Are these the most indie indie bands ever?
As 成人快手 Four explores the story of indie with , its presenter Mark Radcliffe picks five acts that embody the true spirit of independence
1. Buzzcocks
The band who were inspired by punk rock's DIY attitude to make and release their own EP, rather than waiting for record labels to catch up with what they were doing. led by example, as co-founder Pete Shelley explains in this clip. Mark also points out that they "weren't actually indie for long but kick-started a new generation of independent thinkers and dreamers with the Spiral Scratch EP".
The impact of the EP was twofold: It showed that fast and furious music didn't necessarily need to be laboured over in expensive studios in order to get its point across, and it looked and sounded like the kind of thing that people could make without having to pass a special test of musicianship, or packaging. It was both cheap and cheerful, and all the more powerful for it.
2. Joy Division
Using exactly the same resources as Buzzcocks, took the sound in a very different direction, away from the grazing thrash of punk and into darker territories, as Mark explains: "For me, a sound I would have heard inside my head as a student in Manchester at that time even if they hadn't invented it. Strange, heartfelt and deeply mysterious. Haunting still."
3. Cocteau Twins
Many words have been used to try and describe the sound of and most of them have failed. This is a band that defined their own musical territory (plangent, heavily-treated guitar and melodic bass), created their own language (Elizabeth Fraser sang a teasing tumble of words from a variety of sources at the back of a huge cave of reverberant echoes) and remained stubbornly opaque, as bassist Simon Raymonde explains in this clip. They were aided in the cause by their label 4AD, who had been inspired by the example of Factory Records to create records that were completely satisfying musical artifacts (with the emphasis on art) from the groove to the sleeve.
Says Mark: "They created an ethereal, otherworldy new music in its own language that defied categorisation. Major labels wouldn't have touched it. Music from a distant planet."
4. Aphex Twin
A slight deviation from post-punk and art rock here, chosen by Mark because "indie was never just about guitars."
Richard D. James picked up where acid house and techno had left off, using cheap and readily available electronic instruments as ingredients for sonic experimentation, with the use of a soldering iron, some screwdrivers and a wish to find useful sounds that even the manufacturers hadn't considered.
A true independent, he found a natural home as at Sheffield's Warp Records and began releasing records that Mark describes as "nightmarish electronica that fuelled a radical alternative scene". A scene that was occasionally sideswiped by other Richard James tracks released under different names, such as Polygon Window, AFX, and Caustic Window.
Pete Tong plays Maceo Plex's remix of Polynomial C by Aphex Twin and chats about John Peel
Pete Tong plays Maceo Plex's remix of Aphex Twin's Polynomial C and chats about John Peel
5. Mel & Kim
To reiterate then: "Indie was never just about guitars."
With Respectable and Showing Out (Get Fresh at the Weekend), represent the very best pop records by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, an independent production team working in an independent recording studio and releasing their records independently. As Mark puts it: "Stock, Aitken and Waterman didn't fit the indie identikit, but then, wasn't that the whole idea?"
