From cool to wet to everywhere: A Short History of Indie

What even defines indie?

It used to mean something way back when. Groups that were on independent labels with a DIY approach and a different take on the world.

But in a world where Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish with their billions of listens are indie - even Taylor Swift - does indie mean anything at all any more? How did we get to where we are now?

Join me, Ian Forth for a short history of independent and indie music.

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

Chapters

• 0:20 Introduction
• 1:19 The Medium-Sized Dive
• 2:51 Early US Independent Labels
• 4:50 Early UK Independent Movement
• 7:08 The Smiths
• 9:21 C86
• 13:11 The 90s
• 15:45 The 21st Century
• 18:28 Conclusions

Transcript

From Cool to Wet to Everywhere: The Rollercoaster History of Indie 

Introduction 

Taking inspiration from Hüsker Dü
It's a new generation of electric white boy blues
C'mon Indie Rock
It's gone big
C'mon Indie Rock
Just Gimme Indie Rock

Breaking down the barriers
Like Sonic Youth
They got what they wanted
Maybe I can get what I want too
C'mon Indie Rock
It's gotta be!
C'mon Indie Rock
Just Gimme Indie Rock

So sang Lou Barlow of Sebadoh on Gimme Indie Rock. That’s his version of indie because he’s from the post-grunge early 90s US lo-fi tradition. But indie is still used as a term now. In fact, it’s everywhere and it doesn’t often sound like what Lou was singing about 30 years ago. So, what’s it all about, indie?

Time for the medium-sized dive.

Medium-Sized Dive

Indie music is a broad style of music characterized, at least until recently, by creative freedoms, low-budgets, and a do-it-yourself approach to music creation, which originated from the liberties afforded by independent record labels. There are a number of subgenres of independent music which combine its characteristics with other genres, such as indie pop, indie rock, indie folk, and indie electronic. The evolution of independent music in to indie and what characterises an indie sound will be the subject of this episode.

Independent record labels are characterized by their smaller operations, lower funding, and greater creative control as compared to major labels. The major labels are essentially three – Universal, Sony and Warner. Between them they account for roughly 70% of sales. Independent labels use a variety of methods of distribution, with the label generally owning the copyright for the sound recording. They tend to give smaller advances, or sometimes no advance, and some may offer higher royalty splits than major labels.

The Pivotal Inflection Points in the History of Indie Music

#1. Origins

Independent labels in the US have a long history, such as Sun and Stax. But although Stax had an associated sound and Elvis recorded on the Sun label, there was no real suggestion that the artists involved chose to be on independent labels for ideological reasons. That’s not to say there wasn’t a sense of independently minded music. Rock’n’roll was a symbol of independence in a way, and the same could be said of the garage bands which came later in the 60s and 70s, but also disco and soul, psychedelia and heavy metal. Ditto the scene around CBGBs in New York in the mid 70s. But no one was calling this music “independent” and certainly not indie. 

#2. Early independent music in the UK: !977-1983

Independent music in the UK has a different history. Soon after punk emerged in 1976, a DIY music scene sprang up, helped by fanzines facilitated by access to the office photocopier for the first time. Then in 1977 the first independently released UK EP - Spiral Scratch by Buzzcocks arrived. A plethora of independent labels then sprang up, such as Factory, Rough Trade, Postcard and others, which enabled embryonic bands to get their music out more easily.

Each of those labels had an independent ethos, but not necessarily what we would now think of as an “indie” sound. Factory had Joy Division who would qualify, but they also had the weird funk of A Certain Ratio and the arpeggios of the Durutti Column. In the early ‘80s the independent charts featured number ones by Crass, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Discharge, The Exploited, the Dead Kennedys and Anti-Pasti, none of whom we would nowadays describe as indie. 

During this period then it was possible to be independent but not indie – but also indie, but not independent. For example, early Cure, with tracks like Boys Don’t Cry and A Forest from this period are almost a walking definition of indie. However, because they were signed to Fiction, which was part of Polydor, The Cure were ineligible for inclusion in the new independent charts. 

So we now had independently distributed music in the UK, but we didn’t yet talk about indie music. The terms most widely used at the time were first new wave and then post-punk, which now has a more specific definition. That was about to change with a new band in 1983.

#3. The Smiths and the Indie Template

From 1983 to 1986 we can begin to see the embryonic form of what we now understand as indie start to emerge. The big early indie beasts were the Cocteau Twins, New Order, the Jesus and Mary Chain, in Australia the Go-Betweens and the Triffids, and then a tranche of smaller bands such as the June Brides and the Shop Assistants.

All of these bands were usually, but not always, on independent labels and all had their own distinct sounds which actually didn’t overlap that much. But indie as we now know it was really defined by one band, The Smiths.

There were two planks to this definition. One was a cultural outlook and the other was in the music.

So, first highly personal lyrics reflecting the romantic pain and bleak humour of adolescence and young adulthood, specifically for white youngsters. And a jangly guitar sound, reflecting a more innocent age of 60s music, encapsulated in The Byrds, CSNY and George Harrison, although at other times the guitarist Johnny Marr has mentioned Nile Rodgers, Bert Jansch and The Stooges.

At this stage in the mid-80s it’s possible to discern a split or a fissure in independent music on either side of the Atlantic. The US, had a hardcore punk scene in the early 80s, then developed a more art rock, more robust pre-grunge form of independent music centred on the experimental Sonic Youth alongside Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. There was far less in the way of jangly guitars and lovelorn loners.

3. C86

C86 is a cassette compilation released by the British music magazine NME in 1986, featuring new bands as they were emerging that year on British independent record labels. This in effect finished the job that The Smiths had started by cementing indie as jangling guitars and melodic power-pop, although, as we shall see, other musical styles were clearly represented on the original cassette.

