TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 21: Landfill Indie feat. Fred Macpherson and Oscar Rickett

Episode Date: October 29, 2022

This week we explore the phenomenon of 2000s Indie Rock (and the endless succession of bands that seemed to go nowhere) with two long-suffering veterans of the scene: Fred Macpherson (of the bands Spector, Les Incompétents, and and Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man) and music journalist Oscar Rickett. It's a lot of bad memories but it wouldn't be Britainology if we didn't dredge them up! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes (to include more Britainology), early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *BRITAINOLOGY ALERT* We’ve added a live show in Melbourne on the 19th of November in which Nate and Milo will present Britainology! Get tickets here: https://tccinc.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/79853 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of Britannology. I'm Michael Edwards. I'm joined by my co-host, Nate Bethay. Hello. Once again, lovely day, getting not rained on and not being cold for the first time in a long time in August because I've just embraced it. This is what summer is like in the United Kingdom. Yeah. I drove it with the roof down this morning after I pulled a muscle in my neck playing squash. So just reminding myself that I am aging, that death is coming for us all. You know, there was a time when this didn't happen to me.

And this week, we are discussing a topic that did the hearts of many listeners and probably completely not an anathema to our American listeners. It's indie landfill or landfill indie, depending on which way round you think that phrase should go. And we are joined by two experts in this field, the field of the mid-2000s. I don't know if I'd use the word experts. Victims, maybe. Victims. Okay. Yeah. This is like a group therapy session for the victims of the mid-2000s. We are joined by Oscar Ricker and Fred, whose surname I was never told. I'm Mac Furson.

Fred Mac Furson. There you go. Hello. Welcome. Hi. Great to be back. It's great to be here for the first time. I've heard great things about this podcast, but I have yet to get around to listening to it. No worries. That's the best way, I think. I listened to a bit of your episode about the mound, the marble arch mound on the way,

on the way, and that got me hyped. All right. Cool. Yeah. We spun this out because our show did start to get an American audience, and obviously, me being American, there are a lot of things that I have to ask Milo. Like, what the fuck is this? Like, what the fuck is a carry-on film? And so Milo had the idea of like, I'm just going to make Nate suffer through learning about niche British things. And thus, this sort of spin-out part of Trash Future was born.

And so we're going to talk about Indy in the early 2000s or mid-2000s. It's been a real smorgasbord so far. We've done carry-on, we've done dogging. As in, we have discussed it. We didn't go dogging. But it wasn't like Gonzo journalism. We're not vice magazine. It's not like... We're not going to bring you in here and make you start a band on this episode. I wouldn't put it beyond Fred, though. It's funny that you mentioned we're doing something that we're kind of explaining it back to

Americans or English people who are lucky enough to not engage in it. I think it's one of the, you know, how kind of discourse or criticism catches up with culture over the years. So Americans might have read lots of books about punk or 80s, you know, synth music or bands from that era or Britpop. And we've read lots about American stuff through the 70s, 80s, 90s. This is kind of the last or first bit that's just on the brink of being something that's actually talked about as an actual thing. And I think people are still kind of forming the ways of understanding it. With America, you mentioned, just before we start recording,

they'll meet me in the bathroom book, which is great and kind of enshrines a relatively recent period with a lot of... It makes you feel like it was a real thing that actually happened. A booklet, if it was in the UK, could have been about dogging. Well, Indy is a bit like dogging in a way. I think we're full Indy as much. Like no one wants to say they were there, but at the time everyone was really enjoying it, gathering in relatively clandestine ways to kind of exercise themselves of something. And the cycles of nostalgia that we have in our culture,

that much shorter now. I mean, maybe this is my unwillingness to accept the passage of time, but of course, I am a casualty of the early to mid-noughties. And so, and actually, as me and Fred were talking about before we came on here, it's 20 years ago, almost to this week that The Strokes This Is It album came out. And it was that's probably... It inspired a summer bin Laden too. No, hilariously, hilariously, hilariously. I don't think it came out early in the UK. It was supposed to come out if I'm not mistaken right after September 11th,

but they had to pull it because America went through this really weird... I was there, I was 16 when this happened. It went through this really weird kind of mockish. We can't be transgressive. We can't be challenging phase. So the two problems were... A phase that it's still very much in. Yeah, in a much more armed and psychotic way. But yeah, it was really mockish and really, really like prudish. And The Strokes, the original cover of Is This It was a really high contrast black and white photo of a woman's ass and a leather glove. And they're like, nope, no, we're conservative now.

And there was a song called New York City Cops where the chorus is New York City Cops, they ain't too smart. And so with everyone's grandma buying NYPD and FDNY sweatshirts after 9-11, they're like, no, this can't fucking happen. So they pulled the album and they put it out in, I think, October with like a completely different cover and a different song. Yeah, when it started with this song. And New York City Cops is so much better of a song. 100%. Let's remember being like, why the fuck being angsty 16-year-old?

And certainly when they were touring Britain in that time, it was... New York City Cops was one of the big... I mean, that was always a big moment in the set. It's one of the best songs. And actually looking back to that era, not that I know much about New York at the turn of the century, other than my fantasy kind of strokes, wank bank that was plastered across my wall at the time. If anything, that would have been an even greater moment had it been allowed to happen. It probably made it cooler that there was this song that wasn't allowed to be on there. Yeah. I mean, also it's just weird because it was so much... I mean, to not open up a huge parentheses

about 9-11, but so much about America's reaction to 9-11 had nothing to do with New Yorkers and how New Yorkers felt. It was about how everyone who'd never been to New York or who fucking hates New York and thinks of it as like this den of sin and vice felt about what happened there. And so like, yeah, that wasn't done for the benefit of New Yorkers who might be offended. It was done for the benefit of the same people who would have gotten mad that the Kooz album party music was supposed to come out on September 11th and the cover was then blowing up the World Street Center. I was just thinking, yeah, there's quite a contrast between the Kooz Boots Riley, the Kooz album, which was... Yeah, which was...

But didn't he stick to his guns and didn't that album come out? Did eventually, yes. It exploded. It was Boots Riley and I can't remember his bandmate, and he's pushing the button on a remote detonator and behind him the World Street Center is exploding. But I mean, it's funny because I was doing this... I mean, I didn't expect to be incorporating this material into this show, but I was doing a story about Donald Rumsfeld after he died, and I spoke to various people who had worked with him who were basically like kind of confirmed and talking about what we sort of all know, which is like the invasion of Afghanistan in Iraq was essentially an hysterical, wounded reaction to 9-11. So, I mean, if that's going

to happen, then you can bet that the strokes are taking New York City cops off their album. And there was a lot of talk about Metallica or whoever being played in Guantanamo Bay as part of torture processes, but had they had access to a couple of Razorlight or Koox albums. That's actually against the Geneva Convention. Oh, my life watching America. Yeah, that's right. If you each try sticking the Klaxons on, and then people are going to get really mad down in Guantanamo Bay. So, I got to ask then, like if you were, to me, when I think of early 2000s to mid 2000s, music like indie, if you want to call it, that this is, as I recall, mostly major label stuff or like mid-tier label stuff in America. The Strokes is a huge one.

