Who killed Indie?

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blissblogger

Well-known member
no pain no gane

i remember when i interviewed stereolab years ago, tim talked about how as part of some career guidance type thing at school he applied for a job at Industrial Records and also the Fall's label at that time

Broken Flag -- i was reading that Wolf Eyes piece in the Wire (my, but they're some inarticulate fellows, or should I say "dudes" aren't they?) and they start going on about how it's no good thinking you're on top of the late 70s/early 80s UK scene if you've downloaded a few Broken Flag tapes off the net, you have to dig deeper and get into the flexis, the really obscure noise tapes. And I'm thinking "Broken Flag are like the middlebrow option, then? I've never fucking heard of them. " Alarming given that i've spent three years on a massively over-researched postpunk book! still something tells me that it's not going to be worth my while chasing 'em down. Esoterrorists, doncha just love 'em?
 
M

mms

sometimes
carlos said:
don't know much about broken flag tapes- but they came up in another forum so i remember a discography page:

http://www.monotremata.com/skull/flag.html

there was also a page by a japanese collector who has tons of these but i don't remember the url

just fyi- in case you decide to go after these...
Click to expand...

that's an interesting site, broken flag had rameleh and skullflower on em which philip best from whitehouse was in blah blah.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
calling shamblers!

original c86 blogged here :

nmec86.jpg


oh the apathy, the ennui, the humanity!
 
D

dominic

Beast of Burden
because Sufi just now resurrected this thread, I thought I'd clarify this very minor DFA issue, which comes perilously close to name-dropping, at least on my part . . . .

blissblogger said:
i was surprised to discover that Tim Goldsworthy of DFA -- and before that, of Mo Wax and UNKLE -- had been heavily into C86 type music. And in a recent issue of Index magazine, he and James Murphy both interview Morrissey
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which lead to this comment =

danny dmx said:
I'm trying to remember, Tim has an older brother or something who was a real scenester, was in some band. Back when I did Plant Bar on mondays my friend Kevin dj'd happy hour, he's always been a standard bearer of that type of stuff, he put out the Love Is All single recently, anyway, he had Tim's brother DJ once when he was in town, it was all that stuff.
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which lead to this comment by moi =

dominic said:
Yeah, his name is Andrew Goldsworthy. He used to play at Lotus on the LES on Tuesdays. He's also the man behind the music on VH1's "Behind the Music." Supposedly has one of the largest record collections known to mankind. A friend of mine reports that his apartment is wall to wall records, i.e., one must move carefully to avoid stepping on records. So, while I don't doubt that Andrew Goldsworthy has lots of shambling bands stuff, he's got a lot of everything. Prog rock, punk rock, 80s electro, 60s Nuggets stuff. On and on and on . . . . However, so far as I know, he doesn't have an English accent.
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which lead to this correction =

Kek-W said:
Tim G is the (much) younger brother of Chesterfields mainman the late great Dave Goldsworthy - big up Yeovil C86 Cru! Tim was raised on a diet of C86 music at gigs round Yeovil & Sherborne indie scene via his big bro' ... Dave also had a love of old school hip-hop, so that may have also been an influence in the Mo Wax thing....Tim moved up to Oxford from Yeovil when his parents moved house; he met James Lavelle and the rest is history.
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and so now finally this clarification =

I was thinking of Andy Galkin -- the man with the truly enormous record collection -- and so far as i know one of his brothers (or half brothers) runs DFA, and for whatever reason I think it's Tim G, not James M
 
D

dominic

Beast of Burden
sufi said:
original c86 blogged here
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hah! -- this "mocking music" blogger mentions the American band Velocity Girl -- one of the few American bands that I actually liked in the early 90s!!! saw them play live several times -- imitators of MBV, i reckon -- washed-out guitar feedback, w/ girl pop vocals -- think they were from Washington, DC -- all the guys in the band seemed oh-so-sensitive in proto-emo kinda way -- but the girl singer seemed cool
 
S

shykitten

peek-a-boo
hi i am new here. i know i've come in a bit late on this but it is a thread i can hold onto...!

who killed indie? good question.

