020 wasn’t entirely without good news. Case in point: the utterly unlikely return of the fabled independent label Postcard Records, which, as the year ended, broke a 25-year silence to announce it was back in some kind of business, via an enigmatic, characteristically off-kilter Twitter feed (@dubh185).

The most inspirationally DIY of the UK’s original post-punk indie wave, Postcard was dreamed into life in the Glasgow of 1979 by Alan Horne, then an ambitiously bored 20-year-old, who famously ran the business out of the sock drawer in his tenement bedroom. Under the banner of its impudent logo – the mischievous kitten banging a toy drum – Postcard was low on resources, audaciously high on insolence and ideas.

Spearheaded by Edwyn Collins, Horne’s co-conspirator in setting up the label, Postcard only had four actual bands – the Scottish trio of Collins’ Orange Juice, Edinburgh’s Josef K, the teenaged Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera, plus Australians The Go-Betweens – and only really existed for one 18-month blur across 1980–81. Yet it left behind an example, an attitude, that has been inspiring misfits ever since.

Horne followed Postcard in the mid-1980s with the equally short-lived Swamplands label. After lying low several years, he next resurfaced in Glasgow in 1992 to unexpectedly reactivate Postcard, issuing some archive recordings, but focusing primarily on two stunning new albums by an elusive figure who had been part of the Postcard gang since the first: Paul Quinn.

A school friend of Collins’, Quinn started singing in Glasgow cafes in the early 1980s with a nascent Aztec Camera as backing band, before gaining wider recognition as frontman of Bourgie Bourgie. A compellingly reticent figure, blessed with an extraordinary voice that simultaneously evoked Roy Orbison, Scott Walker and Philly-era Bowie, he should have been a star several times over. But bad luck and bad timing dogged his career, keeping him a cult.

Backed by The Independent Group, an all-star band of Postcard faces, Quinn’s two LPs – 1992’s The Phantoms & The Archetypes and 1995’s Will I Ever Be Inside Of You – affirmed his greatness: impossibly perfect pop, soul and R&B, boneweary in places, explosively sensual in others, with disconcerting undercurrents everywhere. Instant cults, the original Postcard albums now change hands for eye-watering amounts. And after making them, Quinn, Horne and Postcard simply vanished.

“PAUL’S RECORDINGS SOUNDED SO GREAT, AND SO WONDERFULLY OUT OF STEP WITH THE TIMES”

ALAN HORNE

Until today. So why, after “25 years wandering around in some other parts of the forest”, is Horne rousing the slumbering Postcard from its long cat nap? The answer, again, is Paul Quinn. The sole reason for reviving Postcard this time is to issue Unadulterated/Unincorporated, a lavish vinyl box gathering all Quinn’s Postcard records, alongside unreleased material and live cuts.

Made with the same hands-on approach that once saw Orange Juice colouring record sleeves with felt tips, it’s a labour of love available in an excruciatingly limited edition of only 300 copies. But why now? “Well –I just never tire of Paul’s voice,” Horne says. “I didn’t have a problem with the idea of the original records being hard to get hold of, not being yer mass-market sort of a bloke. But then one thing led to another and I just started to enjoy putting this box together, as an art project. Having never attempted anything on this scale, it turned out great, especially the book of notes and photographs and things in there. The access to technology now makes doing what I did back then – the whole DIY thing – so much easier. I mean there’s now absolutely no conceivable excuse to be whoring yourself off to any crooked corporate malarkey and having to put up with all the usual morons.

“Simply put, though, Paul’s recordings sounded so great back then, and so wonderfully out of step with the times – which, if you remember, were truly dreadful. They sound even better now. As for the times? Mmm…”

While going through the Postcard vaults (“a loft with no windows”) for the Paul Quinn box, Horne uncovered “an overwhelming amount” of visual material and ephemera documenting the entire Postcard adventure. Here, he shares some snaps from the Postcard scrapbook.

DAMIEN LOVE

DAVID BOWIE TICKET, 1976

SUCH is the stuff from where dreams are woven… This was in the middle of my highers at school, but I headed off alone in a state of high anxiety down to London. The Big Black Smoke. I went to see Bowie the Friday and Saturday nights – The Man Who Fell To Earth was showing in Leicester Square, too. I learned later Paul Quinn was also at these shows with the Dundee Bowie posse. It’s still the most exciting show I’ve ever seen. Next time for me was 1978, at Glasgow Apollo, where I met Paul and Edwyn Collins for the first time, in the foyer. I was really underwhelmed by Bowie that time, and the spell was finally broken – but for five years I was ever so slightly obsessed. Besides, I was now 19. Perhaps not quite prepared to put away childish things, but…

OUTSIDE THE POSTCARD FLAT, 185 WEST PRINCES STREET, GLASGOW, 1980

THERE’S Edwyn and David McClymont from Orange Juice and The Go-Betweens, just before they returned down under, where unfortunately they were eaten by dingoes – really very sad. I liked having The Woe-Begones around. It’s not true I’d planned to leave them stranded at Central Station if it turned out they had long hair when they arrived. David’s made that story up, I reckon –it’s certainly funnier than a truth, but obviously a lie, as he says he was sent to pick them up, and he couldn’t drive. I was the only driver back then. Annoyingly, as I would always much prefer to be driven.

