Search And Destroy: Indie-Dance

x¹⁰⁰ = the Happy Mondays' "Kinky Afro" and Primal Scream's "Loaded."

-x = anything the Darling Buds did after their 'conversion'

i = Northside -- they weren't real, were they?

This is arguably a very incomplete table.

Destroy: Northside, Bridewell Taxis and all the other half-wit chancers who came on in the coat-tails of the Mondays.

OK then, search Happy Mondays' "Step On", if that counts, and destroy the Mock Turtles' "Can You Dig It?".

Search - "Wise Up, Sucker!", "Dance Of The Mad", "92 Degrees"

Destroy: "Def Con One". It still boggles my mind that people liked this song, particularly when infinitely better things like "Inject Me", "Satellite Ecstatica", and "Not Now James, We're Busy" were on the same album. You'd think quoting "Funkytown" would save it, but it doesn't.

Search - _Soundclash_, "Cocaine Sex"

Destroy: Everything after _In Dub_ except "Bubbaluba" and "Blast 'Em Out".

Flowered Up = the brian album and weekender, fantastic stuff, I once listened to weekender for three days straight. Incidentially Liam Maher's new album is coming out soon and it is a killer. The underground shaun ryder without the fame. It is really good.

the completist - electronic music for the cinema...andrew innes....

I have to admit....I think the soup dragons, I'm free cover is very good but the rest of lovegod is trash. Nice bloke though. Maybe this is in another thread.

Dream Academy - Love with Poly Styreme doing indie chanting in the back...

Stone Roses - fools gold of course!

But I am shocked and amazed that no one has ever mentioned once, Techno Animal......amazing city slang kevin shields protegee.

the andrew weatherall mix of MY BLOODY VALENTINE.....

Still, Northside? Why weren't they drowned at birth?

1.Big Hard Excellent Fish - "Imperfect List"
2.The Field Mice - "Missing The Moon"
3.Flowered Up - "Weekender"
4.McCarthy - "Get A Knife Between Your Teeth"
5.My Bloody Valentine - "Soon" (original mix quite i-d enough)
6.New Fast Automatic Daffodils - "Big"
7.Paris Angels - "Perfume (Up To You)" 12"
8.Pop Will Eat Itself - "Def Con One" (sorry Dan)
9.Primal Scream - "Slip Inside This House"
10.World Of Twist - "Sons Of The Stage"

The Mondays and Roses are a curious case cause for me none of their actual dancefloor excursions really do it - love the Mondays as a pop band, don't like the Roses much.

EXPLANATIONS: 1. Shows corrosive indie sensibility applied to beat minimalism. 2. C86 vs acid house - infatuation-as-mantra, great idea. 3. Indie-dance's "Stairway To Heaven". 4. The great thing was that everybody had to have a go. My favourite McCarthy track! 5. Weatherall didn't do much for them IMO. 6. As Dr C sez above, a useful bridge to previous experiments. 7. The most blissful thing Madchester produced. 8. Age 14 totally validated my geeky comix-kid existence - so the Weezer you could dance to, or something. 9. Their most danceable track I reckon. 10. The beat slows down but we pick it UP.

Almost certainly nobody but me remembers Big Hard Excellent Fish but wasn't there a Pete Wylie connection?

pretty sure they are mum and dad now.

www.twistednerve.co.uk

Mum and Dad and nuts. Check out the mp3's of them.

Someone mentions the Bridewell Taxis above, and I think of their "Honesty" single as a prime example of how even no-hope acts are capable of belting out fantastic pop moments, albeit seemingly by accident.

Guilty pleasures: JBC's version of We Love You. Drum massives.

That JBC version of we love you was a belter too.

Since this is a search and destroy, the ugly face of indie dance would include:

- The Farm. Anything by the bloody Farm, oh God. Remember a v.entertaining argument about whether "All Together Now" was just as bad as "Pipes Of Peace" or not.

- Soup Dragons' "Mother Universe". They couldn't even do hippies well. "I'm Free" however is no worse than any other hit of the time.

- Stone Roses' "Something's Burning". Only to cover up the smell of this.

- 'remixes' of what were basically rock bands eg Inspiral Carpets, House Of Love which amounted to slapping a bongo track on somewhere.

- East Side West Side South Side North Side. Though "Southside" is actually worse than Northside.

- The High!!!

- I'm not sure whether Candy Flip's "Strawberry Fields Forever" counts or not because most of the opposition to it stemmed from its being sacrilege to cover the Beatles inna dance fashion rather than any actual badness.

- Blur: "We killed baggy!" Yes, by doing it awfully.

Farm - yeah.

But...but...I LURRVE Somethings Burning. Fantastic stuff. Slow mellow groove.

My recommendation: One Dove, who I've only just managed to track down but who hit the spot superlatively, largely by doing what Primal Scream were did so well on the first half of Screamadelica - indie "giving up the ghost" to dance, as Tom once brilliantly put it. Of course, they did it a tad more sedately.

Often though I think that (certain parts of) indie had more success in coming to grips with the formal ideas behind dance music than in actually *being* dance music - eg. "Soon" is a much better dance record in theory than in practice. And then there was stuff like Spacemen 3's "Big City", which is like house music as imagined by someone whose knowledge of Moroder amounts to a couple of shout-outs in Kraftwerk interviews. This leads on to all the wonderful chancers like Seefeel, of course.

charlatans - the only one i know. groovy stuff.

Indie dance compilation - Unbelievable set for release July 16th.

