Who killed Indie?

blissblogger

Well-known member
vomitosity

"vomitous"
ha! that's bizarre. great minds, eh!

actually having said that, i'd probably prefer to listen to what's designated by kosmigroove (kablewurggh) than yer actual Fire Music/free music

weather report, jan garbarek, jon abercrombie etc etc mean more to me than all the screechers, and even starting to get into roy ayers (having used him as a lazy anti-reference throughout the jungle chapters in energy flash!)

but i'm wandering off topic: what killed indie?

erm it's innately un-rocking timidity and tepidity? its modesty of ambition and spirit?

there's some piece by Greil Marcus or perhaps Lester Bangs where he talks about how a certain great piece of music would deserve the word "virile" if only that word had no gender-coding or loadedness. and that's the trouble with indie. that largeness of spirit that you get equally in the Slits or PJ Harvey as much as in the Pistols or the Doors (or any rap or grime you care to mention) is just not in hardly ever. not that that's the only thing music can be about, but....

the ultimate indiepop song in some ways might be this thing that Looper, the belle & sebastian offshoot, did, a song whose title i forgot, but it's about some long-drawn relationship that drags on for years and years before the boy and girl finally.... hold hands. it's very sweet actually but it sort of distils that whole essence of cutiepop in re. not grabbing life by the jugular

mind you someone told me the C86 lot were at its like rabbits, so perhaps i'm talkign out of my arse.
 

dubplatestyle

Well-known member
well yeah i think the secret subtext of indie rock/pop (maybe indie pop is better because it's closer to what i think we're talking about here, rather than, say, world domination enterprises or killdozer) is that these scenes are practically swingers clubs. (think of the beat happening chapter in "our band could be your life" where olympia is portrayed as this kind of granny glasses melrose place where everyone is swapping partners and constantly screwing. and let me tell you, little has changed in the intervening 20 or so years.) i can only guess that the feebleness extends to the rutting itself.
 

xero

was minusone
dubplatestyle said:
i can only guess that the feebleness extends to the rutting itself.

laughing out loud at the idea of feeble rutting ensuing once threadbare cardigans have been divested of
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
minusone said:
I think this is bang on the money and Brighton was the ground zero of this phenomenon I reckon. It was probably the first place the London acid house scene spread to. I remember weirdos in brightly coloured dungarees & bandanas running amok around the town drawn by Boys Own all-dayers and the like. Primal Scream were living there at the time and rather than hanging out in indie gigs & nights (like the afore-mentioned 14 iced bears, Brighton's indie heros of the time) they were regulars at the zap club's early house nights & beach after-parties.

Was there a connection between the Zap Club in Brighton and the Shark Club, which I believe was located beneath the boardwalk?

Also, I'd be interested in reading about this era in Brighton nightlife. Has there been anything written on the subject? What kind of music was played at the Zap Club?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
"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."

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.
 

xero

was minusone
dominic said:
Was there a connection between the Zap Club in Brighton and the Shark Club, which I believe was located beneath the boardwalk?

Also, I'd be interested in reading about this era in Brighton nightlife. Has there been anything written on the subject? What kind of music was played at the Zap Club?

The shark bar opened some time in the early nineties - not much of interest there musically except that I remember Damien Harris, now boss of Skint records & presumably somewhat wealthy, used to dj there before anyone cared.

The zap club used to be a great live venue as well as a small club. It was the only thing under the arches on the seafront in the late eighties other than fishermen's lock-ups & an irish club. It had strong links with Brighton festival and hosted performance art stuff as well as club nights, arty cabaret etc. Some of Brighton's first acid house nights happened there as well as electro nights that got taken over by jackin' freaks. Then in about '89, I think, they more than doubled it in size by knocking through to the next arch and excavating. It really took off as it was the only 'proper' club in the town. The only other place was the escape which at that time was still a dingy pub basement venue where Norman Cook played hip hop on Saturday nights (must have been just after the housemartins split), it took a while to succumb to house fever.

