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Jun. 30th, 2007 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanWhen I was at Ely station this morning, in the newsagents, I got an inkling that today might be better from the radio. Out of the blue came a song I love, and hadn't heard in years - "Wake Up Boo!" by the Boo Radleys. 1995 and proud of it...
And then, in a nice piece of synchronicity, these evening saw the last of the "Seven Ages of Rock" - a series which I have greatly enjoyed, providing you sdon't take it as seriously as it takes itself - on Indie Rock. It reminded me that I have been meaning to post something on the subject of Indie for some time, as it is an area of music about which I know a certain amount, or did. Unfortunately I am too tired to be especuially coherent, so this probably won't be it. Instead, I will only comment on the show, and add a couple of bits.
I thought the programme was very good, but knowing the era of Britpop well (I was at university from 1993 to 1996), I waqs struck by how much got missed out. This is inevitable, of course, and no doubt all the previous shows have missed out vast quanities that I wasn't savvy enough to spot. Sarah Records, the Wonder Stuff, the shoegazing scene, the Verve - none of them got a mention. But there are two omissions in their history iof indie which I found hard to forgive:
i) Pulp. The story of Britpop they wanted to tell was "It's Blur, and particularly Oasis, getting out of control and forgetting the fans under the fame". Fair enough, but Pulp were a band who didn't do that, not least because Jarvis had always had a more complex and interesting relationship with his fans than either Damon or the NoeLiam monster. Pulp actually had a fr more plausible claim to the title of successor to the Smiths than either Blur or Oasis - the Smiths has made music for those dispossessed by the trends around them - in their self-image of invincibility, Blur and Oasis both lost that connection, by becoming the trend. Lagered-up blokes singing along ("And all the roads we have to walk are winding / And every goal that Shearer scores is blinding") and firls and boys off their tits in Magalouf shagging to the robot beat of the song that bore their name - this was now the mainstream. It was Jarvis Cocker who looked on all this with a wry eye, and continued to write the sort of songs that the people who didn't get pissed of a saturday night and smash uop a telephone box would sing. You could not, for example, have imagined Oasis covering "Mis-shapes", because Liam likely spent his young days beating up the kids about which the song is written - and it was them, not the crowd at Maine Road, who were indie's traditional audience.
Pulp were at the heart of Britpop, and at the heart of the indie music that spawned it (they had been gigging around Sheffield, lest we forget, since the Smiths were in full flower). Even now, although Common People may be about a more rarified situation than I bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, it remains the better song, because it cuts to the heart of what it feels like to be on the outside, not on the inside.
ii) Belle and Sebastian. You could argue successfully that a show about Rawk can't possibly feature B&S. But no show about indie can possibly miss them out. They are the one band who have become both indie and huge, without, for want of a better term, losing the faith. The average punter on the street may not have heard of them, yet they can sell out the Albert Hall - that's true indie stardom. And while the music on their last two albums has been a lot less self-consciously leftfield than that which went before (the turning point being the pop gem "Legal Man"), their musics and lyrical concerns have remained about seeing the things that other people don't see, the exceptional in the mundane and everyday. Their trajectory - first album an art-school project, underground acceptance, kooky press, NME single of the year, and a gradual building to a shadowy army of fans That walk Among Us - is the true indie story, and they are, in their own way, as important as the Libertines, just less shouty about it.
I went to a fair few indie gigs when I was in London, and still have a few tastes which are beyond the reach of any shop in cambridge. I still get a frisson of pleasure from buying from Rough Trade on Talbot St, the temple of all things indie, and knowing that these are albums which, unlike the Kaiser Chiefs or the Arctic Monkeys, will definitely not be appearing in Tesco.
I enjoyed the gigs from those days - the self-conscious scenesters looking ridiculous, the sense that the band and the fans really were connected (I remember having a chat to Bob Wratten, singer-siongwrityer of the Fieldmice et al, at a gig in Islington, and discovering him to be capable of happiness, which his lyrics would never hint at), and the ever-present Rat-Tail Jim (I originally saw him when he was still wearing the rat-tail itself, upstairs at the Garage). There are memories I can't swear weren't hallucinations - the Chadwell Heath Ladies Drum 'n' Bass League, for instance, who showed up in the bar of the Union Chapel - and some truly awful bands, as well as some truly great ones. They mostly flashed then vanished like fireflies - I have faith that one day Baxendale will rise again, and I Will Be Ready - but they left behind some undiscovered, and often peculiarly brilliant, literate pop music (Ballboy being a particular exmaple - "A Guide For the daylight Hours" is an indispenable album for anyone wanting to understand British indie). I'm older now, and wouldn't necessarily get the same from those gigs that I did back then, but it was a great thing to have seen, and part and parcel of the general theory that there are more worlds happening in cafes and the upper rooms of pubs than we can ever imagine.
Since you ask, my favourite albums of the Britpop era?
1. Coming Up - Suede
2. Different Class - Pulp
3. Parklife - Blur
And from just before it, "Never Loved Elvis" by the Wonder Stuff, of which Q magazine brilliantly said "If Peter Pan had had an electric guitar, this is how he would have seduced Wendy".
And the two great lost albums of the Britpop era, that we all bought but now almost no-one remembers as being as ubiquitous as they were:
i) Moseley Shoals - Ocean Colour Scene, and particularly
ii) Urban Hymns - The Verve (which came out the same year as Be Here Now, but sounds from another planet)
It says a lot, however, that after all this talk of the cutting edge of British music over the last 20 years, the CD I am going to take with me to listen to in bed is "Blue" by Joni Mitchell, from 1971.
