Indie rock

• 1. Introduction

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  Indie rock began its life as a legal description, not a sound. On the 15th of January 1983, a Billboard magazine writer named Roman Kozak published an article titled "Despite Hard Times, Indie Rock Labels Survive", coining the shorthand phrase to describe independent record labels thriving in New York's emerging alternative rock scene. What started as a bookkeeping category would go on to shape the sound of multiple decades, spawn a dozen subgenres, and eventually collapse the very distinction between underground and mainstream that gave it meaning.

  At its heart, indie rock posed a single stubborn question: who controls the music? Before the late 1970s, major record companies held such dominance that independent labels rarely survived. They either failed commercially or were absorbed. The shift began when Rough Trade released Inflammable Material by Stiff Little Fingers in 1979, the first independently-released album to sell over 100,000 copies and enter the UK Top 20. That one commercial breakthrough sparked major label interest in independent music and, by the decade's end, the UK indie charts had been established. A BBC documentary on Rough Trade noted that when the label started in 1976, around a dozen independent labels existed in Britain. By the decade's close, there were over 800.

  How did a distribution model become an attitude, then a sound, then a marketing term, then a genre sprawling across Dunedin, Manchester, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Sheffield? That is the story this documentary follows.

• 2. Roots and Renegades

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  Patti Smith became the first punk artist to self-release a single when she pressed her 1974 cover of "Hey Joe", with "Piss Factory" on the B-side. Television followed with "Little Johnny Jewel" in October 1975, and Pere Ubu added their own debut single in December of that same year. These artists in New York's CBGB scene were not simply playing music differently. They were building an infrastructure as they went.

  Across the Atlantic, two concerts at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on the 4th of June and the 20th of July 1976, both by the Sex Pistols, set off a chain reaction that is difficult to overstate. Tony Wilson and Alan McGee both cited those performances as inspiring their interest in British alternative music. Wilson went on to found Factory Records. McGee founded Creation Records. The bands who attended those gigs included the Smiths, Buzzcocks, the Fall and Joy Division.

  The Buzzcocks moved first. On the 29th of January 1977, their Spiral Scratch EP appeared on their own label, New Hormones. Writer Kevin Dunn's Global Punk described the EP's lasting impact: the record printed the details of the recording process, including the number of takes and overdubs, and the pressing costs right on the cover. It was a literal instruction manual. A wave of DIY releases followed across the UK, from 'O' Level to Television Personalities to Swell Maps.

  Distribution was the next problem, and it was solved by the formation of the Cartel, an association of companies including Red Rhino and Rough Trade Records, who moved releases from small labels into record shops nationwide. Stephen Malkmus would later cite this entire British DIY era as a foundational influence on Pavement.

• 3. The Dunedin Sound

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  The city of Dunedin, New Zealand, became the home of Flying Nun Records and a cluster of bands whose guitar tones would echo through indie rock for decades. The Dunedin sound stripped punk of its aggression and replaced it with reverb-heavy, pop-influenced textures; jangly and droning guitars, indistinct vocals, a mood shaped partly by opposition to Prime Minister Robert Muldoon's government.

  Chris Knox's band the Enemy was among the earliest Dunedin Sound groups, a post-punk outfit whose short-lived run nonetheless impressed the teenage musicians who attended their shows. One of those teenagers was a young Shayne Carter, who went on to form Bored Games, the DoubleHappys and Straitjacket Fits. Knox then started Toy Love, and after its breakup formed Tall Dwarfs, a band Audioculture identifies as integral to the emergence of home-recorded lo-fi indie.

  The scene's character was marked by the Clean's 1981 debut single "Tally-Ho!" and the following year's Dunedin Double EP, which featured the Chills, Sneaky Feelings, the Verlaines and the Stones. In the years after, the Dunedin sound spread from its city of origin to other New Zealand centres including Christchurch and Auckland. The influence of Flying Nun acts would eventually reach American college radio, which was one of the key transmission points for indie rock's growth.

• 4. C86 and American Underground

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  NME's C86 compilation cassette in the United Kingdom gathered tracks from groups including Primal Scream, the Pastels and the Wedding Present. Bob Stanley called it in 2006 "the beginning of indie music". The tape blended jangle pop, post-punk and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound approach, and its name became a descriptor in its own right. "C86" came to label not only the bands on the tape but those they influenced, often used alongside terms like "anorak pop" and "shambling". Some found major success: the Wedding Present charted eighteen times in the UK Top 40, and Primal Scream won the first-ever Mercury Prize in 1992.

  In the United States, the Minutemen occupied an uncomfortable position within the hardcore scene. Pitchfork noted that the first time they opened for Black Flag, the Minutemen were showered with spit from the crowd, described simply as "not that hardcore". Despite that reception, they have since been credited with providing "the life blood of indie rock for decades". Wipers took a different route, their melodic riffs and guitar leads influencing J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., helping bring guitar virtuosity back into alternative music after punk had dismissed it.

  Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Unrest began releasing music on independent labels indebted to these earlier acts and soon acquired the indie rock label themselves. Hüsker Dü and the Replacements signed to major labels in the mid-1980s, and while those albums did not replicate R.E.M.'s sales numbers and major labels soon lost interest, the records left a deep impression on younger musicians.

