Fey city rollers

It was the punk of the mid-80s - unmacho music for teens who weren't interested in rock, or even sex. Now the indiepop sound is back, says Michael Hann

A door into a basement beneath a north London pub: from the bottom of the stairs comes the numb thud of a drumbeat, the muffled jangle of a guitar. Down to the bottom, through the door and the sight, hardly unusual, of a hundred or so sweaty teens and twentysomethings dancing.

It's what they are dancing to that surprises. Alongside the classic soul that makes up half the playlist at the bimonthly How Does It Feel To Be Loved? night are songs barely heard since their release nearly 20 years ago, and which, when played in public, tend to provoke sniggers of derision. But at this night - and a number of others like it around the country - the music that dare not speak its name is back: fey, twee, indiepop.

The indiepop sound - in its classic form, an awkward collision between the Byrds, the Ramones and cut-price Phil Spector - has been asking, rather diffidently, for some attention for a while. Belle and Sebastian owe an explicit debt to the so-called "shambling" bands of the mid-80s, and the return of Morrissey this year suggests a renewed appetite for guitar music that champions uncertainty above aggression. Franz Ferdinand bear an uncanny resemblance to indiepop pioneers Orange Juice and Josef K. And now a new compilation in the excellent Rough Trade Shops series has brought together 46 songs that will catapult listeners back to 1986, the high water mark of indiepop.

Despite its roots in the DIY ethos of punk, indiepop was not for rough boys. "If you like popular music there's pop and there's rock," says Phil Wilson, now of HM Customs and Excise but once of the June Brides, whose wonderful 1985 single Every Conversation features on the Rough Trade album. "And if you're a little bit sensitive then a lot of rock music feels a little bit ridiculous - all that feet up on the monitors stuff. I approve of not being macho."

The people who crowded the gigs of the mid-80s indie bands were anything but macho. A crude but largely accurate stereotype was soon constructed: the uniform consisted of bowl haircut for boys or a bob for girls, and a proper, unfashionable, 60s-style kids' anorak, the kind you now only see in Judith Kerr's illustrations for the Mog children's books.

The bands fed the fans' hunger for this seeming regression. Record sleeves appeared to have been designed by six-year-olds, and many of the songs sounded as if they had been recorded by people who had only that morning made first acquaintance with musical instruments.

The problem was that very incompetence and meant that by the end of the 80s, indiepop had become almost universally critically reviled. Ian Watson, who runs How Does It Feel To Be Loved?, sums up the prevalent view: "It was sexless and anaemic and it seemed to be about people who were afraid of life, moaning atonally about how they didn't have a girlfriend."

Oh, but the naysayers were wrong. Indiepop - also known as C86 after the tape compiled by the NME that brought the scene's principal bands together - was, for those of us who came of musical age in the mid-80s, our very own punk rock. It was exciting, vibrant, welcoming, and ours.

"What else was there?" asks Martin Whitehead. He ran the Bristol-based Subway Organization record label, which specialised in C86-style pop in the late 80s and is now a lawyer for the BBC World Service. "By 1984, you had the fag-end of goth, with people painting their faces white to go to the Batcave, or political music, or people in shiny suits playing latin music, like Kid Creole and the Coconuts. There was no one flying the flag for pop. Then people like the June Brides and the Jesus and Mary Chain started taking 60s pop music and adding something from the leftfield."

The indie scene was avowedly regional and inclusive: those involved cared about music, not fashion. Labels such as Subway and Sarah in Bristol, Vindaloo in Birmingham and 53rd and 3rd in Edinburgh ensured that every major regional centre had its own thriving scene, while London had the one label that made the transition from bedroom hobby to international pop behemoth, Alan McGee's Creation, later the home of Oasis.

"It was very much a non-London thing," says Matt Haynes, who co-ran Sarah Records, later viewed by many as the epitome of indie wimpishness (one of its best-known singles was entitled I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist). "There were scenes outside London, with people who had been exchanging letters and fanzines. People didn't feel the need to go to London to make things happen."