And then I think of Yeah, Yeah, Yes. I think of TV on the radio, subsequently LCD sound system. With rock bands, you also have some things from overseas that were popular. But I was trying to ask you guys, what would be that sort of like, when you talk about landfill indie, which bands are like that equivalent here? Well, I think landfill indie is usually used to refer to the bands who were the kind of also-rands who had less cultural resonance, but ended up filling the shelves as labels rushed out to sign the kind of supporting cast. Bands that when you mention them now, people go, Oh, yeah, fuck. Like that. That was the reaction. And my impression was also that there's this phenomenon in British music journalism,

particularly with outlets like the NME, that like literally any band that has a single is the band that is going to save rock and roll. And that this was a phenomenon back then. And so there was so much hype behind it that it- Yeah, sorry to interrupt. I think this was also music journalism in the UK and almost its final form, entering its final form. The last era of NME is something that could actually sell and people would buy. I mean, I remember buying a copy while I was still at school that came with loads of stickers that it became a pop cultural moment where indie boy fans and girl fans were almost treating it like just 17 or one of these kind of teen vaccines where it informed so much more than just what you were listening to, but how you're

doing your hair or what clothes you were buying. And it was one of the last moments, at least for guitar music, where all the stars align to actually affect culture beyond its kind of- I think to sort of, we sort of set out this kind of differentiation between America and Britain on this. When you talk about bands like The Strokes and TV on the radio, there was and is, as there always has been in popular music, a kind of ongoing conversation between America and the UK. And there was a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of the first wave, 21st century indie bands from Britain were very recognizably in conversation with bands like The Strokes and Interpol. And bands that kind of came out of that scene. And that's all stuff that we would probably

consider to be pre-landfill. The Strokes album comes out in 2001. The Libertines are not that far after that. The Libertines are the sort of probably now we would consider the big British answer to or equivalent of The Strokes. Yeah, although in reality, in terms of the long, when you zoom out, it's probably more realistically the Arty Monkeys in terms of actually becoming global phenomenon. And I found today when I was on the way over, I googled, I was like, how many albums of The Strokes actually sold? And allegedly, according to Wikipedia, up to 2020, it was about five million albums worldwide. Whereas the Arty Monkeys have sold 20 million albums worldwide. So in reality, you go on to become an even bigger commercial global force

than any indie band other than, say, The Killers and Kings of Leon, who then went on to be stuff that my mum would still probably listen to this day. Because the Arty Monkeys have really bridged that generational gap from a band that I think people have like our generation-ish liked, to being a band that teenagers are into now and are unaware that they were big 15 years ago. Whereas I imagine the Libertines have probably sold, not that it's about record sales, obviously. Indie is originally short for independent music. Although actually, it's worth noting the Arty Monkeys are a band who did this on an independent label. The Strokes were signed to Raftrade in the UK, which is indie, but RCA,

I think, in America. So it wasn't quite pure indie in terms of how it was disseminated. There was still that. The first indie record in the United Kingdom is Nic Lowe in 1976 on Stiff. If it ain't Stiff, it ain't worth a fuck. That's Oscar's personal catchphrase. That song is a great song. So it goes. It's a great song. It's basically a rip-off of The Boys are Back in Town. It's a great song, but it's so close, isn't it? It's very derivative. So it's been like... That was the landfill answer to the pure, real culture of Boys are Back in Town. So maybe it was landfill from day one. I mean, hey, Nic, you got a lot to answer for. I was saying to Fred,

like, so I was 18 in 2001, and I was going to university. I went to university in Leeds just after 9-11. And Leeds was exactly the same. Unruffled. No one was affected. I remember there was a bad thunderstorm once in one of our... Which was shaking the lecture theatre, and everyone freaked out and thought that we were being attacked. And then some guys... And I remember thinking at the time, I remember thinking, well, if we're attacking Leeds, they've probably already got London, and I guess maybe my family's dead. And then some guys... I remember some guys coming up to me in the street and being like, Osama bin Laden, me. Osama bin Laden, 9-11. Just like keying up in my... As if this was

as if this was going to be meted out. This actually happened to you recently. Nothing long ago. I was running an errand in Whitechapel, and there were these kids, probably about 13 or 14, and they were coming out of school, and they saw me locking my bike up. And the kid asked me, and I'm not going to try to approximate his accent, but like extremely East London Bengali accent, like, hey, man, you know my friend, and he holds up a picture of Osama bin Laden? And I was just like... Yeah, I mean, what I basically... My default response to situations like that is to speak as American-ly as possible and be like, I have no idea what the fuck you just said. But yeah, I was just taking it back. But our boys got him? Yeah, something to that effect.

But I was just basically like... You can speak upon the martyr. That's what's going to freak them out the most. I didn't. But the sort of... Because it's sort of like indie before landfill, indie was, I mean, sort of genuinely... There was always that conversation, you know, which was particularly, particularly happened in America with Grunge about selling out and what labels you're on. And I mean, that was very much still a kind of present and ongoing conversation in our generation, although it was sort of more and more common as there came less and less money in independent music. It was more and more common for bands to just be on major labels and to have their songs used in adverts and stuff like that. But it was definitely still, like I remember a lot

of agonizing among friends and bands about whether they were going to sign... Everyone kind of wanted to sign to domino or to rough trade because they were the independent labels that had a bit of clout and had a bit of money. There was a lot of like... And history. And history. And there was a lot of like, you know, I'm not taking this major label deal, I'm going to do... Which to me, like, I look back on with a lot of fondness because it's like... Because I don't know. I mean, it feels like you would want to live in a culture where selling out is a thing and it means something. It's also worth noting that we're talking obviously very seriously about something that in essence was very dumb and very fun and kind of as tempting as it is to analyze it, to blithery.

In reality, it was what most music genres always are, which is young people trying to, you know, get laid and get attention and drink alcohol and do drugs and etc. etc. Podcasting of its day. There are times when I ask myself with the stuff that we do with our show, especially when we do live shows, I'm just sort of like, is this what being in a band is like? Because I mean, like I said, I was in a, in like a misfits cover band when I was in high school, but that was it. I didn't like, we toured or anything. But for TF, we've gone, played shows around the country and stuff like

that. And there's times when I'm like, is this what it was like being in an indie band? I have no idea. The red scare is the strokes. It was funny because I was thinking about this. Yeah. So like, we're talking about a landfill indie. Well, you were, you were mentioning, I realized now that when I mentioned New York bands from the other 2000s, I totally forgot about Interpol. And one thing that was funny, I think, was that there's a lot of this stuff talking about it sort of being like, I think that includes Interpol having them like,

but not New York City cops. Crucially not. It came out. It was funny because, I'll be honest with you, their first album was Turn on the Bright Lights. Like a lot of, all the times it was sold to people, they're like, oh no, man, it's like an American band, but they sound like Joy Division, which I'm like, all right, big, you know, 25-ish, 23, 25-ish year gap there between those bands. But then also what's really funny to me is that I remember my friend who was like, was a station director at a college radio station at the University of Georgia. Like, he was really, and he's still got, to my opinion, great taste of music.

He really didn't care that much for the second Interpol album because he's like, this sounds to me like, fucking, Franz Ferdinand. And I'm like, I like Franz Ferdinand. I always have, but it's just funny to me because I was like, he saw that as like, the official position of this podcast. I'm glad we got that. They sold a lot of albums. They sold four million copies of the first album. I went, I saw the line in America. Like, yeah, when I was 20. The reason why we know those guys is because when I lived in Moscow, they came out to do shows in Russia. And my flatmate was this fucking nuts Irish guy who'd been at university with Bob,

their bassist. And he was out of town, but they were supposed to be like hanging out with him and he was going to show them around. So I ended up doing it. They were like, oh, this guy's fun. Well, I kept taking them to places where like, I would get, I was on Russian TV at the time. So like, I would get recognized by one guy and then they would get recognized by a different guy. So we ended up like not paying the bill like literally anywhere that we went. And I went to this show that they were doing and like people were fucking nuts for that. Like no one in Russian knows anything from the West usually. But like, yeah, this was like an incredibly dedicated Franz Ferdinand fan base in Moscow with Bob and Alex. And then, you know, I followed them on