Of the groups on C86, only Primal Scream went on to significant stadium-sized success with a sound that was ultimately quite unlike their song Velocity Girl on C86. Which, by the way, is the only song from C86 to have its own Wikipedia entry – that’s a sign of how uninfluential the individual tracks on C86 are, as opposed to the overall vibe. That said, The Wedding Present and Half Man Half Biscuit continue to this day as bands with fierce cult followings.

It's a shame that people don’t go back and listen to C86 all the way through more often. The sound was more varied than is usually characterised, with tracks such as the Beefheart-esque Buffalo by Stump and the warped funk of Age of Chance. McCarthy were highly politicised with tracks such as Should the Bible be banned; Use a bank, I’d rather die; Keep an open mind or else; The procession of popular capitalism; We are all bourgeois now. After they split, Big Flame’s successor group, the Great Leap Forward, became one of the few indie bands to address the problems of the common agricultural policy with the song If the CAP Fits, Wear It.

So there was politics and musical variety. But three other things happened outside of the music.

Unequivocally a good thing was that C86 heralded more gender inclusivity. Amelia Fletcher, late of Talulah Gosh, commented in 2004. “C86 was very, very open to women. Although it wasn’t overtly political, women felt involved because musicianship wasn’t at a premium: you could make the music you wanted to the extent you were able.” Not only that, many of the bands featured women on bass and drums which was even more historically rare.

Then there was a return to the provinces. “It was very much a non-London thing,” commented Matt Haynes, who later co-ran Sarah Records. “with people exchanging letters and fanzines.” In many ways this feels like an analogue precursor to the social media world we inhabit now. Scotland, Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham were all important, in a similar way to how Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Liverpool and Leeds had become provincial powerhouses at the end of the ‘70s.

But more problematically, as Michael Hann puts it, “there was an awful lot of sneering from those who believed the cassette was what, in the end, caused indie to stultify, changing it from the term given to music produced and distributed independently to the name given to pallid guitar music made by middle-class students. Rarely has a compilation of largely unsuccessful groups aroused so much ire.”

From here on in fact the concept of indie in the UK rather sadly got set in stone. The term became indelibly associated with middle-class students probably reading The Guardian, sadly strumming an acoustic guitar in a bedsit. Almost certainly white, likely male, and with strong views on CND then and pronouns now. Indie turned into a white middle-class and, for its detractors, emasculated genre which it has struggled to move past ever since.

4.  The 90s

There are several key developments in the 1990s which I’ll condense very rapidly. There are a number of fascinating independent scenes such as acid house, shoegaze and trip hop. But pure indie music as we would think of it was indie-coded by first twee and then Belle and Sebastian in 1996. Twee is based in the 60s, features boys with pudding bowl haircuts and stripey tops, girls who knit and relationships that never seemed to progress from holding hands.

Then in the mid 90s Britpop swamped everything else for a couple of years. Some of it like Oasis or Ocean Colour Scene could not be described as indie. Pulp and Blur were kinda indie – though not twee and could also headline Glastonbury. So by this stage it was hard to know what indie was anymore. And it's been like that ever since.

Meanwhile in America, there was a separate traidiiton usually called alternative or college radio music. First there was lo-fi with bands like Pavement, The Lemonheads and Sebadoh. There were magnificent one offs from bands like Slint and Neutral Milk Hotel. But by the end of the 90s alternative music had degenerated into nu metal. See the Woodstock 1999 documentary for what that looked like. No Britpop obviously, although there was twee which eventually evolved into bedroom pop twenty years later.

I've been necessarily reductionist, of course, for which I apologise. However in broad terms, very broad terms, that was the 90s in Indie. The old definition of technical independent had effectively disappeared. Indie had been stratified between a narrow purist twee version on the one hand and then an emerging populist post-Britpop version in the UK. The lo-fi template in the US got swallowed by the grim nu-metal scene and was ripe for an overhaul. 

#5. The 21st century

The 21st century so far has been bookended by post-punk revivals. In many ways these have been returns to the spirit of original independent music in the late 70s. In the early 2000s in the US bands like the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs pioneered a return to the more arthouse independent scene of CBGB's in New York in the mid 70s. Then more recently on the other side of the Atlantic bands bands like Dry Cleaning, black midi and Fontaines DC have adopted a more arty but often more confrontational approach, appropriate for a post-Brexit Britain and indeed Ireland. This is yet another version of indie, which is not rooted in the 60s, but on the seminal late 70s UK groups the Fall, Wire and the Gang of Four.

However it's now impossible to corral all the indie strands under one roof. We'd be here all day. Which is good in a way. But in another, it sometimes feels as if all music which isn't mainstream pop is indie. Billie Eilish’s biggest song has well over half a billion hits on Spotify and she's indie. Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness has 1 1/2 billion hits. She's also indie. On her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, Taylor Swift explored indie folk in her songs and has partnered with The National’s singer. You get the picture. Indie now cross-fertilises with rap and hip-hop.

So it's hard to see what use the term indie is. It reminds me of craft beers. Certainly in Australia they were once an alternative to mainstream session beers. They felt a little edgy, a little more considered. Now they're the biggest category on the beer aisle. Another parallel is the concept of a Labour party. It started off quite clearly as the party of union members who typically worked with their hands. Now it’s vaguely an umbrella for everything that isn’t the far right.

My personal feeling is that indie, like other words, now has a past it can't escape. For some it's about love-lorn white students in tank tops playing an acoustic guitar. For others, it's just a generic term for this stuff that doesn't get played on the building site. Neither is helpful or indeed aspirational. I'd be quite happy if the term indie was retired for good.