Anoraking: The Dream Turns Sour

Oh dear, the old build 'em up, knock 'em down response kicks in...

The Primitives in Melody Maker, November 8 1986:
"Yeah, we really have got an anorak and we're gonna BURN it. On stage. We're waiting for the right moment. A lot of people have been trying to bash this scene on the head recently. It's about time this 'Nice-little-anorak-band-can't-quite-play-very-well' music scene came to an end'".
Ooer!

Simon Reynolds (hurrah!) interviews Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes in Melody Maker, February 7 1987:
'Why do they loathe the anorak thing?

Andrew: "I can see it had its good points...before it became a defined cult. Like the way it was a reaction against Goth and the return of the hippy. And the way there's a lot more girls in bands, not just as window dressing, but as drummers and bassists."

Margarita: "But I hate the new rules and uniforms that solidify, the way that what was once a joke is taken seriuosly, so that people slavishly start wearing what Stephen Pastel has been wearing for years. And I hate this whole aura of tweeness and cute childishness that hangs over the scene."

What's "Splashing Along" all about?

Andrew: "Oh dear this is going to sound terribly anorak! It's about going to a club called Splash 1 which was this pivotal anorak club, in the pouring rain, to see this girl I was in love with...At the moment I'm considering writing a song called 'Fuck Off And Die' in order to change our image!"'

Mr Reynolds, as is his want, muses carefully on the nature of anoraked-up 'pure pop', leading to a most entertaining conclusion:

'As the second and third waves of shambling bands immitate their predecessors, we get a kind of logic of inbreeding (like pedigree dogs, the aim is for new levels of 'purity'), leading to more and more grotesque breeds. Can you imagine what the progeny of The BMX Bandits will look like?!?'

Melody Maker, September 26 1987:
'Everybody, from that scene, is crappy nowadays. How we can laugh at people's gullibility, how we can snicker over those with a copy of "C-86", amazed at their naivety. A bunch of Anorexic Krankies playing at pop; showcasing the nadir of shambling, heralding a brief new age of more fulsome student pop. So The Shop Assistants crumbled, so The Mighty Lemon Drops pegged their noses over such shoddy suggestions, stalked off and are still pegging out. What a wasteful scene, with its hollow premise and shallow promises.'

Wow, such vitirol! And for what? Why, an article on the brilliance of The Soup Dragons of course! Written by Goth King Mick Mercer in which he apparently 'finds where they left their anoraks and why they lost their innocence'. Oh the humanity!

Even Talulah Gosh put the boot into the 'scene' in Melody Maker, June 13 1987:
‘…there was no surprise that these gentle urchins were placed at the centre of the minute indie "cutie" scene. Maybe there was only them there.
Matthew, a decidedly untwee figure, has an answer, " All that is such a contrived style, and there are all these terrible fanzines with recipes for sweety sweety yumyum cake who suggest going for picnics with ginger beer and playing Buzzcocks tapes."

What can they mean? Incidentally, pictured above are a few pages from cutester indiepop fanzine 'Troutfishing In Leytonstone', ca.1987.

And then there was

'Searching For The Young Soul Rebels: a hatebomb' a brilliantly written rantzine by a rather bitter and twisted Peter - previously known as 'Pete Honey' of Baby Honey fanzine. This fanzine dripped sneering vitriol at pretty much everyone - the NME for being:

'basically SCUM, just a bunch of white do-gooder voyeurs'

fanzine writers for being:

'sycophantic paedophiles eagerly discussing Marigold's new haircut...Fucking hippies.'

the 'Take The Subway To Your Suburb' compilation;

'...when I bought it my immediate intention was to put a knife mark through the grooves of every song on the lp except 'Get Out Of My Dream...'

'Searching For The Young Soul Rebels' was compelling writing from someone thoroughly disillusioned by a micro-scopic music scene:

'All these enthusiastic sixteen year olds going on twenty-five, wearing their hearts all too painfully on their stripey sleeves, shambling as in 'a shambles', given credibility by jerks like The Legend! twittering on and dull fanzine-types without one single fucking original thought between them, who'll tell me how their summer began when they bought the Desperadoes single ("but they're not pressed in red/ so they buy the Soupies instead") all of it perpetrated by inane and smalltown attitudes and the sheer MEDIOCRITY of the likes of The Chesterfields...'

