I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along came a TV programme which reminded me: I WAS cool once. It happened after Oxford when I became, almost simultaneously, both an acid-house freak and an indie kid. And BBC4’s three-part special — Music For Misfits: The Story of Indie (Friday) — captured quite brilliantly what it was like to live in that golden era of floppy fringes, black Levis, obscure music, psychotropic substances and DM boots.
Watching it, I knew just how it must have been for combat veterans watching The World at War in 1973. Same distance in time from the actual event; same sense of disbelieving unreality: ‘I was there, man. At least, I think I was. But it all seems so very long ago.’
What made the indie era special was that it was the last era when music was not a ubiquitous commodity. I don’t mean chart music: obviously, that carried on much as before. Rather I mean the kind of music you had to seek out and find; that hadn’t yet been embraced and sanitised by the mainstream, as happened at roughly the point where Oasis accepted an invitation from Tony Blair to No. 10 and when the new Swinging London was celebrated in Vanity Fair; that involved courting the mockery of your peers (‘New Fast Automatic Daffodils? Kitchens of Distinction???’), risking death by crushing in the smoky, sweaty mosh pits of tiny garage venues, and epic journeys to remote places like Belfast in order to catch Ride before they got unacceptably big. (Which, thank heavens, Ride never quite did, though one of them now plays with Oasis.)
Let me explain. Indie was at once a state of mind, a loosely defined musical genre, and a reference to all the tiny DIY record labels that began springing up from the late Seventies to the early Nineties, in defiance of the hegemony of majors like Warners, EMI and RCA.
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