POSTCARD RECORDS
We Could Send Letters
… 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.