Starsailor. The indie Hear'Say?

Question is, Venga, has anyone ever believed "this shit"? Among the manifold mistaken assumptions made in this week's NME, selected completely at random, are the following:-

1. There's something essentially heroic and cool in wrecking a yacht. 2. Musicians should work for nothing. Major record companies are capitalist bastards who perpetrate worthless manufactured pap such as the Beatles, the Clash, Nirvana, Eminem, OutKast and Tim and Jeff Buckley. 3. V/VM are terrorist subversives rather than merely providing the aural equivalent of drawing comedy moustaches and/or cigars on Robbie Williams album covers ("Welcome to Execrate" was pretty good, mind). 4. If you buy the Avalanches LP you are a sad ambulance chaser whose inadequacy is magnified and confirmed by your failure to pick up the far superior "Gimix" tape at Camden Market in April 1997. Get a life! 5. If you picked up the Avalanches' "Gimix" tape at Camden Market in April 1997 you are a sad loser with more vinyl than sperm. Get a life! 6. Destiny's Child are positive, life-affirming, sassy role models rather than prepackaged Republican-voting Godhead vermin (they performed - grinning dumbly - at the Bush inauguration ceremony). 7. Ending your cover story with the sentence "They've arrived, but the journey's only just begun" is an original and stimulating means of completing an article.

Ah, with this sort of standard I could turn an honest penny for "The Oxford Times" any day of the week. Now, about those potholes in Headington . . .

If the NME is going to shift its bias back towards its traditional indie slant, surely they could come up with something a bit better than Starsailor. Unless *gasp* this is all that's out there. Is originality in the UK indie scene completely dead, do you think?

Originality in the indie scene has been, with one or two exceptions, dead since about 1982, I think. We've just clung on for dear life to this stuff because...we're terrified of the future, I guess. The time has now come to kick this nonsense into touch forever.

But what would you replace it with?

I'm not sure that it's a question of "replacing" it. That kind of rock music is just a tiny branch of rock'n'roll/pop, anyway, and is just withering away like other musics have done in the past: jazz, reggae, blues etc. The last real burst of creative energy in that scene occurred in the late '80s/early '90s.

What else was Britpop but a last, desperate reclaiming of "our territory" in the face of genuinely modern electronic musics taking over the charts and the tastes of young pop fans? Union Jacks plastered all over the inky weeklies, tirades against American music and other such tinpot, small-minded garbage. That bubble burst soon enough and the game is now surely up. It's gone, kaput, finished, good.

The thing people seem to forget about Britpop is that as reactionary as it was, it was hardly a bunch of poorly-selling indie kids working futilely (is that a word? Possibly not) in obscurity. If we take your verdict to be true, then its ethos must have struck a chord (pardon the pun)with a great many people, perhaps showing that this 'truly modern electronic music' isn't as universally popular as you might think. Personally, I find the whole episode quite embarrasing now, but I have a feeling that in the not too distant future something similar will occur.

I pray that you're wrong. If we witness the kind of diminishing returns which ensure that the latterday Brit reaction to American domination is comparable to Oasis as Limp Bizkit are to Nirvana then...I'm emigrating...

The indie Hear'Say? They WISH.

(Has there ever been a decent band named after someone else's LP?)

People who whinge that there "ain't no good indie left in Britain" just clearly aren't listening hard enough. Yes, there is a lot of post-Verve bollocks, and an equal number of ridiculous "I wish it were 1964" Belle and Sebastian twee shitheads.

Whose fault is it that none of the decent stuff ever gets mentioned? Maybe the NME's for perpetuating the idea that ordinary, completely insipid crap like Starsailor is actually "indie"?

Oh, my aching hangover. As hard as I tried, I couldn't drink Airport Bloke away last night. But then the Aislers Set came on and made everything better.

Name names, Kate. Broadcast? The Beta Band? Do Boards of Canada count?

No, I imagine Kate had in mind such ordinary, insipid crap as the Lollies :)

Oh, meow, Steve. Right then, I'll name names and rattle you off a list of bands I have high hopes for without mentioning any of my mates. (these are all totally off the top of our heads, and by no means a comprehensive list)

At the moment, I'd hand the title of the "best indie band in Britain" to Fonda500. If they *ever* came up with an album that was even half as good as their blisteringly demented and brilliant live shows, I would have no need of other music.

Rock of Travolta, who do shoenoise with a *sense of humour* that makes them stand miles above your typical Mogwai/GSYBE fare. Cody, whose album sold about 20 copies, but blissed out gracefully and beatifully into beautiful textures and heartbreaking melodies. The Clientele, who do richly tapestried 60s influenced but not derivative gorgeous pop masterpieces.

Clearlake, who have been on the verge of being hyped about a dozen times, but who have mercifully escaped, and been allowed to develop into their own quirky little world of pastoral psychedelia.

Paul gets sent dozens of promos every week, and it's true, most of them are crap, but every now and then we get things which absolutely slay us- we got a record by a band named Contempo, which I'd never heard of, but occuppied a sort of seedy, Pulp-does-dub landscape, which completely surprised us.

And these are reccomndations from Paul as being the "Best of Strange Fruit": Ballboy, Khaya, Findlay, Vermont, The Loves, George, Mull Historical Society, Copenhagen, Ladytron, Life Without Buildings, The Action Time (RIP, I think), Future Pilot AKA

So don't tell me that there's no good indie music left in Britain because you can't see further than the fucking NME.

Ah well, your taste and mine just differ then. Maybe I've become jaded but I find it hard to love yer Clienteles and Clearlakes.