Looking at it now, it's amusing how worked up the poor love got over such irrelevant minutiae, especially when the fanzine's denouement reveals the not very mind-blowing news:

'Emily and The Clouds are two of the four greatest bands on the planet right now, along with Primal Scream and The Jesus and Mary Chain. THAT is a fact. Take that knowledge, and make your own contribution to the new soul vision. Oh and for God's sake...BURN IT DOWN'

It's still a good read though.

See Eighty Six

1986 and at least the first half of 1987 were a heady whirl of indiepop sunshine yummy fun jangly goodness. Through the 'marvel' of the Royal Mail, I plugged into the mysterious world of fanzines...blimey! there were people out there getting candy coloured pop kicks the same as me. The Legend! raving about The Soup Dragons and Beat Happening and The Primitives, Troutfishing In Leytonstone getting all over-excited and suggesting:


'...the BMX Bandits DESERVE murdering for daring to release e102/sad 12" two months after the 7"'

or going twee-mental over Talulah Gosh:

'oooooh Talulah Gosh this flexi-disc IS the WONDERFULLEST thing all summer...just like that RUSH of excitement when you were six and it was time for the jelly and ice-cream at your birthday party'

Then there was Jump Away! written by Simon Williams who ended up writing for the NME and setting up Fierce Panda records. We met him at an Avons gig in the wee tiny Suffolk market town where we used to spend Saturday nights getting our teenage kicks. Quite odd that he was there as it really was (is) in the middle of nowhere. This is what happened:

'28th March 1987
We all hit swinging Bungay and went in The Fleece for our first half. Then hit The Tuns for a second, it was a bit swirly in there though (‘swirlies’ probably best translates as ‘townies’). So into Charlies where the support band The Sick Shirts (or something???) were playing with Baz on guitar or bass or whatever wearing a v. silly wig. They were ace and rather shambly. When they’d finished we were hanging about outside and found a bloke with bleached hair selling a fanzine called ‘Jump Away’ so bought a copy each ‘cos it had the Mighty Lemon Drops and JAMC and things.

Then, then, The Avons played and we wigged on down. They were marvy, grooving with all the old faves and some kind of countryfied new ones. Yeah, yeah! ‘Is Billy There?’ twangle twangle aceness.
The Avons are hip to the beat in this sorry town, daddio. After they’d finished, we spoke to the fanzine bloke who was called Simon Williams. He lives in London and goes all over the bleedin’ place to see gigs. He’d been to see The Wolfhounds and McCarthy in Norwich last night. He had Soup Dragons badges like mine and a fab Bodines badge. He’s seen Primal Scream only they weren’t that good, so he thinks they should retire ‘cos ‘Velocity Girl’, ‘Crystal Crescent’ and ‘All Fall Down’ were ace but they’ve nowhere left to go (perhaps a little premature with your judgement there, Mr Williams?) We all talked for ages about gigs ‘n’ stuff, although Simon said he’s more interesting when he’s happy, ‘cos tonight he was sad. He didn’t know why, but he could feel the sadness overwhelming him. That’s what happens when you visit Bungay, you know.'

Jump Away!' was less 'ooh spangly popfun!' and more 'here is a semi-political rant piece about the state of indie music', with added photo-stories featuring a shop dummy. There's an entertaining piece in issue 3 entitled 'Flying The Fashionable Flag? The Independent Investigation' that rambles on for several pages randomly ranting about chart pop, indie bands selling out and 'the derisory term of shambling'. Poking a stick at what he described as 'the Subway Sector', Simon summed up the scene thus:

'Puerility! Youth! Vitality! Shortbackandsides blackplimsoles Creation LemonDrops FireStationTowers Subutteo Polkadots Ladybird campvocals SoupDragons brightcolours cuteshirts bashfulsmiles simplisticlyrics Woodentops Trumpton HeadmastersRitual satchels CamberwickGreen love Truck beguile Train brighteyes Tractor escapefromtheharshworld stripeyteeshirts childrenoftheunderworlduniteinsmilinginnocence'

