Real Indie

anyway indieguy, why limit yourself to just this idea of indie pop/rock? fanaticism is out, dilettantism is in after all...the debate continues as to whether thats really a good thing but it strikes me as un-natural to just be bemoaning the death of a certain genre/culture when there's so much else out there to enjoy. can't live on bread alone etc. - well unless you're Geir Hongro

fuck off white boy

indieguy is surely a wind-up?

Which isn't to say I don't stay awake at night praying and dreaming of the David Devant & His Spirit Wife revival.

true. alas, someone who was genuinely trying to fight the cause of "real indie" would hardly cite shed 7 and my life story as positive examples.

Since when did Food Records become an indie label?

But that is impossible, because, once NME starts hyping a certain band, then thousands of fans will immediately rush to their stores to buy their latest single or album.

To me these bands are part of the reason my beloved indie has become moribund. Not only have they penetrated the mainstream, they have also now become it. Instead of standing at the by-line, feigning friendship with the mainstream; shaking hands with their right hand and pinching with their left, they are not only shaking hands, but embracing. Jake Shillinger or even Neil Hannon would never go that far. They all started out as classic indie outfits, but to me have sold out. Could you envisage Coldplay performing seven nights in a row at Camden Monarch, as Shed Seven did last year? I doubt it. Saying this, Travis' first record was one of the most accomplished of the era.

fuck off white boy

An equally racist assumption is that all black people like hip hop and RnB. This is simply not true, as Oskar, drummer with Ocean Colour Scene will attest. Oh and why do you assume i'm not black my self?

Since when did Food Records become an indie label?

This is a very important point, if i am correct in reading it how i assume you intended it. Everett True has attempted and(as always) failed to make the distinction between "independent" and "indie". Indeed, many of the bands i loved from that era weren't "independent" per-se, and i think it is wrong to define music by the financial state of their record label. "Indie" isa genre. Blur, perhaps the greatest British indie group of all time, were on Food, a subsidiary of Parlaphone as were My Life Story, perhaps the second greatest. But they remained "indie", perhaps not "independent" but i would ask you to put forward some better arguments in this conflict.

Sorry, I don't buy that, and I think it is just great that Coldplay and Travis are able to be themselves and not sink to the level of the Gallagher.s

I'm pretty sure you're taking the piss, but i'll bite anyway. why does it bother you that these bands have sold a lot of records? Haven't they just succeeded in doing what a hell of a lot of indie bands were trying to do? Why would playing 7 nights at the Camden Monarch redeem Coldplay?

What I go with him on is that there is just no room spared any more for the kind of jangly pop and its derivatives that British bands used to turn out so well. And it's hard not to see a kind of conspiracy against it. Papers like NME, which like it or not do set the agenda to a large extent, appear very much to be ashamed of displaying any sign of pride in anything from these shores - which, as we can see here, leads to people here foolishly accusing others of bigotry in a style akin to Rik from the Young Ones.

I'm not putting the boot in here, but I must disagree with this point; Indie means nothing more than on an independent label. It goes back to Rough Trade, Cherry Red etc., who back in the late '70s/early '80s, chose to release an unbelievably eclectic mix of stuff major labels wouldn't touch because it weas deemed uncommercial. It was about musical experimentation, not stereotypes.

Hopefully not. Because, if they did, they'd never ever find the time to come to Oslo and have a concert here.

Så de kan veva ner rutan när det blir för varmt.

However, the bands he claims to like are also rubbish, if anything more so.

actually, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are G*R*A*T*E, indie with a capital I. in contrast, Shed Seven are the worst band ever to release a record.

i totally agree. it's just the choice of shed 7 as an example of "good indie" that made me think "piss-take", as they're sort of the standard example used for piss-poor indie (ditto My Life Story).

"Because to me, Shed Seven have remained TRUE indie. To me indie is about small 'toilet' venues, lager in plastic cups, girls in pig-tails with hello kitty hair clips - not Wembley Stadium, dad and the kids, middle-aged dinner parties."

i can't help you out here because i focus almost exclusively on the music coming out of the speakers. the venues they play in, and the type of people buying the records means little to me.

Anyway, while I am not at all a fan of any of those two bands, I love Dodgy, and I am also quite fond of Ocean Colour Scene and Kula Shaker. Yes, even Menswear had their moments. So several of those typical "standard examples" were actually better than most Britpop bands.

i actually like some stuff by the bluetones and kula shaker, too! but to pick these sort of acts out on their own as The Way Indie Should Be smacks of piss-take. If not, well, i apologise. but it doesn't bother me if an indie band sells records. don't you think shed 7 would love to be able to play in big venues like coldplay do?

Shed Seven and the Bluetones, stadium heroes of bygone years' middle-aged fanbases and hated with a passion by all the allstar-clad glitter-kitties I knew = "about small 'toilet' venues, lager in plastic cups, girls in pig-tails with hello kitty hair clips - not Wembley Stadium, dad and the kids, middle-aged dinner parties"? OK. You must be a troll. If you aren't and you can't see why you're mistaken for one... well.

DV and esoj are OTM, as you say. Going on the remote chance that this isn't a troll, I don't think of indieboy's plodding dadrock-end-of-britpop as Real Indie at all; it's precisely the stuff that gives me Nabisco-esque fear that other people think I mean that when I say I like indie. Of course I know there are plenty of people round here who think the American and Glaswegian strains of scuzzy alt-rock I listen to are at least as objectionable. That's fine. I don't want a badge for following the one true path or anything. It's just my chosen section of that middle-class "narcissism of small differences" discussed on the class and indie thread. My tribe, not that anyone in it acknowledges each other, there's always another small difference to argue about. The one that believes that Ligament and Quickspace and Spare Snare were where it was really at during all that time. Meaningless now, I suppose. Damned if I can work up much enthusiasm for the Strokes or the Stripes or the Kills or whoever either.

Still, if there is a revival of that stuff then maybe at last some vast unsaleable chunks of my record collection will have enough value to cover bussing them up to a second-hand record shop, which would be a very good thing. And maybe my love of Clearlake and "Lava" by Silver Sun and my fond memories of Hofman in the Camden Monarch will feel slightly less like an embarrassingly irrelevant nostalgia for a youth I wasted not in the traditional fun way but by staring at my feet and worrying too damn much. Hello Kitty hairgrips? Bring 'em on, they'll remind me of Urusei Yatsura and Kenickie, allow me a few moments of denial that their rose-tinted lyrics about teenage parties were actually my life.

All of this has nothing to do with anything, but it's where I stand.