LP reviewed in Sounds, 20th January, 1982

Orange Juice | You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever | (Polydor POLS 1057) ** AHH, ST Valentine’s Day! Dingle-dongle Meepy Goblin loves Fluffy Bunny Wunny, Rickiepoos wants Leggy Plumplet-Puds to be his Potato Dumpling and Owange Juiciepies expect their debut albumypoos to be taken seriously.

Just fancy that! “You must think me very naive,” indeed, Edwy-pumps. Precocious Postcardists pinch Perry’s dolphins and pose on inner sleeve with cute Edwyn complete with bleak industrial halo.

Visually speaking, a bad start. Aurally, a breezy one. Critics’ gem of yore, ‘Falling And Laughing’ cuts it with hummy-strummy sweetness, Headsy rhythms and Ed’s throaty croon swanning along nicely. Saccharine but boisterous fun. Yeuch.

A rapid downhill slide to ‘Untitled Melody’, E’s warble wobbling wildly and amateurish offkey guitar and organ plodding away in the middle. A ham-handed tape-recorder-in-the-front-room job. Office opinion at this stage: a resounding, nay, explosive thumbs down and cries of ‘Pipsqueaks!’ rent the fetid air.

James Kirk (is the T optional?( gets to vibrate his equally tweeky larynx in ‘Wan Light‘, uncredited but creditable horns hooting away but sadly not beefing up the fumbling youths. Icky man, icky. Are these OJs honestly s’posed to evoke visions of Byrds and Velvs?

Collins’ callow wimperama gets grate for ‘Tender Object’, all jollity and, jangles, the gangling parts just about hanging together to reach the bursts of pleasingly enthusiastic harmony. The ‘recording stress’ begins to show. Sameyness sets in like concrete on ‘Dying Day’, Collins affecting long, languid phrasings and a false vibrato to create a pop song with a lot of clutter, no cleanliness and certainly no hook.

Orange Juice | You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever | (Polydor) 1982

Hand on heart for ‘L.O.V.E. Love’, the apparent OJ technical ineptitude bordering on the pathetic and butchering Mr Green’s ditty with drippy, gutless vocals and token Backing Girlies. A farce.

The half-bakedness equals nakedness: ‘Intuition Told Me (Pt 1)‘ pares down to acoustics, the croon sticks in the craw and the tinny, tuneless jangle grinds nerves like a grater on a carrot. Around the seguay point there appears the Token Young Funk Track — ‘Satellite City’, I believe.

It veers like a careering train between sparkly, jumping Haircutitude and shaky shambolics, the OJs constantly balancing on the fine line separating order and chaos. They posture preciously through Kirk’s ‘3 Cheers For Our Side’ – until we finally get a glimmer of humour in ‘Consolation Prize’ amidst the Sooty Showband stop-start rhythms and juvenile giggling. “I’ll never be man enough for you,” they chorus. Too true, puppypopsters.

A hook shines on the horizon and arrives during ‘Felicity’, the acceptable face of Juiceism. Full-blooded 12-strings blow joyful bubbles of pure pop and make life feel worthwhile. “Shoo-shoo-shoo-shoodoo,” he coos ‘In A Nutshell’, rescued from the point of hysteria (or so it sounds) by The Girly Chorus, but subsequently plunged down again by the inauspicious, self-indulgent, smarmy, sugary-squelsh of an ending. Pass the bitter aloes, Mummy.

In A Nutshell

In love with the Modern Lovers, huh? Then where did the genuine humour go and ‘who let in the smug in-jokery? (There’s a cotton wool where the guts should be and far too much swaying to the wrong side of cutedom, an offence oft committed by fellow Scotties (whoops!) Altered Images. (An Edwyn/Clare duet soonest, please).

What we need is less bumble-puppying, not so much ploddy-popping, even less pipsqueak-pop and much more pristine-pop. In a nutshell, I’ll hope against hope that the New Improved Version (with Hip Black Drummer) will contain considerably fewer pips and a healthy dollop of pithiness. ‘Til then, pith off. (Betty Page)

ORANGE JUICE: ‘You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever’ (Polydor Pols 1057)

SO, THE long-awaited debut album from the highly – acclaimed Orange Juice. New pop saviours or just singers of sill love songs? Are Edwyn’s ditties the last word in post – adolescent romanticism or as cliched as the’ whole of this paragraph?

First of all, there’s that voice to be reckoned with. Whereas, say, Messrs Cope and Almond get away with experimenting with swooping vocal gymnastics. Edwyn Collins somehow doesn’t,  just as he can’t pull off a fully-fledged Feargal Sharkey quaver.

