THE FRONT ROW

Like all the best ideas the premise of Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? An Indie Odyssey is a simple one. Thirty-five years on from the release of C86 ‘a cassette that would shape music for years to come’ and ‘…was arguably the point at which indie was born’ Nige Tassell set himself the enviable task of finding out what happened to the Class of ’86. As Tassell journeys from Burbank, California, via Birkenhead, Wirral, to the banks of the Bosphorus he invites us along on an enlightening trip to meet members of all 22 bands featured on that seminal tape.

Amongst other things Tassell finds himself: birdwatching on Rainham Marshes with a Wolfhound; dog walking in a London cemetery with a Soup Dragon; talking to a Shop Assistant who is a shop assistant; and chatting to a member of The Shrubs who has at different times played the parts of an Imperial Tie Fighter pilot and Jeremy Iron’s body double. As well bringing the reader up-to-date with the activities of various band members Tassell also manages to tease out their feelings about their involvement on such an iconic production as C86.

The two conflicting sets of feelings overwhelmingly expressed appear to be pride and regret. Pride comes in the form of being associated with something so influential with such longevity. Nigel Blackwell frontman with Half Man Half Biscuit never paid it that much attention at the time, but on receiving his reissue 3 CD set genuinely likes it. Vix and Maggie from We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It! thought ‘we were with some really cool bands – and happy to be. It was nice to be asked.’

Regret comes in two forms. Firstly, the choice of song submitted. With the benefit of hindsight many bands, including The Pastels with Breaking Lines, Mighty Mighty with Law, and McCarthy with Celestial City, now wished that they had gone with more representative material than they hastily offered up to the NME. Members of Stump go a little further with drummer Rob McKahey and basist Kev Hopper respectively describing their offering – Buffalo – as being ‘Atrocious, awful’, and ‘the worst track on the tape.’ The second form of regret comes from being connected with what the term ‘C86’ came to represent – a shorthand for twee, shambling, fey indie music – a characterisation many miles away from the true identity of the majority of the tracks on the original cassette.

In Homer‘s Odyssey the hero was Odysseus, King of Ithaca. If you’re looking for a hero in this Odyssey then it would be John Peel, King of Indie. Peter Ellen, saxophone player with The MacKenzies explained ‘This entire music scene was financed by John Peel. No-one had two brass farthings to rub together and it was doing Peel sessions that gave bands money to pay studio fees to record records.’ Peel lent The Soup Dragons Sean Dickson £150 so the band could travel down from Scotland to do their first Peel session (a sum Dickson repeatedly tried to pay back, but Peel was having none of it). Dave Gedge lynchpin of The Wedding Present probably sums it up best when he declares of Peel ‘He was like a Roman emperor in the Colosseum deciding the fates of the gladiators by moving his thumb up or down.’

If you’re looking for a villain in the piece then that would be the music press itself, who like Victor Frankenstein created an entity, rejected it and set about destroying it. David Westlake from The Servants encapsulates the experience, ‘The Press created C86, and it’s strange it endured because they really tried to kill it. They savaged it. It became an insult to say something was ”C86”. But C86 is like the end of Halloween, when Michael Myers is dead. You think that must be the end now, but it just sits up again.’

If you are a fan of independent music then Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? An Indie Odyssey is a must-read. As well as being exhaustively researched, the book is written by an author with a real passion and knowledge of his subject matter. The book is endlessly informative and packed with incidental indie trivia. Without reading this book I would not have known which band was the inspiration for Manic Nicky Wire’s son’s middle name, or who are the UK’s most successful all-female band who played their own instruments (I’m not telling you).

Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? An Indie Odyssey by Nige Tassell, published by Bonnier Books UK, is out now. Buy yourself a copy and enjoy your own epic indie music journey.

Ian Dunphy.