"It was a fairly small but well connected scene," adds Whitehead, whose own band, the Flatmates, appear on the Rough Trade album alongside other Subway acts. "Bands would play in Bristol on Thursdays at my place, after doing Jeff Barrett's club in Plymouth on Wednesday, and go on to do gigs for Roger Cowell in London on the Friday. Everybody was doing everything because we were all so into the music and the scene, and we'd all end up dossing at each others' houses when we went out and played gigs. There was an incredible level of collaboration and cooperation going on."

That sense of self-reliance was what punk had been meant to be about. Indiepop put it into practice: for all its apparent amateurishness, C86 made politics a practical matter. Even more importantly, it allowed women a place in music that more apparently ideologically sound movements had not.

"The political aspect has been neglected," says Amelia Fletcher, who was lead singer with Talulah Gosh (and is now director of economic and statistical advice and financial analysis at the Office of Fair Trading). "It was very, very open to women. Although it wasn't overtly political, women felt involved because musicianship wasn't at a premium: you could make the music you wanted to the extent you were able."

"Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band," agrees Whitehead. "I think C86 changed that - there were women promoting gigs, writing fanzines and running labels."

The very things the critics objected to - the childishness, the complete absence of testosterone, the Luddism - were political acts. What better way to reject the phallocentrism of rock than to deny masculine values? And why not invest the tired concept of the "generation gap" with some actual meaning by adopting badges of childhood rather than incipient adulthood? The indiepop bands went back to the lyrical themes of the earliest rock'n'roll, the music that first invented "teenage": boy meets girl, boy and girl hold hands, boy and girl are happy. But the indiepoppers were not using holding hands as a metaphor for sex: they meant it literally. By taking the sex out of pop, they were creating their own concept of "teenage" utterly unlike those that had come before: teenage as a state of mind, rather than an age group. The US band Beat Happening summed it up in two lines: "A new generation for the teenage nation / This time let's do it right". In short, this was prelapsarian music: never have so many post-adolescents spent so much time denying an interest in sex.

Rejecting sex as a musical tool was part of renouncing the evils of rock. And rejecting rock started with naming the band. "After Talulah Gosh we formed Heavenly," says Fletcher of her late-80s group. "Everyone was getting into loud rock, which I absolutely despised. So we came up with a group name that no one who liked loud rock could possibly like: a deliberately cissy name. I didn't realise that because of dance music Heavenly had all sorts of drugs connotations."

Even such minor matters as releasing records in the seven-inch format took on meaning. "The big stance we took was against 12-inch singles," says Matt Haynes of Sarah Records. "We put everything out on seven-inch. The 12-inch was all about making money: it was pure capitalism. But the music press completely missed the politics: they never noticed there were no pictures of women on the sleeve of Sarah records, for example. We thought it was wrong to use pictures of women to sell records. So we used pictures of Bristol."

Sean Forbes, the compiler of the Rough Trade album, even cherishes the incompetence. "The moment I realised indiepop was special was when I saw Talulah Gosh at their last gig at the London School of Economics and one of the singers did virtually nothing on stage except suck a lollipop and hang out. It was the first time since punk that it was possible to be in a band without any talent."

That blissful period when indiepop was all that ever mattered did not last long. Through 1987 and 1988, the major labels signed up the most promising of the bands, most of whom duly failed (three cheers, though, for the Wedding Present, who did sign to a major and in 1992 equalled one of Elvis Presley's records by having a hit single in every month of the year).

Both bands and major labels were making a mistake, says Whitehead. "It wasn't an album scene," says Whitehead, "it was singles scene. A band was good as its last single on seven-inch. But if you sign to major you've got to have an album in you."

One by one the groups that had defined the scene split up or slunk back into obscurity, remembered by few. But now, to the apparent surprise of all concerned, people who would have been watching kids' TV first time round are queuing to dance to the old songs. "It was fantastic," says Phil Wilson, who guest DJ'd at Watson's club night, "even though when I got there some kid asked me: 'Are you the guest DJ? Why are you famous?' But it was fantastic to see young kids discovering that music. A little bittersweet, though."

