Johnnie Johnstone – The Secret History of Josef K

Johnnie Johnstone – Through The Crack in The Wall: The Secret History of Josef K

“I felt the need to write a book about Josef K because I believe they merit more than a footnote in a reference book or a website with only a few daily visitors. They seem forever destined to live in the shadow of other groups who may have seemed more significant or fashionable at the time. Surely, for once, they deserve the spotlight to themselves? Their story might be a hazy one – over forty years have passed since the fun and frenzy, and memories have grown thin – but what remains is a canon of intrepid sonic adventures and a tale of unfulfilled potential. More than anything else, however, the story of Josef K is a familiar one. It’s about friendships going sour, and it’s also about a few really bad decisions. Those are things that all of us can relate to.”

It’s difficult to convey the totemic importance Josef K hold for me.

As a young man coming of age in Edinburgh during the post punk revival of 2004 but obsessed with the music and the aesthetics of the original post punk era of 1978-82, Josef K, alongside their fellow Edinburgh co-conspirators the Fire Engines and Glasgow labelmates, fremenies and rivals Orange Juice, were MY band. Guitarist and vocalist Paul Haig, guitarist Malcolm Ross, bassist Davy Weddell, and drummer Ronnie Torrance were from my city. Their press photos were taken in locations I could recognise, and the stylised silhouette of Princes Street stared back at me from the cover of their sole album The Only Fun In Town (1981). Their reading tastes and nervous anxieties matched mine.

It didn’t matter that they only existed for a period of four years, or that they only managed to release a single album and a handful of singles in their lifetime. This only made them more cult-like, which in an era when my favourites were rapidly being coopted by the latest hip young things on the cover of the NME only added to their appeal. They always looked cool as fuck, all sharp suits and sharper cheekbones. And the music they made was remarkable – a fizzing, sometimes explosive mixture of scratchy, noisy guitars and frenetically funky rhythms, topped off by Haig’s debonair croon. They somehow melded everything that was exciting about the disparate original post punk groups into a sound that was almost pop but maintained a frisson of darkness and dissonance. 

Being a Josef K fan was a bit like being in a secret club.

LTM released two discs gathering up almost everything they released over the course of their lifespan. The Only Fun In Town/Sorry For Laughing (1990) brought their only album onto CD, and appended the inexplicably scrapped first attempt at the album, the cleaner and sharper Sorry For Laughing, that many believe the band should have released instead.

Young and Stupid (1990) compiled all their singles, and adds in their John Peel radio sessions and compilation appearances for good measure. But you had to snap them up quickly before they dropped out of print again. Simon Reynolds would make them a heroic presence in his seminal history of the post punk scene, Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005), and Domino Records would eventually release a single disc summation of their career, Entomology, in 2006,  but there remained the sense that Josef K would always be outsiders, forever viewed as bit players.

So the fact that Through The Crack In The Wall: The Secret History of Josef K (2024) exists at all feels something of a minor miracle.

Here is a book finally that elevates Josef K to the status of main characters, that elevates their music to its rightful place in the post punk canon. Johnnie Johnstone has done a wonderful job, speaking to all the members of the band plus various of their contemporaries as well as drawing on interviews and criticism published at the time and later. He also makes a compelling argument for the continued relevance of Josef K’s extraordinary music. Finally, Josef K fans have the complete and in-depth history of the band we’ve always wanted.

Due to their obscurity and their dislike of dealing with the press, Josef K’s origins and history have largely been shrouded in myth. Johnstone rights this wrong, giving us the personal background of Haig, Ross, Weddell and Torrance, as well as Weddell’s predecessor Gary McCormack, their meeting at school in Edinburgh, their early days as TV Art, and their four years as Josef K. He then charts Josef K’s remarkable progress, their lightning fast musical development into an exciting and unique act during one of music’s most exciting and original periods. Josef K signed to Alan Horne’s legendary Postcard Records, one of the earliest indie labels whose strong sense of style and musical ambition would serve as a blueprint for many others, including Creation.

