by Bob Stanley
Postcard’s scratchiness and strength through DIY provided a musical template for the new indie underground.6 There was also a lot of politics, about modern pop, and about modern pop consumption. Fanzines were in red and black, the colours of Bauhaus and the Angry Brigade. The price of a fanzine was important, as was the format: vinyl was fetishised; no one released CDs, which were seen as corporate, expensive and largely a ruse by which the industry could rinse money from unthinking consumers. Similarly, videos were regarded as an enemy of good pop because they were passive – as you sat and watched them, a layer of personal involvement disappeared. Videos also benefited mediocre records – Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ (US no. 1, UK no. 4 ’86) and Paula Abdul’s ‘Opposites Attract’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’90) did so well largely because their videos were considerably more exciting than the songs. Indie was hostile to the idea of MTV’s technologies as potential platforms in any usable way. Partly through its own puritan choosing, it was entirely disconnected.
Like the American hardcore scene, British indie was also anti-macho to the point of being sexless. Women were suddenly allowed a place in pop that they had been unaccustomed to since the Brill Building era, not only forming groups but promoting gigs and writing fanzines. Though hiding itself from the mainstream, by 1986 the indie aesthetic had at least achieved national recognition in the music press. It had also reached a consensus on how it should sound and look. The musical influences tended towards the melodic Buzzcocks end of punk, the scratchy post-punk guitars of Josef K and the twelve-string chime of the Byrds – freed from year-zero dogma, the musical past now became a library of unexpected detail. The sixties were quickly ransacked for both look (polo necks and bowl cuts for the boys, polka dots and bobs for the girls) and sound: from Scotland came the Pastels, Primal Scream and the Jasmine Minks; Oxford had Razorcuts and Talulah Gosh; Bristol had the Flatmates and the Groove Farm; Newcastle provided Hurrah!; from the East London/Essex border came the Wolfhounds and McCarthy; the Wedding Present and One Thousand Violins were Yorkshire’s contribution.
This was impressive and all very brave, worthy of a spot on Newsnight Review even, but there was no getting around the fact that it was a self-imposed and self-conscious pop ghetto, too shambolic to have any impact on the eighties mainstream. Worse, the shared likes and dislikes, the closely watched values, meant that almost inevitably the groups began to sound remarkably similar. There was one group who operated outside the ghetto; they had escaped it just before the wall went up. They also happened to be, by a distance, the most talented indie group of the lot.
Among Orange Juice’s biggest fans was Johnny Marr, a guitarist who worked in a Manchester jeans shop. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Brill Building and sixties girl-group 45s. Across town was Steven Morrissey, a loner who spent much of his spare time writing letters to the music papers and listening to Sandie Shaw and Billy Fury. One day Marr knocked on his door and suggested they form a songwriting partnership. They found a bassist and a drummer, called themselves the Smiths and made two rules for themselves: write a new song every week and never make a video.
Morrissey must have felt he’d left it too late, that the boat that had sailed the maladjusted likes of Adam Ant and Kevin Rowland to the heart of the chart was the one he should have boarded. By the time he got the Smiths together in late ’82 his home town of Manchester had become Britain’s disco capital, with New Order at the fore and the (newly built, usually empty) Haçienda its HQ. The only other local group to use guitars in a way that suggested they’d listened to Orange Juice were fringe Factory acts Stockholm Monsters and James. What Morrissey had on his side, though, was a prolonged incubation period – looking back at the Smiths’ single covers, from 1983 to their split in ’87, you’d guess that their whole career might have all been in his head all along.
Their writing credit, Morrissey/Marr, had the ring of a lost golden era (Leiber/Stoller, Goffin/King, Lennon/McCartney) and the possibility of a brand-new one. Johnny Marr was also their arranger. Morrissey’s voice could have been limited by its distinctiveness, but Marr was always adventurous, finding unlikely homes for it by quoting Chic (‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’), using tape manipulation (‘The Queen Is Dead’) and darting between hard-rock riffing (‘What She Said’) and Elton John piano balladry (‘Asleep’).
The Smiths’ touchstones were the Velvet Underground, the Shangri-Las and British kitchen-sink cinema – they wore their bedsit bookishness on their sleeves. Morrissey’s conservatism somehow forged a way forward in (differently) conservative times. He quickly became the spokesman for the outsider that Bowie had been in the seventies.
