250 Albums Of Memories # 1 Orange Juice - Rip It Up

 

'                                                   How I wish I was young again...'

I live in a flat with an allbum crammed with hundreds of albums. It's an effort to keep things tidy sometimes but I'm not ready yet to let my records go.They're a part of me after all..  I was delighted to get them back when I shifted them up from the attic in my parents house in Canterbury on my move into my own flat in 2011. I could listen to everything on my television set but I'm strangely reluctant to do so.

I've been working from my flat for a couple of years now and if I have my own way I'll never go to work again. I have no desire to work in an office again or make my way through the streets with the morning traffic, attend meetings or generally deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous boredom, irritation and grief that office life seems to generate. At least as far as my experience of 2008-2023 suggests. 

So I'll be listening to plenty of records on a daily basis it seems and might as well catalogue them here. Play the record and record the memory it triggers. Kicking off like a decent breakfast as every day should with some Orange Juice. Playing Rip It Up send me spinning through time back to Twickenham Station in Autumn 1982. I'd just started Sixth Form College and bought a copy of Smash Hits with Edwyn Collins on the cover to read in the waiting room for my train back to Richmond. Our family home was down a long white tunnel connected to Richmond Station.  

I've never owned this record but saw it in the window of RPM a couple of days ago and it's playing on my record player now. Edwyn has retired from music after a drawn out Farewell Tour last year. My sister a long time OJ devotee since those days went to see him in London. Apparently it was emotional. 

Rip It Up is an elegaic, subtle and poetic album which came out on Polydor Records and performed poorly and received mixed reviews when it was released. Pearls before swine. It swings and swoons. Chugs like The Velvet Underground relocated to the Scottish Highlands then swings its hips like Chic. This is a versatile and bewitching record which shrugs its shoulders at ts absence of commercial recognition. 44 years later

The original Juice that had spearheaded Postcard Records, Glaswegian Indie Pioneers before Indie really existed had disbanded Leaving Collins and David Mclymont the bassist to draft in Malcolm Ross from labelmates Josef K  and Zeke Manyika a Zimbabwean drummer who gave the band another joyous dimension and line of attack..

Rip It Up, the single of course was the band's only genuine hit. Competition was fierce back in those days. Orange Juice feel like big winners forty years or more on. This record is a picnic in the heather..