The zap's resident on saturday was Chris Coco, who has now gone all ibiza ambient but used to play a wide range of early house & techno stuff but there were a lot of one off parties or things like Tonka (DJ Harvey's first crew) which was on once a month. In those days the club used to shut at 2 so quite often a sound system would be set up under the cliff at black rock, up the seafront or at shoreham beach and people would party well into the next day

Dunno if anything has been written about the era - it was certainly pretty exciting at the time from my perspective although I guess similar things were going on all over the country. Brighton just got the virus from London pretty early on
 

jwd

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
C86 veterans -- i'm looking for confirmation that Rob Young was actually in the Field Mice.

Young was in the Poppyheads, who released one of the early Sarah Records 7"'s ("Cremation Town") so I guess that's the connection. Also put out a zine called It All Sounded the Same. Oh, the irony. I remember a great story in his review of that Cavanagh Creation book where he talks about going to Weather Prophets or House Of Love gigs and pretending to be Robert Young of Primal Scream so as to get in on the door list.
 

Matos_W.K.

Active member
Jim Daze said:
I always thought that 'grunge' (the mainstream stuff) killed of the secret world of indie, also the whole e-thing.

to get America-centric on your asses once again (har!), this is almost exactly what happened in the U.S. I don't think it's at all a coincidence that Pavement became the indie band du jour in the months after Nirvana got big; a lot of indie kids wanted something that didn't belong to all those stupid fucking mallrats (like me! I worked at the Mall of America selling holograms!) but weren't quite ready to give up scruffiness or guitars. it would take a few years--and, not a coincidence by my lights either, after Cobain killed himself--for a lot of U.S. indie-ists to get into beats, DJing, samples, etc. Stereolab, Tortoise The Wire, post-rock, Thrill Jockey putting out Mouse on Mars albums in America, etc.
 

kek-w

Member
blissblogger said:
strange how you run into the most unlikely one-time C86/shambling veterans

most recently, 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

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. From a provincial point of view, Acid killed C86 down in somerset, or rather factionated the scene...Acid was sneered at by Indie fans in the same way that Punk was reviled by Prog fans...it was seen as being unmusical. Our friend Flinty used to DJ at the local Indie nights and we used to smuggle in Acid and early Detroit 12"s just to piss off the Sarah Records fans. (Tim would have been present at some of these gigs.) Acid polarised opinions down our way, but within 2 years the indie kids were all monging out at the free partie scene...
 

kek-w

Member
dominic 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."

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." .


Nah, wrong guy....Tim's brother was Dave (see above)
 

kek-w

Member
jwd said:
Glenn Donaldson, one of the Jewelled Antler guys, was a big 80s US hardcore fan, I think you'd find a lot of the u/g folks have that as an essential part of their make-up.

Yeah, that's very true of quite a few US bands (was there ever a 'fey' US scene equivalent to UK C86?)...Black Dice and Sunburned Hand have both owned up to coming from a Hardcore/Heavy Noise background...not a particularly obvious influence if you haven't heard their really early stuff.
 

carlos

manos de piedra
kek-w said:
was there ever a 'fey' US scene equivalent to UK C86?

there was K-Records / Beat Happening and TeenBeat / Unrest lo-fi pop scenes around the same time (or maybe a little after) as the uk fey pop thing.

i was around back then- but too busy buying psych-rock/garage punk reissues and stooges/mc5 revivalist records to notice... :eek:
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
>Tim Goldsworthy's brother in the Chesterfields

blimey, i think i slagged them off in MM. Wonder if Tim remembered. they were an example of the secret Haircut 100 influence in C86, if memory serves

>American C86 equivalents

Beat Happening's first album with the cat drawing on the front beats everything that C86 produced, a really magical record

there's also a cluster of bands around the Darla label that draw all the sonic dots between C86, Saint Etienne, Stereolab, and the "Lost Generation" (ie. Seefeel who used to be a blissy indiepop group before going Aphex; Disco Inferno, etc etc). incidentally Darla did a whole numbered series of ambient releases, by outfits like Piano Magic, called Blissout, last time i checked they'd got up to number 11 or something
 

grimly fiendish

Well-known member
jwd said:
I know that The Pastels would be quite fierce about being INDEPENDENT but don't really see themselves as indie, it being such a sad tag.

