My love of Indie Music

I absolutely love Indie music, always have and kind of think I always will.  When I was at college I worked for Our Price and I can without a doubt say it was my favourite job to date.  

Indie Music makes most people think of Ian Brown and Stone Roses. 

The genre of indie can be defined as a music publishing model and it is a style of music with a certain sound.

‘Indie’ was originally simply the shortened form of ‘independent’ and was used to describe bands who were independent of any major record label. These were bands who were signed to small start-up labels or who for one reason or another chose to publish their own music without using a label at all - Buzzcocks EP in 1977.  For a band to be considered ‘indie’ they need to have emerged no earlier than the late 70s or early 80s.

In the 1990s indie music made the transition from ‘alternative’ to mainstream. 

In the UK this change was, in part, a backlash against the massive success of American grunge acts in the early 90s - chief among these being Nirvana. The UK media created ‘Britpop’ - primarily as a marketing device. Nirvana had shown the majors that people were willing to buy ‘alternative’ music by the truckload and the majors wanted a piece of that action.
‘Indie’ means being angry, ironic and amused. It means not doing as you’re told and not fitting in. Indie means eschewing ‘cool’ whilst knowing that being an outsider is the coolest thing of all.  This is music for misfits, by misfits and it’s about misfits.
Indie music is usually guitar driven, it is underpinned by swirling, melodic, rhythmic electric guitar and power-pop verse-chorus-verse structures.

My favourites have to be Radiohead, The Strokes, The Manic Street Preachers, The Wonderstuff, The Arctic Monkeys, Belle and Sebastian, The Stereophonics, Suede,  The Killers, REM, The Vaccines - oh my, so much beautiful noise.