título: C86 - Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? An Indie Odissey
isbn: 978-1-788-70560-8
data: 2023 (paperback). Há Hardback de 2022
1ª Edição (paperback)
Nige
Tassell
C86 –
Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? An Indie Odissey
Na capa:
‘You will love this book.’ RICHARD OSMAN (NO CIMO – CENTRADO)
SHORTLISTED
FOR THE
PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE (NO FUNDO – CENTRADO DUAS LINHAS A SEGUNDA MAIS A BOLD)
1ª
página
Shortlisted
for the Penderyn Music Book Prize
A Rough
Trade Book Of The Year
A
Resident Book Of The Year
A
Monorail Book of The Year
A Virgin
Radio Book of the Year
‘You
will love this book’ – Richard Osman
‘Twenty-two
tales of youthful anger, innocence and indolence, filtered through almost forty
years of regret, melancholy and, occasionally, dogged resistance. Nige Tassell
succinctly and sweetly conjures up an era when groups could form in Glasgow,
Hebden Bridge or Whitstable and – for a few months, at least – become national
heroes via the patronage of John Peel and the weekly music press. He spins gold
from their grab-bag of agendas, musical politics and effects pedals and creates
something that is frequently more impressive, entertaining and enjoyable than
the music itself.’ – Bob Stanley
‘This is
a funny, sad, gorgeous and beautifully researched book about the most
influential loser tribe in the history of British music.” – David Quantick
‘A
valuable slice of pop history.’ – Mark Ellen
‘Nige’s
writing is to be treasured – a warm, welcoming and wonderful book.’ – Jude
Rogers
‘Who, of
a certain vintage and a certain propensity for hoarding things in lofts,
including cassette-tape compilations sold via a weekly music publication,
wouldn’t want THIS BOOK?’ – Andrew Collins
‘Incredibly
beautiful.’ – John Niven
‘Excellent’
– Gideon Coe
‘About
music, but also about youthful dreams and mature reality. A lovely read.’ –
Danny Kelly
‘Absolutely
fantastic.’ – Siân Pattenden, Culture Bunker
‘Often
funny, sometimes poignant… [a] candid, evocative snapshot of a scene that is
fondly but scarcely celebrated.’ – Classic Pop
‘A
valuable preservation of faded networks and forgotten ways to belong.’ – The
Wire
‘Brilliant.’
– The Scotsman
‘A book
about music, yes, but it’s more about the evolution of dreams.’ – Virgin Radio
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
NIGE
TASSELL was just seventeen when C86 came out. Over the decades since, he’s
written about music for the Guardian, the Sunday Times, Word, Q, Mojo, the New
Statesman and Paste, among many other publications. He also writes books on
popular culture and sport, Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? Is his eight book
@nigetassell
WHATEVER
HAPPENED TO THE C86 KIDS?
AN INDIE
ODYSSEY
NIGE
TASSELL
NINE
EIGHT BOOKS
NEB 007
PB
First
published in the UK in hardback in 2022
This
paperback edition published in 2023 by Nine Eight Books
An
imprint of Black & White Publishing Group
A
Bonnier Books UK Company
5th
Floor, HYLO, 105 Bunhill Row,
London,
EC 8LZ
Owned by
Bonnier Books, Sveavagen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
@nighteightbooks
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-7887-0560-8
eBook
ISBN: 978-1-7887-0559-2
Publishing
director: Pete Selby
Senior
Editor: James Lilford
Typeset
by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Printed
and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
3 5 7 9
10 8 6 4
Text
copyright © Nige Tassell, 2022, 2023
CONTENTS
Intro –
1
SIDE ONE
1.
Primal Scream – 11
2. The
Mighty Lemon Drops – 31
3. The
Soup Dragons – 48
4. The
Wolfhounds – 71
5. The
Bodines – 86
6.
Mighty Mighty – 103
7. Stump
– 118
8.
Bogshed – 139
9. A
Witness – 155
10. The
Pastels – 171
11. Age
of Chance – 190
SIDE TWO
12. Shop
Assistants – 209
13.
Close Lobsters – 225
14.
Miaow – 239
15. Half
Man Half Biscuit – 256
16. The
Servants – 272
17. The
Mackenzies – 287
18. Big
Flame – 305
19.
We’ve Got A Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!! – 320
20.
McCarthy – 335
21. The
Shrubs – 355
22. The
Wedding Present – 371
Outro –
396
Dramatis
Personae – 397
Tracklisting
– 402
Acknowledgements
– 404
Picture
Credits – 406
INTRO
I’ve
been up here at least an hour now.