And then we discovered a fellow local Pop Kid when we were sold 'So Naive!' at a gig (possibly The Rosehips??) at Norwich Arts Centre. This was exciting, as indiepop-kids were almost like mythical beings to us, not people we'd actually run into unless we maybe attended one of those iconic gigs we'd heard happened in magical-sounding London venues called things like Chalk Farm Enterprise, Bay 63, Room At The Top. But here was Mike in his stripey tee shirt and chelsea boots (and black jeans, obviously) proffering this indiepop-tastic paper celebration of all the things we loved.

There were only two issues of 'So Naive', the second one possibly even twee-er than the first, e.g:

'Mary Day by The Razorcuts still makes me cry sometimes even after all the times I've heard it. And 'I Heard You The First Time' was simply so so sad and Gregory's voice is just so perfect that The Razorcuts have to be the most ace fabby band in the whole wide world'.

Lordy! No wonder people wanted to throttle the tweesters. Part of the fun of being a pop kid was the fact that it really annoyed people though. Just when we were supposed to be grown up, when our peers were swanning around with perms and stillettoes and discussing diets (and that was just the boys - ho ho), we revelled in growing our fringes into our eyes, wearing anoraks, shaking tamborines, eating Smarties. Not that subversive, but amusing nonetheless. God bless indiepop and the fanzine nation.

Print Workers

Here is a cutting from Melody Maker, circa 1987, by some unnamed writer, which gives quite a sharp overview of the indie fanzine culture of the time. Can you imagine a piece in today’s NME using words like ‘acculturation”? Images are of my ancient school folder, I apparently went beserk with the old graffiti-writing during English lessons. I especially like the random mention of 'Heroin' amidst the biro-based indiepop explosion.

‘The fate of fanzines is intertwined with the music for which they evangelise. Media attention for the whole C86 chimera (a lumping together of jangly feypop, Creation’s nouveau rockism and sub-Beefheartian shamble-thrash) peaked between 1985 and ’86 and, since then, bands and ‘zine writers have faced the same dilemma – crossover or exile. The “best” writers have entered the music press, just as the “best” bands have signed to majors.

The horns of the dilemma are peculiarly painful because, just as indiepop defines itself against chartpop, so fanzines define themselves against the music press, which they see as senile/corrupt/lazy/trendhopping/careerist/out-of-touch-because-metropolitan. Like the groups who seek to regenerate a lost “pure pop”, fanzines espouse “pure” writing – a gush of naked enthusiasm/vitriol unmediated by theory, speculation, or indeed any of the protocols of criticism (objectivity, balance).

Just as anti-pop needs the charts to dramatise itself against, so fanzines need the music press to lambaste for its “deficiencies” (of passion, responsiveness). Fanzines are hooked on the heady mindset of paranoia/martyrdom/in-the-know one-upmanship/exile. But as the media actually gets more and more comprehensive, to sustain that feeling of superiority means evangelising for ever more uncorrupted, virgin, frankly unlistenable musics – zines like THE ROX and RUMBLEDYTHUMP celebrate the sub-sub-Beefheartian scramble of Ron Johnson type bands, while THE LEGEND!, TROUTFISHING IN LEYTONSTONE and ADVENTURES IN BERESNIK rave about the hyper-fey romanticism of the post-post-Postcard groups.

The supreme dead end to this acculturation, this post-modern constructed “innocence”, comes with the flexi-zines. Starting with their anger at Creation for bringing out 12-inch singles (when all their band’s songs are two minutes long), fanzines like ARE YOU SCARED TO GET HAPPY? moved towards the idea of the seven inch flexi as a statement – the idea being both that cutiepop’s flimsy, tiny rush sounds best on flexis played on jumble sale mono Dansettes, and that lo-fi is a Luddite gesture against the yupwardly mobile CD-conscious sound of chartpop. What a vainglorious retreat from the future!’