"UK GARAGE, MY ARSE!" '50 Ways The Alternative Nation is Fighting Back' 13th anniversary POLL

http://www.kompaktkiste.de/cd/mag/mmbtdib0010.jpg

i wonder if noodle vagues radar is working

It's hard to believe even now how shitty melody maker was in its last few years.

43. THE YO-YO’S ROCK AND ROLL HEDONISM- The other McCormack brother flies the flag.

wtf is this

48. BLINK 182 RIPPING THE PISS OUT OF BOY BANDS IN THEIR VIDEOS- Hilarious vids, cool guys, brilliant music.

This is extraordinary stuff, it really is.

There was an ILM thread about this issue:

MM asks: "Should UK Garage be outlawed?"

Are we voting for thing we actually like or most laughable thing? Surprisingly, there are a few of the former in this list. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the latter.

Vote how your heart tells you to.

jj72 got in the charts?

They got to no.21 in 2001! Heady days.

'The Lamacq of record labels' probably is a fairly accurate way of describing Fierce Panda.

I'm completely paralysed by this list. Everything about it is brilliant.

17 FIERCE PANDA- The Lamacq of record labels, peerless A&R, indie brilliance.

lolol how could "The Lamacq of record labels" be a compliment?

Did they just release essex 3 piece pop punk bands?

haha xp

the more you read all the individual blurbs the more they all feel like display names

stated my preference but have not yet cast my vote fyi

i wonder if noodle vagues radar is working

considering i nearly facebook statused "Give me UKG or give me death" last night this was quite astute

23. TOPLOADER ON THE ROAD- Joe and the lads taking rock’n’roll chaos to the streets.

where is the Alternative Nation and can we nuke it?

it went bust xmas 2000

Ultimately I can never turn down an opportunity to vote for King Adora.

KING ADORA?

Mencap otm

hang on, THE WEIRDNESS OF 'KID A' sounds like a 70s Peter Sellers flick

Will never not vote Toploader in an ILM poll.

dear god

the king adora cover issue of MM was the first magazine I ever bought. Must have been...8?9? Heady days.

*first music magazine

there's something sweet about this broad coalition of trad beat music they tried to build, knowing that within less than a year the Alternative Nation wd savagely purge Coldplay, Travis and Toploader in a series of show trials

Bobby G making politics sexy

sorry, just noticed this one

looking for this issue online brought up this gem
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/kawaii/mansun.html

The guy impersonating Craig David on the john has a website here:

http://about.me/alistermorgan

Dear Sir...

9th August
10 days til V2000 exactly.
Also, it's wednesday so there's the whole NME/MM saga, but this week it is definitly both. Gig reviews and album reviews in both, but if you're the sort of person that can't cope with bad reviews get MM. DIE WELLS DIE IN PAIN!

prescient stuff

what the shit is this

jesus no wonder i rejected the UK music press wholesale when i was growing up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3PIIyFxCog&list=TLUNvtkjn1SLGn_Tx49vI_cq4hhbYBtRDQ

Chris Bicknell 1 year ago

My favourite band of all time. As much as I like Oasis, Blur, KUla Shaker etc etc Mansun were the GREATEST band of the nineties.

I quite liked Mansun but lol at that

jesus no wonder i rejected the UK music press wholesale when i was growing up

― lex pretend,

Lex what is really sad is that up until britpop MM was GREAT

well, white supremacist in a different way, anyhow

http://i.imgur.com/3bZUVt6.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/4CWyB3r.jpg

and not long after the final issue came
http://i.imgur.com/gAT4Eit.jpg

well, white supremacist in a different way, anyhow

― You don’t get that at your local UK Garage club (Noodle Vague),

http://everything2.com/title/Melody+Maker

OMG how have I never seen this before

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeGA7sA8HDw

NAPSTER- Music for free! Nuff said

This list is giving me so much joy.

That CD makes The Alternative Nation look like the Steve Lamacq of Neo-Nazi parties.

is that even more unforgivable than a fascist salute?

xxps

have to go with number 8 here. unless we're voting 'funniest' rather than actual best thing in the list.

"best thing"

THE CARLING WEEKEND READING AND LEEDS- The best festival ever

Hahahahahahaha

Incredible thread.

