Young but not so stupid

What a sad day that was... 19 January 1985. Edwyn Collins announced that Orange Juice had split, whilst on stage at the London Brixton Academy for a Miners' benefit gig. Their time was gone, just five years after all, not so much if you think of the Rolling Stones and other rock dinosaurs. Orange Juice was so important for the post punk scene as the Stones for mainstream rock music and there's no doubt aboput it. How I loved their first years, when Steve Daily & James Kirk were still jangling their guitars and Falling & laughing was the best unknown pop song around.. this was the time when Edwyn's boys offered us some of the last century's most quixotic and luminous pop moments. They had raccoon hats, they wore their fringe like Roger McGuinns and, most of all, they wrote songs of real happiness, breathtaking tunes, hopeless bus-stops and bars romanticism....a s someone said years ago, "there were few bands more human than the OJs... they had the courage to fail. They wanted to be The Velvet Underground, they wanted to be The Delfonics, they wanted to be Sly Stone and the Buzzcocks all at the same time, and they were prepared to make fools of themselves in the attempt. According to their detractors, this is precisely what they did, but why waste time on the grouses and churls when there are songs as good... did I say good? Songs as life-changingly fantastic as 'A Sad Lament', 'Falling And Laughing', 'Consolation Prize' and 'The Artisans' ... There's really not much more to say. Except that the "shoo shoo shoo shoo doo"s in 'In A Nutshell' say nearly everything there is to say in the confines of a pop song. And that... oh, don't start me off. We'll be here all night"...