Edwyn Collins - Badbea

The Guardian 60

(AED)

Edwyn Collins’ ninth solo album carries the unmistakable air of a man looking back, lyrically and musically. It’s not just the title track, a lament for the hard lives of the Highlanders in a tiny village that is now “a ruined monument to life and death”. It’s there in Outside, in which fuzzed, frantic Ramones guitars are accompanied by a lyric repeating that band’s old mantra of “I don’t care”. But it’s not the defiance of youth that makes him uncaring: “Now I’m old, I don’t care.” That theme is picked up on Glasgow to London, on which Collins reflects on how there was a time “Ambition drove my life / Now I’m old I must admit I couldn’t give a fuck.”