Console Me

 I've been reading Nige Tassell's "Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids" and I've experienced a sense of wonder. 

In 1986 the NME put together a compilation of 22 zeitgeisty indie bands for a state of the nation cassette, which you could send off for with a postal order. I didn't because I was fourteen, square and still dealing with the trauma of being newly arrived in Basingstoke. No, I mean it - fucking trauma. I've never been the same. 

The Mighty Mighty Mighty

The music contained therein was the template for every knock-kneed shambling band in the country: Mighty Mighty, The Bodines, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Close Lobsters and OF COURSE The Mighty Bogshed. And many, many more, including Primal Scream, who don't seem to reference this collision with arch tweedom very much these days. They must have forgotten they released a single called "Gentle Tuesday". Sake. 

I'm about halfway through the book, and a couple of things are becoming clear. All these guys are doing okay. They all got proper jobs. For a lot of them, being in a band seems like a pleasant holiday memory - copping off with a Dutch girl who was into "electro body music" in the Melkweg - but not something that was sustainable. They still keep it up as a hobby which, in truth, was all it ever was. They had mild pop star dreams, but always kept something to fall back on. They live nice ordinary lives, with soundproofed sheds full of memorabilia, all their Japanese imports framed on the walls, and the Rickenbacker with the Keep Music Live sticker fraying at the edges, propped up next to the Orange amp, ready for a nostalgia festival in Italy. And there's nothing wrong with that. They seem like nice, ordinary, slightly dull, mainly Northern men, the sort who sit with their arms folded in the pub, and are clueless in the music round of the pub quiz because they've not listened to the charts this century. 

I'm with them there. 

The other thing, and it's the thing I'm finding more difficult to process, is how fucking easy it was for them. They may be misremembering, but almost every story is the same: they start a band, there's a local scene and a cheap local studio, they make a demo, it gets picked up, usually by Alan McGee, they make a record, John Peel plays it, and suddenly they're on a charabanc down to Maida Vale to record a Peel session under the baleful eye of Dale Griffin, and it's straight to the top of the festive fifty. Then there's an album and an implosion and a career as a research chemist. 

Again and again it's effortless forward motion. Yes, it only lasts eighteen months of crushing transit travel, and then they're dumped onto the cold shoulder of reality, but FUCKING HELL I'd have loved to have been able to tell those stories. "Oh yes, I did three Peel sessions, actually. Number 12 in the festive 50. They showed ten seconds of my video on The Chart Show between The Bambi Slam and The Godfathers. That's why, to this day, I wear my jeans uncomfortably tight. That's why I get a Christmas card from Sushil from The Soup Dragons every year, whether I want to or not."

I was in bands. Were they good bands? Yeah, they weren't half bad. Were they worse than the bands on C86? No, not all of them. Did Peel extend his hand? No. Did Alan McGee phone my parents house at three in the morning, fucked up and dribbling about a contract? That's also a no. These lazy pricks. They never struggled. They danced a gay gavotte into indie history, where my bands are so obscure even I can't remember who was in them. 

I was. I was in them. That should have been all you needed, really. 

That said, I've become quite a fan of Mighty Mighty, lately. They sound a bit like my first band: scrappy, funny and obviously in thrall to The Smiths. Lovely stuff. "Built Like A Car" and "Is There Anyone Out There?" are both crackers.