POSTCARD RECORDS
AS grim as it was, 2020 wasn’t entirely without good news. Case in point: the utterly unlikely return of the fabled independent label Postcard Records, which, as the year ended, broke a 25-year silence to announce it was back in some kind of business, via an enigmatic, characteristically off-kilter Twitter feed (@dubh185).
The most inspirationally DIY of the UK’s original post-punk indie wave, Postcard was dreamed into life in the Glasgow of 1979 by Alan Horne, then an ambitiously bored 20-year-old, who famously ran the business out of the sock drawer in his tenement bedroom. Under the banner of its impudent logo – the mischievous kitten banging a toy drum – Postcard was low on resources, audaciously high on insolence and ideas.
Spearheaded by Edwyn Collins, Horne’s co-conspirator in setting up the label, Postcard only had four actual bands – the Scottish trio of Collins’ Orange Juice, Edinburgh’s Josef K, the teenaged Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera, plus Australians The Go-Betweens – and only really existed for one 18-month blur across 1980–81. Yet it left behind an example, an attitude, that has been inspiring misfits ever since.
Horne followed Postcard in the mid-1980s with the equally short-lived Swamplands label. After
