Twelve years of misery
How quickly does pop music move these days? You can be on the dole one week, proclaimed the most exciting new band in the country the next, signed a week later, and then - if your first releases don’t live up to everyone’s absurdly inflated expectations - find yourself unceremoniously dropped by your no-good label paymasters before you’ve even released your first album. Then bang: labels, fans, writers and DJs are off looking for the new you. And there are thousands of new yous on MySpace, just waiting to be discovered. Bye bye. Thanks for coming.
In fast times like these, it’s lovely to see a band like Camera Obscura blooming at last. Veterans of Glasgow’s indie scene, they’ve been mostly sort of trundling along for the past 12 years, long championed by John Peel but hardly anyone else, and dogged for at least eight or nine of those years by the constant - and, let’s be frank, often justified - accusation that they were essentially a not that great clone of Belle and Sebastian. Their obvious grumpiness about their lack of success has been a regular source of entertainment - their second album was ironically titled Underachievers Please Try Harder, and the name of their third, Let’s Get Out Of This Country, was partly a dig at the smug self-congratulation of the Glasgow music scene (‘what’s this city got to offer me? Everyone else thinks it’s the bee’s knees,’ went the title track’s weary chorus)
By rights nobody should give a stuff about Camera Obscura anymore, except that they have been quietly getting better and better over the years, and it’s starting to pay off, particularly in America. Let’s Get Out Of This Country was, as they’ve admitted themselves, the turning point. Catching a lot of people by surprise, it was wonderful, a bold, glorious, refreshing, shimmering, bittersweet pop record that left you not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or just dance. It was even a concept album of sorts - tackling the desire to escape a mundane life and the loneliness when you do escape (“I won’t be seeing you for a long while, I hope it’s not as long as these country miles; I feel lost,” went the mournful Country Mile). It was witty too - the first single, Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken, was a cheeky response to Lloyd Cole’s Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? that was actually better than Cole’s original. Best of all, the B&S comparisons could finally be consigned to the dustbin. While their influences were obvious, for the first time Camera Obscura sounded like themselves. It really should have made the Mercury Prize shortlist.
How did this happen? A key factor was Jari Haapalainen, the album’s Swedish producer. I know this partly because it’s obvious from listening to it, and partly because their singer Traceyanne Campbell told me as much when I interviewed her just before it was released. ‘It wasn’t like we sat down one day and said, ‘we’d better smarten our act up, but I didn’t want to make another album without a producer.’ she said. ‘What we could do in a studio ourselves wasn’t good enough.’ Before, she said, because all of the band had day jobs, ‘we used to go in at weekends ... so the songs wouldn’t stick together. When we had 11 songs recorded, we’d say, ‘that’s it, we’ve got an album now.’ This time, the band went to Stockholm, and experimented with Haapalainen before recording. ‘It was the best move we ever made. There was a lot on the line, we were taking a chance, and I think everybody just felt we were a team for the first time.’ (I see that the band are, as of a few months ago, finally all doing Camera Obscura full-time. Good for them)
Another factor was Campbell herself. A sometimes awkward, self-conscious lyricist on previous albums, she was a revelation on Let’s Get Out of This Country, frank and direct about lost love and infidelity. ‘This time the songs are definitely very personal,’ she told me. ‘There were a couple of things that happened. My grandmother died and I split up with my boyfriend. And people can tell. They say, ‘you’ve had a split, haven’t you?’ And you could tell. Once as deadpan a singer as the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, Campbell’s voice quivered with raw emotion on Country Mile, a song about the raw ache of missing a far away lover (“I wish that you were here with me, I would show you off like a trophy.”) Country Mile was written, fittingly given its subject, on a car journey from Stockholm city centre to the airport, Campbell singing into her phone. Tears for Affairs, meanwhile, was a withering attack on a cheating lover who pretends to be taking an illustration class when she’s clearly off with another woman.
Let’s Get Out Of This Country wasn’t the big hit it deserved to be, but it’s been a slow-burn success that raised expectations for what they did next. Which turns out to be more of the same - just out last week, My Maudlin Career (another very Camera Obscura title) was produced by Haapalainen again, and sounds almost exactly like Let’s Get Out Of This Country. For my money, the songs aren’t as strong - first single French Navy isn’t a patch on Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken, but on the whole the album is a worthy companion piece.
They are, I see from this very entertaining interview, as defiantly glum as ever. ‘I write songs when I’m miserable and try and make a career out of it,’ says Campbell. ‘It’s a bit of a joke.’ She then asks the interviewer to bring lots of her friends to their gig at Barrowland in Glasgow tonight, just in case no one else comes.
Sometimes I sort of wish she would cheer up. If we sold as many records in America as Camera Obscura, we’d be delighted. And the band’s glumness can make their live shows exasperating. Musically, they’ve never been better; with brass and a string section filling things out, their sound is big and muscular, but on stage they’re unassuming to the point of looking faintly embarrassed when people sing along (unlike Belle and Sebastian, who have relaxed to the point of cockiness over the years). Hopefully they feel they can loosen up a bit when they play Barrowland. Then again, if they were less miserable maybe their songs wouldn’t be as good. And My Maudlin Career is a fantastic title for an album. Morrissey would be proud.
Andrew
