[Written by Alistair McKay for The Scotsman. August 2, 2002. Transcribed by killermontstreet.com, broken characters left unedited.]
Unprompted, towards the end of our conversation, Roddy Frame tells me about his dreams. "My recurring nightmare is that I walk onto a stage and I go to start the song and I turn around and the bass player's not ready. Then he's ready and I look behind him, and the drummer's still not ready, and I wait to get him, and I look round and the crowd has gone. Then I get them back, but I can never get everything working in the one place at once.
"I think that's very apt," he continues. "A very powerful metaphor for how we run our lives sometimes. We try to control all the bits. I was constantly changing drummers, trying to get it right. Is it the manager? Is it the record company? Then you think: 詮***, maybe it's me.' That's the one possibility you never think about: firing yourself.
"That was the joke - maybe I could fire myself. Well, maybe if I had, things would have got better."
Not that long ago, it looked as if Frame had taken his own advice and sacked himself. His last record, The North Star, his first without the brand name Aztec Camera, had been kindly received but did nothing commercially, despite being on Travis's label Independiente. (It is arguable that Travis wouldn't have existed without the efforts of Aztec Camera and their cohorts Orange Juice, who, for a brief period around 1981, made Glasgow the world centre of jangly guitars.) Of that record, Frame says: "I think they're really good songs and I'm bound to say that, but it's one of those things that just didn't really excite or interest anyone. It was kinda like: 15 years down the road, Roddy Frame with jangly guitars and a band. Nice, but ..."
Nice, but. Frame, we may conclude, was questioning his sense of purpose. He is 38 now and started in the music business at 16. His first record, a lovely tumble of words called Just Like Gold, was released weeks before his 17th birthday, propelling him into a jagged career which delivered shards of greatness (the confessional soul of How Men Are, say, the bittersweet lament We Could Send Letters, the Glasgow bus station ballad Killermont Street) along with a number of diversions where he variously disguised the blunt vulnerability of his blue-eyed soul. He changed the drummer and the bass player and the producer. He worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, hoping that the Japanese producer would make him sound electronic and weird like his soundtrack to Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. (Sakamoto wanted to make a jangly Scottish guitar record.) He duetted with Mick Jones of the Clash on Good Morning Britain. He sampled the World Saxophone Quartet. He sang of the smell of violence.
It's possible to view Frame's career as a journey of exploration which flitted between genres. He was a punk who liked Dylan and Donovan, listened to Anita Baker, and wanted his trumpets to sound like Miles Davis. But flitting between genres doesn't get you played on the radio. Eventually, Frame hit the rocks.
Nine years ago, when promoting one of his less-successful experiments on WEA, I met him, and he confessed to being unconcerned by notions of a career in music. He could, he said, always pick up his guitar and sing. "I'll always get a gig."
Last week, at London's tiny Borderline club, he was doing just that, happily strumming through 17 songs which underlined his claim to be one of the best writers of the last 20 years. There were oldies (Somewhere in My Heart, The Bugle Sounds Again, The Boy Wonders, Down the Dip, The Birth of the True) and several songs from his new record Surf, which is released next week, but already sounds like a classic. It is Frame, an acoustic guitar, and a shattered heart. It is poetic and beautiful. It is his best record, the one he always threatened to make.
Though he is currently too optimistic to say it, Surf is Frame's map back from the brink. He talks now about keeping a sense of scale in his work, making it all easily accessible. The other word he keeps using to describe his current position is "manageable". The record was recorded in a manner which recalled the simplicity of his first recordings, using an Apple Mac. "You write the words on the screen, finish it, go ping, and then plug your mikes into the same computer and record it. You just think 層ow'. This was like the dream. That instantaneous way of making records. It's almost like we wanted to do with indie records: f*** that, we'll do it all ourselves.
"I remember going through on the train to Edinburgh with Alan Horne [of Postcard], to do demos. We went through nine or ten songs in one day and came back with the tape and thought nothing of it. Or recording those Postcard singles - you'd get on the train, make the record, come home and the next week you'd get the record. You can do that again now."
