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Remembering C86: The Original Indie Mixtape

by Nick Perry
7 July 2014 2 Comments

25 years ago, NME had the bright idea of knocking out tapes via mail order and it would go on to change indie music forever...

In 1986 the NME put together a collection of songs by independent guitar bands and issued the compilation as a cassette, sold by mail order through the magazine. The original release sold 30,000 copies (to a readership of 100,000), bringing an underground scene a step closer to the mainstream and paving the way for hundreds of acts from the 90s to the present day whose roots lay in indie music. The cassette’s name, C86, became a tag for a sub-genre of bands who played simple, melodic pop songs featuring jangly guitars.

Cherry Red Records have extended the original compilation from 22 songs to 72 and reissued it as a ‘deluxe 3-CD edition’, including a booklet with extensive notes from Neil Taylor, one of the original compilers and supporters of the scene. This reissue is a comprehensive documentation of the music of the mid-80s indie scene, and it’s a surprising eclectic mix.

With a few exceptions (The Fall, The Smiths, The Cure) it’s easy to view the mid-80s as a quiet time for underground, guitar-based music; a lull between punk, post-punk/new wave and baggy/Madchester and grunge. The music press at the time, NME included, were looking elsewhere for the next big scene after the New Romantics (while stubbornly ignoring hip hop) and widely dismissed indie rock as the pointless last echoes of 1977. The scene was instead supported by a nationwide network of bands, clubs and labels and of course John Peel. Home-made, photocopied fanzines were also important, as was the distribution of cassettes – mix tapes, demos and live bootlegs – often sold by mail order. The C86 compilation represented NME’s first celebration of this thriving underground scene – or its first attempt to commercialise it, depending on who you believe. Following the original release of C86, the name came to be associated with a certain style of music featuring chiming guitars, naïve lyrics and simple melodies.

The opening track, Velocity Girl by Primal Scream is a great example of the archetype and tracks included here by The Wolfhounds, One Thousand Violins and Go! Service also fit the template. A lot of the bands most closely associated with the perceived C86 sound – The Wedding Present, B.M.X. Bandits, The Pastels - are present, but there’s a lot more on offer here and overall it’s a strikingly diverse selection of bands. There’s raucous, low-fi garage rock from The McTells with Virginia M.C. and The Dentists with the excellent Peppermint Dreams.

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The Blue Aeroplanes’ Outback Jazz is a funky, angular track reminiscent of early Gang of Four. Miaow with Sport Most Royal and Janitors with Good To Be The King show two different sides of rockabilly and there’s punk rock from Kilgore Trout (The Peacock Nose), The Soup Dragons (Pleasantly Surprised) and a very early incarnation of Pop Will Eat Itself (Mesmerized). Yeah Yeah Noh (Another Side Of Mrs Quill) and Paul Groovy & The Pop Art Experience are psychedelic and Bogshed (Run To The Temple) and The Shrubs (Bullfighter’s Bones) are arty, noise rock tracks resembling The Fall and Scratch Acid respectively. Buffalo by Stump is just bizarre - sample lyric; ‘swing big bottoms, in blubbery Burberry, baby’ – with its woozy guitar lines and odd structure. It’s not Stump’s best work (their mini-album Quirk Out is brilliant) but it couldn’t be further from the sound with which C86 is mostly associated.

The original C86 was meant to reflect the music of the time, not define a sound for indie rock. The jangly, ‘shambling’ sound was present in the original 22 tracks and it’s present in the 50 newly added tracks in this new edition, but it’s not the full story. Anyone with good memories of this musical period will enjoy this reissue. It’ll take you back to a more complicated time, before Spotify and YouTube, when discovering new music meant mail-ordering cassettes, trawling through fanzines, religiously listening to John Peel and making special journeys to distant indie record shops. You’ll be pleased to hear that the music has aged surprising well too. But C86 is worth listening to even if you yourself don’t go back that far. It’s a wide-ranging and entertaining collection of music, by bands you probably wouldn’t hear of anywhere else, and it’s a document of an important period in the history of alternative music that often gets overlooked.

Best of C86 Deluxe 3-CD Edition

Primal Scream – Velocity Girl
The archetypal indie-pop song. It’s all over in a minute and a half but it’s perfect. Big Flame – New Way High tempo, aggressive, crashing guitars tightly combined with machine gun drumming. Still sounds fresh. 

The Weather Prophets – Worm In My Brain
Atmospheric, slow-paced and brooding song, laced with slide guitar.

Jesse Garron & The Desperadoes – Splashing Along
An indie-pop song with jangly guitars, an insistent bass loop and vocals reminiscent of Liam Gallagher.

The Nightingales – Part Time Moral England
A raucous and shambolic tune from the excellent Nightingales. Sounds like a more abrasive version of The Fall.

That Petrol Emotion – Mine
Catchy, woozy pop song by a band formed from the remains of The Undertones.

Pigbros – Hedonist Hat
Brilliant, nightmarish, three-chord rock song built on an persistent, driving drum beat.

The Jesus & Mary Chain – Inside Me An awesome, feedback-laden noise, taken from their classic debut album, Psychocandy.

The Avons – Everything’s Going Right The Avons may be the most obscure band in this collection, which is a shame because judging by this tune they could produce really beautiful pop songs.

Mighty Mighty – Law Sounds like a terrible Morrissey impersonator backed by South African guitars, but it’s stupidly entertaining.

C86: The Deluxe Edition is out now on Cherry Red Records, and as well as being an ace record comes in some cracking packaging.  Get one in here

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Simon 4:46 pm, 7-Jul-2014

What about the NME C81? A fantastic Rough Trade collaboration that kicked off the whole series of NME cassette compilations.

Joe 8:26 pm, 9-Jul-2014

Best band were the Membranes who preceded the whole C86 scene by a few years , their track on C*6 is not their best but still a great tune.

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