Album Review: Edwyn Collins, "Losing Sleep"

Back in the day – the day being the early 1980s – Edwyn Collins and his then band Orange Juice practically invented the indie guitar pop template. This was soon put to good use by The Smiths and a host of other bands that melded the same jangly guitar sound with fey, campy singing.

The debt owed to one of the godfathers of indie pop was partially repaid on Collins' latest CD Losing Sleep. This was the first album entirely written and recorded since Collins recovered from two debilitating brain hemorrhages in 2005.

With contributions from a who's who of indie pop worthies – including Johnny Marr, Roddy Frame, The Drums, and Alex Kapranos – you might have thought there would be a danger of Collins’ own input being overshadowed. However, the end product is very much an Edwyn Collins record, with plenty of his impressive songwriting and production touches, from the stomping Northern Soul of album title track to the gentle country & western mantra of Searching For The Truth, the first song he wrote on the road to recovery.

Colin Liddell
Metropolis
21st March, 2011

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!