Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey

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I’m guessing the book had a fairly niche audience but I found it hugely enjoyable and also it led me to explore some of the bands that I didn’t know so well, with the help of Spotify. 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. Following on from the cult success of C81, NME or anyone else couldn’t possibly have predicted just how seminal their C86 compilation cassette would become. But even today, nearly forty years on a whole generation and then some, know exactly what you mean when you say the words C86. Hitting play on a piece of music is an act of magic. The noise may be entering your own space and filling up your ears, but in fact it’s the other way around; it drags you, willing or otherwise, to a world usually much more interesting than your own. Over a quarter-of-a-century on, pressing play on the C86 mixtape still has that transporting impact – it opens up a portal to a different world. But of the book itself, it is excellent. Not something that can be recommended to the casual reader. You had to be there at the time (or be an extremely keen student of British popular music.) I was a teenager when I sent off for the C86 tape and instantly fell in love with all the diverse groups, spent every penny I had on the records. So, personally speaking, I couldn’t wish for a more comprehensive and authoritative account than this. There’s not much left out.

There were, though, no sirens trying to lure me to my death through song. The nearest I came was when sitting in on the first rehearsal since pre-pandemic times of the Birmingham five-piece Mighty Mighty, reconvened to play to an audience of just me. But five follicly challenged men on, or just over, the brink of turning 60 do not seductive sirens make. Still, they sounded just as sprightly and glorious as they had several decades earlier, even if they now needed to take fistfuls of painkillers afterwards to ward off the effects of a four-hour rehearsal. Yet, while the pursuit of long-lost musicians can often manifest as earnest hagiography, Tassell's unique, light-hearted approach makes this a very human story of ambition, hope, varying degrees of talent and what happens after you give up on pop - or, more precisely, after pop gives up on you. It's a world populated by bike-shop owners, architecture professors, dance-music producers, record-store proprietors, birdwatchers, solicitors, caricaturists and even a possible Olympic sailor - and let's not forget the musician-turned-actor gainfully employed as Jeremy Irons' body double... Gourlay, Dom (2014-06-13). "Album Review: Various - C86: Deluxe Edition / Releases / Releases // Drowned In Sound". Drownedinsound.com. Archived from the original on 2015-09-06 . Retrieved 2015-06-11. In 1996, NME continued the tradition of compiling a new band album (this time a CD) by releasing C96. This had little impact, with Mogwai and Broadcast being the only acts on the compilation to subsequently enjoy mainstream success. [23] Three other bands on the compilation - Babybird, The Delgados and Urusei Yatsura - had brief success in the United Kingdom after the compilation's release.

Magnus Crawshaw

C86 & All That: The Creation of Indie In Difficult Times comprehensively documents the rise of indie during the socially-divisive 1980s, tracing its ancestry out of Post Punk, Neo Psychedelia, Anarcho Punk, Garage, Trash and Goth and on to the landmark compilation C86 in the spring of 1986. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Reynolds, Simon Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 (Faber and Faber, 2005) ISBN 0-571-21569-6 But by uniting the muddled sounds of “indie” under a single albeit contested banner NME stamped a unique moment in British music. Journalist Nige Tassell, author of 2022 book Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey, would write in The Guardian: “These groups laid the foundations for later outfits such as the Stone Roses, Oasis and Arctic Monkeys who took indie ‘overground’, swapping upstairs rooms in pubs for headline slots at the biggest festivals.” The book casts an eye over a period when indie was a passion not a brand, and places its rise firmly in the context of the turbulent political times. Based on primary source material – including scores of forgotten fanzines -it also draws in the views of many of the key players, opening a window on a period that, with its parallels, resonates strongly today.

The significance of C86 was recognized by several events marking the 20th anniversary of the compilation's release in 2006: Very few still make a living from music and the range of jobs they now have is the result of a careers officer having several strong coffees and randomly shouting titles from a work

Gifts & Stationery

Neil Taylor co-compiled C86 and is the author of Document & Eyewitness: An Intimate History Of Rough Trade. Since the 1990s he has worked in publishing. Post Punk is where the action was when the generation of youth who had their minds scorched by Punk started to apply their own interpretation to music and culture. In this creative free for all barriers were broken and a fervent underground existed way beyond the mainstream. Neil Taylor has taken a dive into this bricolage culture and come up trumps as he tries to make sense of the senseless when a generation thought that music could change the world’ 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.” For example, Sushil Dade, the bass player of The Soup Dragons, was a driving instructor for seven years. Among his customers were indie Glasgow musicians from bands such as Teenage Fanclub, BMX Bandits and The Pastels. In fact, it is thanks to Duglas T. Stewart from Teenage Fanclub for Sushil’s current career as a radio producer for the BBC. However, he hasn’t left music completely, as for years he had a side project named Future Pilot AKA. And he wasn’t the only member of The Soup Dragons to find a fulfilling career out of band life. Ross Sinclair became a professor of art and a multi-award-winning artist.