Instagram and like when they were touring South America, they would be posting some of the photos of their crowds. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, guys, like, I did not realize you were filling like fucking national stadiums. There was a fucking Mexican film crew in some restaurant we're at because they were there for the World Cup. It was about the same time. And then they all came over and were like, we are huge Franz Ferdinand fans. It's wild to me. I still have a stroke to the Kings of Leon play in Argentina, like not not that long into their time as bands. And it was the only gig you could go to get to you like 20,000 people. It was absolutely massive. I remember I remember hearing I was a big enough Interpol fan. I remember getting bootlegs of some of their shows

and like hearing European audiences going fucking nuts for them. Like they played a show in like Wren or non for something like that in France. And literally, they were like, this is the best crowd we ever had. But guys, please stop destroying the fucking venue. Like people were they were having to like calm them down level of crazy. And it was sort of a reminder, though, that like this was like you were saying it's just sort of a youth culture thing that was happening. But in a way, it does feel distinct. And the American side feels distinct in the British side to me. I also seems like different from the American side. But then I also think about like, yeah, but under that umbrella of Indie, like you had bands like Spoon or fucking Modest Mouse who

like we're not from New York. I had a very different vibe, but also got lumped into that sort of selling out versus not discussion. And I remember Isaac Brock doing an interview from Modest Mouse basically being like, no, selling out is when I try to write a song that sounds like someone else. So I think it'll sell money, me giving my record so it can be put on a commercial. If that means I don't have to wash dishes for some asshole as a job, I'm going to do it. And I remember like thinking to myself like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people would, they would be like, no, artistic refusal. I can't accept that. Whereas like by the early 2000s, it seemed like that kind of made sense. It was like, yeah, why not do that? Why not have float on being like a fucking car

commercial? Like who cares? Yeah, it seems like it's just gone down that road to the point where like everyone does it. Well, a manager once said to me that as far as UK bands at least go, Oasis changed everything forever because after that, everyone wanted to be the biggest band in the world because they'd seen that you could be give or take. Whereas in the 80s, everyone prided themselves on the 70s and being outside of the status quo. It'll be Joy Division, Orange Juice, all these people selling just enough records to get by, but actually making stuff quite far out. But after Oasis, and I guess Nirvana was the equivalent in America, having this kind of huge cultural influence, commercial prevalence and being the coolest people in the world,

even just for five, 10 minutes, it's such a kind of became such an attractive proposition that after that, it's like everyone was gunning for that position. It's weird to me because now that you think about, you just made me realize something, which is that there isn't really an equivalent, in my opinion, of what the British phenomenon of Landfill Indy in the 2000s in America, not to the same degree, but the post-Nirvana sign every fucking band. Hey, if I'm remembering the Von Bondi's right, they had that single, Come On, Come On, right? That's a fucking good song. I had a fist fight with Jack White. I remember that being because I was working at a student radio

station and I remember that being part of the PR that the dude had gotten. That was in the stuff we'd get about he got his ass kicked by Jack White or he got in a fight with Jack White or something. Similarly, I was thinking about, you made me think of God, who are the guys who did Electric Six? That's the landfill in America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't fire the disco. It's very like our Michael York voice. No, it's incredible. And allegedly, it was Jack White doing the high vocal part though he denied it at the time that don't you want to know why we keep starting fire? It sounds just like it. Jack White, allegedly. What made me laugh

though is I realized is that our landfill indie. He was beating up anyone who said that was him apparently. Yeah, exactly. Our landfill indie was the Post-Nirvana sign every band from Seattle that gave you sort of like mid-90s alt rock stuff, which is kind of what I grew up on. I started listening to pop music, radio, you know, when I was probably about 10 or 11 and like, yeah, if you bring up bands like Dishwalla or... I mean, I like Mudhoney, but that's what we're getting. Well, that sort of... And everyone, because everyone always talks about the sort of you know, velvet underground phenomenon of, you know, like, you know, everyone who went and saw them started a band and we have the Sex Pistols Manchester show in 76 or 77 is probably the

equivalent of that, for that generation. And then probably it's like, for what we're talking about, it's like, the strokes come along, come along, no one wears jeans the same. And then... Everyone buys a leather jacket, even if it looks like shit on them. Yeah, although it's worth noting, because this is the kind of... What's the word for the believed story? Oh, apocryphal. Yeah, yeah, but it's like... The legend. Yeah, because I think this is actually slightly apocryphal in the... If you look at early pictures of the strokes they were in bootcut jeans. They went through that divorce early. 2001, you couldn't buy skinny jeans. I don't know, because in 2003, I couldn't buy skinny jeans.

And I went up to someone who turned out to be... Could in second hand stores. Yeah, yeah, in second hand stores. We couldn't buy them on the high street. And I remember going up to the person who ended up, I've realized later, Dev Hines, Tesla Ice Creams, Blood Orange, et cetera. They how... Where did you get your jeans? How do you get these jeans so tight? He said, go to H&M by normal pair of jeans, put them on inside out, do safety pins down the side to fit them to your leg, then turn them back the normal way. So you've safety pinned them inside out and then put them on. And that's what people were doing to get jeans that tight. That's a jeans hack, right? Nice and horrendously tight.

Because you couldn't get them. You'd have to go to some stall in Camden and get some weird ones. They weren't on the high street. There was a shop in... There was a second hand jeans place in High Park in Leeds. There was this guy in there who basically treated anyone my age with extraordinary contempt. But that was kind of what you wanted, because you wanted to go in there and basically feel like an idiot and then come out there with those tightest jeans. Because actually early pictures of the strokes, they looked amazing, don't get me wrong, but they had some quite out there styles. You'd have like Albert Hammond Jr. would be wearing a belt match to his tie and they'd both be light blue with then a kind of boot cut jeans and a suit jacket.

It was a little bit Jeremy Clarkson, actually, in its style a little bit. The biggest band in the world. That's true, because also at the same sort of time, you've got shoreditch culture, like what became hipster culture is... And eventually drugstore culture. ...is happening. And at the beginning, that was the sort of thin, the shoreditch thin haircut, which was basically that sort of early Jude Law haircut, if you can imagine it. This is basically like a kind of mohawk look. A really shit mohawk made with shockwaves, gel.

Yeah, yeah. And then like suit jackets and jeans. And the jeans probably at the beginning, it's true, at the beginning, the jeans were not tight. You can edit this bit out, but this is probably the most important. They always say the strokes are skinny jeans. They did eventually wear skinny jeans, but they were almost too soon because they first started playing in 2000. Obviously, the album was out in 2001. Modern AGP, which was the first EP where they re-recorded a few of those songs that came out in rough trade. I think that must have been too...

In 2001, January 2001. Was it? Oh, that was a one, right. But right at the beginning. Before 9-Eleven. 9-Eleven did the jeans. That's what's... After that, we can't have jeans this far. I think this might be a good point, actually.

We should discuss a little bit our indie landfill pedigree, because I feel like we're probably all coming at this from slightly... Also, because the point that before Fred fact-checked my kind of glib, throwaway comment about jeans. Yeah, don't be glib on this show, Oscar. I guess the point is, the thing is, it's like, there's always that effect where you have a few originators at the beginning, and then you have this procession of things that happen afterwards.

Although, of course, we all remember that when Block Party came out, everyone was being like, oh, this is Gang of Four all over again. When Franz Ferdinand came out, when I first saw Franz Ferdinand, I was like, I really like these guys. It's exactly like some 80s band. There was always like... And in terms of what Fred said about Oasis and being the biggest band in the world,

it felt like bands like the Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Block Party, the sort of early first wave indie bands. But it meant a lot to me. It meant a lot to Fred. But they were sort of trying to do a bit of both. They were probably trying to be quite big bands, but they were also trying to be credible, alternative musicians.

