About indie reading

Anna Doble on being an indie music fan in the mostly-analogue 90s:

London Fields by Martin Amis sat on my shelf for at least a year in about 1997. Why? Because one of Blur once mentioned it in an interview. My copy wasn’t even mine – it was taken out on loan from my home-town library which led me to racking up a fine so insurmountable (£8-ish) that I eventually returned it under cover of darkness in a covert mission to the marketplace whereupon I shoved the book through the library’s awkward letterbox and ran panting for the hills. Other books on the curriculum in the School of Indie were Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which we all actually read).

Do musicians tell people what to read these days? I know the likes of Dolly Parton encourage kids to read, but where’s the equivalent of Graham (I bet it was Graham, he wore glasses) begging up Martin Amis? And the Manics doing the same for Mishima and many others, Radiohead for Chomsky and Naomi Klein, Paul Weller for Colin MacInnes, Edwyn Collins for Salinger, Morrissey for Wilde and Capote (less so Keats and Yeats). Is literary prescriptivism not A Thing any more?

About Britpop (and after)

In my 2007 book about Radiohead (as seen in the finest charity shops) I identified a handful of albums that encapsulated their creators’ bleary-eyed response to the end of Britpop’s frenetic hedonism (and none of them were by Oasis, because Oasis didn’t have the wit to realise the party was over). And finally, in yet another documentary about the last gasp of Union-Jack-splattered guitars (and one that also relegated Oasis to a supporting role), Miranda Sawyer found les mot justes to define those records: “everything turned into Tuesday”.

About reading

David Peace:

I was fortunate to be brought up in a house with a lot of books. My dad read David Storey and Stan Barstow, who came from where I came from, but also Chandler, Maigret, Camus, and more sports books than you’ve ever seen. There was Dewsbury market for comic books and secondhand books, and I can’t overstate the education you got from reading the NME between 1979 and 1985. A review of the Birthday Party would be talking about Dostoevsky; Mark E Smith, Nick Cave, Coil and Morrissey all talked about books, painting, other forms of music, and I just absorbed it all. You could be reading Beckett and Philip K Dick, watching the football and The Singing Detective, going to see a band and a Francis Bacon exhibition; almost every week you were hearing or reading something you’d never seen the like of before. I’m not sure that’s the case these days.

Maybe the cut-off came in the mid-1990s, when the likes of Oasis proclaimed themselves heirs to the mantle of indie greatness, but coupled it with a strand of (performative?) bibliophobia. And 20 years later, Noel Gallagher still seemed deeply suspicious of the whole idea of reading and writing books:

“…people who write and read and review books are f***ing putting themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us who f***ing make records and write pathetic little songs for a living.”

It’s not an either-or scenario, and I wouldn’t presume that by not offering their fans a bespoke to-read list packed with dystopia and existential angst modern musicians are implicitly endorsing Gallagher’s philistinism. But it could be that they’re advised not to talk about it, at least not in the opinionated, evangelical tones of their 80s forebears.

About Phonogram

Late to the (Death Of A) Party as always, I read Phonogram: Rue Britannia, Kieron Gillen’s graphic novel that gives a dark fantasy to the glory days of Britpop, and a line leaps up that would have prompted a paragraph or several in my Radiohead book. First:

In those vacuum post-Britpop days that marked the end of the great British indie experiment (Birth: “Spiral Scratch EP”, the Buzzcocks, Death: “K”, Kula Shaker), there was space for all manner of leftist ideas to flourish.”

Gillen’s starting point is pretty much inarguable but in the book I suggested the patient survived the cod-psychedelia of K and staggered on until 1997/8, its terminal hangover depicted in the grooves of (take your pic), Blur by Blur, Ladies and Gentlemen... We Are Floating In Space by Spiritualized, Urban Hymns by The Verve, This Is Hardcore by Pulp (referenced on the cover of Phonogram) or, of course, OK Computer itself. And then Gillen reminds us:

The thing with Kenickie is that they, by the very nature of their existence, draw a line between all the enforced dichotomies modern pop. Seriousness is not the same as intelligence, no matter how many times virginal Radiohead fans reiterate it....

About landfill indie

I’ll be honest, by the time the likes of Razorlight, Kasabian and the Pigeon Detectives were being touted as musical Next Big Things, I was already of an age where it would have felt undignified to care. So the Vice story about The Top 50 Greatest Landfill Indie Songs Of All Time was only of interest as an academic curiosity; I’m fascinated by the formation of cultural canons and this seemed to be a tongue-in-cheek exercise in imposing a hierarchy of significance on a genre that, the authors asserted was never particularly significant in the first place. The subhead refers to “the best most average songs in British music history”, which feels right. The fact that this came hot on the heels of the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Britpop – which really was significant, even if you didn’t want it to be – is another kick in the tender parts to The View, The Enemy and The Wombats. No useful book about Britain in the 1990s can fail to mention Blur and Oasis at length. I wrote a book about The Noughties and guitar bands of the era (I namechecked the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand) earned a single paragraph, which also feels about right.