  Shoegaze emerged in the late 1980s as a continuation of the wall of sound approach used by the Jesus and Mary Chain, merged with influences from Dinosaur Jr. and the Cocteau Twins. My Bloody Valentine pioneered the style on their early EPs and debut album Isn't Anything. The London and Thames Valley bands who followed them into this dark and droning territory, including Chapterhouse, Moose and Lush, were collectively termed "the Scene That Celebrates Itself" by Melody Maker's Steve Sutherland in 1990.

• 5. Manchester and Stourbridge

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  The Haçienda nightclub opened in Manchester in May 1982 as a Factory Records initiative, initially hosting pop acts and performances by New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, Culture Club, Thompson Twins and the Smiths. By 1989, a scene was forming around it that blurred the line between indie rock, dance music and rave culture. The Madchester movement centred on the Happy Mondays' second album Bummed and the Stone Roses' self-titled debut, the latter becoming the most influential work of the scene.

  Madchester's most infamous single event was the Spike Island concert on the 27th of May 1990, headlined by the Stone Roses. Around 28,000 people attended an event lasting twelve hours. It was the first of its size and kind to be hosted by an independent act.

  In Stourbridge, a different scene took shape under the grebo label. Pop Will Eat Itself's 1989 singles "Wise Up! Sucker" and "Can U Dig It?" both entered the UK Top 40, and Stourbridge briefly became a tourist attraction for young indie rock fans. The scene's defining albums arrived between 1989 and 1993, from acts including the Wonder Stuff, Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Pop Will Eat Itself, all of whom sold millions of records and appeared on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. A younger wave of bands labelled "fraggle" emerged around 1991, their sound indebted to punk and Nirvana's album Bleach while occasionally using drum machines. Senseless Things, Mega City Four and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine were the prominent acts in this grouping.

• 6. Grunge, Britpop, and the Split

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  Roy Shuker's book Popular Music: The Key Concepts describes grunge as representing "the mainstreaming of the North American indie rock ethic and style of the 1980s", explaining that a band's independent status became as much a marketing device as an identifiable sound. The commercial success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains in the early 1990s pulled the term "alternative rock" toward them, leaving "indie rock" to describe the artists who remained underground and experimental.

  Pavement's 1992 album Slanted and Enchanted became one of the defining works of slacker rock. Rolling Stone called it "the quintessential indie rock album" and placed it on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Spin writer Charles Aaron described Pavement and Guided by Voices as "the two bands that came to exemplify indie rock in this period, and still define the term in many people's minds". Galaxie 500, particularly their second album On Fire from 1989, were described by Bandcamp Daily writer Robert Rubsam as the "fountainhead for all that would come" in slowcore.

  Britpop arrived in the UK as a counterpoint to grunge, though journalist John Harris suggested it started in the spring of 1992 when Blur's fourth single "Popscene" and Suede's debut single "The Drowners" appeared around the same time. Suede's self-titled debut album, released on the 29th of March 1993, became the fastest-selling debut album in British music history at the time. Politician and academic Rupa Huq wrote that Britpop "began as an offshoot of the independent British music scene but arguably ended up killing it", stripping away the protest element that had defined the independent tradition. Radiohead's third album OK Computer in 1997 and the Verve's Urban Hymns the same year pointed toward a different exit from the Britpop moment, one that proved more durable.

• 7. The Strokes, the Libertines, and After

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  The Strokes released Is This It in 2001 with the stated intention of sounding "like a band from the past that took a time trip into the future to make their record." The album peaked at number thirty-three in the United States, staying in the charts for two additional years, and debuted at number two on the UK albums chart. Rolling Stone declared on its September 2002 cover that "Rock is Back!"

  The Libertines, who had formed in 1997, provided the UK's answer. AllMusic described them as "one of the U.K.'s most influential 21st century acts", and The Independent noted that "the Libertines wanted to be an important band, but they could not have predicted the impact they would have". Arctic Monkeys, emerging from Sheffield in their wake, became one of the earliest groups to owe their initial commercial success to Internet social networking. Their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not became the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history, and they recorded two number one singles.

  The Killers formed in Las Vegas in 2001 after hearing Is This It, and scrapped most of their existing material to rewrite it under the Strokes' influence. Their single "Mr. Brightside" spent 260 non-consecutive weeks on the UK Singles Chart as of April 2021, the most of any song. It charted in eleven of the thirteen years leading up to that point and remained the UK's most streamed pre-2010 song until late 2018.

  The major label rush for indie rock artists that followed the Arctic Monkeys' success produced what the Word magazine's Andrew Harrison named "landfill indie", a term for the more formulaic derivative acts who arrived in the years after. A 2009 Guardian article by journalist Peter Robinson declared the movement dead, citing the Wombats, Scouting For Girls and Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong as the acts that finished it off.

  Arctic Monkeys' fifth album AM in 2013 charted at number one on the UK Albums Chart after selling 157,329 copies in its first week, making it the second fastest-selling album of that year. The band became the first independent-label act to debut at number one in the UK with their first five albums. As of the 14th of April 2023, every track from AM held at least a silver certification from the BPI, with "Mad Sounds" the last to achieve it.