10 Scottish Albums that need to be rediscovered

So, here we go, 10 Scottish albums worth rediscovering. Of course this is a totally partial, subjective list picked for effect, and on a hiding to nothing. But that’s the fun of it, right?

And there’s a small voice in my head whispering that, apart from maybe Pet Sounds, Lexicon of Love and Motown Chartbusters Volumes 1 and 3, no album is perfect. Most could do with the odd trim. Which maybe explains my love for my first choice, Texas Fever, which is really either a long EP or a short mini album. Just six tracks in all.

In 1984 Orange Juice were a band on borrowed time. Texas Fever is a kind of last hurrah for the band (another album would appear later that year featuring only front man Edwyn Collins and drummer Zeke Manyika).

Texas Fever, then, is the last hurrah of Orange Juice as a band. The opening track Bridge is a lovely example of Collins’s talent for concocting pop earworms, but it’s the final track, the blatantly Velvet-Undergroundy A Sad Lament that sustains longest.

By the end Manyika’s drums are all that’s left, rolling over and over, echoing forever.

Blush, Bows, 1999

Luke Sutherland’s CV is long and varied. He was part of the 1990s Scottish post-rock band Long Fin Killie, wrote the Whitbread Prize-nominated novel Jelly Roll and Venus as a Boy (a prime contender for any list of Scottish cult novels; hmm, there’s an idea), played with Mogwai and of late has been working with National Theatre of Scotland.

But back at the end of the 1990s he turned his hand to trip hop. Blush was the first of two albums full of bruised, spacey ballads, glittering strings and mellow, dubby beats. Ruth Emond provides swimmy vocals on a selection of the tracks, her voice floating over and through the blossomy wall of soundscape provided by Sutherland. The result is a lush, gorgeous, soundbed that invites you in to lie down in its midst.

Amorino, Isobell Campbell, 2003

This was Campbell’s first solo album under her own name after leaving Belle & Sebastian. Campbell’s will-of-the-wisp voice has always rather coloured how she has been received and it was no different when Amorino came out. The reviews were, at best, middling. And yet listening to the album all these years later what’s striking is the ambition of the musicality on display. Collaborating with Bill Wells and a host of jazz musicians, here are Campbell’s takes on ragtime, bossa nova and chanson. The result is a shimmering, foxy thing. On the title track she almost sounds like a Caledonian Stina Nordenstam. Ripe for rediscovery.

Will I Ever Be Inside of You, Paul Quinn & the Independent Group, 1994

The second coming of Postcard Records in 1992, more than a decade after its salad days, was maybe something of a slight return, but it did give us this glorious gift, a lasting testimony to one of Scottish pop’s lost boys. Quinn, who made his name as the frontman of the could-have-been contenders Bourgie Bourgie, recorded two albums for the revived Postcard. This, the second, is pure film noir. He was backed by a Scottish supergroup consisting of the likes of James Kirk, Mick Slaven, Campbell Owens and Blair Cowan, who all rose to the challenge of matching Quinn’s remarkable voice; a concentration of Bowie and Scott Walker, filtered through your favourite Scotch.

Stargazer, Shelagh McDonald, 1971

The danger with Shelagh McDonald is that the story overshadows the music. No surprise. It’s a great story. “It wasn’t my intention to walk out of my own life and vanish,” she told The Guardian in 2013, but that’s what she did. When she was 24 she was by her own admission an ambitious folk singer with two acclaimed albums behind her. But then she took LSD at a party one night. She was subject to terrifying hallucinations for weeks after. It took her months to recover and by then she had retreated from London back to Scotland. She and her partner Gordon then lived off-grid for years. As far as the music industry was concerned she had completely disappeared.

What was left were the two albums she had recorded, Album (1970) and Stargazer. Their quality should be obvious from the list of collaborators; Richard and Danny Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Keith Tippett and arranger Robert Kirby (famous for his work with Nick Drake). Stargazer now sounds like a message from another time; a world of seaside cafes, heartbreak and the fading hippy dream.

McDonald finally resurfaced in 2005.

Morning Dove White, One Dove, 1993

Forget Screamadelica. For some of us this is the best collaboration between producer Andrew Weatherall and Scottish musicians. The comedown album of choice for many back in the post-rave days. Glasgow’s One Dove were made up of Jim McKinven (once of Altered Images), Ian Carmichael and Dot Allison whose ethereal, breathy vocals were a narcotic in themselves. One Dove weren’t built to last but what they left behind is an album that captures a moment before Britpop.

Perhaps, The Associates, 1985

Perverse, I know. Perhaps is generally seen as the great disappointment after the dizzy heights of Sulk. Alan Rankine had left and Billy MacKenzie, the legend goes, never found a collaborator who could bring the best out of him again.

Worse than that, Perhaps is marked by cardboard beats, eighties clutter, an at-times agitated busy-ness and a general sense of trying way too hard. And yet, and yet … There’s always that voice, all champagne bubbles at the top end and glossy marble at its base. A voice that could condense a novel’s worth of feeling into a few words. “I had a wild affair. It never lasted,” he sings on the title track and you can feel the whole arc of it in the way he sings those eight words.

Surf, Roddy Frame, 2002

Maybe Knife, the Mark Knopfler-produced follow-up to Aztec Camera’s golden debut High Land, Hard Rain, is the obvious choice when it comes to all things undervalued in the Roddy Frame back catalogue, but this stripped-back album is a delight. Recorded in Frame’s front room, it is an intimate suite of love and loss songs. Just Frame’s voice, words and his close-miked guitar. What more do you need?

Lead Us Not Into Temptation, David Byrne, 2003

David Byrne’s best music usually has Tina Weymouth on bass, but this solo album from the early years of the century - a kind of Scottish homecoming for Byrne - deserves to be better known. Byrne was asked to create a soundtrack for David McKenzie’s film adaptation of Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s first novel Young Adam. Working with various members of Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai and Snow Patrol, the largely instrumental result has a dank, waterlogged feel, suitable for the film’s canal setting. But it also stands as an impressive piece of work in its own right.

Love the Cup, Sons and Daughters, 2004

Now I’m second-guessing myself. What about Ladytron’s Helen Marnie solo debut Crystal World, or DJ Alex Smoke’s Paradolia? Something by Kode 9? The Bathers? The Pearlfishers? No, let’s finish with another mini LP to complete the circle. The wild punk country thrash of Sons and Daughters, all lipstick, flick knives and curled lips, was one of the most thrilling sounds of the early years of the century. This, their first album, just six tunes, was a fierce calling card.