But Maximo Park and Larrikin Love still have their doughty defenders. Step forward one Mark Beaumont, who was writing for NME at the time those bands arrived and is still somehow plying his trade within the cavernous husk that remains of that title. Beaumont asserts that even the use of the term “landfill indie” is “pure snobbery... sneeringly reductive”. To which the only sensible response is, Mark, you say that like it’s a bad thing. Snobbery and reductiveness are what ensured the NME mattered in its glory days in the 1970s/80s. It might not have been kind, it might not have made sense (aesthetic, cultural, historical, even financial), but it was critical statement, a line in the sand, a declaration that some things are good and some things are bad. Beaumont’s defence of Hard-Fi and The Holloways rests pretty much on the fact that people enjoyed them and it’s a bit horrid to say they shouldn’t have:

Don’t let all these jaded old gits tell you that your youth wasn’t as brilliant as theirs – I was watching you losing your shit to ‘Killamangiro’ from the Club NME DJ booth and it absolutely was. The ‘00s UK rock scene was as exciting, energised and unpredictable as Britpop or punk, and far more varied than both.

There’s a distinct sense here that Beaumont is not only asserting that the music mattered and still matters, but that he, Beaumont, also still matters, because he was there and the Club NME DJ booth was really the Lesser Free Trade Hall and The Good Mixer combined and you’re a jaded old git if you disagree. If only such a desperately quixotic, gloriously muddle-headed rage against the dying of the light had informed the music at the time, it might have been more interesting.

PS: In similar territory, Joe Muggs responds to Mic Wright’s interview with Conor McNicholas, which I mentioned last week:

The NME could and should have become a British Pitchfork, but the diminishing of it to a wilfully illiterate fan letter to sub-Libertines, sub-Strokes haircut bands in the 00s - a total cultural reductionism at a time when alternative music was defined specifically by diversity - ensured that would never happen. The NME should still be relevant to the musical offspring of the exciting scenes back then - Trash, Green Man, FWD>>, the birth of grime, etc etc - instead it only speaks to a tiny cluster of wankers in Doherty trilbies pissing on their own shoes and repeating Chris Moyles jokes at some “sheeeeeyine” festival somewhere. Ugh.

PPS: I’ve just remembered, two decades ago I also indulged in a bit of narcissistic scene revisionism.   But at least I was aware of my own ridiculousness. At least I hope I was.

About Cruel World

Under normal circumstances, reports that a whole load of my teenaged self’s idols would be playing together in May would have me at least casually scoping flights to LAX but after about 20 seconds I remembered that most of the names on the bill would turn out to be wizened, excavated shells of their original selves, and I’d be surrounded by a whole load of other people who used to have interesting hair and nice cheekbones and we’d all be in mortal dread of Morrissey saying one of those Morrissey things and to be honest I don’t think my knees are up to it any more and oh God this means I’ve finally grown up doesn’t it?

About Beat Happening

Back in 2002, K Records released Crashing Through, a seven-disc box set devoted to the recorded output of the indie rock band Beat Happening. I asked Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels to review it for Careless Talk Costs Lives magazine, which remains the most quintessentially indie thing I’ve ever done (having chickened out from dancing on stage with Belle and Sebastian at a gig in Bangkok).

Now, there’s a new box set, We Are Beat Happening. It’s on vinyl this time, which I thought at first would make it more indie (analogue rather than digital), although it’s been remastered (at Abbey Road, no less), which I reckon seriously misses the point of BH’s lo-fi charm, and it actually contains less music than Crashing Through, losing the bonus tracks and the live mini-album.

And then of course I remembered that vinyl (or, ugh, “vinyls”), doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It’s a style thing, a hipster thing, it’s an acquisition. Really, they should have released the whole thing on cassettes. No, even better, they should have got someone to play it on the radio, and recorded that broadcast on cassettes, and decorated the inlay card with poems about someone who doesn’t fancy you, and CND stickers, and maybe burned off the corner of the case with a cigarette lighter.

Then I discovered that another band, the Oh Sees, are releasing a box set on eight-track cartridges. Now, who could I get to review that?

About indie music

I’ve pondered the whole idea of the commodification of the alternative many times; is it a debasement of ethical principles, or the natural outcome of the individualism at the heart of the indie ethic? Is this poster by Dorothy, depicting indie classics in the form of commercial print adverts, a recuperation of rebellious instincts or a weary admission that pop music, however fragile and/or angry it has to be, is ultimately a cash-grabbing exercise?