Nevertheless, he’s still got quite a characterful bag of pipes, stalking the mid-ground between Marc Bolan and Clare Grogan yet distinctive enough not to rip off either. But there’s no gelling away from the fact his vocals are often affected, contrived and ultimately downright annoying, only really suited to something like Al Green’s ‘L.O.V.E. Love’, a giddy, tumbling tune sufficiently oft-beat as to be able to handle Collins’ I’m – so – drunk – on – happiness OTT treatment.

In contrast. the fanciful ‘Intuition Told Me’ is plain absurd. With lines Ike “So grab your silk stockings end dance invitation” he obviously Imagines himself the next Bryan Ferry but he’s got a few experiences to go yet. Poetic. some of the lyrics may be but only to about the same extent as the average fourth-former’s English Language homework.

James Kirk — who wrote three of the songs prior to his departure from the band — sings on his ‘Three Cheers For Our Side’ and though a welcome break from Edwyn, the theme is just as grim with lots of waffle about growing old by the fireside. In fact, every track is about some relationship or other, attempting to reduce ‘Gone With The Wind’ to the stature of ‘Soap’

Far be it for me to discourage these guys from bothering with love — I’m getting married meself in a month ferchrissakes! — it’s just that whilst having all of its trials and tribulations celebrated, their total obsession with the thing deprives of all its fun, spontaneity and whatever else one reckons love holds in store.

Whether he’s relating personal experiences or plagiarising Mills and Boon. Edwyn’s scenarios are ridiculously clinical and clumsy to the point of embarrassment.

An exception is the wry ‘Consolation Prize’ where he admits his obsession with the Byrds, attempted falsettos, jangling guitars an’ all.

To the group’s credit, a lot of the melodies, or at least snatches of them are quite pleasant, ‘In A Nutshell’ stylishly structured and even ‘Felicity’ finally growing on me. As an exercise in writing, most of the words are prettily penned too, direct, concise and rhyming even if their one track mind subject matter gets as tireless as the vocals delivering them.

Still, overall I like what they’re trying to do, most of the above criticism stemming from the urgency with which they go about doing It. Too little is left unsaid and like an excess of their namesake, that makes them sickly.

In other words, it’s not what they play, it’s the way that they say it. Still, Orange Juice are young (yawn), relatively original and have got time and potential enough to attract plenty of drinkers. Meanwhile. I stilt prefer mine with a good belt of the hard still. (Record Mirror, 20/01/82)

You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever (Polydor)

SOME PEOPLE are irritated by Orange Juice. Onstage, they’re relaxed and unrehearsed, and execute their clear-cut sound with such disregard for criteria such as tightness, that their rambling poplapses sometimes to a shambling sloppiness so easily taken to be contrived amateurism.

But although Orange Juice’s main danger has always been overstepping the boundaries of unflustered fluidity, and staggering bashfully through exaggerated surges of nearly-right chords, a polished and slick Orange Juice would be as worthless as a pleasantly euphonic Fire Engines, a dour and professional Haircut, or a non-panicked, harnessed Rip Rig.

On vinyl, the ascent from Postcard to Polydor has been attained with little loss of appeal. ‘You Can’t Hide our Love Forever’ displays a variety of moods, surprising in their diversity, some better suited to the OJs than others. ‘In A Nutshell’ and ‘Untitled Melody’ may well be best left to the likes of Aztec Camera: Edwyn playing earnest romantic doesn’t quite come off if you’ve seen him cavort about on stage.

More successful is the injection of humour. In ‘Consolation Prize’ Edwyn plays booby prize to the object of his affectations: “I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn’s / I was hoping to impress / So frightfully camp, it made you laugh / Tomorrow I’ll buy a dress.”

‘Satellite City’ exhibits a brass section that sounds suspiciously like the standard two-trumpets-for-’82 quota. Much more charming is the sparse usage of horns and bugles in the clear and catchy version of Al Green’s ‘L.O.V.E.’, their fifth single, a soulful number drifting along with just the right balance between laziness and life.

On their more usual bubbly and optimistic level, ‘Falling And Laughing’ and ‘Upwards And Onwards’ are typical gems of light modern pop. If these were played on breakfast radio instead of Soft Cell and ABC, maybe some of us would make it work on time. ‘Felicity’, written by the now departed James Kirk, is the track most viable in the chart world . . . it could easily join ‘Love Plus One’ in outshining the rest of the leaden offerings on Top Of The Pops. Only Orange Juice could sing lyrics like “Without, the weather will change, but within remain unchanged the things with which we strive for happiness” without sounding like a parody of Richard Jobson.

All in all, ‘You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever’ is a surprisingly strong debut, thankfully not overproduced by Adam Kidron. Orange Juice are still imperfect, but on this LP, captured at their most disciplined, there’s more fizz than flatness, and no sickly aftertaste. Just how Orange Juice should be. (NME, 20/02/82)