1. Unbelievable - EMF 10. Shine On - The House Of Love 2. Step On - Happy Mondays 11. Can You Dig It - The Mock Turtles 3. Connected - Stereo MC’s 12. There’s No Other Way - Blur 4. Altogether Now - The Farm 13. Def Con One - Pop Will Eat Itself 5. Move Any Mountain - Shamen 14. The Only Living Boy In New Cross - Carter USM 6. Killer - Adamski 15. The Size Of A Cow - The Wonderstuff 7. Sit Down - James 16. Real Real Real - Jesus Jones 8. Dragging Me Down - Inspiral Carpets 17. How Soon is Now? - The Smiths 9. Weirdo - The Charlatans 18. I Am The Resurrection - The Stone Roses

1. Getting Away With It - Electronic 11. L.S.L - Shamen 2. Suedehead - Morrissey 12. Blue Monday ’88 - New Order 3. There She Goes - The La’s 13. Go - Moby 4. She’s So High - Blur 14. Pacific State - 808 State 5. How Does It Feel - Inspiral Carpets 15. Chime - Orbital 6. The Only One I Know - The Charlatans 16. The Sun Rising - The Beloved 7. I’m Free - The Soup Dragons Feat. Junior Reid 17. Enjoy the Silence - Depeche Mode 8. Groovy Train - The Farm 18. Sinful - Pete Wylie 9. I Believe - EMF 19. Strawberry Fields Forever - Candy Flip 10. The Only Rhyme That Bites - MC Tunes Vs 808 State

Answer: The same way you had to dance to MBV 'Soon' and 'how soon is now' - by acting like your arms were burning emotive, burning windmills...

World of Twist = Gods.

Other favourites: Loaded of course and Happy Mondays - Loose Fit (= damn fine tune you can actually dance to). 'Weekender'.

destroy: Electronic

Another search: The Fall's stab at indie-dance, 'Telephone Thing'. Notable for completely gratuitous namedropping of Gretchen Franklin (Ethel from Eastenders). M.E.S. told an interviewer he had no idea who Gretchen Franklin was, the name had just popped into his head. Mind you, he once also claimed that 'Terry Waite Sez' was about a different Terry Waite and that 'Mark'll Sink Us' wasn't about Mark Sinker of this parish. Are we to believe him?

among the gems not listed above:

Primal Scream - Screamadelica (the full 10+ minute glory of acid house-baggy x-over)
Opus III - It's A Fine Day
Golden - Anglo-american
Oval - Love Hour
Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Deee-Lite - River of Freedom
Paris Angels - Scope
World Of Twist - Sweets
Wolfgang Press - Time
Orb - Perpetual Dawn
Sensuround - Blind Faith
Wendys - Pulling My Fingers Off
Northside - Shall We Take A Trip
Happy Mondays - Hallelujah
PWEI - Preaching To The Perverted
etc

will be sharing this on slsk if my cable ever comes back on at home. damn hurricanes...

i was in a pet shop and i heard this awful indie cover of 'it's not over yet' on the radio by... doesn't really matter, you know the song, mid-90s thing. is this shit what they're calling nu-rave?

yeah. the song was probably improved by all those chirruping birds in the shop tho.

it reminded me of that shitty indie cover of 'hounds of love', probably because i don't hear that much shitty indie.

Candy Flip: so bad its brilliant. Those fellows are now doing track and field????

wait wait WAIT. Is that true?

'it's not over yet'

Grace, yes I heard someone else had done a version. I like the Garlic version, not strictly a cover seeing as Mike out of Garlic co-wrote it anyway.

No love for Chapterhouse? Pearl and Falling Down were both fabulous "we've always had a dance element to our music" tracks. Search: This.

Seventeething the New Fast Automatic Daffodils here; other than that, pretty much everything of vaguely dancable merit in that era has been covered already.

Unless! What about all that Magic Roundabout/Trumpton/Charly Says novelty dance shit? Indie labels, loved by the NME, must count, surely. That's my pick for Destroy.

Oh, that reminds me. THE KLF. Obviously.

it was grace. i was thinking it wasn't. the point is it doesn't matter, it was done and can't be bettered, certainly not with chugging guitars.

it's klaxons, fellas. and it's fairly pointless.

*that's* the klaxons? they're getting bare hype and they're lame. fucking hell.

wait WOLFGANG PRESS were indie-DANCE? really? i had no idea. no irony i literally have heard nothing by them. i must investigate.

http://www.discogs.com/release/265523

Now That's What I Call Indie Dance!

wait WOLFGANG PRESS were indie-DANCE?

i think their Time single was pretty well received as a indie dancefloor filler, been years since i heard that or the Queer album. may have to rectify that right away ..

modern indie dance is basically the same indie shit you find all the way down the chart but with a disco beat jammed on top. lamestain mclamesbury.

so...bought any new records recently?

no, but i've been subjected to all the currently-released UK singles, as a music committee member at our radio station. many of the songs are all doing the same things with the same guitar tones and the same shitty vocal inflections, but some of them have this really irritating, non-stop disco-beat shoved on top.

as for that rough trade comp, i shall be getting it off amazon.

Examples, Louis?

(And I went to see Cud the other night, with some old friends, purely for nostalgic reasons, like. Hahahahaha).

so where are we with 90's indie-dance revival? it's time isn't it? surely?

About a year ago. Do you remember Klaxons band?

Somehow the Swedes are showing how it should be done

Yeah, it's the new big thing isn't it, although people call it "blog house" (gag).

Long running weekly house/techno night 'Stompaphunk' in Brighton has been replaced by an "indie-dance" style shindig, 2manyDjs / Simian mobile disco packing them in at Digital (the old Zap club) -- at the former it was so rammed they had to close the bar in the main room for most of the night - although to be fair they've been big for a few years now.