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.
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