They wanted their heroes. They wanted to be exactly like the sort of cache of a band, like Magazine or Gang of Four or Talking Heads or something like that, but then also beyond major labels or big enough to be promoted. Not have the fate of being like, yeah, you make incredible music, but at the time, you don't make any money from it at all. Right. And it's also all before the financial crash of 2008.

The narrative's starting to form now. When the genes start to widen again. Yeah, it's geopolitical. You make a good point. That's the difference between, say, the Strokes and Television, who people say, oh, they could simultaneously be cool, sound like something cool, and be the biggest thing in the world. So much of their appeal.

And maybe you got this in the UK. I imagine you didn't. As an American, I'm not from New York, got it too. Was that like the Strokes, the music they were playing, but also the look, the feel, the attitude was like, you now get to pretend that you are on downtown in 1977 or something like that. You're getting to hear Richard Hell in the void, or it's your television, or Terry Orck records, kind of shit.

You know what I mean? Like all these things. But it was just, it's like a reflection of that. It's like a, I don't know what the right word here would be. It's sort of, it's doing like a tribute act in a way. Like it's great music. I literally liked it. But like so much of the appeal was like,

oh, this is the logical continuation of like Lou Reed looking like a badass. I mean, I remember, I remember the first Razerlight singles, Stumble and Fall coming out. Me and my friend Hannah dancing around our flat saying, it's like television. It's exactly like television. We love it. I think this is probably a good point,

because we like, we touched on earlier the idea that like indie landfills is kind of like slightly embarrassing period. I mean, I at the time was like the ages of like probably like 13 to 16. All right, may we get it? Which, yeah, no, no. But that was like, that was an embarrassing enough period of my life that like this is the least embarrassing thing about it. Like the fact that I like these bands is like,

I'm like, this is a better thing to remember than like the haircuts we were attempting. Some of the outfits that we were attempting. I mean, that whole matching belt and tie thing was giving me some fucking flashbacks. Like, yeah. The big Tommy Hill figure jeans with the little thing with the pat, like the painter, painter loop is coming back into fashion

and like vintage and that shit's killing me because that's exact same thing. I was 13 when that stuff hit its peak. So I absolutely understand not wanting necessarily to be reminded of it. Man, fucking wearing like a neon yellow belt and like a skinny tie. Like, oh yeah. The interesting thing is good is feeding into this

as we talked about Franz Ferdinand and Interpol. And I kind of see Franz Ferdinand almost more within the American universe of it. So you had these incredibly good looking, well-dressed bands making this very tight, dark, arguably like intellectual music. Fast forward a couple of years in the UK and you're having music that sounds like Lonnie Donoghan

with people dressed like farmers who've been up for three days. You know what I mean? Mel, it gave way into something different quite quickly that was no longer necessarily about being tight and smart, but somehow merged with this kind of let it all hang out attitude. People playing tambourine on stage is their full-time job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best of their era.

There's always a best in every era. The best man theory of history. We should talk about some real fucking landfill shit then. We've mentioned Razerlight. Razerlight are definitely one of the bands that I feel like stand up better than some of the others. Like, recalling the kooks is like a more difficult. The kooks and the fratellis, I feel like are a real low point for me.

Although arguably the fratellis made the song that encapsulated it all as far as landfill indies concerned. With Chelsea Dagg out. You don't need to know the band name, the song name. Yeah, they're all lyrics. It's just that. That's as close as the UK got to a Seven Nation Army moment. It could be sung at football stadiums for 50 years after.

It was like, I sort of feel like I've neither of us have quite described the sort of... Just to sort of very... Just to kind of bring us into that era. You can play us a song. Before the strokes. British India was in dire straits, right? And it wasn't dire straits, unfortunately. No.

So, Dagg was implied you didn't need to explain it. Let's do that again. So, you know, it's like Travis and people like that. Oh. And so, you know... He had a hoax and fin. He did, but the trousers were wide. Right, right.

They were very wide. Travis are trying to come back and absolute radio, shilling for them as hard as they can. For some people, they never went away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, listen, you know, I've got two ears and a heart. And then it's like... And then sort of, you know, if we fast forward a few years, suddenly it's this, you know, it's alternative.

And then it's... And then you get to a sort of Fratelli's point where it's just ubiquitous. Like, but there's a few years, we might call them the sort of, you know, sort of 2002, three, four, five, the sort of Libertines block party, Franz Ferdinand years, where it still felt quite alternative, like being into indie music didn't feel like... Yeah, I guess this is... It wasn't everywhere on the high street, but I'm not sure if...

Maybe I'm just saying that because that's, you know, sort of... The thing that I would say is it struck me that that scene and like those bands, and then the progressions from that in the UK, stage-centered on guitar rock and on the sort of indie rock band kind of thing. Whereas in the US, the thing that we're not maybe talking about is that while the strokes had a huge cultural impact, like new metal was bigger in terms of selling records. And in terms of like what people were hearing on the radio, especially in the US where radio stations from the early 90s onward were starting to get acquired by big conglomerates

that more or less standardized the playlists everywhere. You know, a band like System of a Down, for example, will probably got heard on the radio far more than people even listened to the strokes in 2001-2002. And similarly... And they've stood the test of time. I think about, well, yeah, I mean, I think about bands like Puddle of Mud or Stained, or I mean, Slipknot were bigger, but like those kinds of things. I know they had some crossover in the UK, but like that was a big, you know,

the sort of hangover from Creed and bands like that. That was actually like probably pushing more record sales in the US. And like a lot of the really big cultural stuff that was happening around music, like if you're talking about major label stuff, there was a lot more stuff from rap artists. There's a lot more stuff from things like, for example, Justin Timberlake. And the UK obviously had sort of like glossy pop music, but I felt from afar, like what was getting pushed in music journalism and in record sales,

was way more sort of like what led to say Arctic Monkeys is like the sort of pinnacle of that, but like that whole kind of milieu. And like it was different in America. There were some, but not as much. So I remember, and I want to, Fred's going to hopefully talk for a lot longer than me after this. And it's important to say that Fred is not just an expert. He's a protagonist in this story. I wouldn't go that far. As the lead singer of a number of critically acclaimed indie bands.

You might have known him as Johnny Burrell. I'm trying to remember if there was any critically acclaimed, critically defamed. I mean, you know, what's the difference? In 2004, I remember seeing the Arctic Monkeys. I don't think they released an album, but my space was happening. Yeah. Right. Oh, fuck yeah. Friends with Tom. And, and, and, and it was that weird thing of I had never, I had never gone to a gig

where the band had not released an album or even, I mean, they'd maybe released a couple of singles. I'd never gone to a gig and seen a whole audience singing every song back to them. Like, and it was, it was quite a small gig, but it was that thing. It was, it was like, oh, what fucking hell? Like, this is all, this is people are just listening to this music or my space and they're, they're singing it back at this band and it, you know, it changed everything. Well, there's a few things to talk about there. Kind of two threads.

One is that this is in reality the early days of the internet and broadband after Napster, but before worth noting YouTube, which didn't come out till what 2006, I think. Yeah, five, six. And so, A, the internet's a big part of this story. Before we get to that, in terms of what you were saying about the British media and its eyes still on this essentially quite retro music, I think it's worth noting that as far as the industry is concerned, if I think about friends who were working in the music industry, A&R, someone like Imran Ahmed who signed Vampire Weekend to excel, British A&R,

he was at Nebworth, the Oasis concert. And I'm sure he's one of many British A&Rs who were coming of age during the 90s and British music journalists who were essentially still and British radio programmers, et cetera, still kind of caught up in a mindset. At the time, it seemed like the gap between Oasis and Blur towards Radiohead and Travis was an eternity, but in reality, we're only talking about between 96, 97, and 2001. Short time. It's almost no time at all.

