Sekrit Origins

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the persistent themes in the Now polls is "wow this is my first NOW album" (frantically ticks everything). Another persistent theme is "OK at this point I'd got into indie" (ashamedly ticks nothing). So in the endless search for shared experience let me ask you this question:

How did you get into indie?

and as a bonus question - let's try not to make this too loaded -

If indie is less central to your music listening now than it once was, why do you think this is?

Define the i-word however you like.

I think I have asked similar qns on ILM, but this is a new kettle and these are new fish.

Comments

[spittake.livejournal.com]

I got into indie by sending away for the Working Holidays series from Simple Machines because it was written about Christina Kelly in Sassy.

My listening now is more influnced by what's in the $1 bin.

[spittake.livejournal.com]

about BY CK

[(Anonymous)]

Post lyrics to 'Rubber Ring' now, plz!

I got into indie because I got into girls but girls didn't get into me and I wanted to listen to something as I lay on my bed and felt...not so much sad...as...It's an identity thing, I think. I wanted to something to 'stand for' me, and indie esp. say Belle and Sebastian at first seemed to do this. Don't get me wrong, they didn't save my life: it was more a badge, something to talk about, be proud to be into, associate myself with. The reasons why I did this are still vague: I identify with a voice usually, as someone I'd like to know. Perhaps that's it...

But I do still listen to a lot of indie and I do, as then, listen to lots of other stuff. It never particularly 'got in the way' in that respect. Indeed, I've never understood people reacting against their indie past unless they do it on the grounds that they find the music mediocre.

[steviespitfire.livejournal.com]

That ill-formed rant above was by me.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

B-but the Now albums are full of indie!

My answer is the semi-obvious one: When I went to college I was hanging around with people 4-5 years older than me, and it became clear that Dave Fanning was the only 'credible' radio show on the air (unless you lived in one of the bits of Dublin that could get John Peel).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are, sorry, I was exaggerating in my post above.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I was into indie before indie existed, me. Actually that is sort of true in a way, in that I was into the music that indie grew out of - punk and post-punk and Stiff and power pop and all that. It didn't feel like anything separate until it was sort of crystallised into a scene in the mid-'80s, so I guess that was when I started thinking of something called indie, and I was into it then, a lot of the acts that ended up on C86 and so on.

As the '90s got going I found that white guitar music was shrinking rapidly as a proportion of the new music I played. Hip hop and dance (broad sense) were grabbing more and more of my attention and affection. No new guitar/rock/indie bands at all seemed to be emerging that I thought very much of. My suspicion is that the young white British talent that in previous years would have picked up guitars and formed bands were making techno (etc.) in their bedrooms instead, and that Underworld, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and a huge long list of others might mostly have tried rock/indie the decade before - and some of them would have been very good at it.

Whatever, I don't really need to make a case for the decline of indie here - fact is, I stopped liking it with extremely rare exceptions (Pulp, Spiritualized), and these days I listed as little as possible, and I dare say that'll continue until I fall for some new acts in the genre, if that happens.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

How did you get into indie?

When 'This Charming Man' and 'How Soon Is Now?' got re-released in the early 80s I found I liked them a lot although the first Morrissey single I really liked was, strangely, 'Pregnant For The Last Time'. Prior to that I instantly loved a lot of the stuff that co-opted indie with dance i.e. Happy Mondays (although oddly I hated 'Fool's Gold' at first) but this seemed to be more for the dance angle as I didn't really go from there into MBV or anything. I bypassed whatever passed for British Indie at this point, going from acid house influenced stuff straight to US Grunge and Metal before ending up at Britpop...missing a lot because I didn't listen to albums much and I hadn't started going to gigs at that point.

In fact I went to V festival before actually seeing an indie band live. I still can't think what my first specific indie gig would've been...will get back to you.

I think all of this means I never really did get into Indie (the genre) properly but I acquired indie/rockist values thru other means.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

obv that should be 'early 90s' re Smiths singles.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, for me it was a natural evolution from prog! (this was in what are now termed the 'post punk' years, mind)

And I stopped listening to it because indie stopped being "prog" and went back to the 60s (Beatles, Velvets, N Drake etc) for its inspiration instead. Either that or because of alt-country.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Should add that my relationship with chart pop is very complex and does not fit the simple model implied in the question (i.e. indie supplants chart pop, then chart pop supplants indie again). My interest in chart pop has waxed and waned a little, but if represented graphically the path is definitely not a mirror image of the indie path.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

oh but I DID like Carter!

[(Anonymous)]

Got into indie by way of Depeche Mode, around the 1989 mark...

