ARCHIVE
AZTEC CAMERA
Post-Postcard, there’s still a lot to love.
By Pete Paphides
Back in black and white:
Roddy Frame
Backwards & Forwards: The WEA Recordings 1984-1995
CHERRY RED
7/10
THERE are two ways of looking at this incomplete history of Roddy Frame’s time in Aztec Camera.
You can gaze at the contents – everything except for the band’s two Postcard Records singles and then High Land, Hard Rain, the album that established Frame as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation – and come to the conclusion that a careerspanning boxset without High Land, Hard Rain is like, say, a Velvet Underground boxset without a banana. But, without that record, Backwards & Forwards – The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 tells an equally fascinating tale.
It’s not a story about Aztec Camera per se. It’s a story about independent music in the early ’80s; about a wave of literate, ambitious young songwriters who gazed on from the periphery at ABC, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and thought, “Why not us?” Artists such as Scritti Politti, Prefab Sprout and Everything But The Girl, who – not unreasonably – thought that with major label cash behind them, it was possible to finally make the music they heard in their heads, have it resound from the Radio 1 breakfast show and colonise the Top 10. After all, if they were really that good, what was there to be afraid of?