Aztec Camera - We Could Send Letters

Aztec Camera's debut is well up the list of my favourite albums ever, and has been for about two-thirds of my life at this point (eep). I loved them so much as a teenager that I did silly things, like turning in essays a day late because I decided instead to go see them a second night in a row, in a city 50 miles away. Well OK, I only did that once.

It was all a bit of a letdown after that, of course, but the measure of how much I adored High Land, Hard Rain is that I still picked up everything Roddy did afterwards no matter how desperate it was (and the later stuff, it has to be said, was really pretty desperate). Actually, maybe that was just the measure of how much I adored him. Could you blame me, though, really?


This is an early version of my favourite song of theirs, released on a 1981 NME cassette called - wait for it - C81. Roddy was 17 when this was released. Can you imagine anyone being this talented at 17? And so utterly bloody beautiful as well? Imagine.