I would religiously watch The Chart Show, hoping that it would be indie chart week. At that time it seemed to always be Joe by Inspiral Carpets, or Monkey Gone To Heaven by The Pixies at number one.

But anyway, watching The Chart Show to see how DM were fairing got me into "indie". At least The Chart Show's definition of such.

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

Oops. This was me.

[juror8.livejournal.com]

I got into indie because Top of the Pops 2 once had Ben Folds Five and the Eels on the same episode around when I was... 13/14. I think they also had 187 Lockdown on the same show, but they didn't really figure in my consciousness.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Bizarrely, I remember 187 Lockdown being on TOTP2 also. Even though I rarely watched said programme.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

I've never been into indie.

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Yr music collection says otherwise.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I have never been indie, as we all know.

However, the music I loved in the 90s which wasn't Proper Pop - this was basically trip-hop on the one hand, and female singer-songwriters on the other - I got into via their occasional excursions into the chart: hearing Tori Amos on the top 40 show, finding Massive Attack and Portishead on Now albums. And I think the crucial thing is that I now had the resources (magazines, friends) to dig and find more of this stuff; and I also Used Logic, ie rather than waiting for good music to come to me I went out to look for more trip-hop and female singer-songwriters.

And the reason I always insist that Tori Amos, Portishead et al aren't indie is because they seem completely diametrically opposed to the indie I have always loathed ie Oasis!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

as for the second qn - female singer-songwriters aren't central to my listening now because I am not an angsty closeted teenager, though my old Tori and PJ albums are always there in the rare event that I need them; and I don't listen to trip-hop because It Is Dead.

[steviespitfire.livejournal.com]

Indie, to me, has never been Oasis. Possibly because the indie circles I move in loathe them.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

They always seemed to be held up as Indie aka Proper Music by the boys in my year who bought Select and the NME - this was Proper Music as opposed to a) pop, and b) "that weird shit you like", and they called it Indie.

(I have never bought Select or the NME or listened to the Evening Session! Hurrah for me.)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I got into indie because freakytigger decided to wean me off heavy metal and made me listen to Doolittle by Teh Pixies. It was all downhill from there. So I suppose some of the reasons were social, and although metal and indie co-existed for a while, the ideology of indie eventually worked its unpleasant charm and persuaded me that metal was somehow immature and I should not be listening to LA Guns etc. (Oh and Metallica went shit.) I also found other friends were into e.g. Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and so on (Tom was always more on the arty and UK side of indie) so it made for a good topic of conversation outside our little circle. Of course freakytigger was never quite as beholden to the indie-mentality I don't think and used to still like the pop music which I had already rejected when I got into metal. At one point I may have accused him of only liking something to annoy me, which I still maintain has a grain of truth in it. It wasn't real pop at that point, anyway, but indie-approved canon (Bowie, PSBs) and he listened to John Peel just as much as I did... As well as notoriously accusing a reggae song which mentioned Manchester of jumping the bandwagon!

I realised that the indie-ideology was too narrow and got into other stuff. First big step back to life was getting into e.g. Omni Trio and Richie Hawtin in my second year at uni. The awfulness of Modern Life is Rubbish by Blur had been what really made me realise I needed to change my horizons, I think.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Actually Cypress Hill had come by then; I never stopped liking Licensed to Ill or A Nation of Millions which I got into when I was much younger (Beastie Boys) and at school (PE). So however indie, I always liked hip-hop sounding and cut-up / housey stuff (from Cameo -> Acieeed house) on the charts, just never went out and bought it / talked about it much.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Ha, partially via Doctor Who as in the video montage some friends set to 'Animal Nitrate'! And then via the Evening Session.
I think it's still a fairly central plank, but less so simply because I gave up worrying about cool.

[genie22.livejournal.com]

I got into Britpop through the charts. Things could only get better!

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

How did you get into indie?

Embarassingly, I'd never knowingly listened to any guitar music until I was about 11 or 12 and someone played me 'Living On A Prayer', at which point I went out and bought 'Slippery When Wet'. So basically, Bon Jovi got me started, I began reading the NME, and by 1994, I was listening to Nirvana, the Britpop bands, The Offspring, Green Day etc.

If indie is less central to your music listening now than it once was, why do you think this is?