Just as ‘This Charming Man’ – the Smiths’ second single – took them out of the fanzine world and onto Top of the Pops, Channel 4 began screening a season of British black-and-white kitchen-sink movies from the late fifties and early sixties: A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving. The heroes of these films were all misunderstood young adults, usually with quiffs (Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton) or bobs (Rita Tushingham’s Jo). The Smiths appeared not just as heirs to the misunderstood British pop stars of the early sixties – John Leyton, Billy Fury – but to their cinematic equivalents. A new generation latched onto these films, most of which hadn’t been screened for years, and the Smiths’ emergence couldn’t have been better timed.
Timing aside, Morrissey was the best lyricist British pop had ever produced, as fey and distinctive as Marc Bolan, as sensual as Kate Bush, with the super-fandom of Roy Wood and the archness of Noël Coward thrown in for good measure. ‘The most impassioned song to a lonely soul is so easily outgrown,’ he sang on 1985 B-side ‘Rubber Ring’, which then segued into ‘Asleep’ – an impassioned song about suicide written with no one but lonely souls in mind. Such was the acute self-awareness of Morrissey the pop fan, and his awareness of what the Smiths – so soon, just two years after their first single – meant to their fans.
Only a few years earlier it had been commonplace for DIY groups to litter their songs with localised lyrics, but by 1984 new pop, let alone punk, already felt like a lost era. Part of the Smiths’ impact was that they found the exotic in the local – as soon as the Strangeways Here We Come album came out in 1987, the road sign on the sleeve became a tourist destination. Morrissey’s civic pride was instrumental in making Manchester the most popular student city in the country, and that just happened to coincide with a musical renaissance which in turn would render him yesterday’s man. So easily outgrown.
Morrissey sang for the underdog, quite specifically, and his lyrics were richly nuanced, designed to appeal to kids who still used the library: if you couldn’t relate to ‘Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools … jealous of youth, same old suit since 1962’, then you were very fortunate. No one in modern pop had ever started a song with the word ‘belligerent’ before. He captured the collective insecurities of anyone not buying into the wipe-clean eighties dream of a new England: ‘The Queen is dead, boys, and it’s so lonely on a limb.’ Then there were his eccentricities – the flowers, the hearing aid (just like poor old Johnnie Ray), the militant vegetarianism, the celebrated celibacy. At last, we somehow thought, one of us.
Of course, he was nothing of the sort. After an early gig at the Fighting Cocks in Birmingham he asked the group to stop calling him Steve – from now on he was just Morrissey. On the drive back to Manchester, drummer Mike Joyce went to ask ‘Steve’ the time but checked himself in the nick of time.
‘Morrissey, what time is it?’
‘It’s about a quarter to twelve, Joyce.’
The Smiths’ prominence raised the profile of the UK’s independent network, and especially the dozens of groups scratching away on cheap guitars every Friday at the George and Dragon in Bedford, or at the Black Horse in Camden Town. The NME released a cassette compilation called C86 in 1986 which pulled twenty-two of them together, and then the scene had a tag. It was largely compiled by NME write
rs Roy Carr and Neil Taylor, who licensed tracks from labels including Subway, Ron Johnson, Pink and Alan McGee’s Creation (the Pastels, the Bodines, Primal Scream), the most significant in terms of both reach and jangling solidarity. The number of fanzines on sale increased exponentially, their names echoing a new-found liberty, like a second childhood: Are You Scared to Get Happy?, Trout Fishing in Leytonstone, Rumbledethump!, Pop Avalanche, Big Bad Fire Engine.
By 1987 indie had started solidifying into a sound rather than a way of living. This was cemented when Channel 4 started a Top of the Pops rival show on Friday nights: apart from the standard Top 20 singles, The Chart Show featured a rock chart (largely metal), a dance chart (including R&B and hip hop, basically anything black) and an indie chart – effectively, groups that were considered ‘indie’ were now excised from the story of ‘rock’. John Peel started to complain that the Festive Fifty – his end-of-year listeners’ poll – was becoming generic. He was particularly upset that, in 1987, MARRS’s sample-delic ‘Pump Up the Volume’, a thrilling harbinger of the nineties, reached number one in the UK singles chart but only just scraped into his listeners’ poll; meanwhile, songs from the Smiths’ farewell album, Strangeways Here We Come, claimed eight spots.
