Oblivious

The Latin-tinged pop single Frame wrote for Rough Trade, a hit twice in one year.
Aztec Camera, from High Land, Hard Rain (1983)

Written by
Roddy Frame
Released
21 January 1983
Length
3:09
Album
High Land, Hard Rain

Play on hypersongs (1)Play on hypersongs (2)

Frame wrote it in London, set out to make a proper pop hit, and took the bus to Rough Trade to play it to Geoff Travis as a likely single. The guitar line, he said, was lifted from the trumpet solo in Love's Between Clark and Hilldale, and you can hear his acoustic bending out of tune toward the end of his solo. It was cut with the rest of the album in Eastbourne, produced by John Brand and Bernie Clarke.

Released by Rough Trade in January 1983 with Orchid Girl on the B-side, it reached 47 in the UK and number one on the independent chart. After Frame moved to WEA, the label reissued it in October 1983 without asking for new songs, and it climbed to 18. Its video was shot at Madewood Plantation House in Louisiana. Record Mirror said his guitar playing was simply dreamy, and Pitchfork later called it the punchiest of the album's three singles.

It is Aztec Camera's most played song on setlist.fm, logged 47 times from 1982 to 1993, and Frame was still playing it in his solo sets in 2018. Both uploads in the hypersongs web carry the album recording, one as plain audio and one laid over the official promo video.

Covers and versions

More songs by Aztec Camera

Walk Out to Winter

Sources

  1. Oblivious (Aztec Camera song), Wikipedia
  2. Aztec Camera, One Two Testing (1984-01)
  3. Aztec Relics, The Scotsman, via Killermont Street (1999-07-17)
  4. Oblivious (RT 122), Discogs
  5. Oblivious: song statistics, setlist.fm