Indie Pop - History

History

NME followed up C81 with C86. Similarly designed to reflect the new music scene of the time in the UK, it is now seen as the birth of indie pop in the UK (the 2006 extended reissue CD86 is subtitled 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop). The UK music press was, in 1986, highly competitive, with four weekly papers documenting new bands and trends. The grouping of bands, often artificially, with an overarching label to heighten interest or sell copies, was commonplace. NME journalists of the period now agree that C86 was an example of this, but also a by-product of NME's "hip hop wars", a schism in the paper (and among readers) between enthusiasts of contemporary progressive black music (for example, by Public Enemy and Mantronix), and fans of guitar-based music, as represented on C86. C86 featured key early bands of the genre such as Primal Scream and The Pastels, but also included tracks by several more abrasive, "shambling" bands from the Ron Johnson label, who were atypical of the perceived C86 jangle pop aesthetic.

A link between C86 and unifying genre is commonly disputed by critics and the bands actually on the original compilation. Everett True, a writer for NME in the '80s under the name "The Legend!", has argued that "C86 didn't actually exist as a sound, or style. I find it weird, bordering on surreal, that people are starting to use it as a description again". Geoff Taylor, a member of the band Age of Chance, agreed: "We never considered ourselves part of any scene. I’m not sure that the public at large did either, to be honest. We were just an independent band around at that same time as the others." Bob Stanley, a Melody Maker journalist in the late 1980s and founding member of pop band Saint Etienne, acknowledges that participants at the time reacted against lazy labelling, but insists they shared an approach:

Of course the "scene", like any scene, barely existed. Like squabbling Marxist factions, groups who had much in common built up petty rivalries. The June Brides and the Jasmine Minks were the biggest names at Alan McGee's Living Room Club and couldn't stand the sight of each other. Only when the The Jesus and Mary Chain exploded and stole their two-headed crown did they realise they were basically soulmates.

Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire remembers that it was the bands' very independence that gave the scene coherence: "People were doing everything themselves - making their own records, doing the artwork, gluing the sleeves together, releasing them and sending them out, writing fanzines because the music press lost interest really quickly."

Many of the actual C86 bands distanced themselves from the scene cultivated around them by the UK music press - in its time, C86 became a pejorative term for its associations with so-called "shambling" (a John Peel-coined description celebrating the self-conscious primitive approach of some of the music) and underachievement.

In 2004 the UK-focused Rough Trade Shops compilation Indiepop Vol. 1 effectively documented the history of the sound acknowledging that it pre- and post-dated 1986.