FOCUS, RODDY IT'S AZTEC CAMERA

FOCUS, RODDY IT'S AZTEC CAMERA

FEATURES

by

David Keeps

Roddy Frame must be wearing contact lenses. I mean, how could a guy who’s just old enough to drink in any state he wants to have achieved the same kind of critical admiration of a John Lennon, Elton John and Elvis Costello without being something of a spiritual four-eyes? Well, sir, the focus point of Glasgow’s Aztec Camera is offstage and sitting across from me—in a paisley shirt that does not match the floral sofa—and the only thing I can see in his eyes is a perverse little twinkle. Call his sophisticated acoustic-based pop tunes wimpy, if you dare, but don’t accuse this man of a lack of vision!

"I think it’s really funny that in America we’re like an anti-rock group,” Roddy grins. ‘‘But put us in the same room with Motley Crue and our humor is so sarcastic and our cynicism so overbearing that we’d just demolish ’em! Rock ’n’ roll is dead. We’re just dancin’ on its grave!”

Them’s fightin’ words, Scottie! Where’dya get such a big fat nerve? ‘‘It seems like Americans have their big rock ’n’ roll rebellion when they’re around 15,” Roddy muses. ‘‘But I can remember when I was nine years old thinking it was all crap.” ’Course by then, Roddy was already a huge David Bowie fan, but even as an under-10 he had perspective: ‘‘I wasn’t so much in•j»to the glitter as the music,” Roddy reveals. ‘‘But I always thought Bowie’s hair was good.”

That’s what it’s like growing up in the big pop playground we call Great Britaifi. Frame was ushered into this world or^the very first day of 1964 in a shipbidding portion of Glasgow called Clay Ban4C and grew up in a ‘‘new town” called East Kilbride—‘‘very working class,” he recalls, ‘‘but the standard of housing was a bit better.” Early memories include ‘‘being in a cot and a neighbor boy coming in to see me and me hitting him and seeing all the Beatles films at Christmastime. I remember seeing the Move on TV and thinking Roy Wood was the greatest and when my mother said he looked absolutely hideous that made it 10 times better.”

"I just went out and had my head shaved."-Roddy Frame

Before he even started school, Roddy had framed his life’s agenda. ‘‘I wanted to be a pop star,” he declares. ‘‘When I was four I was taken to a department store to see Santa Claus. I was sat on his knee and he asked me what I wanted and I said I wanted an electric guitar and an amplifier. I got an acoustic guitar instead, but, of course, when you’re that age you can’t really be getting your guitar technique together, so I ended up using it as a space car for my Action Man.”

Being the baby of the family certainly had its advantages for young Rod. ‘‘I was always spoiled. There was a 10-year gap between me and my brothers and sisters and I’d always hang out with them and their friends. I always felt a bit removed from kids my age. I don’t know if that made me wise beyond my years. I probably thought I was wiser than I was. But I didn’t want to be like the adults I saw around me. I didn’t want to be successful with two cars and everything.”

Music provided a reasonably risky alternative to the finish-school-andthen-learn-a-good-trade treadmill. Roddy finally got that geetar and amp at age nine and started bashing away. Then along came punk. “I just went out and had my head shaved,” Roddy recalls. “I was totally blown away by it and it’s all I thought about every day. When I was 13 I used to play with this 22-year-old guy, traveling to this really rough part of town with my guitar in a garbage bag to rehearse cover versions of the Stones and Sex Pistols. I had a terrible attitude already at school. My main ambition was to leave when I was 15 before the exams and be on the dole and have a group. In ’79 when Punk ‘died’ it was like the day the music died. I just thought there was nothing else.”

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Bravely Roddy soldiered on, forming a group that summer called Neutral Blue. ‘‘It was half cover versions of the Clash and Alternative TV, maybe even a Stooges number, and half my own songs. We didn’t really play that much live, because I always hated going to see groups that hadn’t really bothered to get it together. And we were kind of precious in a way.”

Not so precious that he couldn’t leave a few months later to form Aztec Camera. Roddy cut his first disc for a local label called Postcard and soon found himself moving south to record for London’s leading alternative label, Rough Trade. ‘‘At the time,” he remembers, ‘‘there weren’t any McDonald’s in Glasgow. So I’d go there and eat some trash and that’s all I was interested in.” Big Macs must’ve led to big ideas, ’cause pretty soon Aztec Camera developed into next week’s Next Big Thing. A debut LP, High Land, Hard Rain, hit the racks in ’83 and big fan Elvis Costello asked Roddy to come see the USA the support-group way. ‘‘He was very nice,” Rod says. ‘‘I can see the comparisons, actually. There’s a warmth—a human factor that makes the same song change from night to night—in what we both do.”

After the tour, His Rodness returned to New Orleans, where he had met his current girlfriend. ‘‘Then I came back for another 10 weeks and spent most of my time in a bedroom with one of these little plastic Portastudios and sat there and played. The result was Knife, a new disc with an even greater variety of influences from ’70s disco to classic Southern sounds. ‘‘But I can’t really stomach most country music,” Roddy admits. “It’s so Dumbo. And my guitar pickin’ is pretty half-baked. I couldn’t stand up and play with a banjo player—I’d be lost.”

Despite growing up on American TV, the You-Ess-of-Hey sometimes bewilders Mr. Frame. “There’s a terrible conservatism here,” he shudders. “I was talking with this guy somewhere in the middle of the country and he had a nylon paisley shirt, ‘New Wave’ shoes and an anti-nuclear badge on and he was saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Reagan is terrible.’ Then we started talking about Britain and he blew me away by saying, ‘Yeah, it seems scary over there, as though it’s getting too close to communism.’ I mean Britain is so close to fascism! The things that Thatcher says and does are just crazy.”

And he’s not totally crazy about Yankee rock aesthetics, either, which brings us to the subject of Aztec Camera’s cover version of the mighty Van Halen’s “Jump.”

“It was the biggest rock record out when we were over here,” Roddy explains. “So I went to see them in Biloxi for a laugh. But it was more like a drag. You know that big fat guy who plays the bass? He has this staircase on the stage that he’s supposed to run up—in theory. But he couldn’t really get up the stairs, he just sort of waddled and it was so sad. It reminded me of this English group, the Barron Knights, who’ve been doing silly cover versions of hits for 20 years, like Weird Al Yonk-o-vitch, only not even that hep.

“When I saw that it really made me sad and I started playing the song on my guitar out of frustration. I played it really slowly and it started to sound like ‘Sweet Jane’ and I thought it was good like that, and when we started to play it live in the end it turned into a big parody with feedback and electric guitar. But I think our version is better. It’s got more irony, more implications. I’ve made it more clever. I don’t think when David Lee Roth was writing it that he meant ‘Jump’ as in you might as well throw yourself off the highest building.

“I think Van Halen can’t write songs at all,” Roddy adds, most diplomatically. “But I made the best of that one. I know people think it’s funny like Spinal Tap, but the fact that these people can be successful, just like Porky’s is successful, is really sad. You shouldn’t think that’s good. It doesn’t matter how far their tongues are in their cheeks, ’cause they’re not good. They’re not ethically sound. They’re not as good as me.”