The boom was over as soon as it was recognised. As had happened with Merseybeat and punk, C86 was quickly subsumed by the major labels, who rushed their new signings into white-walled studios better suited to Duran Duran, and the thrill of the rattling jangle was lost under a battery of gated snare. The industry began to set up boutique labels like Blue Guitar (who signed C86 acts the Shop Assistants and the Mighty Lemon Drops). Infighting resulted, with micro-indie labels setting up – Sarah Records being both the gentlest musically and the most anti-industry – who were happy to sell five hundred copies of a single in a wraparound, two-colour sleeve to a devoted, tiny audience; groups and labels alike sank within eighteen months. Indie’s mid-eighties myopia – its self-regard, its inability to absorb any influence beyond the few flavours endlessly rewritten in almost identical fanzines – was a catastrophe.
The American experience was somewhat different. ‘Indie’ wasn’t a term many people recognised, but ‘alternative’ boomed. College radio stations had been around since the sixties, but exploded in the eighties. They were non-commercial enterprises run by students and community DJs, and tended to broadcast locally so they also reached listeners off campus. They picked up on music that had a similar parentage to British indie, with the fag-end of new wave thrown into the mix. Soon college rock became a genre all of its own. The name suggested something aspirational and intellectual – music that had the illusion of artiness, with lyrics that were hard to decipher or maybe mentioned Simone de Beauvoir.7
The Smiths were regarded as college rock in the States, as were self-consciously quirky, raised-eyebrow acts like XTC and They Might Be Giants; post-hardcore bands like Hüsker Dü (though only once they put melodies ahead of velocity) and Pixies; introspective electronic acts like the Cure and New Order; and, primarily, jangly guitar bands. So the Smiths, Housemartins, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and the La’s from the UK fitted the college-radio format neatly, as did literate US non-hitmakers like Let’s Active, 10,000 Maniacs and Lone Justice. It was like the soundtrack of Molly Ringwald Goes to Cal Arts.
The undisputed kings of college rock were REM. They formed in a college town – Athens, Georgia – and, like their UK counterparts the Smiths, they worshipped at the altar of the twelve-string; their sound was like a love-warmed nest of guitars. Singer Michael Stipe and guitarist Peter Buck lived together in a converted church. Stipe was as self-consciously arty as Morrissey, though more naive (‘Was Donovan in the Turtles?’ he asked an embarrassed Buck during one interview). Though Buck was more voluble than his English counterpart Johnny Marr, he chose to communicate on record in a similar way, harking back to the Searchers and the Byrds’ jet-age jangle. But while Morrissey’s vocabulary was crucial to the Smiths’ reclamation of English pop – quoting Shelagh Delaney, closer to Noël Coward than Jagger/Richards – Michael Stipe’s lyrics were mumbled and often unintelligible. On spectral songs like ‘Talk about the Passion’, his rich voice recalled that of the Byrds’ Gene Clark; the meanings of his lyrics were as tangled and spooky as the covering of Spanish moss that adorned the sleeve of their 1983 debut album, Murmur.8 ‘Some grand feeling is being outlined here,’ said the NME, ‘its implications telegraphed through a wilful obscurity that blurs meaning … it draws us in, makes us want to play along in its games.’ Someone else called them ‘the only band that mutters’.
Stipe had grown up thinking his favourite song, ‘Moon River’, was about Huckleberry Hound. He understood a profound pop truth: ‘I doubt very few people in the world can tell you all the words to, say, “Tumbling Dice” by the Stones. It probably holds a lot more meaning to be able to make up your own words, and to make up your own meanings about what the words are saying.’
