Was this 1980s singer the perfect Scottish pop star? | The Herald

Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Aztec Camera​'s debut album, High Land, Hard Rain.

MEDIA interest in Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera had been building at a giddy speed before the release, in April 1983, of their debut album, High Land, Hard Rain.

The group had released two well-received singles – Just Like Gold, and Mattress of Wire – for Glasgow’s influential Postcard Records before switching to the London-based Rough Trade. The music press was drawn to the music and the wise-beyond-his-years wordplay of the precociously talented Frame. Rough Trade had issued an Aztec Camera single, Pillar to Post, which excited interest still further; a follow-up, the brilliantly catchy Oblivious, would peak at number 47 in the charts. A live appearance on C4’s The Tube only added to the sense of anticipation surrounding the forthcoming album.

In February, Frame was interviewed for Smash Hits magazine. The journalist was none other than the publication’s news editor, Chris Tennant, who was already writing songs with Chris Lowe prior to forming the Pet Shop Boys.

"I try not to do anything that's twee”, Frame told Tennant. “I don't think that pop music's bad or wrong, I just think I'm into something a bit more progressive — which is a nasty word because of the ‘70s.

"The only thing that worries me about this new single [Oblivious] being quite poppy is that people might expect us to be like The Bluebells or something like that”, he added. “I think [it] is probably not really representative of the stuff on the LP, which is maybe a bit more progressive.”

Asked to elaborate, Frame said: "Well, I think we're merging a lot of things in pop music which haven't been merged much, maybe in the leftfield of pop. When I write lyrics I take ages; I can't just write sort of love stuff all the time.”

Did he take himself seriously? "Yes!" he acknowledged said with a laugh, "because I'm not an obtuse person. I think that people are down-to-earth these days about our music. It's quite a thrill getting into the charts but it'd be bad to fall into a trap, like Haircut One Hundred, of having to make singles and the only thing that matters is getting in the charts and all that”.

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Much had been – and would be – made of Frame’s youthful talents. He had formed Aztec Camera and written We Could Send Letters and The Boy Wonders - “some of my best songs”, as he would later describe them - in East Kilbride at the age of 15. The first Postcard single, Just Like Gold, had been released when he was 16. There was much for music journalists to get excited about.

“The press was pro-Aztec Camera before we’d released anything”, the band’s bass guitarist, Campbell Owens, recalls in Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Movement (1977-1984)*. “Signing to Postcard resulted in a big three-page spread in [music weekly] Sounds … I was amazed at the press prior to releasing anything, but when our first single came out, ‘Just Like Gold’, it really delivered, I thought it was wonderful”.

When High Land, Hard Rain was released it proved to be a terrifically assured debut, right from the opening track, Oblivious. There was much to admire: The Boy Wonders, We Could Send Letters, Pillar to Post. The album quickly soared to number 22 on the charts.

“It’s taken Aztec Camera for years to make an LP but this collection of 10 classic songs was worth the wait”, was one UK magazine verdict. Frame’s “versatile acoustic guitar work and forceful vocals inject a rare spirit into his songs”.

Reviewing the album for Record Mirror, Mark Cooper noted: “Where other practitioners of 'soft' rock are content to be mellow, Aztec Camera are passionately exact. Tossed by great emotion, by all the confusions of love, Aztec Camera strive to capture and contain their delights and torments.

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“Aztec Camera have the edge missing from the work of contemporaries like Ben Watt and The Gist. The edge comes from the tension in Roddy's songs between great feeling and careful craft. Roddy holds emotions in check in order to suggest their force. It is not enough merely to be quiet … Aztec Camera make you realise how slapdash are Roddy's contemporaries. These songs trace the twists and turns of moods that matter”.

In the US, Creem magazine’s Dave DiMartino went even further. “Imagine a perfect world, where some human somewhere has the wisdom, taste and fortuity to take Love's Forever Changes, the third Velvet [Underground] album, Neil Young's first and ‘Expecting To Fly’, and Jackson Browne's ‘Song For Adam’, and combine them into something that, in this new and perfect world, would not sound utterly derivative, or the work of some half-assed rock critic whose reach vastly exceeded his or her ability. Not old, done up as new. Just new. Well, the world ain't perfect. But High Land, Hard Rain comes close.

"Aztec Camera's first album, written, arranged and performed mostly by Great Scot Hope Roddy Frame, sounds younger than yesterday and not necessarily stoned, just beautiful”. It was, he concluded, “probably the best album I've heard all year”.

Elvis Costello was so impressed by the album that he invited the band to support him on his 1983 US tour. By the end of the year Aztec Camera had been signed by Warner Bros, which re-released the single, Oblivious. A follow-up album, Knife, produced by Mark Knopfler, went Top 20 in September 1984, as did the third album, Love, in 1987.

High Land, Hard Rain has continued to leave its mark on fans and critics. The NME ranked it at number 293 in a 2013 survey of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time (it "preceded more commercially successful albums ‘Love’ and ‘Knife’, but set the group up as a worthy addition to the pop end of the new-wave spectrum). The Toronto Star, in 1989, included it in a list of the top 100 albums of the Eighties, noting that the "sweetly ironic" Oblivious "was to pop what Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl was to moviedom".

In 1999 a Herald writer felt compelled to observe: "There are some pop records so perfect that when you hear them for the first time you almost regret that you've heard them because you'll never be able to hear them for the first time again, if you know what I mean ... : Pretty Vacant, This Charming Man, Band of Gold, Tutti Frutti, Heart of Glass. Aztec Camera's first LP, High Land Hard Rain, is a whole long-player of such blistering moments; the mind can barely take it all in".

"I've heard people say that High Land, Hard Rain is the classic album, and I used to think, 'Yeah, but there's more to it than just that record'," Roddy Frame told the Sunday Herald in April 2006. "Now I don't even care. If you make one classic album that's not bad. The Velvet Underground made two or three, but most people don't make any. In fact, most people go to work and do something they don't particularly like."

In December 2013 the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was filled to capacity as Frame marked the album's 30th anniversary there as part of a brief tour. It was a memorable evening. In the audience was the Herald's arts editor, Keith Bruce. "Frame's precocious talent was remarkable, and few songwriters would be so comfortable revisiting the work of their 15-year-old selves", Bruce wrote. "The music that made it on to the album included four fine singles and boasted a conclusion that made it an instant classic".

In May 2014 he did the promotional rounds upon the release of his latest album, Seven Dials, the recording of which he had interrupted in order to do that tour.

"Those gigs were like a dream," he told the Herald. "It all happened in quite a short space of time. The difficult bit was learning those early songs because they are so complicated, they really hurt your hands. I was cursing my 15- and 16-year-old self when I was trying to play Green Jacket Grey on that big Gibson guitar, but the gigs themselves far exceeded my expectations. People were so into it and it sounded great, man. It sounded like the record to me. The vibe was amazing."

* Hungry Beat, by Douglas MacIntyre, Grant McPhee with Neil Cooper.

Next week: Morning Dove White, by One Dove.

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