#5:L.O.V.E. Love : Orange Juice (Polydor, POSP 357, 1981)
As featured just a few months ago on the blog as part of the random 7″ singles feature….and prior to me coming up with the idea of this particular series.
The summer of ’81 and the news that Orange Juice had signed to Polydor.
They had actually, with the connivance of manager Alan Horne, who had a long-time dislike of Geoff Travis of Rough Trade, taken an advance from Travis to fund recording sessions in London in the summer of 1981, working with Adam Kidron who had also been producing Scritti Politti‘s debut album. The plan, as far as Rough Trade knew, was for the Orange Juice album to be distributed by them but to appear as if it was a Postcard album with full control being given to the band.
Instead, in what wasn’t the nicest of moves, Orange Juice took the tapes to Polydor, and the bosses at the major label made them an offer that couldn’t be turned down, even if it came with the loss of overall control that the indie label was proposing.
The last week of October 1981 saw the debut 45 for the major.
mp3: Orange Juice – L.O.V.E. Love
A cover of an Al Green song.
The 7″ single came with a fantastic b-side:-
mp3: Orange Juice – Intuition Told Me
Both had been recorded with Adam Kidron, but the wish of the label, backed by Edwyn Collins, to go with the cover as the new single was the final straw for James Kirk and Steven Daly as they had grown increasingly disillusioned with life in the band, notwithstanding they had been fully involved in the forthcoming debut album.
One of the decisions that had caused ructions was Edwyn Collins’ wish to recruit Malcolm Ross into the band. You’ll hopefully recall from previous parts of this series that Malcolm had been involved in production duties with some early singles, and now that his band Josef K had come to an end, he was on the lookout for something new to get involved on. It led to Edwyn and Malcolm, along with bassist David McClymont, undertaking tours in late 1981, with stand-in drummers to support the release of the debut single for Polydor and to showcase the album. By all accounts, the shows were shambolic……
Taking into account that copies of Falling and Laughing were already beginning to shift for considerable sums on the second-hand market, the decision was made to add its b-side Moscow as the extra track on the 12″ release of L.O.V.E. Love, albeit really is Moscow Olympics in a cleaned up and more polished version:-
mp3: Orange Juice – Moscow (alt version)
L.O.V.E, Love entered the charts at a rather underwhelming #68, climbing three places the following week before dropping out of the Top 75 altogether.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
Loving this series already JC!
Alan Horne had a dislike of Geoff Travis you say? And the rest. Spent a gloriously entertaining afternoon in Mr Horne’s Glasgow West End living room sometime in the 90s listening to an endless litany of scandal, grudges and gossip. He should write a book, although I doubt if publishers’ legal teams would risk it. LOVE was initially unimpressive but really grew on me. Major label adjustments notwithstanding, the debut LP was pretty great (Keir Starmer regards it as the best ever, but his judgement is notoriously suspect).
My least favourite OJ single .