We've had longer pandemics, you know. Yeah. So it was a relatively short time and I think it's easy to think of the strokes as the first band of the naughties. I'm going to put forward the theory here that we actually think of them as the final band of the 90s because I've heard it said that the 90s, someone said that the 90s ended with 9-11, that was the real turn of the century in the 90s. Yeah, it wasn't the millennium dome opening up.

We still had 2000, 2001. I mean, I was only 12 or something 13, but I remember it still felt a bit. I think about bands. I turned 15 in 1999. I remember a perfect circle being huge. I remember in the summer of 2000, right before I got my driver's license or the spring rather, when I would ride the bus to school, I would hear higher by Creed twice on the way to school and twice on the way home because it was all over the fucking radio.

You think about just a few years later, so much changed and the stuff that was on the radio was both them for one, pushing old Metallica, but also playing stuff like System of a Down or not Creed, Stain or Corn or a little bit of Hangover from the Limp Biscuit Hay Day and stuff like that. But yeah, I take your point that it was more kind of the end of the 90s and then what came after was, it's weird, I should be able to give you a really good name of like, inarguably, what was huge. But I can't think of, and maybe you've got an answer here, of like an American equivalent

of Arctic Monkeys in terms of a band that started like that and got so popular. I really don't have one. I mean, Spoon did better, but they don't sell anywhere near as many records. Well, Kings of Leon kind of became that. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, Maroon 5. Yeah, but Maroon 5 to me, their initial vibe was way more pop band.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I suppose basically the Killers and the Kings of Leon. Killers. No, the Killers is perfect. Yes, that's the good example. But even at the beginning, when the Killers came, I think I saw them on their first British tour and they were, again, they fitted into that sort of first new wave of 21st century indie, where you could see that they were clearly taking from, in this case,

80s kind of synth rock bands. I mean, as in a lot of the conversation was about them being derivative of an authentic alternative music, rather than them being a potentially absolutely massive stadium band, even though they were definitely going for it. I heard an anecdote with the Brandon Flowers that one of their musicians in the band, the original lineup, quit because he's like, I'm tired of doing this Duran Duran shit, which only regrets that decision. But you know, that's how life goes.

You could argue that they were genuinely, had a more cultural beginning or bent, whatever the word, brought up in Las Vegas. How many people can say that? Their parents, a lot of them were waitresses and waiters on the strip. Brandon Flowers mentions that in the book, Mimi in the bathroom, when they talk about how the Killers and Kings of Leon ended up being bigger than the Strokes. They said, well, our parents were waitresses on the strip, we had nowhere to go back to. Worth noting the Strokes, you know, they're essentially celebrity children.

Julian Casablanca's dad, John Casablanca, started Elite Models. There's a very dodgy, kind of like Gislain Maxwell adjacent documentary on... Most of them met in a private school in Switzerland. Like, it's a different vibe than if your parents were... Albert Hammond Jr. was Albert Hammond's senior son. So John Casablanca, I mean, there's a real tale of two Casablancas, isn't there? Because it's like, John Casablanca is, I mean, essentially, I mean, he did get sort of wine stained in the end, didn't he?

Because what's the deal with that documentary? Even watching this documentary that was, I think, he made because he narrates it. He's now passed away, but it's worth watching. So it's on Netflix. It's called Casablanca's The Man Who Loved Women. It's basically him talking over like stock footage and old photos for an hour and a half about how he started a model agency, essentially to shag younger and younger women, leaving each wife and children as time goes on.

And it definitely gives an interesting cultural context to Julian Casablanca's because it's easy to say, oh, well, this is just some... Who wants to hear a rich guy moaning? There was clearly some darkness or something for where they came from. And Brandon Flowers, I understand it, was raised Mormon. And that's obviously a weird thing to come from, to then become a non-Mormon rock singer. Like, in the sense that if you know anything about Mormons, especially in the West,

like there are Mormon bands, like people who are Mormons who go into pop music, make music for Mormons that has like Mormon themes and stuff. So he's kind of like, in a way, sort of a pariah. And if I'm not mistaken, they got their band... It's the next big thing, Mormon rock. Check it out. That's who we were just putting our money on the table in. The More Man Who Loved Women.

They got their band name from the fake band that's playing in the video for the New Order song, Crystal. So in a way, it's just sort of like the killers, I think they wear that in their sleeve, that like there's a certain extent to which like there is an admiration for British music. But that's kind of what I mean. Like those bands were, they were all obviously influenced by these kind of titans of alternative indie legend, like New Order. And particularly with Brandon Flowers, the way he sang, where it was like,

people were like, wait, is this guy English? But also like, and I think what Fred says is, you know, because I think, you know, like I've sort of got a lot of time for them and for the Kings of Leon. I have a lot of fondness for the Kings of Leon, even though like they sort of deformed into this kind of monstrous stadium rock band. But there was that like, and also with Brandon Flowers, it reminds me of something, a friend of mine who, a friend of mine was with Paul Banks from Interpol on his 23rd birthday and she told me that Paul Banks was like, 23, time to get serious.

Brandon Flowers sings about, you know, I'm so much older than I can take. Like these guys, they were ambitious, right? You know, they were, you know, it was like, it was like, right. Yeah, we're, you know, it's like, yeah, we like New Order, but also we want to be on the stadium. Yeah, it's just so funny to me because I remember Interpol, there was a thing where, I mean, Interpol always made me wonder, like, if they took the sort of like jaded, disaffected thing so far, they actually just didn't enjoy themselves because I saw them live. I mean, they did not seem to be having a good time.

Blonde Red had opened for them and fucking completely upstage them. Like it was wild to me. I mean, great, it was in like fucking Cincinnati, Ohio. So it's not like a really glamorous place to be playing. But yeah, man, like they, they were very, very into sort of like wearing the influences on their sleeves and sort of being like, yes, this is like, we don't mind or at least like, we're comfortable with this association that we're going to sound like Joy Division. But then it's like,

I mean, I remember a friend of mine basically being disappointed that they weren't, you know, vampires from New York, like actual, you know, that sort of return on the bright lights photo shoot is an amazing piece of myth making where they're sort of photographed by the Brooklyn Bridge and it's dark, gray, sky, everything is kind of, everything is sort of revolved, you know, everything is kind of seems to be looming above them. It's quite like Gotham, like, I mean, again, you know, it's a band, but I loved, I don't think that I never saw them. I never saw, I never felt like they kind of lived up to it live.

And I remember friends of mine who played with them would be like, you know, I remember some friends who played with them who were really enamored with them and they sort of taught, you know, they're trying to get them to tell stories about, you know, the good old days of Viper Room in New York and everything. And Paul Banks was just like, you know, and they were all just like, yeah, yeah, that was like, those were some times. Yeah. So, and to now to zone in on the landfill thing, just so we can finally try and is that, so yeah, 2001, The Strokes, in 2003, the first Libertines album came out.

I think it's fair to say that Ray's Light probably are to the Libertines, what the Libertines are to The Strokes, if we're thinking it is some kind of like galaxy where it's almost like a half-life of each time you removed by a band, The Power Weekends, or I think Johnny Borrow was a great songwriter. He was originally in the Libertines for a short while, went to school with the bass player, John Hassel, they had to cross over. Same school I went to. Oh, wow. But it's funny because the reputator that said,

Johnny Borell and John Hassel from the Libertines were maybe, we may be overlapped for about a year. They were a few years, four or five years older than me, maybe, but the stories that I used to hear about, John, I knew a bit, only, only, I mean, which is ridiculous considering, but he, I mean, the problem with this is like, is basically trying to work out what is and isn't going to be libelous. There was, let's just say, that there was a culture in the school among that sort of age group of like shooting up in the toilets at school. Those are the UK school shootings. And before turning the needle on himself.

