British Indie In The 1980s

This book is a study of the emergence of indie as a genre term in the UK in the 1980s. It places a special focus on the ‘cutie’ sub-genre of indie, exemplified by groups such as the Pastels and Talulah Gosh. The book also examines the significance of NME’s compilation tape C86 (issued in Spring 1986), exposing an antipathy to the independent sector among the tape’s compilers and revealing that the direct effect of the tape was that several of the independent sector’s up-and-coming groups moved on to major labels (many directly after the compilation was released, others such as the Wedding Present later in the decade). The chapters that make up the book alternate between a chronological survey of developments across the 1980s with a range of more particular topics of enquiry: genre, gender and sexuality, race, Britishness and more. The core argument is that the codification of indie as a genre was a crucial component in the effective weakening of the independent sector during the 1980s. Methodologically, the study is primarily based around archival research of the UK’s weekly music press and fanzines from the period, as well as some musicological analyses. These archives show that an antipathy towards ‘the indie ethic’ and the small-scale end of the independent sector was firmly held by key journalists such as Neil Taylor (one of the three compilers of NME’s influential C86 compilation). The book’s musicological analyses, meanwhile, clarify what can and can’t be said about the nature of indie as a genre in specifically musical terms. It is clear that indie is not characterised by invariable attributes but then, genres never are.