Answer: When it’s ‘Findie’ (hat tip)

Tune into a mainstream radio station in 2007 and more likely than not the song being played will by from a bunch of skinny white boys with guitars who describe themselves as an ‘indie’ band. Most likely they’ll be backed by a record label, produce a few hit singles, sell an album off the back of them and then disappear into relative obscurity. Nothing inherently wrong or unusual about that, it’s the way pop music has been sold for decades.

Which is precisely the point. What we call ‘indie’ music is rooted in the development of an independent approach to making music during the post-punk period of 1978-84. Initially, the major punk bands chose to take on the established music industry by using their own power against them. The Sex Pistols perfected the art of signing to major labels for large amounts of money and behaving so obnoxiously that the labels paid them even larger sums to go away. The Clash signed to CBS and played nicely, using their commercial success to obtain platform for their views and negotiate reduced record prices for their fans. You can judge for yourself who was most successful.

Many of the bands who emerged in the wake of punk took a different approach, defining themselves against the industry and setting up their own record labels to release their music. The best know of the early Indie bands and labels are probably Joy Division on Factory records, the Smiths on Rough Trade records, and Primal Scream (amongst others) on Creation records. These bands were called ‘Indie’ because they actually were independent of the major labels. By the mid-eighties this method of approaching the business side of making music had also helped define a musical sound, an artistic style and an creative scene, represented well in the C86 tape released by the NME in 1986. If you can get hold of a copy it’s well worth listening too, not because it’s particularly good (it isn’t) but because, as Andrew Collins said, it’s “the most indie thing to have ever existed”. Nicky Wire (yes, I know, him again) wrote a good article about C86 for the Guardian last year which nicely captures the spirit of indie music.

“If there was any kind of coherence, it was the fact that the bands were so independent from the music industry and from the mainstream media. People were doing everything themselves: making their own records, doing the artwork, gluing the sleeves together, releasing them and sending them out, writing fanzines because the music press lost interest really quickly.

[...]

“A couple of the bands went on to lasting success, including Primal Scream - who now seem really embarrassed about that era in their history. But most C86 bands had a lack of ambition in a really good way. There seemed no desire to make any money. Today’s indie artists are well-groomed; in the C86 era, every band member had holes in their jumpers. It wasn’t a punk thing, it was a poor thing. You also got the impression, looking at a C86 band, that a lot of these musicians were living at home with their parents. This was totally inspirational: here were people who were in a band and just like you.”

Indie took a different direction towards the end of the eighties. The success of bands like Happy Mondays and Stone Roses brought the sound of indie music into the mainstream without bringing the fiercely independent attitude with it. These bands had no lack of ambition; they openly wanted to conquer the world. From there it wasn’t too long before Blur and Oasis were releasing singles simultaneously and measuring success by record sales, which would have been a complete anathema to the indie bands of 10 years previous.

I make this point not to make a value judgement on the way I think bands should operate, but to emphasise the difference between the original concept of indie as independent music set against the music industry and mainstream media, and the way many bands who later claimed the term indie actually operated.

In America the term ‘alternative rock’ has much the same role as ‘indie’. The American bands which emerged in the aftermath of punk were ‘hardcore’ bands such as Minor Threat, Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, who took the sonic assault of punk to its logical extreme; and ‘college rock’ bands such as REM, Sonic Youth and the Replacements, who were so called because student radio stations were amongst the only place where their music could be heard. Like the British indie bands of the eighties, both scenes had a fiercely anti-commercial philosophy, and spent much of the decade building an independent scene by touring around the country in battered Transit vans. Through the independent touring circuit which was established, the melodic song writing of college rock and the power and energy of hardcore punk came together in a new wave of alternative rock bands know as grunge, with Nirvana at their head.

What we now know as alternative rock might be musically similar to the bands which emerged from the American underground in the late eighties and early nineties, but the independent spirit is nowhere to be found. Again, the use of the term ‘alternative rock’ to describe such bands must be called into question. Foo Fighters, Staind, Puddle of Mudd and Nickleback are not alternatives to the mainstream, they are the mainstream. If you listen carefully to Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace you can hear Kurt Cobain spinning in his grave as though his feet were tied to an aeroplane propeller.

And as it was with British indie and American alternative rock in the nineties, so it is with the current crop of mediocre major label cash cows who clog up the airwaves with so-called ‘indie’ music. The post-punk revival at the start of the decade was a welcome return to guitar music after the dismal dance-pop of the late nineties, and many of the emerging bands (the Libertines, British Sea Power) brought with them something of the independent philosophy of the original post-punk movement. But the current crop of faux indie (or ‘findie’) bands being pushed by the record industry have very little to with the independent production of music and represent the mainstream of popular music rather than any sort of alternative vision.

Y’know the stuff- bands like the Wombats, the Hoosiers, the Pigeon Detectives, the Fratellis. It’s almost like there’s a manual for putting these bands togeher. you get a bunch of skinny white kids with floppy hair and regional accents, put them in jeans and leather jackets, give them a Fender Telecaster or Gibson ES series guitar and a lightly overdriven amp and get them write songs of love and loss with self-obsessed ironic lyrics which are still cheery enough to get played at the indie clubs. It might sound unobjectionable- it pushes all the right buttons, after all- but in your heart you know it’s just shit.

Alright, that’s a bit harsh. If people like this stuff then that’s fair enough, and I don’t really hate it. For example, the Wombat’s Moving to New York is likeable enough, and nicely captures the feeling of going a bit crazy due to overwork and sleep deprivation. But it’s hardly original, and and it feels a long time since the Libertines were holding gigs in flats and tube stations. Certainly it doesn’t deserve to be called independent music. This is what the Cribs are getting at when they bang on about the ‘commercialisation of indie’.

You’d never exist if you wasn’t generic
You have to impress our bovine public
I’ll never forget how all this begun
And I will never regret a thing I have done
But you would never exist without us

Well you say nothing
So you’ll always mean nothing to me
And if what you say means nothing
Then what you say will always mean nothing to me

- The Cribs, Our Bovine Public

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the impetus of 2002/3 is fading away. It’s an inevitable part of any musical movement. Something emerges organically from the primordial soup of young people with nothing to do other than make music, and is then repeatedly Xeroxed by the music industry, losing a little definition and resolution each time, until it barely represents the ideals which drove people to make such music in the first place. Right now, we’re at the fag end of the post-punk revival, looking for something new.

At least I’m not the only person whinging about the state of popular music. (Actually, there’s been some great albums this yeah, but very few of them from British guitar bands.) John Harris wrote something along the same lines in his last article for the Guardian Review the other day.

“Preparing for this final instalment, I thought about having a quick cry, and then had a long look through my 65 or so columns, which gave me a load of memories I didn’t actually know I had, and hardened a suspicion that music is currently taking a rum turn, and that the middle distance might be the best place from which to observe it. The other day, for example, I got on a train to Manchester to see the revived Squeeze - who were great, but that’s my problem - and sat next to a bunch of fellas on their way to a Shed Seven concert. Led Zeppelin was that week’s media obsession, and further down the carriage, someone’s iPod was tweeting out the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony. Something is not right here at all, and the fact that 1) Radiohead, Damon Albarn and Oasis still loom over domestic rock, and 2) bands continue to sound like Joy Division and Gang of Four some five years after that syndrome started, are unrelated parts of the same feeling. It rather smells of death, but I may well be part of the problem - and anyway, it’s Christmas, so I should shut up.”

Naah. Why stop whinging for Christmas?