Simply, because I listen to A LOT of music. And after a while, I began to notice that all guitar music essentially sounds pretty similar. If I had to pick a moment when my tastes changed, it would be the day that I went into an HMV or Virgin, saw the new Underworld album 'Beaucoup Fish', thought "hmmm, I quite liked that lager lager song from Trainspotting" and suddenly found my music tasted transformed. I began listening to hip-hop at roughly that sort of time in my life. Later I began investigating electronica, around the time of my first year at Uni (and my first visit to Trash). More recently, I went through a punk phase (Rancid, NOFX, a CBGBs compilation, the Ramones). Right now, I'm enjoying world music (in line with my current live of foreign films). I guess throughout I've carried on listening to guitar music, but these days I'm more likely to buy something random (like the samba CD I picked up in Brazil last week) than buy the latest "next big thing" as published by the NME.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

True or false: John Peel was a gateway to indie - he played a lot of everything, but if you lived in a decent-sized (or perhaps specifically-sized) town, the stuff that you could go into the one grubby music shop to buy, or that you could see in the one grubby venue, was indie.

Kat's Listening Habits Timeline

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

1989 - Lap up consistent diet of Kylie, Jason, Yazz, Roxette.
1990 - Acquire tape player. graciousviv starts sending home mixtapes of what she is listening to at uni - soul/ancient classiX0r eg Yakety Yak plus yer grebo Neds/NFADs/PWEI/Wonderstuff/Mock Turtles etc.
1992 - Receive "Rave 92" on birthday. Head explodes. Listen to KissFm.
1993 - Start buying own tapes (Nows, dance-pop compilations and cassingles only). Listen to Capital Fm.
1994 - Start buying CDs despite not having CD player. Purchase of Best Dance Album In The World...Evers = Best decision in the world...ever.
1995 - Hear Elastica for first time, take up guitar, become goth. Disappear into Skunk Anansie/Nirvana-lined hibernation burrow. Listen to Xfm for five years.
2000 - Emerge at uni with extreme specialist knowledge of bands wot have been played on Xfm and not a lot else.
2002 - Realise Reading Festival is utter bobbins after attendance for four years in a row.
2003 - Reluctantly embrace electroclash and rediscover the joys of techno whilst studying for finals (I needed music with little or no vocal). This is most definitely unrelated to first consumption of certain Young Person's Dancing Aid.
2004 - Isolate self from any sort of new music as have no money or radio reception in Bethnal Green; discover ancient ska and dub reggae.
2005 - Rediscover the BOSH (tho it never really went away) plus old/new pop classiXor and denounce most guitar music as insufferably dull apart from guitar music written by self.

Re: Kat's Listening Habits Timeline

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

1994 - Start buying CDs despite not having CD player. Purchase of Best Dance Album In The World...Evers = Best decision in the world...ever.
1995 - Hear Elastica for first time, take up guitar, become goth. Disappear into Skunk Anansie/Nirvana-lined hibernation burrow. Listen to Xfm for five years.

Am curious as to why hearing Best Dance Album... didn't lead you/many others to take up sampler/synth, whereas Elastica had such power! Is interesting I think.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I think my first official Indie gig was Mercury Rev. IN 2001!!!!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

How did you get into indie?

Through stuff I liked being played in the charts! The appearance of the Smiths and the Jebus and Mary Chaib in the charts circa 1986, and later w New Order and listening to Annie Nightingale while doing my A-level homework = i was going to hear the Wedding Present at some point. I never left my beloved Pet Shop Boys behind tho, and tho listening to the realactual charts waned a little at the college, but i never really lost interest in the church of what's happening now and ver kids.


If indie is less central to your music listening now than it once was, why do you think this is?

The same reason i don't listen to Orbital/underworld all the time like i used to - they don't make it any more :-) SCHMINDIE MORE LIKE

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i am so going to be listening to Weddoes all week now :-)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I got into indie when I heard The Smiths' The World Won't Listen in 1987. The lyrics had an immediate, direct appeal - some were emotions I felt and some were emotions I found myself wanting to feel (is this the seductive appeal of all pop, deep down?).

Musically the appeal was simple too - hooks, short songs, pop. The model (Pop-Indie-Pop) Jeff suggests is too simplistic - I'd stopped listening to current "pop" when I got into Pink Floyd, and had been making laborious tries at liking Zep, Blue Oyster Cult, Zappa, the Doors and others. Indie for me was a way back into pop, and an expansion of pop (the music press at the time was still quite open to all sorts of different styles).

On a social level it had the advantage of being something very different from what other people at school listened to: I had got into music by borrowing continually from the collections of other boys at school but I was very aware that all this was 'second-hand'. So I was very receptive for the dramatic effect the Smiths had on me.

