Fantastic – and genuinely indie: Personal Trainer, at the Shacklewell Arms, reviewed

Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded, manufactured and distributed independent of the major labels. In practice, that tended to be music played by young white people, usually more in hope than expectation of either competence or success. As the years passed it came to be applied particularly to a kind of whey-faced, solipsistic music, played on guitars by people who were either too clever by half or too wimpy by half.

These days, though, indie means whatever you want it to mean. Entirely mainstream soft pop acts with massive worldwide hits on major labels – such as Glass Animals – are classed as indie. Big rock bands with crowds of pint-tossing geezers get called indie. Indie now seems to mean ‘any band with a guitarist that we can’t easily fit into another genre’.