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Within months, C86 would become infamous and still sparks debate today. At the time, the mixtape was emblematic of the publication’s warring factions at the time: the indie-rock writers vs ...
C-86. In 1986, the British music weekly NME issued a cassette dubbed C-86, which included a number of bands -- McCarthy, the Wedding Present, Primal Scream, the Pastels, and the Bodines among them -- influenced in equal measure by the jangly guitar pop of the Smiths, the three-chord naivete of the Ramones, and the nostalgic sweetness of the ...
Mar 9, 2011 · C86 And All That: The 25th Anniversary. Jim Keoghan explains why the C86 cassette compilation has a far more important legacy in independent music than just giving rise to jangly indie-pop. As soon as a jingly-jangly indie band appears today, the C86 tag isn’t far behind. And yet, this wasn’t always the case.
- The Story of C86
- “The Most Indie Thing That Ever Existed”
- Criticism of C86
- The Beginning of Indie
The story of C86 begins in 1981 with the C81 tape. Released by mail order, it was a showcase of bands recently signed to the Rough Trade label rather than a thorough compilation. Despite the tracks coming from only one record label, its sound was far more varied than C86, ranging from experimental jazz to ska. The joint venture was a success regard...
‘Pop’ was an appropriate label for the compilation. The whole point of C86 was a rejection of rock, at the time inundated with over-commercial pop rock, synth infected new wave and Americanised glam metal. According to Chris Nickson, C86 represented ‘a concerted move away from a testosterone-fuelled sound which had been such a vital part of rock mu...
One of the prolonged criticisms of C86 was that it gave birth to a wave of indie pop bands defined by twee, superficial lyrics with little opinion on anything other than how the frontman can’t get a girlfriend. It’s a criticism of alternative music that has continued to this day. Many of the groups were distinctly political. For example, McCarthywe...
The most striking aspect of the tape is that its influence didn’t stop at the bands it helped launch, nor even the bands of the 80s and 90s who were influenced by it. Even to this day, the indie scene contains influence from C86. Just look at bands such as The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and The 1975 (listen to one of this year’s singles, ‘Me & You To...
Aug 11, 2022 · The mail-order tape, which cost £2.95, was called C86 (short for the class of 1986) and it ended up being far more important than the list of bands featured would suggest. While a few of them ...
Apr 29, 2022 · Sometimes conflated with soundalike sub-genre ‘jangle-pop’, C86 was the term given to a particular brand of introspective, lo-fi, Byrds-influenced indie power-pop. The name derived from a cassette tape given away with a May 1986 issue of the NME. A belated follow-up to their C81 comp from five years previous, C86 was somewhat narrower in ...
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Jan 22, 2021 · This year it’s been 35 years since British magazine New Musical Express gave away the freebie tape C86 to its readers, as a round-up of what was going on in independent music in the country.
