Indie Schmindie. I've realised with time that I am essentially an Indie person and my tastes both musical and in terms of my general lifestyle preferences and choices are Indie. I'm far from being alone. Perhaps I should get a T Shirt. .
When I was coming of age in the 1980s things were simpler than they are now. You just liked whatever you liked and nobody seemed particularly bothered about putting everything and everybody into categories. There were categories of course, Goths, Punks etc but I was never particularly anything and many people I grew up weren't either.
Labelling everything, putting them in a jar and preferably in a list seems to gather apace. I've had conversations with record shop owners who have kids coming in with lists of records they need to own in some act of assembly of sensibility. A Smiths album, a Pavement one, a Beastie Boys record, a Tupac one.
That strikes me as compiling a record collection and constructing a personality to go along with it in a rather self- conscious fashion. In contrast with my adolescent fumblings in the early Eighties. Haunting libraries. Reading Fitgerald, Camus but also Agatha Christie, Buying all of The Doors studios albums in a few months when I got my first Saturday job. Then finding my way towards key R.E.M, Go Betweens and Velvet Underground albums. Of course I'm fully aware that I'm taking a 'things weren't that way in my day' approach. But isn't that just what you start to do at a certain point in life.
There's something about this compulsive and slightly relentless listing impulse that increasingly reminds me of the Terrence Stamp character in The Collector. A story about a butterfly collector who decides to collect young women instead, and one day abducts a beautiful young women and imprisons her in his cellar. A wonderful if slightly ghoulish film adptation was made of a wonderful if slightly ghoulish novel by John Fowles which I read and liked as a teenager. Morrissey of course loved the book and the film. He has since become a slightly ghoulish figure himself.
Since the millennium everything has become stratified. Channel Four has programmes about 1973 where people like Stuart Maconie decide and proclaim that the great thing about the year was Curley Wurlies or Space Hoppers rather than being alive. Ir seems a rather strange way to look at our your childhood. But the past is a foreign country as they say.
Anyway. Ir's 2024 and if I say I'm Indie you will understand broadly what I mean. I like The Velvet Underground and Audrey Hepburn. J.D.Salinger. I like French and Italian Films. I like Truffaut and Fellini. I prefer old football to modern football.
Which brings me belatedly to the record this post is for. Cults. Cults, are essentially a duo, Formed in New York City in 2010. They make Indie music in the purest sense of the word.. Theirs nods its head to Saint Etienne and Belle & Sebastian and on latest record To The Ghosts they don't break any of Indie's cardinal rules. They play to the rules. I liked this. If you are a bit Indie like me, you might like it too.
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