And it's like these guys, these guys were, you know, they weren't messing around. So you were led to this. So, so I was. Yeah, London day schools are quite something, aren't they? But Johnny Borell was always like her. I mean, I also remember him, I remember like seeing him somewhere. He was wearing a white shirt with one button done up and white jeans. I mean, he, you know, and then there was that period when he was going out of Kyrsten Dunst

and he bought a motorbike. Well, that's the thing. I thought he was a myth maker. And that kind of hysteria around things, I think. Wasn't that infamously at a music festival where there was mud everywhere and he was in an all white outfit. I seem to recall this Johnny Borell moment. And it was testament to the time that he could end up with someone like Kyrsten Dunst.

And there wasn't Matt Bellamy with, well, you had Jack White and Renee Zell Winger, but you had all these kind of funny crossover couples. But so around the time of Ray's Light and Franz Ferdinand, who it's worth noting, we're having top 40 singles, which now to imagine an indie band, I mean, top 10, top 20, even top five singles is insane. He made a kids pop version of Take Me Out. That tells you like how big of a thing it was and it was a staple. There you guys, we're talking about bona fide hit songs and then, you know,

Ray's Light, Golden Touch, etc. So then what you had was all the major labels. Trying to explain that to an American girl just Sunday night. And she had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. She's got enough. She's got too much. It's his simple stuff. The major labels then just start, as they always do, going to overdrive,

trying to sign whatever the next thing is. And it was a time where I wouldn't say it was easy to get a record deal, but there was a lot of people making it look easy, given the quality of the music. And I was in a band at the time that was probably one of the few to not get a record deal, which shows how underachieving we were, all these bands started getting signed. The quality started to go down. People just thought, we might have the next Take Me Out. We might have the next Golden Touch.

And so you get, you know, whatever Ray's Light were to the Libertines, you had dogs who did that to Ray's Light. And then these bands, it's important to say, like, these bands, some of these bands are getting like record deals, like hundreds of thousands of bands, like this is, you know, and then they're ending up. Some of them potentially been seven figure deals for artists we've never heard of. But, you know, this is often how the music industry operates. And so you get all these kind of two-part players that we know now,

Zoom, Ming, Forward, weren't the real deal. But at the time, you just get this thirst for it in the magazines, in the radio, and in festival bookings. This is a point, I mean, festivals are big now, but... Kind of music dogecoin. You get all these spin-offs. And it was still before the internet, so it hadn't quite been democratized. Say what you like about Spotify as a platform.

At least we can use it to see what people kind of are listening to. So we get some idea that you can see pockets of culture happening around the world. This was still very top-down music industry. Yeah, I mean, to get a copy of Up the Bracket in 2003 where I'm from, like, you either had to go to a specialty store that was like one of in the big city near us, or use something like Napster or like a forum. I was on a forum that had people hosting FTP servers, and I was able to turn on the bright lights and up the bracket that way.

But nobody was listening to it. Whereas now, like, if something becomes... I mean, I remember trying to hear the first... Yeah, to develop skills only known now to child pornography and music. Well, I mean, I think about it like the first Shin's record, which I don't even like, but I remember hearing all the hype around it. Like, to get a copy of that was fucking impossible in 2000, 2001. So like, now, if you read an article, you can go on Spotify,

and typically you can find the stuff, or you can get it on YouTube. Like, it's just trying to explain that to people who didn't grow up with that. They're like, yeah, there was an extent to which what you heard on the radio or what you could buy in the store was what you would get. And that was it. But I mean, I think like your analogy for Americans, Nate, your analogy to Washington, Washington State, Seattle, the Pacific Northwest in the time of Nirvana is exactly right.

Basically, and it sort of tells you something about how markets operate, about how kind of industry executives operate, which is basically to say, let's try and find the counterfeit version. Find the next version of this thing. And again, you were at university in Leeds at the time. Probably in Leeds alone, there were about 10 bands with record deals. Right. And there was a mini version, again, to hit singles.

Yeah, yeah, big hit singles. But there was a mini version of that happened in Leeds. Dance to the radio, that label. Dance to the radio, yeah, yeah. But the Kaiser Chiefs for a long period of time in Leeds were the first band on the bill for every... So Franz Ferdinand would come to play. I mean, so I remember this exact bill.

Franz Ferdinand headlining a band from London called Ludes, great band. Me and Fred have a lot of love for that band. And then the Kaiser Chiefs opening up. Kaiser Chiefs were that band for a long time. And it was... They were this band that everyone on the Leeds indie scene was like, was like, oh yeah, it's them again. And then it happened for them.

I remember liking it. And they became absolutely enormous. And it wasn't something that... Again, look, people who know this much better than me, but I would say it wasn't really something that anyone around them particularly saw happening. Well, necessarily even enjoyed on a local. Oh, no, no.

And there was so much to sense. I mean, there was music that ended up being enjoyed on a national scale before. It was essentially some quite culturalist artists. And I've got time for the Kaiser Chiefs. So I'm not talking about them, but you've got these... Who we are talking about. Cooke's, for example. They were a band who...

It wasn't a rise, a slow bill rise. Well, they in London, they felt Southern, but I... I think they're... Yeah, or... I don't know if they were organic or anything. Like the Cooke's actually felt like another... They felt like a... They realized in the evening that...

Well, I think they would went to Beedale, some of them. So I mean, for a borderline state school. We love a fucking boarding school with no rules. That's a great place to become an indie band. Well, there you go. It was. And they were. And what's the first album called?

Like Right Side On, Wrong Side Off? Inside it, Inside Out. Oh, there you go. Oh, there you go. I was involved today. How are we going to get it into my ear? And again, I mean, Naive was probably the top five single, but this is the interesting thing.

I got laid for the first time as a direct result of that song. So that's basically... It's the one hour. It's the one hour. It's the one hour. It's the one hour Sunday, when you're... It's the one hour Sunday. It's the one hour.

It's the one hour. It's the one hour. It's the one hour. It's the one hour Sunday. But this thing about local scenes reminds me that in that sort of 2002, 2003 era, so the Kies achieves... There was a band called Ten Thousand Things, who... The lead singer was a guy called Sam Riley,

who went on to be a quite successful actor. He was in control playing... He played Ian Curtis in control. That band, they were going to be... It was them and the band called The Cribs, who became... Who really did make a long lasting career out of it. But Ten Thousand Things was like the big leads sort of hype band.

You know, like they're going to be the leads Libertines. And there was a lot of sort of excitement about that in leads. They... When their first album was about to come out, the press release talked at length about how many gigs Sam Riley had been propositioned at. Their song Titanium includes the lines, I think I need titanium boxer shorts. I just can't control all these sexy thoughts.

I think that might be it. Oh, that's quite like Wright said Fred energy about those. There's also some good eating notes. That's a bit Chernobyl with the titanium boxer shorts. Anyway, my now partner was in a relationship with their guitarist. I didn't know this was a Ten Thousand Things podcast. One of her big indie claims to fame is that the dog at the Hawley Arms, a legendary indie pub in Camden, was named after her.

Wow, your girlfriend. Morena. Wow. Exactly. Anyway, the Ten Thousand Things album comes out. It's not quite Golden Touch, but it's good. It's good. Every Winehouse probably petted that dog multiple times.

Absolutely. It's given one out of ten by anime. I was going to say something else there, but still better. The album was given one out of ten by anime. I thought the dog was given one out of ten. Which is at a time when that really meant a lot. That really meant a lot, and it basically ended them. And there were all these bands and people in leads who were basically

saying to these guys, oh man, I'm really sorry. And behind their backs, they were like, fucking yes. Because there was that very weird cross. It was like when we're all together, we're all together. But if one of these bands becomes really successful, then everything feels a bit different. No one in the arts in Britain could relate to that kind of tall poppy syndrome. I have never encountered this in my career. The number of podcasters who were gunning for Milo.