The Smiths split in 1987, when Morrissey’s adherence to dusty antique culture became too suffocating for the restless Marr. The guitarist said leaving or staying was like making a choice between Herman’s Hermits and Sly and the Family Stone, though given his patchy post-Smiths career this was wishful thinking.9 At this point, REM became the default biggest alternative pop group in the world. Within months, they had a genuine hit single with ‘The One I Love’ (US no. 8 ’87), and promptly left their independent label IRS for Warner Brothers. Stipe took to wearing a dress and make-up on stage and singing through a megaphone – this, said Jon Savage in ’89, ‘marked their passing from cult rock-band status to the blurred, warping world of pop stardom’. So they left indie behind but, unlike any of their British indie contemporaries, they continued to make better and better records until they reached the sixteen-million-selling Automatic for the People in ’92. Here, Buck ventured into AOR guitar work on ‘Ignoreland’; ‘Star Me Kitten’ blended the exotica of the early Shadows with a bed of voices borrowed from 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’; ‘Sweetness Follows’ was a cello-led ballad; ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’ had one of Stipe’s most indecipherable lyrics and was as vivacious as any Capella or Bizarre Inc. hit of that year. Just for good measure, the album included a rare song by drummer Bill Berry, ‘Everybody Hurts’ (UK no. 7, US no. 29 ’93), which was as corny as ‘Octopus’s Garden’, but you couldn’t begrudge him. Settled, content and creative while going six times platinum in the UK alone, few groups have peaked as neatly as REM. Two years later they came back with the raucous, tuneless Monster, and the spell was broken. Bill Berry left and – as the Smiths had split when Johnny Marr quit – that should’ve been the end of REM. But they slogged on until 2011, slowly degrading their legacy year by year, with Michael Stipe edging ever further from Gene Clark shyness, ever closer to Bono, Bob Geldof and a ‘world leader pretend’ role he had tried to exorcise in 1988.
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By the end of the eighties Morrissey, the British indie poster boy who had seemingly been tied to Manchester’s apron strings, would be living in a Hollywood mansion designed by Clark Gable. ‘It was never the intention for me to be a flamboyant rock star,’ he told Stuart Maconie in 1994. ‘I thought that I had spearheaded a new mood for singers. I thought there’d be a rejection of all those old, stereotypical manoeuvres but there hasn’t been. Everyone secretly still wants to be photographed with Yoko Ono.’
For the ninety-nine per cent of indie groups who never had a sniff of the Smiths’ or REM’s commercial success, there would be no Hollywood mansion. Reflected glory came years later in the Manchester boom of 1989, the fanzine-led insurrection of riot grrrl and the brief promise of Britpop.
For those who missed the librarian chic of eighties indie, it would be condensed in the mid-nineties by Glasgow group Belle and Sebastian. They were tailor-made for the disaffected and the wilfully independent, for teenagers who spent ‘warm summer days indoors’. Simultaneously updating and reducing the Smiths/C86 sound, with imagery borrowed from the contemporary
American cinema of Hal Hartley, they giggled when they appeared on Top of the Pops. In the States, Stephin Merritt’s Magnetic Fields fulfilled a similar need. Both were making music that revived the hermetically sealed indie-pop scene of the mid-eighties. It’s not hard to imagine either group covering ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’. Beyond these cloistered walls, ‘indie’ became an ever-expanding term, gobbling up sections of the past: by the late nineties Joy Division were regarded as godfathers of indie rather than pioneers of a new kind of rock; George Harrison was the ‘indie Beatle’.
By the twenty-first century ‘indie’ had stretched out to become a meaningless catch-all term that covered almost anything contemporary and guitar-based: Radiohead, the White Stripes, Manic Street Preachers, the Polyphonic Spree, Toploader – anything except metal. It had absolutely nothing do with the physical distribution of vinyl records.
1 I don’t want to spoil a good story, but for the sake of honesty … Decca in America insisted the Dreamweavers re-record their demo, and this new version was the one that charted. Truthfully, you’d never guess. Buff is no Tony Bennett, no matter who’s manning the recording equipment, and at the song’s conclusion it sounds like a piano falls on the hapless singer, fulfilling his wish that tomorrow should never arrive.
2 The longest run of independent-label success in the modern pop era was in America, between 1956 and 1966, from doo wop to psychedelia via the British Invasion; the majors then got their act together and descended on the San Francisco hippie scene, swallowing it whole. In Britain, from 1977 to ’82 – the aftermath of punk – independents became politicised and majors were ostracised for the first time; this time the majors didn’t use heavy artillery, but instead created their own boutique labels like Dindisc and Rialto. From 1988 to 1991 house and techno blew Duran Duran’s yacht out of the water, and labels like Trax in America, XL in London and R&S in Belgium rewrote the rules again. Turbulence for the industry usually meant the best of times for pop.