And then, in a nice piece of synchronicity, these evening saw the last of the "Seven Ages of Rock" - a series which I have greatly enjoyed, providing you sdon't take it as seriously as it takes itself - on Indie Rock. It reminded me that I have been meaning to post something on the subject of Indie for some time, as it is an area of music about which I know a certain amount, or did. Unfortunately I am too tired to be especuially coherent, so this probably won't be it. Instead, I will only comment on the show, and add a couple of bits.
I thought the programme was very good, but knowing the era of Britpop well (I was at university from 1993 to 1996), I waqs struck by how much got missed out. This is inevitable, of course, and no doubt all the previous shows have missed out vast quanities that I wasn't savvy enough to spot. Sarah Records, the Wonder Stuff, the shoegazing scene, the Verve - none of them got a mention. But there are two omissions in their history iof indie which I found hard to forgive:
i) Pulp. The story of Britpop they wanted to tell was "It's Blur, and particularly Oasis, getting out of control and forgetting the fans under the fame". Fair enough, but Pulp were a band who didn't do that, not least because Jarvis had always had a more complex and interesting relationship with his fans than either Damon or the NoeLiam monster. Pulp actually had a fr more plausible claim to the title of successor to the Smiths than either Blur or Oasis - the Smiths has made music for those dispossessed by the trends around them - in their self-image of invincibility, Blur and Oasis both lost that connection, by becoming the trend. Lagered-up blokes singing along ("And all the roads we have to walk are winding / And every goal that Shearer scores is blinding") and firls and boys off their tits in Magalouf shagging to the robot beat of the song that bore their name - this was now the mainstream. It was Jarvis Cocker who looked on all this with a wry eye, and continued to write the sort of songs that the people who didn't get pissed of a saturday night and smash uop a telephone box would sing. You could not, for example, have imagined Oasis covering "Mis-shapes", because Liam likely spent his young days beating up the kids about which the song is written - and it was them, not the crowd at Maine Road, who were indie's traditional audience.
Pulp were at the heart of Britpop, and at the heart of the indie music that spawned it (they had been gigging around Sheffield, lest we forget, since the Smiths were in full flower). Even now, although Common People may be about a more rarified situation than I bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, it remains the better song, because it cuts to the heart of what it feels like to be on the outside, not on the inside.
ii) Belle and Sebastian. You could argue successfully that a show about Rawk can't possibly feature B&S. But no show about indie can possibly miss them out. They are the one band who have become both indie and huge, without, for want of a better term, losing the faith. The average punter on the street may not have heard of them, yet they can sell out the Albert Hall - that's true indie stardom. And while the music on their last two albums has been a lot less self-consciously leftfield than that which went before (the turning point being the pop gem "Legal Man"), their musics and lyrical concerns have remained about seeing the things that other people don't see, the exceptional in the mundane and everyday. Their trajectory - first album an art-school project, underground acceptance, kooky press, NME single of the year, and a gradual building to a shadowy army of fans That walk Among Us - is the true indie story, and they are, in their own way, as important as the Libertines, just less shouty about it.
I went to a fair few indie gigs when I was in London, and still have a few tastes which are beyond the reach of any shop in cambridge. I still get a frisson of pleasure from buying from Rough Trade on Talbot St, the temple of all things indie, and knowing that these are albums which, unlike the Kaiser Chiefs or the Arctic Monkeys, will definitely not be appearing in Tesco.
I enjoyed the gigs from those days - the self-conscious scenesters looking ridiculous, the sense that the band and the fans really were connected (I remember having a chat to Bob Wratten, singer-siongwrityer of the Fieldmice et al, at a gig in Islington, and discovering him to be capable of happiness, which his lyrics would never hint at), and the ever-present Rat-Tail Jim (I originally saw him when he was still wearing the rat-tail itself, upstairs at the Garage). There are memories I can't swear weren't hallucinations - the Chadwell Heath Ladies Drum 'n' Bass League, for instance, who showed up in the bar of the Union Chapel - and some truly awful bands, as well as some truly great ones. They mostly flashed then vanished like fireflies - I have faith that one day Baxendale will rise again, and I Will Be Ready - but they left behind some undiscovered, and often peculiarly brilliant, literate pop music (Ballboy being a particular exmaple - "A Guide For the daylight Hours" is an indispenable album for anyone wanting to understand British indie). I'm older now, and wouldn't necessarily get the same from those gigs that I did back then, but it was a great thing to have seen, and part and parcel of the general theory that there are more worlds happening in cafes and the upper rooms of pubs than we can ever imagine.
Since you ask, my favourite albums of the Britpop era?
1. Coming Up - Suede
2. Different Class - Pulp
3. Parklife - Blur
And from just before it, "Never Loved Elvis" by the Wonder Stuff, of which Q magazine brilliantly said "If Peter Pan had had an electric guitar, this is how he would have seduced Wendy".
And the two great lost albums of the Britpop era, that we all bought but now almost no-one remembers as being as ubiquitous as they were:
i) Moseley Shoals - Ocean Colour Scene, and particularly
ii) Urban Hymns - The Verve (which came out the same year as Be Here Now, but sounds from another planet)
It says a lot, however, that after all this talk of the cutting edge of British music over the last 20 years, the CD I am going to take with me to listen to in bed is "Blue" by Joni Mitchell, from 1971.
