All The New Indie Bands Are Basically Old Indie Bands In Disguise

They say that cultural trends come in roughly 20 year cycles, which would go some way to explaining why you can barely move for bands who sound like Now That’s What I Call…The 90s and venues full of girls dressed like Angela Chase in My So Called Life at the moment. But the recycle rate for band members is, thank god, a lot shorter (let’s face it, no-one needs to see the bassist from Menswe@r cropping up on an EDM track anytime soon).

Take a casual browse through the buzz bands currently fighting it out for that coveted down page live review in the NME and you’ll see a host of slightly-more-haggard-yet-vaguely-familiar faces among them. They are the class of the mid 2000s and they’re staging the medium-sized indie reunion of their own, except instead of getting Andi Peters to narrate us through their high and lows on a gaudy ITV2 show, they’re standing at the back of press shots, quietly hoping that no one remembers the time they went on tour with Razorlight and got quoted saying Borrell had taught them everything they know.

The Fat White Family/ The Metros

THEN: Who’s that little tinker with no teeth? Why, it’s Saul Adamczewski, former singer of The Metros! For those who didn’t spend a large portion of 2007 searching on MySpace for ‘bands that sound a bit like Jamie T’, The Metros were a band that sounded a bit like Jamie T and had videos featuring themselves running away from things, presumably to give the impression that they were a jack the lad bunch of cheeky young scallies who did kerazy stuff like nicking a Snickers bar from a newsagent and not even feeling bad about it. They also appeared on short-lived TV show Lily Allen and Friends.

NOW: Well, it’s not so much that being in The Metros makes Saul’s new vocation as a member of gutter-dwelling, genuinely-please-don’t-stand-so-close-to-my-children, fans of The Fall, The Fat White Family any less believable. It’s more that these two pictures are basically the before and after music industry equivalent of the dude with no throat left on the back of cigarette packets that warns you against smoking.

Skaters/ The Paddingtons

THEN: Back when Nambucca was the centre of indie and all you needed to make it was a leather jacket, half a pack of B&H and a vague affiliation with Carl Barat, there were The Paddingtons - a band so embroiled in the spit’n’sawdust, rock’n’roll clichés of working class Britain that their album may as well have come with a scratch n’ sniff cover that smelt of Carling, ashtrays and unsatisfying one night stands.

NOW: Guitarist Josh Hubbard now makes up one quartet of Skaters, whose entire schtick seems to be based on monogrammed baseball caps, pizza, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and aesthetically ripping off FIDLAR. Dude, no matter how many times you say “rad”, we know you’re from Hull.

TOY/ Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong

THEN: The original awkward reinvention of the current indie crop. Tom, Dom and Panda used to form three quarters of the Jing Jang Jong – the largely mute foils for frontman Joe Lean’s Borrell-worthy posturing and a band saved from their own white-trousers-and-‘Slipway-Fires’ destiny by the fact that their debut got scrapped even though it was already completely finished and had been sent to reviewers. Awkward.

NOW: Yeah, so it was kinda funny for a bit that the former band mates of Sophie’s brother on Peep Show then went on to form a moodier than thou group of krautrock devotees. But tbh, you get the feeling that the JJJ boys weren’t exactly the driving force behind their old band and, well, TOY are just really good, aren’t they?

September Girls/ The Chalets

THEN:For some reason, despite the fact that the two singers were nicknamed PeePee and Pony and looked like extras from a 50s episode of Blue Peter, I always used to feel a bit awkward playing The Chalets’ album around my mum. Maybe it’s because they had voices like Warner Bros cartoon characters but sang songs about shagging. Maybe I was just a weird teenager. Who knows.

NOW: PeePee and Pony have resorted to their birth names of Paula and Caoimhe, lowered their vocal registers by several octaves and are two fifths of garage pop buzz band September Girls. September Girls sound a bit like Dum Dum Girls raised on My Bloody Valentine. They don’t sing many songs about shagging. You can come back now, mum.

Teleman/ Pete & The Pirates

THEN: "All In My Head" by Good Shoes; "Edwould" by Larrikin Love; Panic at the Roxy on a Tuesday; "22 Grand Job" by The Rakes; Candybox at Moonlighting on a Thursday (£1 for a single and mixer); "How It All Went Wrong" by Les Incompétents; "House Of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture; Frog at the Astoria on a Saturday. If any of this makes you feel old and past it and nearly dead, then you’ll probably also have a soft spot for Pete & The Pirates (esp ‘Mr. Understanding’). RIP youth.

NOW: Three ex-Pirates then went on to form Teleman who, instead of soundtracking drunken fumbles at 3am round the back of Tottenham Court Road, decided to sound like alt-J without the weirdly skewed libidos. Maintaining some probably quite depressing thread of continuity from their former escapades, however, Teleman are still spending the majority of their days supporting Maximo Park and Franz Ferdinand.

Albert Albert/ Kaiser Chiefs + Black Wire + Howling Bells

THEN: It may be hard to imagine now that their singer heads up a dribbling Saturday night singing contest and their main songwriter got bored and left, but there was a period around March 2005 when the Kaiser Chiefs were actually quite cool. Also around at that time were Black Wire, a bunch of riotous post punk fans who chose the burn out rather than the fade away option. A few years later came Howling Bells from Australia, headed up by mega girl crush-inducing babe Juanita Stein.

NOW: Indie bands unite! Picking up stray musicians like a metal detector targeted to track down Morrissey fans, newbie band Albert Albert is either a kind of low level indie supergroup or a group therapy session for people abandoned by the NME depending on which way you look at it. Expect the drummer from The Rakes and two of The Spinto Band to join the ranks at any moment.

Follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaAnneWright

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