My arse
aches, there are splinters in my elbows, and my teeth are clenched around a
pocket torch, its flickering beam growing feebler by the minute. I’ve contorted
myself into the most unnatural, unflattering of shapes in order a) to avoid
falling to earth through the open loft hatch across which I’m balanced
precariously, and b) to be able – just about, at the fullest of stretches – to
drag that last box out from under the eaves.
There
are many boxes much closer, comfortably within arm´s reach, but I’ve been
through them already. They each contain plenty of bounty, but it’s just not the
one particular item of treasure I’m searching for. Still missing, still
elusive.
Fingertips
inch this final box – of course it’s the final box – near enough to where I can
get a proper grip and pull it closer. Scratchy fibers of loft insulation come
whit it, the desiccated corpses of long-dead insects tangled up in them. This
is the last tomb to be wrenched open. A cardboard tomb sealed by brown parcel
tape and mummified by a thick layer of dust.
Once
opened, the treasure shines through the darkness. The dog has been lying at the
bottom of the loft ladder for most of this past hour. If he could talk, he
would be my Lord Carnarvon.
‘Can you
see anything?’
Me, the
intrepid Howard Carter.
‘Yes,
wonderful things.’
Well,
one wonderful thing in particular: a golden, rectangular box, small enough to
fit in the palm of your hand, that’s lying on top of a pile of similar-sized –
but not golden – rectangular boxes. I pick it up. A dragged thumb clears away
more dust. Its providence, its hallmark, is revealed by three letters. NME. Its
date of origin is confirmed by a letter and two numbers. C86.
This is
the genuine artefact, the real McCoy, the reason my arse is sore, why splinters
are lodged in my elbows, why there’s a torch between my teeth. The discomfort
dissolves. The treasure hunter’s expedition is over, his discovery exhumed and
ready to be paraded.
At the
bottom of the ladder, Lord Carnarvon looks distinctly unimpressed.
Press
rewind and hit the stop button when it reaches 1986.
‘Yowsa!
Yowsa! Yowsa! Five years on from our lavishly lauded C81 cassette debut, NME is
once again making a declaration of independents.
The
copywriters of the NME had certainly had their Weetabix the morning they wrote
the blurb to accompany the announcement of their latest mail-order cassette.
Under the headline ‘This Year’s Models’, the alliteration was working overtime.
This
latest compilation, C86, was ‘a punchy parade of prime-time pop’ and ‘a cool
spool of stunning sonic splendour’. Fortunately, for those unfazed by
hyperb9ole, a tracklisting was also included; readers could make up teir own
mind if the twenty-two tracks – eleven a side – were worth trundling down to
the post office to fetch postal order
for £2.95.
Of
course that tracklisting was worth it. The whole thing was delivered to your
door for less than fourteen pence per song. It was a no-brainer to 40,000-odd
members of the NME faithful who speedly clipped their coupon from the paper.
For starters, there were plenty of strong hitters among the roster – Primal Scream,
the Soup Dragons, Age of Chance, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Wedding Present –
who’d already made at least half a name for themselves among the readership.
Those were worth the price of admission alone. Then there was the promise of
the lesser-known outfits – Miaow, McCarthy, the Wolfhounds – who might be the
heroes of tomorrow.
The
intention of the three NME staffers who compiled the cassette – Roy Carr, Neil
Taylor and Adrian Thrills – was to replicate the blueprint of C81, to provide a
snapshot of the independent music scene in the country at the time, ‘The sound
was starting to change,’ Carr later told Record Collector, ‘and we were getting
a sense of that at the NME. You were starting to hear the first hints of what
would later become indie-pop. It was a really interesting time for music.’
Around a dozen bands were initially earmarked as potential contributors, a
figure that eventually expanded to the sainted twenty-two. Those who made the
final cut, Carr admitted, ‘were the ones who were coming through at the time
that we happened to like. It was all quite arbitrary.’
As a
barometer of independent music, it showed that the current scene wasn’t quite
as wide-ranging as it had been five years earlier. On C81, US underground
rockers Red Crayola were followed by Brit-funkers Linx, the Beat by Pere Ubu,
John Cooper Clarke by James Blood Ulmer. In comparison, C86 was narrower – and
almost exclusively populated by white kids with guitars.
But
there was still plenty of variety on show. There’s a world of difference
between the plaintive, longing tones of the Pastels and the angular indie-funk
of their fellow Glaswegians the Mackenzies. Similarly, the shouty sloganeering
of the Age of Chance is the antithesis of the shy tunes of McCarthy.