what? come on: stephen pastel is the definition of the shambling indie mook. you see him shuffling about at little gigs in glasgow, with his bloody ripped domino records bag and the same haircut his mum gave him in 1982, and you think, jesus wept, talk about wasted potential. the pastels can be a MIGHTY band when they try, but their entire image is inexctricably bound up with the "sadness" of indie. indeed, they've become a byword for it.

other thoughts: i'm not sure about E killing indie - there was a lot of very interesting E-influenced guitar music in the early 1990s (and not just the mondays/roses: terry bickers was, IIRC, rather keen, as were a lot of other shoegazing types). but all that noisy grunge stuff, with its instant "image" and air of american cool, was a big lure for the disaffected teen - especially, at my school anyway, for the kids who'd been into grebo/stourbridge stuff and already had long hair. all they needed to do was grow out their undercuts. heh.

but then i also remember how my mate eyres went from being a die-hard smiths/kitchens of distinction/mondays kinda boy into wearing plaid shirts and listening to fucking primus almost overnight. never underestimate the effect grunge had.

when i went to university (1993) i remember buying things like passion fruit and holy bread and swimmer (boxes! woah, i'm off to dig that out RIGHT NOW) and feeling that there was still all this interesting, unusual music being talked about by lamacq and the nme; stuff that wasn't mainstream, but wasn't hard to find either. then, by easter 1994, the only thing anybody cared about was fucking, fucking, fucking oasis and bloody britpop. britpop should have been a subset/spinoff of indie (cf baggy), but it span out of control and killed it off completely.

(boxes isn't quite as good as i remember, now that it's coming to an end. and the flipside sounds like pavement v oasis. good in parts.)
 

kek-w

Member
blissblogger said:
They were an example of the secret Haircut 100 influence in C86,
Ha! Dave would've dug that. His big influence were Edwyn Collins and Josef K...so you can draw a firm line from Postcard Records thru to C86. Andy Gill of G04 was a huge influence too...If Dave was still around he'd be well pissed off about them reforming.


blissblogger said:
Seefeel who used to be a blissy indiepop group before going Aphex
Ah, yeah, the "shoegazers" like Slow Dive, etc...a half-forgotten strand of Indie Evolution...were they Indie's response to Ambient, I wonder; an attempt to carve out a new ecological niche? St. Etienne also had their own 'shambient' side-project: Cola Boy...
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
kek-w said:
St. Etienne also had their own 'shambient' side-project: Cola Boy...

I have the Cola Boy "7 Ways to Love" record. St Etienne did production, but the track was actually by a person named Jesse Chin . . . . And not sure if I'd call Cola Boy "shambient." I think they were straight-up pop rave . . . . Great record, in any case
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
kek-w said:
Nah, wrong guy....Tim's brother was Dave (see above)

I'll have to investigate. Sounds like "Dave" is the person everyone else has in mind. However, I've been told by numerous people, including "Andrew" himself, that he's Tim "DFA" Goldsworthy's older brother . . . . Is it possible that there are more than two sons in the family?
 

xero

was minusone
dominic said:
I have the Cola Boy "7 Ways to Love" record. St Etienne did production, but the track was actually by a person named Jesse Chin . . . . And not sure if I'd call Cola Boy "shambient." I think they were straight-up pop rave . . . . Great record, in any case

and a massive tune at the coco era zap!
 

BSquires

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
Tim Gane used to be in McCarthy, who i think actually had a track on the C86 cassette. They were an anomaly, an overtly political, leftwing shambling band

From memory, before McCarthy Tim Gane was 'Unkommunity' who were a minor entry in the Come Organisation/Broken Flag early eighties UK Power Electronics scene. Some of their tracks turn up on various the Broken Flag compilations and I think he/they even put out a 7" on their own Black Dwarf label. Not sure if too many Stereolab fans would be that keen though...
 
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