My friend has a theory that indie rock died sometime in early 2010. It was a quick death without drama — no tears, no black armbands. There wasn’t a sentimental memorial service and no mourners left Converse prints in the dirt at the graveside. It just fizzled out, leaving nothing but electronic covers of soft rock songs in its wake and the deep, semi-permanent red marks of too-tight skinny jeans around our hips.
Our collective consciousness recalls the golden age of punk with fondness even if we didn’t live through it. At fancy dress parties we cover our denim jackets in safety pins from the bottom of our mothers’ sewing boxes. We step into our shiny Doc Martens and brave the blisters that will inevitably appear on our heels and little toes. We scream God Save the Queen into the blackness under bridges and across canals like the rebels that we wish we had the guts to be. It’s cool to have an Iggy and The Stooges album in our vinyl collections; to wear faded black t-shirts with the London Calling album cover spread across our chests.
We don’t admit to our love of disco in the same way but we all admit that it’s fun, and listening to Donna Summer while we workout is just one of our guilty pleasures. At the end of the night at a family wedding, we bust out flamboyant moves to I Will Survive like nobody’s watching. We dance the YMCA unprompted. We box up those big and little fishes. We’re all John Travolta in his white flared suit and statement quiff. Some of us are Chaka Khan.
Indie rock is tricky to define. Unlike punk and disco, the moniker is hazy and confusing like someone’s thrown an all-day breakfast at a wall. Somewhere in the swirl of baked beans, hash browns and plum tomatoes sits indie rock. It used to refer to an independent movement of musicians in garages and spare bedrooms producing tracks themselves and posting them on Myspace. Now, it lovingly refers to the men with raspy voices who weren’t as dynamic or slick as the pretty pop boys, or as dirty and angry as the rock gods. It came out of Seattle and Sheffield. It followed on from grunge and Britpop and art rock. Jarvis Cocker and Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke were the rag-tag spiritual inspirations. Some of the music was jangly and you could imagine yourself walking down long strips of road listening to it. It’s not pop, but it’s not rock either, and it was safe for eccentric teenagers with backcombed hair and dreams of getting out of their hometowns.
It’s trendy now for musicians to fetishize their heartbreak. They moan and bitch about their pain and the way their tears dry across their cheeks like spiderwebs. Sometimes they sing in falsetto. Indie songs told stories reminiscent of Tommy and Gina from Livin’ on a Prayer. They were sentimental in a way that an old sweatshirt can be. They sang about whether their partners fancied going out that night or the fact that bands with female guitarists were infinitely better. Sometimes they just wanted to let you know that they wanted to dance and they enjoyed it and it wasn’t a big deal if you wanted to as well. It wasn’t complicated.
The mid-noughties saw a surge in these almost-exclusively male bands with long hair and full fringes who soundtracked my entire adolescence. I was past bubble-gum pop and I was bored of The Top 40. I got into independent films that won awards at Sundance: films about misfits falling in love with other misfits. I was obsessed with Paul Dano in Little Miss Sunshine, I wanted to be Miranda July. And this melancholic rush of men who played guitar and sang in their regional accents floored me.
Indie rock is a feeling. It reminds me of falling in lust for the first time, having a crush so weighty that I could feel it pressing down on my chest. Hormones raging so quickly through my veins that I didn’t know if I was going to explode with happiness or sob uncontrollably. It reminds me of wearing cheap plastic-framed sunglasses at the beginning of April, just as the sun began to peak through but it was still cold enough to wear a coat. It reminds me of sipping alcopops in a field, the drinks laced with pineapple and lemon that left a film of sugar on the backs of my teeth. It’s the infinity of summer — long days, sunburn on your thighs, ice lollies dripping down your wrist. The defiance of time.
In the future, when my children ask me about my youth, I will tell them that I had a shelf full of jewel cases bursting with weird band names like ‘Vampire Weekend’ and ‘Two Door Cinema Club’ and ‘The Pigeon Detectives’. I’ll tell them that I learnt about new bands by watching Freshly Squeezed on early-morning T4. That Alexa Chung and Alex Zane and Simon Amstell influenced my identity in a bigger way than anybody else ever has, and for that I am eternally grateful. I will tell them that I kept a Post-it note next to my bed which I’d scribble these exotic band names onto. Unless I was feeling lucky enough to gamble my time on an illegal download of these shiny new songs, I’ll tell them that I used to walk thirty minutes into town and wander around an intensely air-conditioned HMV when I wanted something new. They didn’t always have that Maccabees album or Tommy Reilly EP and I’d traipse home defeated. I’ll brush the dust off my iPod Classic, try and find a charger that fits, and plug in some headphones. It’ll be brimming with this gold dust; this treasure. I’ll tell them that a bar in town has a cover band that sings Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis every Saturday night and that sometimes they also play Let’s Dance to Joy Division by The Wombats. My children will know these songs from our frantic dances around the kitchen while I cook.
The radio still plays I Predict a Riot. We still know all the words to She Moves in Her Own Way. I don’t see washed-up men with curly mops of hair wearing that odd t-shirt-and-tie combination that Alex Turner wrote about on the streets though. Where are all the men in red jeans? Did the studded belt factories all burn down? Why can’t you buy an ironic waistcoat on the high street anymore? Now there’s no easy way to tell the boys apart. Indie rock has tried to make a comeback a number of times since its demise a decade ago but it has slipped through unnoticed, underwhelmed. Some bands have persisted, but their sounds have changed to match a new audience that brandish their smartphones and grease-stained bags of Deliveroo between perfectly manicured fingers.
We’re creatures of nostalgia and the artists that scored our formative years will always be the ones that we feel most fondly about. The way I feel about indie rock is the same way that my parents felt about The Beatles and eighteen-year-old girls now feel about One Direction. I still surprise myself with how many Maximo Park lyrics I have stored in my auditory cortex. It’s the same for The Hoosiers. And Razorlight. I still get a comforting frisson when the first chords of I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You by Black Kids plays and I probably always will. My jeans might be a little less tight and my hair may be a little more tame, but I don’t think I’ll ever shake that feeling of traipsing around sun-scorched fields listening to indie rock on my iPod and imagining — if just for a second — that there is nothing more magical in the world than a girl listening to her favourite music.