These
bands had different ambitions. Some desperately wanted to be on Top of the
Pops. Others refused to work within the structure of a rapacious music
industry. All, though, were united by a willingness to do the heavy lifting, to
cover the hard yards, themselves. In the face of bright, shiny New Pop, and as
a middle finger to Thatcherism’s dismantling of society, punk’s DIY culture was
re-adopted. Inadvertently, the government’s own Enterprise Allowance Scheme –
signed up to by plenty of the bands on the cassette – helped create this new
cultural wave.
Despite
the differing styles of the cassette, C86 the compilation title became C86 sub-genre,
the shorthand for jangly guitar music made by shy types who bought their
clothes in musty secondhand shops and who sang of chaste love rather than
earthly sex. ‘Anoraskia nervosa,’ scoffed the writer Simon Reynolds.
While
C86 the sub-genre became a tool of those who wished to ridicule, C86 the
cassette has enjoyed an ongoing affection and cultural impact which its
compilers could never have seen coming. ‘I don’t think anyone thought they were
establishing a template for that would later become “indie”,’ Adrian Thrills
explained to the Indie Through the Looking Glass blog. ‘We weren’t trying to
define a genre.
More
than thirty-five years on from its release, and following several reissues and
numerous broadsheet think-pieces about its cultural worth, it remains an
artefact seemingly impervious to the passing of time. Indeed, the writer Andrew
Collins, in describing C86 as ‘the most indie thing ever to have existed’,
believes its legend will be intact well beyond everyone who ever bought it is;
a battered copy will be exhumed and exulted over ‘long after the planet has
been made uninhabitable by SUVs and soya farming in Brazil’.
For now,
as Saint Etienne’s resident music historian Bob Stanley wrote in The Times,
hindsight has endowed C86 with a significance not necessarily appreciated at
the time; to him, it’s ‘a great British DIY boom in the tradition of skiffle or
Mersey-beat’ that was ‘in the vanguard of revolution rather than the revolution
itself’. C86 wasn’t the storming of the Bastille, but it was the battle cry
that mobilized the troops.
‘With
the honourable exception of the Postcard label,’ says Stanley, ‘it was the
starting point for indie music. It lit the touch paper for the Stone Roses,
then Oasis and eventually all manner of million-selling acts.’
As the
late Roy Carr charmingly observed, ‘I’ve talked to people who formed indie
bands because of listening to music introduced to them via our tape. And I’m
immensely proud of that.’
The loft
ladder has been folded away, the insect skeletons brushed off the T-shirt. It’s
time to examine my find – the very C86 cassette for which I dutifully sent off
my coupon back when I was just seventeen.
I open
the box and take out the cassette. The tape spools, visible through that tiny
window, it was approaching the midway point of Side One. This means that,
thirty-odd years ago, I last hit the stop button after the fifth track, my
favourite song of the cassette at the time: the Bodines’ ‘Therese’. It’s been
stuck there since, frozen in time for three decades between the final twangy
chord of ‘Therese’ and the undulating bassline that announces Mighty Mighty’s
‘Law’.
I unfold
the inlay card. The band names and song titles are printed at a size
uncomfortable for failing middle-aged eyes, but squint hard enough and they’re
just about legible. The names, the songs. And, most poignantly, the
songwriters, then in the first flush of youth and now in the late afternoon of
their lives. The Caine / Fenner / Ryecroft / Winters tag-team who came up with
Miaow’s ‘Sport Most Royal’. The Brown / Green / Keefle trio who co-wrote Big
Flame’s contribution to the cassette. The Linehan / Newton pairing who gave the
Mighty Lemon Drops’ ‘Happy Head’ such thrust and energy.
Squint
hard enough on they’re just about legible.
That’s
not much of a legacy, little inn the way of a salute. They deserve something
more; to at least have the metaphorical dust blown of them, to be remembered
somehow. Where did they go? What did they do? Where are they now?
To the
kitchen table with the laptop. Just five minutes of light browsing throws up
the couple of ‘afterlives’ that need further investigation. But there’s no one
else in the house to share these revelations with. The dog’s lying at my feet
now. He’ll have to do.
‘Did you
know that the singer with the Wolfhounds is now a world-renowned ornithologist?
And who could have guessed that you can book Bogshed’s bass player to draw
caricatures of your wedding guests?
‘You
know what, these are stories that need to be told…’
The dog
looks up. He’s seen this twinkle in my eye before.
Again,
if he could talk, I know what he’s say. Just one word.
‘Book?’
I nod
back and smile.
‘Book’.
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