I *can* see further than the "fucking NME" thank you very much ;) - I'm on here, aren't I - but my main moan was that they still, after everything that's happened in music over the last decade, see fit to stick non-entities like Arsesailor on the cover and proclaim them as the new way forward. Like, er, yeah...

OK, I guess I misunderstood where the thread was going. It started with slagging off the NME, which is like taking potshots at your grandmum, and seemed to go on to imply that by extension, there was no good indie left coz the NME wasn't covering it.

Is the NME still relevant? I don't know that it ever *has* been. It's a means to sell advertising space, no more, no less, with occasional moments of written brilliance almost by afterthought or accident. I agree with your original sentiment- that Starsailor are to Indie what Hear'Say are to "pop". Yeah. You won't get an argument from me that the NME is just a pale shadow of what it was supposed to be.

But when people start with that premise and go on to whinging about how there's no decent music in that genre any more... that pisses me off. If my taste isn't the same as yours, fair enough. That's not the NME's fault. ;-)

Marcello's post is interesting, mostly cause it makes the NME out to be much cooler than it actually is. If it really had given 4/10 to the Avalanches based on some tape nobody's heard I'd have squealed with joy at its reader-hating elitism. V/VM are terrific precisely because they are drawing comedy specs on Robbie. DC may be Christian republicans but if Laura Bush and her sprogs made "Survivor" I'd still have to go buy it.

The really interesting thing about the post though is reference to Headington. Yeah!

Are 'electronic dance musics' that original any more, in the main?

from the "new acoustic movement" thread:

Starsailor are a genuine toothsome kiddie horror, all our 6th form pasts come back to haunt us. The next coldplay indeed. What astonishes me, although i guess i should know better, are the glowing reviews they recieve at the hands of the NME and their ilk. It makes you think that the NME really *are* singing from a totally corporate songsheet nowadays and will claim black is white if Nasty Nigel tells them to... disgusting.

There is a rewarding world of "indie" music outside the NME, and more and more people are looking beyond it. I think the change that Venga notes is the way the NME have gone from being mainly crap, to outright disgustingly bankrupt.

May I say the Clientele are fantastic live? I saw them in London on Sunday: a blistering Tom Verlaine guitar overlaid on a jazz base and a mozzarella topping of pop nous... the records seem a little muted in comparison.

Hey, Peter, was that at the Pow! To The People thing? How was that, BTW? I don't know anyone who went, cause we were all mightily hung over from Strange Fruit the night before. %-)

But I agree, it took seeing the Clientele live for me to actually appreciate them- they're not insipid or twee at all as they can tend to be on the records.

I don't think the Clientele sound insipid or twee on record at all, just more sober and airy and laid back. Live, they really cut loose, mainly its the stinging Eddie Phillips / Tom Verlaine guitar.

But yeah, it was at Pow to the people. They were the best band there: The Aislers Set had awful tuning problems with a keyboard, but by the end had sorted them and were awesome. Beachwood Sparks played a few songs far too loud, but very nice, the Tyde were cool, most of the rest were forgettable.

at which, to get back to the thread, one felt like shouting, "this is the high society" into a microphone, MC5 stylee, because the best bands there really were the cream of the indie crop and have about as much chance of getting on the NME cover as Peters & Lee. May the lord prove me wrong.

I think I've talked about this thing a bit and each time my opinion changes. Kate's of course 100% right when she says that the NME's coverage and the state of indie aren't synonymous. On the other hand I think that the NME's coverage is at least partially indicative of the state of the indie system, in which it (still) plays an important role. I think the paper's bad taste would be more forgivable if it was at all convincing. Instead it seems to be in the middle of a twitching, limpet-like stage that provokes nothing so much as a slightly pitying indifference.

As an eighteen year old who is theoretically in the thick of the paper's target audience (and who does listen to a lot of indie, contrary to appearances) I should be either getting excited or angry about Nu Acoustica or Nu Metal or post-Verve psychedelia or twee. I can't work up either reaction, not because of the quality of the music, but because of the barely concealed air of desperate sluggishness that surrounds the paper and its associated press.

Similarly to say that the indie system is severely impaired is not to impugn upon the quality of the bands so much as to question the relevance of its ongoing intra-scene discourse, which seems increasingly introverted, repetitive and static in a way that greatly resembles the drum & bass scene.

And as for the Avalanches tape, I have it and it is a mighty thing, but the NME's argument (if that's what it is) is silly. The mixtape is pretty much just large segments of the album spliced with songs the group like ("Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", "Boy With The Thorn In His Side", "Got Your Money" etc. etc.). Dissing the album for not having other artist's songs on it is like dissing "Baby One More Time" for not being cut up with an Eminem song. You can conceivably make the criticism but it has no other real purpose than demonstrating insider kudos (or alternatively, pomo obtuseness).

A moment of astonishment - I agree with Kate on something!

The Clearlake album's really rather good.

I wouldn't call it 'pastoral psychedelia' - it's not pastoral, just kind of damp and wistful, and it's not psychedelic, being redolent of no drug stronger than tea and the occasional pint. Its strength is in the voice and the pretty songs, and the lyrics seem quite strong too. It's like an album made by somebody having to live in Morrissey's "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and making the best of it and muddling through. I've not enjoyed a UK indie record this much for ages (not counting The Clientele).

actually, to tie this thread up nicely, did you know Starsailor actually supported the Clientele at the Heavenly Social last year? James Oldham, the then live editor of the NME was to all intents and purposes managing Starsailor (surprise surprise, big, massively positive review in the following week's NME - written by one J. Oldham) and they were being groomed as Parlophone's new signing.