We really get a broad range of personalities too, those who remain proud of their contribution and others who wish to distance themselves from it and are determined not to be defined by it.

C86 Kids? - Monorail Music Nige Tassell Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? - Monorail Music

I have been reading Nige Tassell’s C86 book of late and this one would not been out of place on Ron Johnson Records.Every precious stereotype associated with C86, however, is blown out of the water by the box set’s avant-garde contingent. It's rather relative, but I think if someone's selling out fairly large venues in London and their name is immediately recognisable to people who are interested in that genre of music, then I don't think they count as "forgotten". The retro thing even by-passed punk: the guitar thing harked back to the Byrds and Velvet Underground. The words, angry vocals and the bass driven sound certainly stand out and what more do you want or need in a track?

nige tassell - whatever happened to the c86 kids? an indie

C86 even came with its own retro “cutesy” couture: 60s anoraks and duffelcoats, childlike plimsolls, bowl haircuts and cardigans. Lots of these bands featured women, and often in roles women were rarely seen in: bassists, drummers’. Quickly reduced to a sneering, single-line stereotype that described such bands as either jangly, fey or shambling (or a combination of all three), any scene that may or may not have existed was quickly dismissed. In Lancaster, I spoke to the Bogshed bassist who became a caricaturist at weddings, while down in Croydon I found the ex-member of the Shrubs who later trained as an actor and found gainful employment as Jeremy Irons’s body double. The gallows humour of Birkenhead’s Half Man Half Biscuit always seemed at odds with the wide-eyed, uncynical naivety of the other bands on the tape, while The Wedding Present seemed a little butch among their fey compatriots.

Christopher,is underlain with an atmospheric smear of static that might as well be a wormhole to the next three decades of noise-pop. That’s how long Primal Scream’s “Velocity Girl” lasts, and the song was enough to have crystallized an entire era and established an undying narrative. The nearest I came was when sitting in on the first rehearsal since pre-pandemic times of the Birmingham five-piece Mighty Mighty, reconvened to play to an audience of just me. For those of us who were there at the beginning of this project it is galling to know that there are people who now have the book (and other ephemera – postcards etc. I was good friends with Flossy and Esme, who briefly dated a way, way, way before he was famous Erol Alkan.