Author:Nige Tassell
I was too young for C86 but within a year or two I was a fully paid up NME/Melody Maker indie-kidder with the fringe and big jumpers to prove it. But I do remember listening to the tape at some point and thinking it was crap even then. I’ve recently listened to the playlist on Spotify and in all honesty it’s even crapper now.
But, this book is fascinating. Featuring new interviews with one or more members of all 22 bands on the original tape, focusing on that time and their lives since. As such It works as a sort of companion piece to Exit Stage Left from last year – interviews with musicians post-fame – but in the case of C86ers most of them didn’t even get famous in the first place. For many, C86 was the pinnacle.
There’s quite a lot of regret over terrible decisions taken and opportunities missed. Quite a bit of wry, self-deprecating humour. A few, though happily not too many, premature deaths. A wide range of (mostly fairly middle class) post-band careers. A few low-key reformations. A lot of ‘I still make music but just for myself now.’ Some entertaining detective work from the author.
Interestingly, after the recent news about Martin Duffy and his shabby treatment by Primal Scream, the band’s original tambourine player (yes, really) implies that Bobby Gillespie has always a mean-spirited dufus. Gillespie himself isn’t interviewed. The other ‘big name’ survivors – Half Man Half Biscuit’s Nigel Blackwell and the Wedding Present’s David Gedge – are clearly deeply eccentric but come out of it as very decent, though rather ruthless in the case of Gedge.
So, a very interesting read about lives lived and the joys and disappointments of ageing (yes, really). And a time-machine back to a very different time. And you definitely don’t have to like the tape to enjoy the book.
Length of Read:Medium
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Exit Stage Left
One thing you’ve learned
Bobby Gillespie is a dufus
Was anyone in the slightest doubt about Gillespie’s arsehole status?
I think this might actually be my favourite music related book of recent times. It’s not so much a book about C86 as a genre, more a book about youth, ambition, hope, dreams, obstacles, frustration, coping and compromise. It really is, maybe inadvertantly, a superb book on middle age and how that can make you reflect on your life, the bits you enjoyed before the demands of career and family took over, forcing you to “put away childish things.”
I’m a big fan of Nige Tassell’s writing anyway but this is his best.
However, I’d take issue that the whole C86 tape is “crap”…although a fair bit of it is cheaply and/or quickly recorded, the whole point of the tape was that it was a snapshot of one bit of the independent underground…it wasn’t meant to sound like it was recorded at Air Studios by Trevor Horn, and was never going to. It wouldn’t have been possible. This was music on a shoestring, recorded by people who might have seen success as one Peel Session or a slot at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, and often making a virtue out of its utilitarianism by default. Plus there are some good songs on there including some genuine indie classics by The Bodines, Mighty Mighty, Close Lobsters, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Wedding Present and The Soup Dragons.
Considering the mainstream chart at the time had The Smiths, The Housemartins and The Mary Chain, the only difference between them and the best of C86 was a better budget.
And Bobby Gillespie? He’s always been an embarrassing tosser…
I really enjoyed this book too & I am hoping hoping & hoping that one day Nige Tassell does a book purely about Half Man Half Biscuit. I always enjoy his writing & I am sure he would love to do so seeing as he is clearly a huge fan.
I am looking forward to reading this after seeing the OP and comments. I don’t know if I could justify mid-80s indie to anyone under 30, let alone my teenage nieces, and I would concede that a lot of it is hasn’t aged too well, but I spent my teenage years with it (trips up to North London to see bands in pubs and student halls etc.) and can still listen with pleasure to a lot of the singles (e.g The Servants “The Sun a Small Star” The Weather Prophets “Almost Prayed”, The Pastels “Truck Train Tractor”, The Pooh Sticks, “I Know Someone…”, and local heroes The Wolfhounds “Anti-Midas Touch”). And the David Cavanagh book on Creation Records is also being reissued this summer, which will be nice.
David Cavanagh’s book is quite superb. As near faultless a summary of the eighties indie scene through it’s birth, development and what it turned into as is likely to ever be written. Forensically detailed but never dry, there is also a real wit in the storytelling. Alan McGee and Bobby Gillespie can quite frankly FRO in their criticisms of it. They’d rather you’d have read their own crappy versions, which focus much more on the tedious drug stories.
Most definitely: McGee’s ghost-written memoir was insultingly bad; haven’t bothered with Gillespie.
Seconded (or thirded?), I bought a hardback in a warehouse sale for a quid and it sat on my bookshelf for years. I finally opened it, loved it, and by the time I finished it… he killed himself before I got a chance to tweet him how much I enjoyed it.
Gillespie’s book is just embarrassing and this isn’t just revisionist thinking after the recent allegations about the disgraceful way Primark Scream (so called because they’re cheap and unethical) treated their loyal keyboard player Martin Duffy. It’s just the rantings of a late fiftysomething man who is still desperate to look “cool” in order to impress. The only people still taken in by this are as deluded as he is.
Agree with every word of this. He came across like an absolute helmet.
Indie will eat itself. The lack of ambition meant a lack of passion and a desire for self defeat if they thought they were “selling out” ( such a rockiest concept, dear), and ambition would inevitably lead to more professionalism and assimilation by the industry and its tropes.
I’m a bit frustrated by this. The book has been out for months and still no (obvious) sign of an audiobook version.
The contents of that tape looks poor value, even if it was free. However, I do remember another free tape from the NME, including Freak Scene by Dinosaur Junior and Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth – my favourite version, without the boring intro and possibly even a live version.
Half way through the book so far and really enjoying it. Everyone comes across ok so far ..apart from Mr Gillespie.
I knew of the bands and the scene at the time but didn’t really actually know the music. I should put that right.