20 years on from C86

An interesting theory about C86 is that it was part of the "hip-hop wars" at the NME. A handful of their writers who mostly were into post-punk indie guitar stuff wanted to try to carve out a scene separate from where the general editorial direction of the paper.

i would suggest that this was the core of the hip hop wars.
at the time, i was a young country boy with no access to NYC 12" records,
but somehow, the nme made me excited and connected to the scene, and i loved their coverage of this new world.
that and the electro/street sounds compilations.
hence why this boxset is fucked up.
if the compilers genuinely believe that this is the natural conclusion to c86.
i mean, and yes, i have to do this, look at age of chance.
in 86, they were clearly part of the c86 scene with their shambolic early releases.
whereas by 87, they along with others, had moved on, and were making music that reflected the new era with record label stretching demands.
but this boxset does little to reflect that change.
(and yeah, the presence of a brilliantly bonkers GBOA track does not count !)

yes, there's a few great, under-appreciated songs/bands on here: GBOA, Bachelor Pad, Great Leap Forward. There's also a lot of stuff that I'm fine with but totally over-compiled.We need a moritorium on any rerelease of "Ask Johnny Dee", "Get Out of My Dream", "Pristine Christine" and the like.

Then there's so much stuff that's just terrible LOL.

Feels like the idea that this stuff never went anywhere and doesn't matter has turned around since this thread was started. Not the Ron Jonson/Bogshed stuff but the indie/60s/punk hybrids. So many of the young local bands here talk about that stuff, and emulate the sound and aesthetics. The music is now accessible and festivals like indietracks and Popfest are giving the original bands motivation to reform.

There's dozens of undiscovered gems waiting to be compiled (plus lots of trash of course). I wish someone would do more crate digging and compiling from the 1984-1988 period.

Are you aware of the excellent Cherry Red box sets: C86 (3CD), C87 (3CD) and the forthcoming C88 (3CD)? Also, there's a 5 disc set called "Scared To Get Happy" which really digs deeply into this area.

Yes, I trashed them upthread LOL. No, I'm actually okay with them other than the repetition of bands and tracks. It's like if the Pretty Things and the Standells had to be included on every Nuggets/Pebbles etc compilation. No, they're on the first one and after that it's one-off releases by bands you've never heard of. The compilers compete to find tracks that haven't been comped. With this stuff it's as if there's only two CDs worth of good stuff and after that you have to move on to the post-Sarah Records era.

Also more digging into unreleased stuff by the well-known bands. With the difficulty of producing and releasing records back then there's tons of recordings that have never seen the light of day. I know there's mid-80s stuff from the prehistory of Teenage Fanclub, Vaselines, Bachelor Pad, etc or radio sessions and the like that aren't available.

Ah, good point, especially radio sessions. I imagine the legalities are an issue there, but looking at the "Keeping It Peel" site there's TONS of one-off band sessions that I'm sure have a killer cut contained within them.

New book on C86 coming out on 18th August, preceded by a Guardian interview with the author.

Reel lives: how I tracked down the class of NME’s C86 album

The book's a fun read. Cool to read retrospective article of the sort that Mojo etc do for more major artists but obviously would never touch 90% of this lot. He interviews at least one person, usually more, from each band. It's a bit like the tape - some chapters are stand-outs, some are forgettable. The more successful artists tend to be a bit boring while the ones who never went anywhere have their own story to tell. The Stump chapter is very good, Bogshed and Miaow also. I enjoyed the McCarthy, Close Lobsters & Wolfhounds chapters too, since these are the records that stand up nowadays in my opinion, plus the interviewees are interesting. If you have any interest in these bands you have to read this.

The Pastels chapter is a favourite, not because of Stephen Pastel, who's life has the appearance of being completely uneventful and static for three decades. It's because of their former drummer Berniece Simpson effortlessly skewering Pastel (who we find out fired the original band via a lawyer's letter) by having a very successful and happy non-musical career and family, and very pointedly defining her decade as an indie musician as a young person's game.

pricing an Eton Crop record from 1987 (Yes, Please Bob) and in their Discogs bio they call them a "pre-C86" band and lump them in with the Membranes and The Three Johns and it all makes sense i guess but i don't think i'd ever heard of a group of bands being called that. not exactly arbitrary. all people with the Mekons in their veins.

mekons very much relevant to all three - langford played on a couple of membranes ablums and i think did the sleeve to the eton crop record

i think i want to like those kind of bands more than i do. they are missing that langford je nais se quois despite his input. but maybe i just haven't found the right one for me. i never play membranes records when i get them in.

yeah i've never been totally into their stuff tbh. veeing off at a tangent but that eton crop album always make me think of this album by the welsh band fflaps (both covers reference the same long-running uk tv quiz show, blockbusters):
https://www.discogs.com/release/2060127-Fflaps-Malltod

more of a dog-faced hermans vibe though and it totally rules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghiTVUTlDvA

wow love that! that name is totally ringing a bell. totally get the DFH vibe too. i love DFH beyond reason.

not really connected, but THIS is an album i really fell for and played 5 times in a row and i'd never heard it until this week! from 1980. where's it been all my life?? they just didn't make it over here. i only remember the later "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" single.

https://i.discogs.com/wxWgUbhbHJ7Ir7sPRPq-unlMBMR4grvkCaTEHw81KO8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTU3MzIy/MC0xMzUyOTIwODc0/LTg1NDAuanBlZw.jpeg

fantastic band whose records you can still buy for buttons pretty much. the album with 'german film star' is also great

yeah, i need the other LPs.

'Oh No, It's You' is the standout for me. I think I bought this album for about a pound in the early 90s. Isn't Robert Smith on it on somewhere on backing vocals?

boom, just pulled this out to price. there is your "pre-c86" in a nutshell, no?

https://i.discogs.com/ZeyoMktHl2CY6kPBnE4jZEJykj0gKYPQ7SvQz-JLVyg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE3NDE3/MzItMTMwMzczNzM4/NS5qcGVn.jpeg

Love Fflaps!

Trying to get my head around this - so like post-punk or proto-indie/jangle pop? I love a ton of that stuff but sometimes the venn diagram circles are almost perfectly overlapping when trying to mentally categorize...

I've been deep diving a lot of 80s early indiepop kind of stuff, was jamming to The Dentists last night for instance.

xp underrated band on that comp - Rote Kapelle

Did Fflaps have a female singer who was going out with Mark the singer from Dandelion Adventure. I think anyway since they were from Preston and Fflaps somewhere in Wales.
Just remembering hitching tours in the late 80s and meeting them along the way.

Was looking for clarification BTW

They were part of the scene that included the Membranees and the bands John Robb writes about in Death To Trad Rock. The one track by them on Spotify is on the compilation cd that tied in with the book. Or at least one of the 2 instances of the same track is.
So I think they were in the rockier side of indie and probably had direct roots to punk, though I think they may have been a bit late in the decade for the term post-punk which would possibly fit otherwise.
Venn overlap between several different subgenres.