From my pov this is definitely the time I stopped reading the music press. Obviously there were other factors at play - the Internet, the fact I was over 18 etc - but until then I remember mags like select, mm, nme being genuinely fun to read. Select became dreadful in this era too - endless irrelevant Oasis front covers, it wasn't the same. I felt like I was being SOLD to for the first time. Maybe I was just older and wiser or maybe the music press just went shit. Or both, who knows..

this is probably the most amazing list i've ever read

Less Than Jake and a host of punk heroes do it for the kids. Take note, Placebo et al!

15. CHRIS McCORMACK - He’s back! Grand Theft Audio thankfully great, former 3 Colours Red hero Chris as barmy as ever.

man i was worried he wasn't as barmy as he used to be

i stopped reading the weekly music press the week my first child arrived in the world at the end of 96 (louise werner was on the cover of the nme - felt that it was a good time to break the bond).
hence i had no idea re this era of MM.
clearly i didn't miss much .

(louise werner was on the cover of the nme - felt that it was a good time to break the bond)

I remember an amazing MM issue with Wener on the cover, and three ALMOST-IDENTICAL photos of her side-by-side on the center spread, with the same hand on hips pose and light-on-gorm mouth open, just with a minutely different cast of the hips.

Obviously the photo editor was aghast at her uselessness as a subject and decided to make a subtle silent protest

8. LONDON'S TRASH CLUB- Revitalising indie clubs with style and eclecticism.

was that simon price?

Price was Stay Beautiful. I went to that once.

Grandaddy were my favourite band c.2000 + I really liked Black Box Recorder but I also owned the Brassy album.

IIRC Trash was Erol Alkan and was all electroclash + Kate Moss + 'sleazy glamour'; Stay Beautiful I don't really remember what it's 'thing' was but probably all Manics + Bowie + really obvious token northern soul record once an hour.

There's not a whole lot of Stay Beautiful/post-romo/Placebo type stuff on this list with the exception of King Adora.

Hadn't Simon Price left MM under a cloud not long before this?

Stay Beautiful #1 took place on Wed 10 Jan 2001 according to the Stay Beautiful website.

I guess ‘LITTLE KIX’ is another example of this sort of stuff that made it onto the list.

Hadn't Simon Price left MM under a cloud not long before this?

He tweeted earlier

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

Basically, MM 2000: "Enough of these black people, with their exciting and futuristic pop! We must fight back with Toploader and Travis!"

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

I left Melody Maker in 1997, with the escape route of a contract to write a Manics book. Looking at that list, I couldn't be more grateful.

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

Some of the things on that MM list are genuinely great, and don't deserve to be tarnished by association with Mark's Kampf. But the rest...

THE MUSIC WE PLAY

WE PLAY: DIRTY SLEAZY GLAM AND GLITTER ROCK // ANGSTY BOY-MUSIC AND SHOUTY GRRL-MUSIC // HI-VOLTAGE ELECTRO AND FUCKED-UP DISCO // '77 PUNK AND ALTERNATIVE ANTHEMS // …AND A FLASH DASH OF POP TRASH
Not a lot of black people on the Stay Beautiful playlist either, to be honest:

by which we mean things like...

Adam And The Ants * Babes In Toyland * Bikini Kill * Blondie * David Bowie * Kate Bush* Buzzcocks * The Cramps * The Cure * Daisy Chainsaw * The Damned * Dead Or Alive * Dresden Dolls * Duran Duran * Fischerspooner * Gogol Bordello * Goldfrapp * The Gossip * Guns N' fckn' Roses * Hedwig And The Angry Inch * Hole * Horrorpops * Huggy Bear * IAMX * Iggy Pop * Interpol * Jack Off Jill * Joan Jett * Joy Division * Kenickie * King Adora * Kiss * Kylie * Lady Gaga * Ladytron * Le Tigre * Manic Street Preachers * Marilyn Manson * Mansun * Mindless Self Indulgence * Minty * Motley Crue * New York Dolls * Nine Inch Nails * Party Monster * Peaches * Pink Grease * Pixies * Placebo * Prince * Public Image Ltd * Pulp * Queen Adreena * Rachel Stamp * Ramones * Robots In Disguise * The Rolling Stones * Roxy Music * The Runaways * Shangri-La’s * Sex Pistols * Shampoo * Siouxsie And The Banshees * Patti Smith * The Smiths * Soft Cell * Sparks * Gwen Stefani * The Stooges * Suede * The Sweet * T. Rex * T.A.T.U. * Velvet Goldmine * Patrick Wolf * Yeah Yeah Yeahs * X-Ray Spex, etc (you get the idea)

I like Simon Price though, if the 2000 era Melody Maker had chosen to base itself on that canon I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

instead it covered nu-metal

Not a lot of black people on the Stay Beautiful playlist either, to be honest:

I regretted writing that as soon as I posted it, it seems like such a crass thing to say. It just seemed odd that Price was complaining about the Sutherland era MM/that list not covering black artists when the Stay Beautiful playlist is just as white, but obvs there's a difference between a weekly music magazine and a clubnight you put on covering a particular kind of music, and Price wasn't advertising Stay Beautiful with posters of a Craig David on the bog or rhetoric about reclaiming the charts for 'our music' so it's not really the same thing. Also, I realise that white people using 'black artists' as ammunition to score points against white people is dangerous territory (not that I was trying to score points against Price, basically I'm sorry for saying stupid things is my point.

Contender for most thoughtful and self aware post ever on ILX. Suggest ban.

whatever happened to craig david anyway? lighthouse family and david grey were huge for 1 album and disappeared to (the mm alt nation stuff just disappeared)

I'm fairly sure Bo" Selecta! killed Craig David's career.

I'm voting for 46. DUM DUMS- Taking the boy bands on at their own game. And winning.

http://chartarchive.org/a/dum+dums

They really were winning with those chart positions.

yeah Bo Selecta didn't help him none.

He changed his image so he no longer resembled the puppet

What's amusing me about the Stay Beautiful playlist is that I genuinely thought it was an original early-00s playlist until I saw Lady Gaga in the middle as the one concession to the last decade.

Although if I had a bottomless pit of money and even less self-awareness (and I long every day for both) I would start my own club night with a suspiciously pre-2005 playlist with even less popular appeal than Rachel Stamp apparently have in 2013, so Price is still ahead of me there

oh man if i ran my own club night there wd be about 12 people in there but it wd be the best

That was pretty much what happened with mine.

in retrospect bo selecta was pretty shockingly explicitly racist

it certainly wasn't funny

Funnily enough circa the time of this very MM issue I was very tangentially involved with a group of people running a club night, which clutched at every micro-hype going including some of the ones on this list in a desperate bid not to get kicked out for something more profitable, and still only got 12 people through the door. So I was thinking of figures closer to the 0 mark, but yeah.

Any Brightonians know how well attended Stay Beautiful is these days? (It seems there is one on tonight but don't go just to report back. Ugh, have I been tricked into street-teaming?)

in my limited provincial experience tho (and i have no idea how things work in the bigger cities) running anything like a viable club night involves playing the same obvious demeaning shite week in week out to crowds of music-hating twats who are terrified of anything they don't know

students you mean? or "normal" people?

students probly worse but make up more of the market

I would have thought the more um "meatmarket" clubs made up most of the nightclub market.

esp in provincial towns

if you're suggesting that students and meatmarket clubs are mutually exclusive then this is very offtm, certainly in my experience

oh i wasnt

meatmarkets with different music

Oh the glory days when ILM/Freaky Trigger/Poptimism was on a mission.

there's not many meatmarket clubs per se round here, late pub opening has blurred the lines and the old school clubs are gone - maybe a couple just the other side of the river - but the few functioning nightclubs are catering to a studentish crowd on the whole. also the line between students and any young people in the 18-25 bracket is v. blurry except at the extreme end of the underclasses

on the other hand, the last time i passed thru Wakefield it was like a National Trust heritage site for the 80s

also i probably wasn't clear about the crushing repetition of the playlists - i got no ish with the pop/dance/r'n'b nights, it's the more studenty "another chance to hear the indie canon from 1980 on" shite that crushes the soul

i don't really care, i dunno why i'm dissecting this, everything is tawdry and horrible

dunno that the big cities are really that much different on that front, e.g. through unfortunate empirical research i've discovered that pretty much every indie pop club night across the country is basically the same, london just has a bunch of them. but then i don't know how much that particular kind of homogeneity is really the concern. i'd go to your club though, promise i'll bring at least two friends too.

i mean i don't suppose anyone cares about indie pop nights specifically, but rather that for the most part there are a small number of template for club nights in general and in bigger cities it's just that the number of clubs fitting each template is multiplied.

i struggle(d) to find places that were good to carry on drinking but where the music wasn't interminable was the main thing i think

that and judging people because they like things i don't

i dunno why i'm dissecting this, everything is tawdry and horrible

New board description.

my arse

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

How many MM writers pre 95 were still there in 2000?

Or had they all completely buggered off to Uncut/Mojo etc

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yesssssssssssss

UK Garage...in my arse?

50. YOU LOT 1

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