About the NME (RIP, etc)

Paul Morley, one of the old NME hands mourning their alma mater in Record Collector:

Post-Wikipedia, writers spend about nine-tenths of their piece setting out facts and received wisdom before saying anything original. Back then, we could make it all up. You didn’t know the “facts”. Didn’t really need them. I remember doing an interview with the Monochrome Set, in which I numbered them, one to six. What mattered was the words, the making up, that colouring in, which became the truth, the narrative of the music.

Now, this may feed into our modish hysteria about Fake News, and also confirm the prevalent belief that Morley is nowt but a posturing pseud. But surely it’s preferable to the recent banal prattlings of another NME alumnus; or the Best of British list, so male, so white, concocted by listeners to a radio station that once had vague claims to being alternative, whatever that might mean.

How to be indie, part 2

I was rather rude a while ago about a WikiHow article entitled How to Be Indie (for Girls), with its confused, contradictory invocations to “be yourself” and at the same time instructing readers to have an appropriate haircut, avoid tanning and admire Zooey Deschanel. And, of course, the fact that music appreciation appears to be the least important aspect of the whole indie experience. It all seems so inauthentic, so contrived, so superficial, so much what indie culture wasn’t meant to be. Ah, it was better in the old days. Why can’t we have the old days back?

And then I read a review of a concert in Manchester a few days ago that seemed intent on bringing the old days back, in the form of the Wedding Present (not too bad), Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (ummm...) and, uh-oh, Cud, among others: basically a bunch of men in their 40s and 50s — yes, I know, that’s me — spending half a day wallowing in desperate nostalgia for the time when a Chesterf!elds badge and a pint of snakebite and black were all you needed to maintain a veneer of cool. That’s what having the old days back means. The C86 equivalent of Showaddywaddy, essentially.

And suddenly the idea of 14-year-old girls being advised to get a Zooey Deschanel haircut if they want to be indie seems infinitely preferable.

Where Britpop came from

I’ve been wondering what, if anything, to write about the 20th anniversary of Britpop and then Taylor Parkes comes up with his glorious more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger piece for The Quietus so I think I probably won’t bother. But one passing reference in Parkes’s piece does trigger a memory: the NME’s overview in the last issue of 1989, titled “The Eighties: Thank God It’s Over”.

Because, in so many ways, music in the 1980s was indeed horrid, especially the second half. Sure, there was Madchester and C86 and acid house and rare groove but the dominant note was a sort of bombastic, chest-beating post-Live-Aid earnestness with ghastly haircuts, as expressed in T’Pau’s China In Your Hand. I spent a year of the decade in Canada, which was at the time in thrall to the likes of Glass Tiger, Heart and the egregious Loverboy, responsible for this abomination...

In case you can’t bear to watch it, this is the gist: a louche, quirky lounge band performs a version of Loverboy’s earlier hit Working For The Weekend, to general indifference, so the venue manager calls up Loverboy themselves, who are variously partying with hot chicks, playing strip poker with hot chicks and jamming – without hot chicks, because hot chicks aren’t actually into music – and they come and redeem the situation, to the disgust of the lounge band.

The joke is (presumably) that first band is everything that is antithetical to great music, in that they are arch, laconic and include a female member who actually plays a proper instrument and probably doesn’t enjoy strip poker. Whereas the real Loverboy have big hair, tight jeans and huge, fistypumpy choruses. Oh, and did I mention those hot chicks? This was the triumph of jock rock over foppery, Top Gun over Blue Velvet, and the fact that I hated Loverboy’s preening, ball-grasping idiocy and rather liked the pink-suited geeks at the beginning – I rather thought they resembled the LA outfit known only as X – suggested that I was on the losing side.

Well, for the time being, at least. In the following decade two American bands – Nirvana and REM – that thrived on their outsider status and attracted fans who felt the same way, suddenly achieved massive worldwide acclaim and commercial success. They were followed in due course by British acts such as Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay. Music that would once have been identified as indie or alternative, implying a certain otherness to the mainstream, was front and centre stage. The nasty strain of arrogance that Taylor Parkes identifies in Britpop was a sort of Revenge of the Nerds effect: suddenly the geeks in pink suits were playing strip poker with the hot chicks. Britpop, for all its ills, was about the skinny kids who’d finally got tired of having sand kicked in their faces and demanded their piece of the action. Even if we never actually wanted to go to the beach anyway, but you get my point.

The only problem was, as soon alt-rock became the dominant form of popular music, it ceased to be alt, ceased to be indie, ceased to be other and pretty much lost its reason to exist beyond offering a sense of beery camaraderie – I saw Oasis at Knebworth, I know of what I speak – that was eerily similar to the sort of crap that Loverboy had served up. Essentially, in order to save the pink-suited lounge band, it became necessary to destroy it. Loverboy lost a few battles but they ultimately won the war. And in a funny sort of way, that’s how I like it.