You'd be surprised. You'd joke. Oh, I bet, man. Podcasters, open mic comedians. I'm wondering too, with taste makers stuff, like the anime and other music journalism outlets, like do you feel as though in this era you saw their influence, Wayne? Or were they actually like when the hype was being generated, was that driving success of these bands?

It was really important at that point. Because to me, I think of Pitchfork in America, and that's the only analog. I don't think they had that much influence over here. But in the US, a band could be pulled out of nowhere, and if Pitchfork gave them a big review, they were like, I think of architecture in Helsinki, I was talking to Milo about them. Like a band from fucking Melbourne, Australia, they just happened to tour in America and open for some bands in New York. And they got like an 8.9 on their first record, their second record.

I feel like there's never been a music publication in Britain that has the wank factor of Pitchfork's life. And Pitchfork's better now that it used to be. But I mean, I used to read it a lot when it was at Hay Day. I remember reading like Q Magazine when I was a teenager, but it definitely didn't have that like cool factor that something like Pitchfork had. It had so much influence that it would make the or like Travis Morrison from the dismemberment plan put out a solo album.

They gave it a 0.0 and like it suddenly had negative sales. Like more people were taking it back to the store than were buying it. It's so shame. Like they could absolutely make or break careers. And I wasn't sure if there was an equivalent to that. Had no idea that some of us owned a copy of Costello Music. But I think we at the time, yeah, enemy wasn't quite on that scale. Although I do remember that one out of 10 review you mentioned.

But I think obviously we've always had the BBC here. And the main difference when it comes to indie culture in the UK and America is that America has enough towns and cities that you can tour from one end to the other and then start again. Essentially a UK tour will be 10 to 20 dates in terms of there's not that many places you can play. So unless you are selling records, it's quite hard to maintain being an underground band here. Whereas in America, there's always been a history of that because you can just about tour and the history of college, the college circuit, etc.

So I think here you're either underground or you make it. But the space in between doesn't really exist unless you're going to be a band who plays every now and again and works your main job, which there are lots of great bands like that. But at this point in history, there was all this money being thrown around. The BBC is playing all these bands. They're playing so many bands that they have to start another radio station, Radio 6, as a spin-off to play even more bands, to play even smaller indie bands,

because the big commercial indie stuff is so big. And I think for a lot of the journalists and the taste makers at the time, it was happy dates. They were like, okay, well, now we can just finally listen to kind of Trad Rock. And nothing will ever change. The end of history or whatever Gordon Brown called it. No, not landfill indie, but the end of Poo Man Pust. Yeah, you put Fuki Yammer and Brown.

Francis Fuki Yammer said that biggest hit woman who put me with her. And meanwhile, of course, I was just thinking about that show, the sort of Strokes Kings of Leon show that I saw in Argentina. I then went and saw, at the same festival, I went and saw Dizzy Rascal in a tent. It was right at the beginning of him. And because of course, at the same time, grime is happening in Britain. And that probably ends up being, from our standpoint now, that probably ends up being the most culturally musically significant movement

of the years that we are talking about. And of course, for obvious reasons, it's talked about and received by the mainstream in a completely different way. But of course, having said that, Dizzy becomes a massive, massive star. Yeah, because prior to that kind of landfill indie period, I would say that the main music I was exposed to, rather than being like the Strokes or the kind of indie precursors, was more like UK Garage, where I was always going on in Essex at the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there was a big music of my sort of late 90s. Like for me, when I was 16, 17, 18, it was Garage. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I really want to talk about the later period of indie life. Yeah, I want to know what happens to this, because we've talked about the early part, but yeah. Yeah, this is like my older teen years,

where I feel like there was this real division between like, there was these indie bands that were huge, like the Kaiser Chiefs, the Fratellis, with their one album and one song with no lyrics. And even the Klaxons came in a bit later and were kind of big for a bit. There was maybe a change, they represented a change maybe. Yeah, but then you also, at the same time, you had these bands who were like, pretty big, but were like,

and still are now kind of as almost culturally irrelevant as the others. But at the time, we're considered cooler, like the Maccabees. I remember like the Maccabees being like... Well, that's a sensitive one, Fosca. You probably don't want to speak ill of them, because they have friends. I can talk about the Maccabees, but the lead singer of the Maccabees is a very close friend of mine.

I don't really want to even talk shit about them, but I just remember distinctly the Maccabees being like this band, where like, if you wanted to fuck the hot girls at your sixth form college, you were like going to Maccabees gigs. But actually, when you look back on it now, the Maccabees don't really feel that much cooler. Which is so funny, because the American equivalent of that was absolutely John Mayer, which is just a completely different brand.

I know you do. Half of my home. My buddy, one of my best friends was in high school in Georgia. They had a huge party plan. They made Jell-O shots. They got a keg. They invited all the girls. No girls showed up because they forgot they'd scheduled the party

on the same night as a John Mayer concert. And all the girls, it was literally all dudes, because he was that popular. That is cultural reach. Yeah, and that's sort of like... That's hegemony. But that's the thing. It's testament to how white this genre was,

that all these genres were in genres. Someone might like the Mystery Jets, and someone else might like the... The Ordinary Boys. The Ordinary Boys. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we have to talk about Preston.

And at the time, it would seem like such a gulf. Oh, no, they're in stuff like the Ordinary Boys. I'm into cool stuff like the Mystery Jets or whatever. There were so many bands and so many gigs going on. At the time, there were all these venues in central London that I remember in my teen years, going out three, four times a week to see gigs that were five pounds or one pound off with a fly or whatever.

It was reflected in the culture and the club nights going on. People going to... Punters going to club nights, watching bands going home and starting their own bands based on what they've seen, a kind of praxis or whatever for a better word. And there was just so much of it. You could throw a stone and hit five pubs with live music

or club nights, et cetera. I don't know what the point I was making here, but more that you were saying, yeah, the Maccabees seemed like, oh, that was a cool thing or a sensitive thing or whatever. But again, you zoom out and it's much of a muchness. But at the time, it was so commercially big that it felt like there was almost indie within indie.

Oh, no. This is the cool thing that's not that because that is on Kaisa Chiefs on the radio. I'm going to go and watch a band that may sound quite similar to the Kaisa Chiefs because they're not on the radio. It's more like the real... To put this in even funnier context,

I remember being at Reading Festival in 2010 and watching the Maccabees directly follow Limp Biscuit, which now is like such a fucking trip. I'm going to have to ask him how is time with Fred Durst? I'm going to say his relationship with Fred Durst. I was thinking what was popular... Because I definitely agree with you, Fred, that there was a similar phenomenon

that as indie broke into mainstream in the US, then there was more niche stuff and more stuff that was never going to be major label. When Modest Mouse became huge in the mid-2000s, I remember working at a college radio station and some of the bands... I don't know if you even know the band DRHUF, for example. They're big in indie circles,

but they're never really going to get played on the radio. They might get a sync with a Netflix show or something like that, but they're just the way they are uncompromisingly weird and they're not going to... That sort of thing was getting more and more bands of Montreal and stuff like that who are big now, but were still pretty new then. But I also think about British bands that were crossing over

because Maccabees didn't here, had never heard of them. Kaiser Chiefs only, I predict, a riot, only song I had heard of. I'm trying to think of the only guys you've named. I've never heard them at the time, but Lady Tron was huge in America among indie kids, not necessarily on the radio, but they were...

