Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey

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What runs large through the book is how carefree pretty much all the artists were in the late 80's and how many carried that freedom through to their later lives. Just took a stab in the dark as to my untrained eye I wondered if any other than the Slits might fail in your ballpark. Primal Scream then proceeded to reduce the pop song to its subatomic essence: quick, breezy, quirky, and above all, exquisitely small. Revisionism, though, is the prerogative of the reissue curator—and that prerogative is exercised impeccably by Taylor, who glosses over none of the conflict or confusion of the era in either his liner notes or his choice of bonus material. Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band; I think C86 changed that - there were women promoting gigs, writing fanzines and running labels.

C86 is out now! - Cherry Red Records C85 | Our prequel to C86 is out now! - Cherry Red Records

C86 became the NME’s best-selling compilation, selling an estimated 40,000 copies and eventually being re-issued on LP and cassette by Rough Trade the following year. com/projects/826456098/c86-and-all-that-indie-1983-86-a-history) helped finance the C86 book, CD and ‘exclusive’ t-shirts three years ago and have received nothing, while Neil continues to sell these items (and make extra money) on Facebook/Twitter to anyone with a Paypal account. The third disc explores a broader range of British indie music around 1986 and includes a few bands who – like C86 alumni Primal Scream, Age Of Chance and the Soup Dragons – would later neck some pills and “go dance”, including Pop Will Eat Itself (probably the first of these indie bands to embrace hip hop) and the Happy Mondays (who, even in 1986, sounded like an under-rehearsed jazz-funk band trying to play folk music).C86 was a tactic devised to reinvigorate interest in the indie scene, taking attention away from the burgeoning rap game. We have a regular newsletter with the week’s new releases that goes out every Thursday or Friday too. Tassell's style is effortlessly easygoing; he's like your best and most interesting friend telling you down the boozer how you'll never guess what happened to that kid from your sixth form. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Fast forward to 2014, the triple-CD edition celebrated the cult status of C86, which had come to embody a whole style of indie guitar music with 50 extra tracks.

Various Artists: C86 Album Review | Pitchfork Various Artists: C86 Album Review | Pitchfork

Months later, famed independent label Rough Trade would press the compilation to vinyl to cement its legacy. Tassell has done a fine job, his informal and relaxed style works really well and this makes for a great trip down memory lane for fans of the era or an ideal introduction to newcomers, into one of the most important Indie albums to be released in the UK in the 80s. saw the original compilation reissued in a 3CD expanded edition from Cherry Red Records; [4] the 2014 box-set came with an 11,500-word book of sleevenotes by one of the tape's original curators, former NME journalist Neil Taylor. The line between C86’s jangly, dreamy representatives and its more distortion-smothered counterparts is blurred by bands like 14 Iced Bears.

Music is the common thread but the book's really about how you replace it when real life encroaches. The C86 scene is now recognized as a pivotal moment for independent music in the UK, [3] as was recognized in the subtitle of the compilation's 2006 CD issue: CD86: 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop. 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.

C86 cassette helped create the British How NME magazine’s C86 cassette helped create the British

This reissue triumphs by celebrating, rather than denying, the richness and invention—the dissonance and paradox—at play within a small scene of bands whose joyously erratic racket was much huger than their humble songs could contain. I started reading NME in the late ‘90s, so this era of bands is before my time, but this book is just brilliant. Along the way, we hear many key records by the likes of post-Undertones band That Petrol Emotion (their blistering debut ‘Keen’), The Woodentops, James, Del Amitri, The Housemartins (their debut ‘Flag Day’) and a then largely unknown Happy Mondays (again represented by their first single). Where discs one and two reflect the predominant indie pop sound with which C86 was most closely associated, disc 3 acknowledges the harder, more angular sounds of that era (encapsulated by the bands on the Ron Johnson label). Ex-NME scribe Neil Taylor, who compiled the first tape, here assembles this box-set (he’s now a literary editor who has also written an upcoming book on the shambling scene), and disc two features many of the bands he left off the original.The UK music press was in this period highly competitive, with four weekly papers documenting new bands and trends.