Despite the fact that Horne was never particularly fond of Josef K

They recorded and released the only album the label released during its lifetime. Their singles saw them rise from being the dark shadow to the bright, tuneful Orange Juice to eclipsing them in verve and brilliance. However, a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, plus the disintegration of Haig and Ross’ friendship, scuppered the band. Self doubt led to them shelving the more commercial and immediate version of their album, losing them crucial momentum while they rerecorded a more confrontational and less accessible version, and turning the press against them while the music scene moved on. 

Johnstone chronicles the highs and the lows with equal clear-eyed passion,

bringing out the shadowy characters of the brilliant young men who made up Josef K. He celebrates their musical triumphs whilst lamenting what could have been. After all, as he points out, had Josef K stuck together, perhaps they could have occupied the cultural space of The Cure, Echo And The Bunnymen or The Smiths, rather than being consigned to the footnotes of history.

His conversations with Haig and Ross in particular give us a fascinating glimpse under the hood of Josef K’s music, highlighting the invention of these singular musicians. Johnstone also gives us an in-depth rundown of every single song that Josef K wrote during their lifespan, tracing their development across demos and live recordings, and provides a detailed discography for those of us who would like to fill the holes in our collection. He even provides a potted history of what the individual band members did next, from Ross’ stint in Orange Juice and Aztec Camera through Haig’s experiments with synthesisers. It’s an admirably comprehensive endeavour. Fans will find plenty to argue about within – after all, is not being a massive contrarian part and parcel of being a Josef K fan?

To this day we argue over whether The Only Fun In Town or Sorry For Laughing is superior. 

Johnstone makes a case for Josef K’s influence, speaking to their fans in high places, like the Smiths’ guitar hero Johnny Marr to Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, a band who much more obviously owe Josef K a sonic debt. But over forty years since Josef K acrimoniously split up, their true legacy remains the wonderful music. Listen to their masterful singles ‘Radio Drill Time’ and ‘It’s Kinda Funny’, give both Sorry For Laughing and its more difficult sibling The Only Fun In Time a listen, and once you’re a convert seek out this wonderful book. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K, but Johnstone, at last, has the truth. 

Johnnie Johnstone – Through The Crack in The Wall: The Secret History of Josef K

Everything was just so intense. There was an alienation and awkwardness about Josef K, but that was actually very true to life for me. Listening today I find really difficult because it brings back so many memories, so many ghosts and characters from the past. — Paul Haig.

A lot of what Josef K were about was as much to do with what not to play as what to play. Josef K could never have anything rootsy, no blues scale. We were always looking for the modern. — Malcolm Ross.

Josef K are the great lost post-punk band. 

Taking their name from the haunted protagonist of Franz Kafka s existentialist novel The Trial, they posed for photographs before brutalist and gothic architecture and produced visionary, often incendiary music that felt like the product of perpetual anxiety. And it really was.

Through The Crack In The Wall is the first ever biography of the band, tracing their story from their origins in the leafy suburbs of Edinburgh through to their untimely implosion four years later. It s a tale of fun and frenzy, filled with highs and lows. From their thrilling live shows, which left onlookers spellbound, to more anxious occasions confronting a baying audience of rioting anarcho-punks in Brussels; from a brief spell as press darlings of the inkies to the fateful decision to pull their debut album just as pop stardom beckoned — one that continues to haunt them today.

Drawing extensively on new interviews with the band members and those around them as well as contemporary press articles, the book explores the band s inner workings and analyses their relationships with Postcard Records supremo Alan Horne, labelmates Orange Juice, and manager Allan Campbell. It re-evaluates their position in the pantheon of post-punk greats and considers how their music helped shape the UK independent scene of the eighties. More than anything else, though, the book s primary purpose is to celebrate the incredible music Josef K made and consider what makes it more vital today than ever.