For that headline, I can only apologise. Moving swiftly along…

One of my favourite singles of 2008 is Gabriella Cilmi’s “Sweet About Me“, which on first listen might have sounded like just another post-Winehouse piece of whimsy, but with repeated listens it reveals itself to be what a musicologist might call an “earworm”. Her album is co-written and produced by Xenomania and her next single is a Saint Etienne co-write. Pop is in good hands so there is good cause to be happy. This contentment with the healthy state of pop - something I might otherwise lie awake at night worrying about - was interrupted slightly when I perused the latest issue of Hot Press. The contents page of the current issue introduces the Aussie popster thus: “She has more in common with Nina Simone or Janis Joplin than any of this year’s production line pop moppets. Thank God for her parents’ record collection.” Now while I have a lot of time for old Nina, I must say that to mine ears Janis Joplin has always sounded like a gravel-gargling, caterwauling bag-lady. Taste is such a subjective thing, eh? But leaving aside the rock snobbery implicit in the Hot Press quote - and it’s difficult to leave aside because it gets my goat let me tell you - what is this about “this year’s production-line pop moppets”? Surely in 2008, it is production line indie which plagues us. Westlife are not the enemy any more. The Enemy are.

(”What’s this shit?” - Andrew Collins) Scouting For Girls “She’s So Lovely”

Today’s Independent On Sunday has a great article on this point, so I thought I’d alert Analogue readers to it now in case they want to nip around to the shops before closing time to buy themselves a copy. It’s the cover feature of the New Review section which grabbed my attention - a parody of the Conservative Party’s 1979 “Labour Isn’t Working” election campaign posters. Here the dole queue has been replaced by a series of current-day indie musicians queuing for a band audition. Tim Walker’s article also mulls over the current state of the NME, features good insights from Simon Reynolds and Andrew Collins, and contains a sort of quiz where the reader is invited to identify a bunch of “landfill indie” bands. It is easy to sneer at the utterly pedestrian so-called indie scene these days what with all of the generic music it produces, all of those generic band names…they might as well be called The Thises, The Thats or The Others (oh hang on, they do exist…). But at heart what is at issue here is the freeing up of youth imagination. The suggestion that the guitar pop of 2008 is so mired because the musicians and songwriters involved grew up with the fag-end britpop - Shed Seven, Sleeper and Gene - is persuasive. If there is a genuine spirit of independent music at the moment, perhaps it is to be found in the genre-hopping gender bending torch pop of Antony and the Johnsons, or the global pop of M.I.A. or the psychedelic disco of MGMT. All of those acts are fairly close to the mainstream though. A cursory glance at this week’s Independent Singles Chart makes it feel like a lifetime has passed since the days when you could see videos by Nurse With Wound, Half Man Half Biscuit and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel on The Chart Show.

Ciaran Gaynor is a pop fan from Dublin.
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