20 years on from C86

The (majority of the) people on C86 were (at least) 5 years younger than those on C81, so is it really so surprising that they "sounded like bands who'd listened almost exclusively to postpunk"? After all, it's what they grew up with...

You had your Right But Repulsive roundheads on one side – the volubly politicised Soul fans (biggest error: their belief that hip-hop was inherently left-wing, rather than, for the most part, brutally and rapaciously capitalist). On the other, you had the Wrong But Romantic cavaliers, who still believed in Rock as profound and redemptive and allied to something like the counter-cultures of previous rock eras (biggest error: thinking that The Long Ryders were the future of anything).

!!

the third post in this thread = otm x 1,000,000.

No, it's a complete load of bollocks actually. Name one band on this album who fits the description of "artists who took the beauty of Young Marble Giants and turned it into insipidness, "noise" bands with little wit, humor or overt intelligence".

I think it's being overlooked that the whole point of the compliation was not principally to let people hear these songs but to introduce people to new bands (at a time when hearing new stuff was not particularly easy). Folks who listened to this went out and bought records like "George Best", "Sonic Flower Groove", "Quirk Out", "I Am A Wallet", "1000 Years of Trouble", "Headache Rhetoric", "Back In The DHSS", "Bright And Guilty", "Up For A Bit With The Pastels" etc - all fine albums. Later on they bought "A Fierce Pancake", "Seamonsters", "Sittin' Pretty", "This Leaden Pall", "Screamadelica" and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" - all brilliant albums produced by bands included here, or their later incarnations.

If there's not some stuff in that lot that floats your boat then I'm afraid you've permanently run aground.

oh, i love that comp., don't get me wrong here. but, eh, it's legacy has just become more than a bit off putting. i think you got a point in that post there, everything. i really never thought about that, and i'm sure you're probably right. just, all the shitheads i know really into c86 and twee are just bumbling, rockist, ironic morons, though.

maybe my disdain should be directed at a lot of the fans of it. it shouldn't matter what you're influenced by as long as you have cool intentions and catchy songs. i might have been wrong. the whole thing is really confusing and i need to think about it more.

though, i probably do have every c86 record ever made. and, at least as far as artists in that non-"scene" at the time, i really know what i'm talking about. i'll only lump bands like the ex and talulah gosh together for the sake of convenience (and what most people understand), i know their both very far apart. it's hard to talk about c86, when really, we're really talking about two "scenes".

they're*

and, i just love the sound of all this junk.

Wait, what do the Ex have to do with C86?

They were on Ron Johnson records, along with Stump, BigFlame? etc..

Apart from that, no.

Really, I didn't know they were on Ron Johnson. Which records?

I have the Spanish Civil war double single with book, that certainly was.

Too Many Cowboys was as well

two scenes for one. one's ice cream, one's shit-pie.

That Ex single with the book was apparently one of the reasons Ron Johnson went under. Losing money on every copy ala "Blue Monday".

I can see why: It's a thing of beauty.

Found the quote from Dave Parsons, the man behind the label:

"The Ex double-single was a fiasco of Rough Trade's making - they sold it at a price that was lower than the manufacturing cost and because it was reviewed as such amazing product for such amazing price felt that they couldn't put the price up - it sold 15000 copies and RJ lost £15000! Fantastic. The only band who ever made a profit in RJ were A Witness and they have a right to feel slightly aggreived. I gave 24 hours of my life for 7 years to RJ, lost my house, never made a penny and was eventually bankrupted because I loved the music."

That's from sometime ILM poster Rhodri Marsden's Ron Johnson page by the way.

that'll be 24 hours per day, rather than 24 hours over 7 years, right?

Either one seems unrealistic really.

ok, 24 hours a week.

...7 weeks a year.

that's why i say don't fuck with ron johnson.

28 years...

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19423-c86/

mine arrived today. someone really needs to add the 72 titles / bandnames into cddb.