I worked hard to get the friends I did have into indie - it was something tangible we could have in common. I never worked quite so hard at making friends with other boys who were into it, until I left school: roleplaying games were far more likely to be the way I met new friends, not music. Partly (though this may be back-projection) this was because I got the impression these other boys believed in indie a lot more than I did: I was too timid to want to be in an ideological gang.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

the pattern for me is you start with the charts (like the training stage, or the village that Link starts in on Zelda) , then when you explore beyond (out into Hyrule field) the first bright shiny thing you see is this thing called indie and you just gallop around on your horse kind of exploring the new freedom, and then you get tired of just galloping around and start to look around the new places opened up for you, and then you can always go back home just to collect some free rupees by breaking pots.

or something.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

And the answer to the second question:

The time of my life when I listened to not much but indie was short - a few years at school, and even then I still listened to pop and some other stuff. I stopped buying the NME when they presented shoegazing as acceptable, and when I started again a year later (at 19), it and MM were things to take the piss out of as much as to admire.

At University indie was a social common denominator rather than something any of us loved passionately - we would all adore different bands and tracks across a lot of styles, indie was something we could argue about, laugh about, go and see, but so was pop and so was dance and all sorts of stuff. Select was the music mag we all bought and if you remember it in the early 90s you'll know the aesthetic. I still believed though that even if the music press was mostly laughable it would still be my vehicle for letting me know when something exciting did happen. What disillusioned me was Britpop, and then the desperate crop of post-Britpop attempts at finding a Big Thing - Tiger, Bis, etc.

Indie wasn't working as a social glue any more (except online, a bit), and I was souring on the emo aspects of it too, cos I was struggling at bit with depression and over-identifying with records felt like more problem than solution. My last really huge indie obsession was Stephin Merritt - I loved his quote about "experimental and bubblegum and nothing in between", and have mostly ignored the 'experimental' element ever since.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What a waffler I can be on this topic!

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

Haha, Girls & Boys was possibly pretty key! It was a pretty natural, gradual process - a lot of the songs I liked on the radio (I was a Captial FM kid) / on NOW comps had guitars on them, and I just seemed to like those tracks more than the ones that didn't - I can remember secretly staying up till dawn on a Monday night in the (foiled) hope that'd play Monday Morning 5:19 by Rialto. Later I found out that there were whole radio shows and magazines that covered just music like that, and that got me into the Indie World View.

I got less into indie when I joined Sinister - there was this really strong Youth and Pop association that was powering a lot of the really beautiful posts, the whole Tangents thing, and I'm very much Sinister's creation, so I dyed my hair blonde and bought a lot of pop records. The funny thing was that unlike with indie I was actually forcing myself to like them, but I genuinely did like the slower sadder songs (Hey Boy especially) they gradually started drifting me towards my current ballads-and-schmindie tastes...

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

I'm counting, say, dance music as schmindie for purposes here - I got into non-guitar-based non-pop through the traditional just Lamacq -> Lamacq + Peel -> just Peel transition, aged about 15.

[dorsalstop.livejournal.com]

How I got into indie is amazingly close to jauntyalan's. All I did was follow the charts, but more and more I started to like the "weird shit" in them - New Order, Smiths (this stuff charted a lot lower in the NL than it did in the UK of course) and the less weird Simple Minds and Depeche Mode. And I was also into the Pet Shop Boys (and Duran Duran and InXS and bloody Dire Straits).
By the time I was 16/17 [1989], I wouldn't have traded Doolittle, Bizarro and Technique for GOLD.

Strangely, MTV had started playing a big part in it at the time. Dutch radio was low on indie, and I made sure I never missed a 120 Minutes with Marcel Vanthilt (and then Paul King and then Miles Hunt for a while yeh?). Got me into Galaxie 500, and Front 242, and REM, and Dinosaur Jr.

But I also went out dancing a lot 'round this time, at the one club in town that played both (acid)house and baggy/'Madchester' stuff.

Anyway, early '90s - Teenage Fanclub, Nirvana, St Etienne, Blur, Pulp, Boos yada yada yada.
1996: GOD I'm bored with this stuff there must be more to life? Got back into dance music, trip hop. Then short lived lapse back into indie (Belle et Sebastian, Magnetic Fields), then TOTAL liberation in 2001 when I pissed my indie/rockist friends off by declaring "Get this party started" by Pink my new favourite record.

NOW: still love indie pop, don't like indie rock - certainly not the regressive lazy r'n'r the NME writes about nowadays.

[spittake.livejournal.com]

ohhhh, I forgot about 120 Minutes! But that was more "alternative" rather than "indie"