Another classic Lethal vs. Norm brawl Shame though, both incredible bands. Will defend The Monochrome Set a bit later on in the morning, or tonight if I can't find the time right now. In the meantime, go listen to them and feel amazed.
Haha looking forward to this one. Orange Juice are probably my favourite of all my nominations. Will write something about them later. Just wanted to point out that that definitely isn't a picture of Orange Juice in the OP.
All right! I'll try to turn what announces to be a severe beating into at least honorable defeat.
Between 1980 and 1982, a strange outfit from around London, led by a Mr Bid
and his Watson of sorts, Mr Lester Square, decides to enchant the world with no less than three (and two for 1980 only) poppy tongue-in-cheek extravaganza albums, and a handful of potantial "Singles of the week", only the world doesn't really care.
It all starts with the already very good 1979 series of singles, including their now classic "He's Frank" :
Awesome already! I hear you say. But the best was yet to come. In 1982, The Monochrome Set release their magnum opus, the incredible Eligible Bachelors. All killer, no filler. It's the one album you want to get to have the best of The Monochrome Set. It contains their best known song, "The Jet Set Junta" :
And more wonders, including the awesome instrumental (one of their specialties) "March of the Eligible Bachelors", probably their most "postpunk" number :
I just want to preface this by stating that Orange Juice are one of my favourite bands of all-time. I have a connection with Orange Juice that stretches back years; it began when I decided to pluck out and put on a cheap compilation of their stuff from my dad's collection, largely down to its bizarre cover. "The Esteemed Orange Juice", it read. How very odd. What sort of band describes themselves as "esteemed"? This was before I knew what "post-punk" was. I'd unknowingly heard plenty of post-punk, thanks to my aforementioned father, but I'd be lying if I said that genre label had even registered at that time. I was thirteen. Maybe. The big albums in my life that year had been the Kings of Leon's incendiary debut (who could have known what they'd go on to become?), the White Stripes' Elephant, The Libertines' debut which, despite being released a year earlier, I'd only just cottoned on to, The Rapture's Echoes, 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin', and Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner. I was reading the NME weekly, and as such had stumbled upon plenty of my favourite band's influences that I'd felt almost obligated to delve into. I checked out a whole bunch of stuff (The Clash, The Specials, The Gun Club, Talking Heads, The Strokes (it's strange to think it, but they were widely being cited as an influence despite being only a couple of years old themselves), etc.), but never once did the name Orange Juice ever crop up. Who the fuck were this "Orange Juice" (and why was their name so terrible)? I was young and dumb and pretty poorly listened. If they weren't in Rolling Stone lists or this week's copy of the NME then why would I need to know about them?
Anyway, I listened to that cheap, shitty compilation a hundred times or more. Track one, 'Falling and Laughing', had lyrics that I thought were universal; I was mistaking lyrics I could relate to for lyrics everybody could relate to ("you may think me very naive, taken as true I only see what I want to see"). It was all funky basslines and wiry, scratchy guitars, sounds I would later realise were reappropriations of Nile Rodger's shimmering disco, filtered through the art-school side of Glasgow. The first song I ever wrote was a shameless rip-off of track two from that CD, 'Consolation Prize', which featured a couplet that a young music nerd who had grown up on classics such as myself found totally irresistible ("I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's"). Later on the disc there was a wonderful chorus the went, "just like The Four Tops, I can't help myself". There was the funky, sincere 'I Guess I'm Just A Little Too Sensitive', a song whose message resonated with an insecure thirteen-year-old me, despite never having had a relationship like the one the song details (my Orange Juice love came full circle recently with a cover of that song). There was the dark, slinking 'What Presence?!', a song that I would later think of when I first heard the young upstarts Franz Ferdinand some eight or nine months later (fittingly, Franz Ferdinand were also the first band I ever saw namecheck Orange Juice in the NME, around the time of their ascent). I went years without ever hearing an Orange Juice album, without knowing a song outside of the 22 that were on that best-of. I know that compilation inside out, and though there are at least two actual Orange Juice LPs that I think are better than it, not too mention another compilation of rarities and unreleased early stuff, I am still eternally grateful to it for opening a door to a band that have come to be one of my favourites ever.
I'd learned to love them free of outside influence, without knowing under which particular genre label they stood or any of the context for these songs. Soon afterwards I became the archetypal music nerd, reading as much as I could about music, endlessly swapping recommendations with like-minded kids. Orange Juice are one of the few bands that I stumbled across totally unaware of what was to come, and the beauty of finding something like that was taken for granted by myself at the time. It seems now that I virtually never find a band for whom there is no reference point, or clue as to their sound, or other outside bias. Thinking back to finding that band takes me to a time of relative naivete and innocence, and it's only fitting that the band's sound should encapsulate those feelings so perfectly. Their songs are naive and innocent, and insecure, but knowing, and clever, and deliberately anti-macho. They are songs about love conquering all and, whether or not that is even possible (and I'm pretty sure that I don't think it is), it's hard for me not to get caught up in that message when listening to this band. I apologise for story time and tl;dr, but before I get onto actual promotion through some facts about the band and some of their greatest songs, I thought it appropriate to recall my finding this band, a band I will never let go.
