Popular Culture No Longer Applies
“It’s starting to feel like we’re the last of a dying breed…”
When Jack Bevan, drummer with the band Foals, said those words in an interview with Long Live Vinyl in 2019 he was referring to the fact that their contemporaries, like The Maccabees and Wild Beasts, were splitting, leaving them as one of the few UK alternative rock bands who were still a draw at festivals and filling arenas. Whereas rock and electric guitar-based music may have taken a back seat in recent years, with festival line-ups being very different in character to those a couple of decades ago, these things do tend to work in cycles. Rock music, in the form of punk, prog, art rock, or whatever style has once been popular, always has the potential to re-appear: history will show that scenes and genres re-emerge with every generation, under new guises, with styles melding and evolving all the while. Put simply, good music never dies.
Foals emerged from an incredibly fertile and exciting UK scene in the mid noughties, one that comprised a number of micro-scenes embracing everything from post-punk, prog, folk, post-rock, hardcore and synth-pop, and whose threads could be traced through the rabbit holes of MySpace, and in the pages of the NME (still in print back then) and fanzine style blogs & websites like Drowned in Sound, Dot.alt and ClickMusic. Thanks to a by-then firmly established internet, bands and mini-scenes were connected like funghi, forming a thrilling mycorrhizal network from which a new favourite band or artist could appear daily.
Styles and genres were re-born in exciting forms, such that would inspire the inevitable music press epithets Nu and Post, cut & shut with age old genre categories, but aside from the Nu-gazers and Post-mathematicians, on the whole, labels didn’t stick, there was just too much variety of syle and influence in the music being produced. There were little revivals wherever you looked, be it psych-folk, art-rock, synth pop or punk, and, refreshingly, tribalism in the creation of music seemed to be a thing of the past. Styles were continually merged with glorious effect, be it acid folk meeting punk (Fuzz Against Junk), pop with riot grrrl (Blood Red Shoes), or prog with hardcore (Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies). One common feature was brevity of track-length – there were few overblown epics here. This in turn meant that the music was perfectly suited to the 7-inch single, and that was the real beauty of this whole scene. Whatever style the music, it was united by a DIY ethic spawned by punk 30 years earlier. Small indie labels like Try Harder, Unlabel, Full Time Hobby and Fantastic Plastic were being formed on a regular basis, releasing short runs of 7-inch records, often hand-numbered or with hand-made collaged sleeves. The vinyl revival started here.
Another glorious feature of this new DIY scene was that it inspired such magnificent band names; from the urgency and awkwardness of !Forward Russia!, Tunng, Art Brut, iLiKETRAiNS and Help She Can’t Swim, to the verbose majesty of The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, 65daysofstatic, Voice Of The Seven Woods, Amusement Parks On Fire, and Shut Your Eyes And You’ll Burst Into Flames. Brevity may have been a feature of the music, but definitely not with some of the monikers, and you can probably thank the likes of …And We Will Know You By The Trail Of Dead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor for that.
But all good scenes come to an end, or evolve beyond recognition at least. Given the complexity and variety of the mid-noughties UK underground scene, it’s difficult to pinpoint when that was exactly, more that the tendrils just spread to the mainstream. Given that we started this piece with Foals, let’s just say it was when original singer and founder Andrew Mears left the band, in 2006, paving the way for Foals to become the mainstream success they are now. So given that this is an anniversary of sorts, let’s mark the occasion with a list of 10 recommended scene singles as a taster…
- Help She Can’t Swim – Suck Our Band EP – Vacuous Pop, 2004
A brilliant name and a brilliant band. Formed in Southampton in 2003, this, their first EP, was released on Vacuous Pop, but it was far from that. Lead track Knit 1, Pearl 1 is 1 minute, 28 seconds of breakneck punk-pop perfection, with joyously shouty vocals from Leesey Frances.
2. Art Brut – Formed A Band – Rough Trade, 2004
If any record summed up the DIY ethic of the mid-noughties scene it was this effort from Eddie Argos and co. Whereas Formed A Band might seem like the obvious choice if an art punk scene had an anthem, the flip side Bad Weekend is even better – “I haven’t read the NME in so long, don’t know what genre we belong” plus “Popular culture no longer applies to me” just about sums it up.
3. Fuzz Against Junk – Trenchfoot/Dugout – Invada Records, 2004
This Bristol collective started out as a progressive psych-folk outfit but this track veers off into stoner rock & punk territory, sounding a bit like Comus, Blue Cheer & Killing Joke playing simultaneously. Also check out their brilliant cover of Ultimate Spinach’s 1968 psych classic (Ballad Of) The Hip Death Goddess.
4. Neil’s Children – I Hate Models – 2004
This London trio were clearly in thrall to Sex Pistols and Syd Barrett, with an image that suggested that they may have been fans of A Clockwork Orange too, and their aesthetic and sound managed to capture all three. In guitarist & singer John Linger they had a brilliantly charismatic frontman, whose sound and energy was perfect for the cramped, claustrophobic underground clubs they were playing in back then.
5. Comanechi – Comanechi EP – White Heat, 2005
Two piece bands and the guitar-drums format became more prominent around now, thanks to The White Stripes no doubt, and Comanechi were an early example, their furiously energetic and catchy brand of punk in full flow here, on Naked in particular. Featuring drummer & singer Akiko Matsuura, who later went on to join The Big Pink, bagging a couple of hits and an appearance on Later With Jools Holland in the process.
6. Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies – Ores – Fierce Panda, 2005
One band for whom brevity was often a stranger, with their brand of hardcore prog often birthing tracks pushing the 10-minute mark, and don’t even begin to try & memorise the full title of their debut album. But at bang on 4-minutes, and with a 4 letter, one syllable title, Ores is the opposite, a hard-rock-synth-pop-disco-mathcore mash-up that’ll leave you in a spin.
7. The Victorian English Gentlemens Club – The Tales Of Hermit Mark – Fantastic Plastic 2005
A fabulous name to match a fabulous image. Akin to Help She Can’t Swim in terms of their male-female dynamic and the edginess and urgency of their post-punk influenced music, this Cardiff trio released a series of great singles on Fantastic Plastic that harked back to the neon mid-seventies heyday of the DIY 7-inch, button badges & wraparound sleeves et al.
8. !Forward, Russia! / This Et Al – Nine / He Shoots Presidents – Dance To The Radio, 2005
Talking of which, This Et Al, like their partners on this split 7-inch, hailed from West Yorkshire, and both produced full throttle, dynamic post-punk, and always with a hook or two. He Shoots Presidents is the best of the two tracks here, with hooks aplenty, and a series of winning couplets. “He shoots Presidents and she sells insurance, but his isn’t part-time work …” At least I think that’s the opening lyric.
9. Blood Red Shoes – A.D.H.D – Try Harder, 2006
Another male-female, guitar & drums duo, with a similar furious energy to that of Comanechi. The duelling vocals of Laura-Mary Carter & Steven Ansell were a key feature, as was Ansell’s frantic but metronomic drumming. They too had a talent for a hook and an anthemic chorus, and produced some classic pop-punk songs worthy of a wider audience. The production became more polished over time, but this is the sound of a band at their raw and youthful best.
10. Foals – Try This On Your Piano – Try Harder, 2006
Back to where we started, and for Foals this is where it all began, and what a sparkling debut it is. Featuring founding member Andrew Mears, and not Yannis Philippakis, on vocals, the math-rock influences were clear even at this stage but there are few clues here as to the stadium-filling success they would come to experience. Mears would soon leave the band to commit to his main project, Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies, and the rest, as they say, is history.