Roddy Frame's dad was a singer. Not a professional, but sometimes he would perform in clubs. He liked the popular tenors, Josef Locke, Mario Lanza, and specialised in the pop songs of the 1940s. "He had a perfect voice," Frame says. "A very beautiful voice, strong high notes." The Frames were from Faifly in Clydebank, but moved to East Kilbride when Roddy was a year old. He has photographs, but no memories from Clydebank.
When people ask about East Kilbride, Frame refers them to the Bill Forsyth movie, Gregory's Girl. "That's Cumbernauld, but it looks exactly the same." East Kilbride, he recalls, had "a million roundabouts, which means there are a million underpasses. To walk from one end of town to the other, you have to go through about 40 tunnels."
But it felt OK. "It felt good. I remember saying to someone, 詮***in' hell, it's not that bad. There's a lot of grass and that'. And he goes: 糎ell, it'll be f**kin' great if I ever decide to keep sheep.'"
When he was four or five years old, Frame saw Roy Wood and Wizzard on Top of the Pops.
"My sisters were into pop music and the Beatles, so I was hearing them say how great it was all the time. And my dad was a good singer, so there was always music around the house. But I remember seeing Roy Wood with all his hair dyed and all that. I liked him in the Move as well, I loved the sound of the electric guitar in Get The Fire Brigade. And then I saw him on TV, and I said: 選 want to be like that.' My mum said: 塑ou want to be like that? You don't want to be like that.' I said: 選 really do, that's who I want to be.' So I got a little guitar.
"And then my sister had a magazine with pop pin-ups in it, and there was one of David Bowie, looking really weird: there was all this red light on him, and his spiky hair, and I said 糎ow!' She said: 選 don't want that one, you can have it. He's weird.' I took it. Before I heard Bowie's music I liked his picture."
When Roddy was seven, his uncle came over from San Francisco and gave him ｣10. His dad took him to a record shop called the Arcade. Upstairs, it was dark and the walls were covered in posters of topless girls on motorcycles. He bought Bowie's Space Oddity. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the chord change near the start of the song changed his life. "That change from C to E7: 禅his is ground control to Major Tom'. You just think: 糎ow! What was that?' I remember putting that on again and again, thinking it was just weird. I couldn't believe this sound on a record could make your whole being feel weird. This yearning feeling."
His heroes were Bowie's guitarist Mick Ronson, Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera and Dr Feelgood's Wilco Johnson. And then there was punk. At the age of 15, Frame phoned up Siouxsie and the Banshees and offered to be their guitarist. "The girl said, 前h, I think at 15 you might be a bit young'."
Last month, he went to see Siouxsie play. "I got such a thrill seeing Siouxsie doing it again. I even warmed to the idea of nostalgia. Coming from a punk background, I always would have frowned on that. You know: this is nostalgia, this is not real. This is people remembering what was good in the past. Now I think that's all right. It's good. It's quite pleasant."
It's continuity.
"Yeah! That's exactly what it is. You think: 禅hey're still here, maybe everything's OK!'
"As you get older you value those things. I was watching Fawlty Towers the other night, and Reginald Perrin before that - you want to go and hug the people that made those.
"It's like when I see David Bowie. It's not like I want to meet him or hang out with him, I just want to go up to him and say thank you for all that great stuff. Thanks for being such a big part of a childhood I can look back on and think, 糎ow, that was great'."
Briefly, I talk to Roddy Frame about love. It is his subject and no-one is writing better songs than he has on Surf. (On Big Ben, for example, he offers this: "Like the wind that leaves the trees all standing/Shy and raked as their leaves are landing".)
He compares it to a kind of spirituality "that washes over you and makes you better". And then, more pertinently, to a loosening of the grip, a detachment: "a letting go. Sometimes when you let go a bit, it helps.
"If there is a theme," Frame concludes, "maybe that's it. Acceptance, maybe? It seems like the more I let go, the more power I get."
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