The Red and Black

Issue date: 1/18/07 Section: Out & About

For Scottish pop group Camera Obscura, success is the result of hard work, determination and a little help from some lads in high places.

When lead singer Tracyanne Campbell penned the opening track to 2006's "Let's Get Out of This Country," she merely sought to answer a question posed by English singer songwriter Lloyd Cole in his 1984 track "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?"

The result, of course, is "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" - a clever and infectiously blissful sing-along recently nominated for best video of 2006 on MTV2.

"Tracy came up with the title first before she wrote the song," said Carey Lander (piano, organ, vocals) in an e-mail interview from her Glasgow home. "Lloyd is posing a question to the listener, and I think it invites a response. He was one of the first people to hear the finished record, and thankfully he liked it."

A stamp of approval from well-trained ears is always a good sign for an up-and-coming band, but for Camera Obscura that endorsement has ensured a widespread and fiercely loyal fan base since the 2001 release of "Biggest Bluest Hi Fi," the group's self produced debut.

Thanks to the near-divine intervention of Camera Obscura's biggest fan, the late John Peel, the band has received almost constant airplay on BBC's Radio 1 for the past five years. The group twice recorded in-studio at BBC for his famous Peel Sessions and broadcasted a handful of shows live from his home in the English countryside, a sprawling estate where he housed his unrivaled record collection, reportedly in the hundreds of thousands, in a set of barns and stables.

"We owe a lot to John Peel. Every new band would send him their stuff and pray that he'd play it so we were really happy that he liked us," Lander said. "I think he played every single we released. It gave us a lot of courage to carry on and believe that we weren't completely terrible."

Shortly after the band's first stateside tour in the summer of 2004, a coast-to-coast jaunt that hit Athens' own 40 Watt Club, Camera Obscura gave thanks one last time to its most ardent supporter by playing a private concert at Peel's 65th and final birthday party.

Though Peel was undeniably the group's most influential sounding board, the band's longest-running friendship happens to be with Scotland's other internationally adored indie-pop collective.

"We're friends with Belle and Sebastian. They've helped us out on lots of occasions," Lander said. "Richard Colburn drummed for us before we got a permanent drummer in the early days, Stuart Murdoch produced 'Eighties Fan' and made the video for it, and they invited us to support them at a big outdoor show in Edinburgh last year."

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