(The Esteemed) Orange Juice
As Simon Reynolds points out in his wonderful book about post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again (incidentally named after an Orange Juice song), "in 1980, when post-punk seemed locked in a gloom-laden death trip, everything about Orange Juice felt different". More influenced by the "very witty, very camp" Buzzcocks and the charming Vic Godard's Subway Sect (Collins recalled trying to recreate the Subway Sect's guitar sound, "completely out of tune, the treble cranked up full") than by the macho Sex Pistols or The Clash, Orange Juice arrived in a blaze of "unabashed romance" with debut single 'Falling and Laughing'. It was the first release from Postcard Records, a short-lived but now legendary Glaswegian indie label who were also responsible for early singles by Josef K, Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens. It matched splintery, trebly post-punk guitars with a Chic-aping bassline that dares the listener not to shake his/her tail feather. It was ramshackle and held together as if by string, and featured beautiful, almost old school lyrics about falling in love, which hadn't really been a particularly de riguer topic since punk broke. I still think the line, "you say that there's a thousand like you, well maybe that's true, I fell for you and nobody else", is amongst the sweetest and most sincere ever written. Fuck, I wish I'd written it. It just has that immediate timeless quality that is so difficult to attain. As far as debut singles go, 'Falling and Laughing' is right up there with the very, very best, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
'Falling and Laughing' (I actually prefer the re-recorded version of this from their 1982 debut album, but that's probably down to familiarity stemming from the fact that it was the version present on the compilation I mentioned in the intro)
Orange Juice cut a number of other singles for Postcard, all of which were eventually collected in 2005 on the compilation The Glasgow School, which also featured a bunch of other out-of-print rarities and unreleased demos. It is the definitive document of Orange Juice during what were arguably their peak years, before a major label had got their mitts on the band and begun to polish their sound. I know a few people who actually prefer The Glasgow School to any of their official studio albums, and I can see why (even if I disagree). Here are a few of my favourite moments from the band's early years:
In 1982, Orange Juice decided to go major, and signed with Polydor for the release of their classic debut album You Can't Hide Your Love Forever. The album has been an ever-present (I believe) on my chart since the day I joined this site, and recently made the jump into my Top 10. They polished the sound of their early Postcard singles, and refined their songwriting to a point where nearly every song was a slice of catchy, clever pop perfection. Collins had evolved into a great singer and frontman, his fey warbling and modest demeanour endearing him to fans. He was like Morrissey without the self-important posturing and holier-than-thou attitude, and he was writing some of the loveliest pop songs of the era. Even the stock horns that Polydor tacked onto some of the songs couldn't detract from their quality, and they are one of very few bands who lost their supposed lo-fi charm without losing any of their actual charm. I highly recommend just listening to the whole album to be honest, but I know many of you lead busy lives and don't have the time to check out every album recommended by some random guy on the internet, so here are a few of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums:
Within a year, half of the lineup had been replaced and the new Orange Juice had recorded a new album. Collins wanted to bring order to the chaos that was Orange Juice, a band full of ideas but occasionally lacking the talent and focus to pull them off. He wanted the band to have what he called "a sophisticated amateurism", not to the point of sloppiness but not to the point where "slickness (was) the ultimate virtue" either. The follow-up album, Rip It Up, was certainly more ambitious than anything the band had released previously, but it was lacking in great songs. That said, the album still threw up a few gems.
The album was also home to the single of the same name, Orange Juice's biggest hit and the song that most people would know them for. It was the first hit single to use the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, which gives the song its immediately recognisable squelch, whilst choppy, trebly disco chords (which were one of the band's defining features by this point) chime underneath, adding to the song's playful, joyous mood. The lyrics of the song work as a tragic ode to punk, and especially the way people like the members Orange Juice were always a little cautious of the genre's blatant (and often openly encouraged) machismo. "You know the scene is very hum-drum", sings Collins towards the end, "my favourite song's entitled 'Boredom'", namechecking the classic Spiral Scratch track before emulating its two-note guitar solo, all the while pointing out what many people were almost too scared to admit - punk had peaked too early, and the copycat three-chord wonders that had cropped up in the wake of originators such as The Buzzcocks had only acted as a catalyst for the genre's subsequent stagnation. "Rip it up and start again" seems as good a call to arms as any, and the lyric is such a perfect mantra for the era that Simon Reynolds nicked it for the title of his peerless book on the subject.
Orange Juice's next release was a mini-album named Texas Fever, and it was a brilliant return to form for the band. The songwriting seemed more focused than that found on Rip It Up, and the production (courtesy of British reggae legend Dennis Bovell, who was a member of Matumbi and, more impressively, the mastermind behind dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's sound) was considerably more urgent.
The band's last album, The Orange Juice, was very much in the same vein as its shorter predecessor. It's another of my favourite albums of all-time, and has spent much time on my chart. Gone were the lovably amateurish tendencies of early Orange Juice, but they'd been replaced by a real sense of maturity and a certain amount of sonic muscle that were absent during the Postcard years. The album has aged extremely well, and is a great testament to the band's evolution, from the romantic naivete of their V.U.-meets-Chic days through to the aplomb with which they were able to pull off their final LP, a grown-up, often gorgeous record full of seemingly effortless indie pop. Here are a few of my favourite songs from the group's fourth and final record, a fitting swansong to an unfairly underappreciated career:
when I decided to pluck out and put on a cheap compilation of their stuff from my dad's collection, largely down to its bizarre cover. "The Esteemed Orange Juice", it read.
This is how I met them too! Found a cheap cassette tape in a used records shop, bought it on a hunch, that was like 20 years ago. What a glorious band.
All right! I'll try to turn what announces to be a severe beating into at least honorable defeat.
At 9-5, I'll call this an accomplished mission. Congrats on the winners, an excellebnt band indeed. Hope some of you guys did discover and enjoy The Monochrome Set
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Shame though, both incredible bands. Will defend The Monochrome Set a bit later on in the morning, or tonight if I can't find the time right now. In the meantime, go listen to them and feel amazed.
