C86 Remembered: The Birth Of Uncool, The Birth Of Indie

This weekend, London’s ICA celebrates one of the most critical events in music: the release of the C86 mix tape. The mixtape held the songs of a generation of British groups that some say launched the Indie sound. In the Guardian, Manic Street Preacher Nicky Wire says:

Music history holds that nothing much happened in British rock between the rise of the Smiths (early 1980s) and the rise of the Stone Roses (early 1990s), but something did. For want of a better name, it gets called C86, after a compilation tape the NME put out that year. It was iconoclastic and human, and so fiercely independent it was kind of beyond authenticity. Some people have called it the true birth of indie, in which case this year marks its 20th anniversary.

Twenty years on, if you listen to the actual C86 compilation tape, it doesn’t sound like a scene at all - it’s all over the place. Some of the bands, such as Big Flame, were abrasive. Some of them, like the Shop Assistants or the June Brides, were performing brilliant pop songs that teetered on the edge of falling apart. Then there was McCarthy, probably my favourite band of all time. They were quite fey musically, but their lyrics were so political and erudite: We Are All Bourgeois Now, The Procession of Popular Capitalism.

…If there was any kind of coherence, it was the fact that the bands were so independent from the music industry and from the mainstream media. 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. And they were all making up manifestos, no matter how ridiculous it seemed.

Details for C86: Still Doing It for Fun at the ICA over at The Purple List