1. Oasis (the obvious culprits, as stated above).

2. the loss of an indie-friendly music press in favour of an NME bland-out monopoly and corporate retro-monthlies.

3. indie's not dead, its just evolved... electro is indie, Warp is the leading indie label (unless EMI's bought them and i didn't know about it).

4. all/none of the above, etc.
 
B

Buick6

too punk to drunk
I think the fact that is became even easier to do DIY stuff in the early-mid90s that killed indie.

Once it moved away from labels building up an 'indetity' or 'sound' and you had all these jocks and shmuckos making their own sub REM/Smiths type sounds in their bedroom for 40 bucks, that killed indie.

I think it also got found out when they got bigger budgets and their music was found to be shit.
 
T

Tim F

Well-known member
Does anyone remember The Space Monkeys' "Acid House Killed Rock & Roll"?

The Space Monkeys were this late 90s Tony Wilson-approved band who appeared to base their entire sound on the space between "Setting Sun", the first Oasis single from <i>Be Here Now</i> and the dancier parts of The Charlatans - ie. it was this weirdly meta experience to hear them sing this song.

I think the difference between grime and indie (and I don't say this to bury indie and exhume grime) is that grime's lo-fi-ness is matched with a paradoxical but essential/complementary hi-fi-ness - grimey future electronics innit. Whereas indie's "death" as such is that for most practitioners this paradox has basically been resolved into two options, with bands either choosing a slick studio rock sound (ie. neither future nor past, just the never ending now of a non-signifying burnished rock sound. Think Manic Street Preachers' <i>This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours</i> or of course the Coldplay/Travis axis) or a determinedly lo-fi sound - there's no tense negotiations, nothing to be <i>worked</i> out in the music as it's being played. The vocabulary itself has been reduced, with "raw", "live" and "stripped back" now all considered to be basically synonymous.

Most of my favourite 90s indie artefacts (Saint Etienne and "the lost generation" yeah, but also stuff like The Happy Mondays, the last Auteurs album, The Beta Band, Piano Magic, Position Normal etc. etc.) escape these competing traps to some extent. They don't sound as high-tech and shiny as Timbaland of course, but there's an acknowledgment that high-tech has a role to play, that the negotiation between ambition and useful limitation has to be worked out on a case by case basis.

Obv. all of the current vaguely "indie" "great white hopes" (as Matt would have it) are similarly resistant to following a straightforwardly "lofi" approach.
 
D

dannyDMX

Member
bored at work and looking at old threads I posted on...

Andy Galkin was a regular at my party as well, probably there when Tim's brother DJ'd, it's a small world. Andy DJ'd with me at the last friday at Plant Bar before they shut down for remodeling and the removal of the DJ booth. Fun times.

But regarded what Wolf Eyes said, man, that's just totally ridiculous. Oh, anybody can download a Broken Flag cassette so that's not cool you have to get the flexi? Whatever. Most of it's pretty much unlistenable and totally boring anyway. I'm only somewhat aware of that because I spent my college years as a huge fan of what the people in that scene became when they moved out of power electronics and into metal, psych, rock etc. Stuff like Ramleh's Be Careful What You Wish For got me very excited. As part of the UK noise scene, this would all be tangentially related to Simon Wickham-Smith and Richard Youngs later on, who I still love.

On the other side, and i guess this is probably all another thread, the Broken Flag scene had crossover with a weird sort of UK Hardcore scene that maybe you all know more then me about. I know that one sometime member of Ramleh and/or Skullflower recorded as JFK, and that and Matthew Bower both appear on this UK comp I bought years ago that also featured God I think. anyway, back to the topic at hand...
 
firefinga

firefinga

Well-known member
During the 1990s - my teenage years - I was totally into electronic (dance) music + metal. I didn't care for Indie really. However I used to listen to John Peel over staellite radio a lot and he played a fair amount of that stuff. I actually liked most of it, also bc it was a nice contrast to all the electonics sounds. However, I never really liked ot to the extent I actually bought any "indie" band at all. Only exception was the Jesus and Mary Chain - who I still think are awesome.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Yes, there are some scans of the Indie charts from the mid 80s in my link above.

Also the John Peel Festive 50s well worth looking back on.
 
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