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Opening for The Clash at Edinburgh Odeon, debonair TV Art duly found themselves heckled as Mod revivalists, as if aping The Jam. I was quite interested in the original Mod movement, and that was one of the influences in us wearing suits - from Oxfam, mind.'Īnother influence, both sartorial and musical, was avant-punk quartet Subway Sect, whose landmark single Ambition appeared in October 1978. I suppose we were quite puritanical, but modernist too. We just thought that they weren't on the same wavelength. Paul and I were always striving to be, if not experimental, at least not clichéd. Whereas you could tell the bands who had, because they would chuck in rock guitar cliches here, there and everywhere.
'None of us had played in groups prior to punk so it was a clean slate. 'We were forward-looking,' recalls Malcolm Ross of this formative period.
By the time David Weddell took over on bass at the beginning of 1979 the nascent group were gigging regularly, complementing a thriving local scene that also included The Associates, Fire Engines, Scars, Metropak, Visitors and Another Pretty Face. Initially a three-piece called TV Art, singer Paul Haig, guitarist Malcolm Ross and drummer Ron Torrance were briefly joined by Gary McCormack, later to find fame of another kind with The Exploited. Inspired in equal measure by British punk and American artrock bands such as Television, Pere Ubu and The Velvet Underground, Josef K came together in Edinburgh in mid-1978. Although outlived - and outsold - by labelmates Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, Josef K perfected a prescient blend of skinny funk and leftfield pop, an artful combination of style and substance that continues to exert an influence out of all proportion to the brevity of their career. For two brief years at the dawn of the 1980s Josef K provided iconic Scots indie label Postcard Records with its sharpest cutting edge.