Q: There has been a fair amount of debate about who should and shouldn’t have been on the tape. Do you think you got it right at the time ? One common complaint which seems to afflict most of these acts, was how unhappy they were with the choice of song they put on the compilation. Most insist that they thought it would be more along the lines of C81, which was released to celebrate five years of the Rough Trade label and the wider Independent music scene in the UK in general. So most of the bands approached it with low-expectations, believing that this set-up would be along the same lines in terms of audience and impact. But of course hindsight is always 20/20 and no one was to know just how significant and popular the tape would become. A unique journey into the legacy and afterlives of the artists who featured on the legendary NME C86 tape. One by one they agreed to be interviewed. Invariably, they would ask who else had confirmed. If, say, members of the Pastels or Age of Chance or the Mighty Lemon Drops were on board, that was enough for them. Some would tender old phone numbers of their former bandmates, keen for each of these missing persons cases to be solved. In the end, no band wanted to be left out, for their story not to be told. When I secured an interview with the drummer from the 22nd and last band to respond, I punched the air in delight. Relief, too. 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.By 1986, however, the politics of the magazine had changed dramatically. C86 was used as a weapon not only in the civil war within the paper, in but in the war between it and other music magazines. There was heavy competition around this time between music publications, with four weekly music mags competing for sales, each trying to pique reader interest by writing about new bands and trends. C86 aimed to create a new genre for NME to profit off, hoping to generate attention by ‘discovering’ and promoting a new genre. In achieving this purpose, the tape was a success. To this day, C86 is recognised as its own legitimate subgenre on RateYourMusic.com. But C86 was also used as a pawn in the so-called ‘Hip-Hop Wars’ going on in NME in the 1980s, a schism between fans of hip hop and guitar music enthusiasts. C86 was a tactic devised to reinvigorate interest in the indie scene, taking attention away from the burgeoning rap game. It was designed to be, as Ex-NME staffer Andrew Collins put it, “the most indie thing ever to have existed”. “The most indie thing that ever existed”

For those who stayed in the music industry, Keith Curtis from A Witness has become a successful promoter and tour manager for more than 200 acts, with a roster of artists including Arlo Parks, Bauhaus, De La Soul, Kaiser Chiefs, Kano, Lewis Capaldi and Orbital. And you can still see The Pastels and Close Lobsters perform live, among others featured. In 1986, the NME released a cassette that would shape music for years to come. A collection of twenty-two independently signed guitar-based bands, C86 was the sound and ethos that defined a generation. It was also arguably the point at which 'indie' was born. Indie music and festivals - C86 review of c86 week". Indie-mp3.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2015-09-08 . Retrieved 2015-06-11.

This is a very sympathetic account and is both a snapshot in time and an account of what happens after giving up on music. It's a wonderful, life reaffirming exploration of C86's surprisingly wide-reaching legacy. This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. ( June 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) In 2022, journalist Nige Tassell published the book Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey, based on interviews with members of all 22 bands that had appeared on the cassette. It outlines the "many and varied paths through life" these musicians took over a period of more than three decades. [22] Follow-ups [ edit ] Therefore, the book remains a real treat for indie music fans, whether you lived through the 80s and wanted to revisit it, just for a little while, or you’re from a younger generation and want to read about how it all began. That is why there is still an appetite for documentaries about Factory Records, for example. So, despite the increasing challenges for musicians across the country, it is lovely to see the legacy – and enduring appetite – for early indie music is still going strong, and it is books like this that help keeps that spirit alive. To conclude… Following on from acclaimed histories of the British punk upheaval of the late 1970s (Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming) and the post-punk ferment of the early 80s (Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again); Neil Taylor’s new book takes the story forward to cover the next wave of groundbreaking musicians, dubbed the “C86 bands” after a now-legendary cassette compilation released by music weekly NME, whose work paved the way for the commercial breakthrough of indie later in the decade.