· Rough Trade Shops: Indiepop 1 is out now


Heaven in a seven-inch

10 great singles from the golden age of indiepop

Michael Hann
Wednesday October 13, 2004

1. The Jesus and Mary Chain: Never Understand (Blanco y Negro, 1985)
It was not strictly an indie single - Blanco y Negro was a "boutique" label for WEA - but the Mary Chain's second single was the one that gave the mid-80s indiepop its shove into the limelight. Sheets of feedback all but obliterated the girl-group pop song lurking underneath, and a minor tabloid furore was created by the band's desire - resisted by workers at the pressing plant - to put a song called Jesus Suck on the B-side. It still sounds remarkable, nearly 20 years on.

2. Talulah Gosh: My Best Friend (53rd and 3rd B-side, 1986)
How Talulah Gosh were hated. All for daring not to care about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. "I asked you a hundred times would you be my best friend, for ever and ever," chirrupped Amelia Fletcher. "You replied a hundred times that you didn't need a friend, not never, not never." And so tweeness was loosed upon the world. In truth Talulah Gosh were as punk rock as you like: perfectly set upon their own world, and hang the rest of you.

3. McCarthy: Red Sleeping Beauty (Pink, 1986)
As Nicky Wire writes in this month's edition of Word magazine, McCarthy were an inspiration to the Manic Street Preachers, blending the Byrds with the Communist manifesto. The gorgeous Red Sleeping Beauty is free of the stridency that sometimes marred their work, and can happily be enjoyed by those anorak wearers convinced that indiepop's purpose was to allow them to live in a cocoon.

4. The Wedding Present: My Favourite Dress (Reception, 1987)
Indiepop goes rock! The Wedding Present were really rather manly for many of the shamblers. One of their member watched Leeds United every week. Proper lads attended their gigs. There was even a football-related riot at one Leeds show in 1988. But they also made a string of fantastic singles, led by this tale of betrayal and heartbreak.

5. The Loft: Up The Hill and Down The Slope (Creation, 1985)
They made two great singles, and they split up on stage at the biggest gig of their career! And none of the members was ever again involved in a group half as good! You have to admire that kind of judgment, just as you have to admire this piece of stream-of-consciousness psychedelic pop from the band who were the flagship of Creation a decade before Oasis.

6. Another Sunny Day: I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist (Sarah, 1988)
Oh, stop scoffing. Heartfelt, melodic and emotionally wrenching, this was a perfect example of indiepop at its best. It also encapsulated why the music press turned against indiepop: fey, bloodless, wispy and utterly without spine. The critics got it wrong, of course.

7. The Soup Dragons: Whole Wide World (The Subway Organization, 1986)
Long before turning into a wretched baggy equipe with I'm Free, the Soup Dragons made a handful of terrific punky pop singles. Whole Wide World was 90 seconds or so of Buzzcocks by a band whose live set lasted 25 minutes, because that was as many songs as they knew.

8. The Chills: I Love My Leather Jacket (Flying Nun, 1986)
Indiepop had an outpost in New Zealand as early as 1981, when Flying Nun released Tally Ho by the Clean, still one of the all-time great indie singles. The Chills, however, took the so-called "Dunedin sound" from regional fame to international obscurity. Martyn Phillipps was one of pop's great melodicists, whose following remains fanatical despite the rarity of his visits to recording studios over the past decade.

9. The Primitives: Really Stupid (Lazy, 1986)
Two years later, Crash became an authentic top-five hit for the Primitives, but 1986's Really Stupid was the apotheosis of their, ahem, art: guitars that roared like the Ramones, as Tracy Tracy (not, one suspects, her given name) put down a worthless suitor with effortless one-liners. They were never this fierce again.

10. The House of Love: Christine (Creation, 1987)
Any of the House of Love's first four, breathtaking singles could make it into an indie top 10. This one wins out by virtue of its simplicity: a mournful three-chord elegy, given substance by the unearthly guitar playing of Terry Bickers. Stardom beckoned, but mental illness seized Bickers and the band's promise was stillborn. Now, it seems, they have reformed. The moment may have passed, but let us hope they can still make sweet music together.

Useful links :

How Does It Feel To Be Loved?
Indiepop 1