The appropriation of the alternative, episode 44,173

Along with many others, I sneered at this WikiHow article entitled How to Be Indie (for Girls), with its recommendations of “curly or wavy hair”, “old comics”, “indie celebrities” and with – oh, yeah – music as a 10th-place afterthought. And then I found myself editing a fashion spread that namechecked the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis and the Cocteau Twins, filleting my own adolescence to flog the autumn/winter collections. God, have I finally recuperated myself?

On brows

In The American Thinker, William Deresiewicz seeks to add some 21st-century nuance to Dwight Macdonald’s famous identification of ‘Midcult’, mass culture that masquerades as art.

Actually, I say “famous”, but while Macdonald’s pronouncement caused a stir in the States back in 1960, it was pretty much ignored in Britain, where slagging off the middle brow had become an established and respectable hobby for several decades. TS Eliot, for example, was a devotee not only of serious, abstruse cultural endeavours, but also of what would be regarded as trash. He loved the cheery vulgarity of musical hall, writing an adoring epitaph to Marie Lloyd, and was also a big fan of detective thrillers, especially the works of Georges Simenon. However, he was remorselessly rude about the stolid seriousness of then-successful but now almost forgotten writers such as John Drinkwater, whom he dismissed as “dull, supremely dull”. As Arnold Bennett put it, “Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.” Although I suspect Eliot might have dumped Bennett with Drinkwater in the recycling bin of middle brow.

Anyway, Deresiewicz does not argue that Macdonald’s middle brow has ceased to exist; it’s still the stuff that wins the big, mainstream prizes. But he has identified a new brow, younger, hipper, but still neither high art nor avant garde, and he dubs it “upper middle brow”:

It is Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson, Lost in Translation, Girls, Stewart/Colbert, The New Yorker, This American Life and the whole empire of quirk, and the films that *should* have won the Oscars (the films you’re not sure whether to call films or movies).

Deresiewicz suggests that such works – like the old-school middle brow – are designed to flatter their audience; the only thing is that the audience is different. The funny thing is, not so long ago, such art would have been defined not by its audience, but by the economic context of its production. We would have called it “indie”. Wouldn’t we? 

In defence of pretension

So I was reading Richard King’s How Soon Is Now, about the people behind the rise and fall of (ugh) indie music in the UK and I was thinking there really wasn’t anything else to say (Tony Wilson was on the telly, Geoff Travis had an afro ho ho, Spiral Scratch, yada etc) when we get to Daniel Miller aka The Normal and founder of the Mute label. And then this:

The tracks ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ were two corrosive and minimal songs that sounded as though they had been intimidated out of a synthesiser.

“Intimidated”. Yes. Oh, yes, that’s good. Oh no, hang on, perhaps it’s pretentious. Actually, that may not be such a bad thing, according to Pat Long’s The History of the NME, another recent book that covers much the same ground as King’s, from a slightly different perspective. In it, Ian Penman stands his ground:

The cliché that grew up at the time around me and Paul [Morley] was that we were pretentious, which I’m not ashamed of... Pretentious is just another word for aspiring to something, for trying something out.

Phew.

All babies want to get borned

Finally got around to seeing Juno. And it's good. Compelling central performance; snappy script, packed with the sort of one-liners that were just born to be the titles of blog posts; and a cracking soundtrack. (Kimya Dawson, Belle & Seb and the Velvets? With this wry indie-folk you are spoiling us!)

And yet (or maybe because of this) it feels ever so slightly hollow. Yeah, it's edgy, if we mean by that that it doesn't spoonfeed the audience, and runs the risk of annoying some of them: pro-choice and pro-life groups alike have attacked it, which I'm sure cost the producers no sleep whatsoever. But it feels like indie-cinema-by-focus-group; it's a Fox Searchlight product (see Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways and their ilk) which aims to bring more left-field films to mainstream audiences, but in doing so redefines the precise location of left field. As was the case with 'indie music' after the global success of Nirvana and Radiohead, the critical goalposts aren't so much moved as chopped down for firewood. Which was lovely for a while, but led to all those skinny-trewed 'The' bands playing third on the bill at a festival near you this summer: what Tim Walker identifies as "landfill indie".

A purist argument would be, of course, that there are good films and bad films (records, books, etc) and the removal of any genre distinction is a good thing. Although, for someone to make the decision that this is a Fox Searchlight product, there must still be a mainstream for Juno to be outside. Even if only slightly outside, looking in, chucking out one-liners to a backing track of wry indie-folk.