After the void of Britpop had horrifically let in the nu-metal regime at the turn of the millennium, it took an American band to show the Brits how to play their own game. The Strokes were both a blessing and a disaster for British music - it reinvented intelligent guitar music but at the same time slammed the Brits for letting themselves get in such a mess that the resurrection had to be pre-empted across the pond.
The response was swift, however, as 2002 acted as the bedding ground for a new wave of British guitar music that would act as the foundation for the indie explosion we're still experiencing. When The Libertines released Up the Bracket in October 2002, the album may have skimmed the lower end of the top 40, but more significantly, it ushered in a new literary era of British guitar music. The Coral soon followed, Placebo struck success with Sleeping with Ghosts and then Athlete arrived.
Listening back to Vehicles and Animals four years on is a joy. It is an utterly superb album; wistful melancholy that exuded euphoria. You only had to witness them at the V festival that year to gauge just how much impact their debut album had been. Yeah, so some of the lyrics weren't exactly challenging - "fly to El Salvador; I don't know why and I don't know what for" but it didn't matter. The Brits were back on top. And Athlete were serious contenders to be one of those at the front of the pack with Pete & Carl.
In the same whirlwind in which it came it almost unravelled itself. The Libs twisted tore their love apart at the height of their popularity, and even a number one album couldn't help that in September 2004. In fact, The Libertines was harrowing in some points. We delved into a conversation between two embattled friends that we really perhaps shouldn't have. And then there was Athlete, whose February 2005 album Tourist was a retreat further into the mist of despair, and the end result was a number one album, but a drastic decline in form.
The Brits had fought back against their American counterparts, despite heavyweight competition from Foo Fighters and Green Day. And within a year of doing so, it was back on the precipice. The Killers were lurking with Mr Brightside and White Stripes were always ready to take the initiative. And so the Brits looked desperately sideways, backwards, upwards, downwards and dug out Kaiser Chiefs, The Futureheads and Bloc Party. Saved, again.
From the uncertainty of appeal surrounding British guitar music after the public, painful explosion of The Libertines' Arcadian dream - uncertainty which unfairly claimed the record contracts of Dogs and The Paddingtons, there was salvation. Since then, British music has been unchecked in a meteoric rise. Yes, American indie still breaks through but it's struggled especially after Arctic Monkeys blew all preconceptions out of the water. It's not even the mainstream that needs appraisal... the undercurrent of British indie bands is very strong at present - The Rifles, Milburn, The Holloways, The Maccabees.
The danger now is the saturation of guitar bands. Of course, musical epochs move in cycles, and one suspects the British 'indie' revival since 2003 is not going to last forever. Even now it seems to be moving towards (or should that be back) to the rave culture of the early 1990s. Whether Klaxons, Hadouken!, et al can extract enough from the new rave movement to create the new world order remains to be seen, but even they owe much to the past four years, and must not be forgotten that when two likely lads from Bethnal Green decided to take up the challenge, it opened the floodgates to surround us with the talent that we enjoy today.
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2 comments:
It sickens me to my very stomach that you bolsteringly refer to Placebo in the same sentence as The Coral and Athelete.
Now I admit that I enjoy dancing around to The Coral as much as the next person, jazz hands and all. And yes, Athelete have an important role to play, namely at British summer BBQs, but to say that Placebo's success was spawned alongside theirs thanks to the likes of The Strokes is a heinous error, my friend.
Placebo have been kicking around for many, many years; long before CDs became the norm there they were, struggling to make their unique (then) genre defying sound heard. They most certainly had a substantial 'underground' following, and with the release of 'Without You I'm Nothing' they really started to get noticed by the industry bigwigs and were privy to some precious Kerrang column inches.
I agree, that with 'Sleeping With Ghosts' came an element of success in the mainstream market, but to compare this with The Coral and Athelete's flash in the pan indie and britpop charm is nothing more than an insult to their years of creativity and hard graft, the likes of which the alleged 'creators' of their success, The Strokes, know not.
Just my two cents :P x
I was getting at the point that Placebo reached a higher degree of commercial success during the period, to illustrate it had perhaps been a bit more accessible thanks to guitar music's resurgence.
I, of course, acknowledge their longevity. But it can be argued in the same vein that the Manics' took six years to get a commercially successful album thanks in part to Britpop. Similarly Pulp.
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