DAVE HILL tracks Aztec Camera from Postcard Records – home of the near-misses – to Rough Trade. Will that worthy label’s newly-acquired gloss spell gold for the Aztecs . . . or will the Camera fail to click again?
Article published in NME, 4th September, 1982
Aztec Camera | Aztecs Inca Contract At Last | RODDY and Campbell. Not a pair of Gorbals axe-murderes. Not a brace of Celtic pixies. Rather, they are the only two survivors from a former Aztec Camera, neglected jewels of the Postcard crown., dewy-eyed poets of poignance, rough-cut politicians of the rigours of romance.
“We’re not wimps though. Just romantics. There’s a difference, says Roddy, grinning at Campbell, who grins in return. Then the both of them grin across at me. I don’t really know what all this grinning’s in aid of, but I grin back just the same.
But that’s alright because such vaguely shared but never specified understandings are at the root of an Aztec Camera song’s appeal. And I’m a sucker for an Aztec Camera song. We get along just fine.
Aztec Camera made their two absurdly blissful singles for Postcard back in 1980. What they’ve done since then can adequately be summarised as “sitting around rehearsal studios trying to get a rhythm section together”. Now, Roddy and Campbell have got a rhythm section together, though it was as recently as May that they sacked a former Haircut drummer because “he was getting too silly and uncooperative.”
Aztec Camera | Aztecs Inca Contract At Last
They’ve moved from East Kilbride, Glasgow to Acton, London, and they’ve signed a recording contract with Rough Trade. A buoyant single, ‘Pillar To Post’, has just been released. We’re sitting in a pub on the same block as the Sunday School rehearsal space, where boy wonders Roddy (vocal, guitar) and Campbell (bass), along with Dave Ruffey (drums, The Ruts) and Bernie Clark (keyboards, guitar) are practising diligently, preparing to record their first LP, with the working title ‘High Land, Hard Rain’.
When Roddy first tells me this title, I mishear ‘High Land’ as “highland”. Highland? A bit heavy on the Scot associations, don’t you think?
“It’s gonna have a big tartan sleeve,” lies Roddy, “and we’ll all be wearing shorts.”
“I show you jewels you’ve seen a thousand times / and then I tell you that those jewels were never mine / so when you’re asking me to define that feeling for you / what can I say? /It’s there until it goes away.”
An extract, that, from the lyric of ‘Just Like Gold’, the Aztecs’ very first 45, a lovely record built from a glorious, aching melody, doused in glistening acoustic guitars; and so exquisitely affecting as to be almost ridiculous. Ridiculous, because of its shameless veneer of adolescent corn. Remarkable, for its evocation of ambiguous feelings both intangible yet so strongly implied you could almost hold them in your hand. Roddy Frame was 16 when he wrote that song.
“‘Just Like Gold’ was Single Of The Week or something,” smiles Campbell.
“I think it stands up quite well as an independent single. But that’s not much of a criteria really,” says Roddy. “I think we were maybe overrated at the time. Getting to be Single Of The Week and stuff, and people saying it was the best record they’d ever heard. It wasn’t that good a record. Saying things like that was stupid. The production was terrible.”
Aztec Camera | Aztecs Inca Contract At Last
For me the second single, ‘Mattress Of Wire’ (with its echo of the Family Favourites radio show theme) almost matched the debut.
“It was rubbish,” says Campbell, bluntly.
This unenthusiastic attitude to their early works perhaps indicates the unsatisfactory nature of their relations with Postcard in general. The group’s line-up was always unsettled, and, Roddy explains, “we didn’t always get on too well with Allan Horne (Postcard entrepreneur) a lot of the time.”
I’ve never met Mr Horne, but he does tend to read like the ultra-pushy type. I can imagine him ruffling Roddy and Campbell’s shy scepticism.
Campbell: “Well, I suppose you’ve got to be a bit like that to be a manager. But he’s even like that sometimes when there’s nothing at stake.”
Roddy: “But he was sensible enough to tell us that we shouldn’t put any more records out till we’d got ourselves more organised. At the time we were really impatient to put all our stuff out.”
Of theoretical hit label Postcard’s string of theoretical hit singles, Aztec Camera‘s strike me in retrospect as those with most conventional hit potential. They shared the ramshackle edge which characterised the Postcard sound (and doubtless sent the listless play-listers of Radio One running for cover), but seemed less oblique than Josef K, and more obviously melodic than Orange Juice. The tunes recalled that undefinable ’60s Pop Classic Universal you found also in Costello or The Pretenders.
Roddy and Campbell’s scruffy boyishness could possibly have been lodged in that slot now occupied by ickle Nicky Heyward or someone, had they cared for such things. But the Aztecs lacked the gob of Collins and the received mystique of Haig. They were cute, but not Important. Roddy and Campbell opted to leave the Glaswegian indie, and since half the band were also Jazzateers, it meant losing them as well.
For Roddy and Campbell, ‘Pillar To Post’ indicates the rebirth of a group with a producer (John Brand) and a sense of modern polish to add to their previous style.
“We were looking for a Motown or northern soul type sound,” says Roddy. “Actually it’s funny that people used to rave about a rough sound, and now the same ones have gone right over to the other side of the fence. If the record’s not on a major, and produced in a Martin Rushent super studio, they don’t want to know.”
Aztec Camera | Aztecs Inca Contract At Last
‘Pillar To Post’s’ drums sound expensive. There are unobtrusive keyboards, and girl backing singers too. Everything is more streamlined. Perhaps this is a new Aztec Camera befitting a new Rough Trade roster.
Roddy: “The new single is just a song that stands out from the set. It’s quite commercial, you know. But apart from that one, a lot of the album will be a more freewheeling type thing, if you know what I mean. I’ve got one song called ‘Down The Dip’ which is sort of pure acoustic.”
If the Postcard singles revealed Roddy as a master of lyrical imagery, he claims the new songs to be “a lot more straightforward. There’s a bit more sort of, uh, social statement. There’s one line about ‘the bourgeois breed’. You know. And ‘all you need is greed’. Things like that. But there’s gonna be a lot of different things really. There’s still a lot of love songs.”
About this “social statement” stuff. Word has it that Roddy and Campbell have been going through a bit of a Dylan phase. What’s that in the album title — ‘High Land, Hard Rain’! Perhaps that “freewheeling” adjective was intended as a capital ‘F’.
“Ah well, I can see people saying that,” opines the new Dylan. “After we’d been through the punk – disillusionment thing, I think we were looking for an identity in those things we’d heard in the past. Like yer older brothers with their Bob Dylan and Simon And Garfunkel records. I just think Dylan’s lyrics are great. Like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is one of the best lyrics I’ve ever heard.”
In the plethora of contemporary cross-currents, there’s one drift where Aztec Camera now seem to fit. One which maybe runs against transience and fad. Maybe one that signifies only a craftsman’s conservatism. Are they (and we) growing up, or just growing old? There’s a difference. With Aztec Camera we might just find out what it is.
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