Neil Taylor - C86 & All That: The Creation Of Indie In Difficult Times

C86 AND
ALL THAT

THE CREATION OF INDIE IN DIFFICULT TIMES

NEIL TAYLOR

This edition first published in 2020 by
Inkmonkey Editions
www.inkmonkeyeditions.com

Typeset by Megan Sheer
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Cover Design by Karen Morgan at Morgan Radcliffe
Photographs courtesy of Paul Groovy

All rights reserved
Neil Taylor

The right of Neil Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 909502 33 8 (TPB)

ON 1 MAY 1997 THE Labour Party returned to power after eighteen years out of office. A mood of great optimism greeted it. The economy was buoyant - as it had been for most of the 1990s and a cultural renaissance was taking place, with both British pop and British art blazing a trail in terms of sales and exposure. Successes in film, fashion and design followed close behind. Seeking to capitalise on the good fortune, the Government introduced a policy to promote economic growth through creativity, and to help publicise it the Prime Minister threw a party.

The Cool Britannia' reception was held in Downing Street on the 30th July and many of the great and the good attended. Designers Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood lent their support, as did comedians Tony Robinson and Lenny Henry. The film director David Puttnam was present, and the writers Melvyn Bragg and Margaret Drabble. But the next day when the news editors began assembling their obligatory 250-word photo story, it wasn't any of the above they chose to write about, but Oasis star Noel Gallagher, who had attended the party with his wife Meg and record company boss Alan McGee. McGee had donated 50,000 to the Scottish Labour Party and was a worthy invitee in his own right. The pictures in the papers showed Noel, Meg, Alan and Tony Blair: all beaming smiles and bonhomie.

The picture was a measure of how far so-called indie' music had come since the monochromatic days of the early 1980s. I'd not met Noel Gallagher, but was an old friend of Alan McGee, although I hadnt seen him since the late 1980s when Id stopped writing music journalism and the success of his Creation Records label was starting to take him to a place where our paths were unlikely to cross. When wed first met, in the early 1980s, he was working as a stores clerk for British Rail, and moonlighting as a concert promoter. In August 1983, he began putting on shows in the tiny upstairs bar of a pub in central London. He christened the venue the Living Room.

The bands that appeared at the Living Room including Primal Scream, the June Brides, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Shop Assistants, the Pastels, the Jasmine Minks, the Loft and scores of others were part of a new wave of indie music that laid the groundwork for what in the 1990s would be called Indie (note the capital letter). The story of old indie was less about garden parties with centre right prime ministers and more about grit and determination against the odds. It was a story not without its successes, and there were a few spectacular, cause clbre moments, but the successes, at least commercially speaking, were not quite like those that followed, including the one enjoyed by Oasis whose career trajectory, like the title of one of their singles, went supersonic.

In the 1980s, indie was still to be turned into a brand. The economy was stagnant not buoyant. The gulf between the have-s and have-nots was almost as great as it is at the time of writing. Politics was deeply divided. Music was also deeply divided: at times, indie felt like the barricades, the last line of defence against a mainstream pop culture that had become increasingly slick and commercially-focused, as befitted the times. The mainstream sound of the age was synthetic: synthesizers, syn-drums, syn-sincerity.

Alan McGees club was just one of the clubs (and later labels) that set about changing things. Various Government-funded schemes and a more generous dole culture enabled many to play in bands in lieu of the jobs that in any event were not out there for them anyway. Some of the less lucky unemployed were on the Youth Training Scheme or the Youth Training Programme, the Government's method of artificially keeping young people out of the unemployment statistics. The schemes were a free market licence for exploitation by unscrupulous (and largely unregulated) employers - in 1982, seventeen youths were killed on the schemes that according to The Times amounted to industrial conscription', or back up the chimney for all those who fail their 11-Plus', as Julie Burchill more colourfully put it at the time.

The threat of nuclear annihilation was another concern. The Cold War got considerably warmer at the start of the 1980s when around 100 US nuclear weapons bases were located on UK soil. Youth CND membership rose dramatically and 70,000 turned up for a 1983 CND concert in Brockwell Park (featuring the Style Council, Madness, the Damned and others). That same year, the mass-market edition of Raymond Briggs graphic novel,