"C87 imagines what the NME compilers might have chosen, had they revisited the idea one year later, choosing music from mid-1986 through 1987."

http://louderthanwar.com/cherry-red-announce-line-up-for-c87-box-set-c86-imagined-one-year-later/

could have sworn that in 87 the NME was covering a lot of hip hop ...

a lot of those i have on those melody maker indie top 20 tapes, especially vol2 - http://www.bandplanet.co.uk/Oldsite/indietop20s.htm

OK, so it's Cherry Red so you don't expect much care but anyway, at first glance that is a pretty half-assed compilation. I mean yeah, it doesn't cover what the NME was going on about in '87 in any kind of comprehensive way. They literally never covered some of those bands EVER. One of them appeared on the cover and the editor got sacked. If it was a genuine attempt to do an NME thing from '87 then they'd need things like Trouble Funk, Colourfield, Def Jam, Salt'n'Pepa, That Petrol Emotion, Michel Shocked, Coldcut etc.

But let's put that aside and accept that "C86" has nothing to do with NME or even the C86 cassette anymore.

There was the CD86 from a year or two ago that more or less did the same thing. If this is supposed to supplement that by reviewing the situation from a year later, then they haven't put much thought into it. Some of them ("Poised Over The Pause Button", "Pristine Christine", "I Could Be in Heaven", "Franz Hals", "Ask Johnny Dee", "Golden Shower" others) already appeared on CD86. Others, eg. The Bachelor Pad song are b-sides of songs from CD86 so where is the supposed progression.

I don't have any problem with endless genre comps but c'mon, you have to find new tracks and preferably stuff that fits the concept of the comp.

it doesn't cover what the NME was going on about in '87 in any kind of comprehensive way.

exactly my point.

as proven by :

http://www.nme.com/bestalbumsandtracksoftheyear/1987

in 1987 the nme was my fucking bible for music with beats and noise, and this compilation is the worst kind of revisionism.

Revisionism is right. It's telling that they have picked more retro songs from bands that were moving from indie to beats that year. ie. "Sweet Sweet Pie" instead of something from "Box Frenzy", or "Young Till Yesterday" rather than "Christopher Mayhew Says". Even "Hang Ten!" (1986) rather than the more sophisticated "Head Gone Astray". Or the Mackenzies "New Breed" rather than the much more futuristic "Mealy Mouths" from the same year (1986 btw so fuck this concept we invented for the comp).

Fact is the likes of the Shamen or PWEI would have gone nowhere if they had continued doing indie/60s/punk influenced stuff and they had few fans till they switched that up. Everyone, especially the NME, knew that style was moribund.

You could pick holes in this all day.

Still a great jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37TO9Dmaoz0

"C87 imagines what the NME compilers might have chosen, had they revisited the idea one year later, choosing music from mid-1986 through 1987."

Jesus Christ Almighty, wtf?!?!?

By the way, re-reading this thread:

it was an artificial attempt to mimic the 1981 NME/Rough Trade cassette - which was borne out of a real movement

What movement were Robert Wyatt, Linx and Cabaret Voltaire (to name but three) a part of?

Don't agree with that post in any way but think it's refering to DIY cassette culture - the C81 cassette as a product, rather than it's contents?

now, if they had included the baby amphetamine 12", then maybe, just maybe i would have been interested.

nme vs 1987 summed up here :

http://www.creation-records.com/classic-interviews1-baby-amphetamine/

Don't agree with that post in any way but think it's refering to DIY cassette culture - the C81 cassette as a product, rather than it's contents?

Oh right, well in that case maybe the Door and the Window or 49 Americans (or whoever) should have taken preference over James Blood Ulmer. As far as I can see, the movement in question seemed to be the movement of artists involved with Rough Trade in some capacity or other.

haha-yeah. Particularly since Linx and the Specials were replaced by Panther Burns and TV Personalities in the reissue.

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. So that would have precluded Baby Amphetamine presumably.

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.