JOHN MAIN

POSTCARD HOTLINE, 1980

JAKE Black – later singer in Alabama 3, who did the Sopranos theme – taught me how to call the operator from a phonebox, claim to be an engineer working on a line problem, give a makey-uppy ID number, and ask to be connected to such’n’such a number – say, Rough Trade – for free. It invariably worked. Later, something went wrong with the phone at 185: it wouldn’t dial out unless you tapped the number like Morse code on the prongs the receiver sat on. But we weren’t being billed, so this facilitated a lot of cheap talk. It was a time when people could be smarter than their phones.

JUST LIKE GOLD POSTCARD, 1981

THIS is the postcard we gave away with Aztec Camera’s “Just Like Gold” single. Roddy looks about 10. The picture on the card was taken by Robert Sharp at his pal Marty’s mum’s cottage – middle of a golf course, I think. It’s where the photo on the Incredible String Band’s Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter album was done. Marty and Robbie were actually the kids on that sleeve. The mum’s bedroom in the attic was pure hippie pad stylee, and the story goes Bob Dylan visited in ’66. Can’t think who the dog was, though.

JOHNNY THUNDERS and PATTI PALADIN, 1984

JOHNNY covered Elvis’s “Crawfish” for Swamplands, but it wound up coming out on some other label. I took this while we were shooting the video – Super-8, I think. Patti and I were shopping in Liberty one day, hunting the crocodile earrings she’s wearing here, when she bumped into a Hare Krishna and got chatting. I just wandered off, thinking, ‘Who the fuck?’ Turned out to be Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. Patti had a great sense of style; Thunders too, of course. He was a very sweet-natured person. Saw the Heartbreakers at Clouds in Edinburgh in ’77, and they were really electrifyin’.

ROBERT SHARP; ALAN HORNE

PAUL QUINN and EDWYN COLLINS, 1984

DID these promo shots for Paul and Edwyn’s “Pale Blue Eyes”, outside Mickie Most’s RAK studios, where Edwyn was recording the third Orange Juice album – some nice things on that record. St John’s Wood, London’s mean streets: those were hard times and life was cheap, so you were wise to carry your metal comb with the handle sharpened to a fine deadly point – all the better to chib you with, ya bass. I’m practically having an attack of the vapours here just thinking back on those bad, bad old days before…

ALAN HORNE

PAUL QUINN, EDWYN and WILLIAM COLLINS, RENFREW FERRY, 1991

I PU T together a concert for Edwyn on the  Ferry, and Paul came on and sang “Ain’t That Always The Way”. This was during the soundcheck, with Edwyn and Grace’s son getting in on the act. I’d seen Jonathan Richman on the Ferry, and thought it was a great place to play if it was a nice summer evening. I’d suggested Jonathan should play with Orange Juice at the Hammersmit h Palais when he reappeared back in ’84-ish, and we got chatting backstage: he was telling me he wanted to go up to Findhorn, to check out the giant cabbages.

PAUL QUINN, GLASGOW 1992

I ’D go endlessly wandering, always with an eye out for locations for shoots, or putting on concerts or whatnot. I discovered this old film noir-style lift in a building in Argyle Street. Near Argyle Arcade, famed for its jewellery stores, and where Edwyn would famously catch his reflection in the window, and I’d take the piss out of his sucking in his cheeks and posing. I remember planning a jewellery heist there with John De Main à la The League Of Gentlemen movie: we’d do the whole arcade and be off to South America before you know it.

ALAN HORNE

ROUGHS FOR ORANGE JUICE COMPILATION, 1992

A CUT-up’n’paste, in the style of the original Postcard art. I thought the tartan thing would have a slightly mental look that would catch the eye. Certainly, there was nothing remotely like this malarkey going on back then, and it certainly did get noticed. Anyway, somehow I feel I’ve managed to capture the essence of the four of them here perfectly. If you stare closely, that’s Sydney Greenstreet looking up James Kirk’s skirt.

DAVY HENDERSON COLLAGE, 1994

DAVY  from Fire Engines, of course, but he was doing The  Nectarine No 9 on Postcard at this point. Davy turned up with the poet Jock Scot for the weekend, cut, bruised and battered – sordid details were not so forthcoming. But I took some shots for the LP Jock and Davy were doing for us. Davy made some great records around the time, but “TIGER TIGER,” the one The Nectarine No 9 made with Paul, was something else again. I really love that record.

VIC GODARD POSTER, 1993

A MOCK-UP for a poster for a concert – on  my birthday, in fact, same day as Gore Vidal’s – which didn’t take place. Unfortunately, the birthdays kept happening. I recently found a cache of old letters from Vic: lyrics he’d sent for Paul to put tunes to. Never got round to it, as usual. Written on Post Office stationery, too. The picture’s from the shoot for Vic’s Postcard LP, The End Of The Surrey People. He’s against the garage door at Berens Road where Edwyn and Grace were living. That’s an old mic he’s holding – one of Edwyn’s, no doubt.

PAUL QUINN ON STAGE AT GLASGOW FILM THEATRE, OCTOBER 1994

T HIS is during Cheap Flights, a grand concert-happening in the cinema to launch Paul’s Will I Ever Be Inside Of You album. We projected movies – Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild One and more – onto the group as they played. A huge amount of work– I wish I’d just been able to sit and watch it properly, but I was busy spinning samples and audio into the mix, and getting films cued up. All live, no safety net, so I was really wired. But when the elements would come together, it was incredible looking and sounding. Genuinely thrilling. That album and show, though, definitely left me feeling quite wrung out.

KEVIN LOW; ALAN HORNE

Details about the Paul Quinn boxset, Unadulterated/ Unincorporated, can be found at www.postcardrecords.co.uk