And I don't know if a band like that was already major label big here or if they were of a similar sort of grade. I think you grew up with Hard Fire, as we all did, a huge... Stains. A friend and I. Stains? Stains? No, but my first...

They sounded like they were from Stains. You've got to realize where I'm from, man. My first concert was... Well, I saw Bush, Buck Cherry, and... Somewhere in the Tangam Valley. Nice. Like... I had a little lineup.

Yeah, I was going to say, also I didn't realize Bush wasn't big here as they are in America, but I don't want to derail the conversation. But this stuff didn't really cross over, and we had a similar phenomenon. It's just that those bands weren't popular here at all, from what I can tell. And the ones that you guys were hearing about constantly

and seeing, only a few. It's fine, because we're talking about this in America, it makes me think of the Arctic, because the Arctic Monkeys sort of went from being a British indie band. I don't think they were ever an indie landfill band. They went, to me, they went from being a British indie band to being an American rock band. Yeah.

Like some George Homme, all of that. They went to being like the guys in the desert wearing, you know, boots. If we're talking about international crossover, I have a friend who makes the kind of slightly un... What's the word? Unproved? Un something claim? Spurious.

Spurious claim that landfill indie gave forth to essentially the second British invasion, and the most commercial strain of British music in America, in the form of Adele, Florence and the Machine and Mumford and Sons. All of which came out of this scene in one way or another. So yeah, because... And ended up truly conquering America. Yeah.

Because Ludes, the band who I mentioned earlier, who played with Franz Vernon and Kaiser Cheese, Florence was the girlfriend of the bass player from Ludes. And they sounded like a more sexy Mumford and Sons without the Evangelical Christianian. They sort of, they were heroes with the clash. And then Mumford, I think, started out supporting the Macbys. And all sorts of other kinds of things.

And certainly... He was Laura Marling's drummer, Marcus Mumford. And I think when he found out, you could kick the kick pedal of a bass drum. And with hands free, you could pick up the guitar with that hand and then get a little... Suddenly, you've got a hat full of coins at the Edinburgh Festival. Exactly.

Yeah, this is now real, like, hauntology for me. Because I can distinctly remember there being like, you know, like, I'm at the... I'm at the Maccabees show trying to fuck the hot girl in my sixth form philosophy class or whatever. But like, all of her friends then want to go and see fucking Mumford and Sons or Frank Turner. Right, and that's where...

And by this way, it had mutated. But I think it's this lineage where people went to see Libertines or Pete Doctty. And I was triggered coming in here because I remember going to a Pete Doctty gig in his flat in Whitechapel where you had to pay 20 pounds to a guy on the door. And cash, which I've realized years later was the drug dealer to pay off that kind of crack cocaine bill

and then watch him play an acoustic set in his front room or someone's front room. But I think that was at the lineage there, was that people would go and watch him. They would see him wearing a straw hat. And the takeaway wouldn't be the music, but would be the straw hat. So they'd go to the rehearsal room, they'd be like,

well, I've got the straw hat, where do we go from here? And I think eventually this bled into country, into folk. You had obviously Jamie T, who's a great songwriter. Jamie T, who I love, actually. In the kind of folk tradition. And then people like Laura Marling and coming through influenced by him. And eventually this led to Mumford and Sons

appropriating deep Southern racist music or whatever. It's really new to me that I got to confess as I was never a fan of theirs. I heard a few songs here and there and never my thing. I did not realize they were English. I thought they were an American band because they were sort of putting on that impression. But yeah, they definitely are huge.

That was a weird era. Because I remember people that I knew being hugely into all at the same time, like fucking messianically into Mumford and Sons, Frank Turner, Muse, who were also like incredibly ubiquitous and most bizarrely of all, Pendulum. Wow. I don't know how you bridge a taste gap

from Mumford and Sons to Pendulum. To like curse it in completely different direction. And it's funny because it sort of occurs to me, but when we're talking about indie, are we also perhaps talking about like the last period in, this is far too kind of enemy style journalism. But are we talking about the last era of British tribalism? What Fred was saying about all these different nights,

it was true. And there's this tyranny of small differences where you would like the mystery jets, but you wouldn't like, you know, Paolo Nuttini. I hope we've not got that on the left. Where now, from a vantage point of 2021, when people now talk about Land for Lindy and they lump a lot of different things together,

it only seems like a lot of different things if you were there at the time. But also this was pre, you mentioned MySpace, but it was essentially pre-social media, or the kind of self elevating era of social media. Twitter, what year was that 2010? 2006, but like it didn't really start to become a thing till 0809.

0809, right. And then Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. This was still before that. And MySpace was massive. I remember getting into a band on MySpace because I'd seen their MySpace address written in dust on the back of a van. It's a back of an even thief,

so I don't think it ever got anywhere. It's essentially the Victorian times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is well to me. Consumers cannot relate, simply. They do not understand the things we did. We used to have to leave messages in dust on vans. Piedophiles were the main method of disseminating

music with their free advertising space. But I do think that it would be an argument. Sorry to interrupt again. The Mumford and Sons existed as the kind of somewhere between Woodstock 99 and the rise of Trump. There's a kind of connection, and I say that as a friend of the band. And of course, the discreet bass player of Mumford and Sons is the son of the billionaire funder of the Unheard website,

who also wrote GB News, who also wrote the Liberal Democrats orange book. Typical Mumford and Sons, really. Mumford and EZ. I think we should ask Fred what it was like being in a touring indie band. We can get to that because it's very uninteresting. But say, I feel like we've interrupted you. No, it's okay, man.

The only question I was going to say was that I think what I perceived happening in the music industry was more that things that were like you were saying, Oscar, genres that were sort of siloed off and you were a fan of this genre. And like in America, when you think about hip hop or country music, or like R&B to some extent, a lot of that started to get blended into what was popular and what was selling records.

And so in a way, I thought about this, like who were kids into when I was in school and what would be the sort of radio music people were into? And some of it was like Rascal Flats, which is basically country, like pop country, or things like that Shania Twain was kind of a groundbreaker for. And similarly, you saw this happening with some indie bands that just kind of got incorporated into that.

I like them a lot, but I think TV on the radio is a good example of that. It starts at a band like Tunday at IMPIG used to go and do open mic nights with just like a repeater pedal and a guitar. And they made, to my eyes, really challenging good music. And like now they're very much a like sell records, big label promotion kind of band.

I think that sort of happened in the US and I got the impression that there's a similar sort of flattening here. I just, I think the big difference to me also from what you guys are telling in your stories is that so much that was happening around live venues in London. And obviously there was stuff around the country too, but it's like for the US, it's just such a big fucking country that like what you have in your local scene is one thing,

most of that doesn't ever break out to the national stage. It is relatively rare. And so the, I think, and Fred, you were talking about this. The, I think it's important to make the point you were making to me before we came on air about all these venues in London not being around anymore. There was a whole culture that, and it's not just in London, but I mean, it's specifically even in like a 25 meter square

of where Tottenham Court Road Station is now in the development of, is it HS2? Is that a train line? What's the one they're building there? The Crossrail. So in the development of Crossrail, they closed almost 10 venues to make this train line that still is nowhere near coming to pass.

You had the Astoria, which was basically London's only 1500 capacity venue. So it was, it was, you know, below Shepherd's Bush Empire, which is 2000, but above somewhere that's like 800. The perfect size place to watch National, International X underneath that, the Astoria II, the Mean Fiddler. We had the Frog Club night on a Saturday night, which pretty much every band we talked of about played,

had one band every week, was just like on 9pm till 3am, and easy to get into even without ID. You had Metro Club, you had Sin Opposite, which is like a three-story club, which is now with the New Gloss, Tottenham Court Road thing is, I don't know what that is called. Geodome. The Roxy, which had the Club Night Panic.

You had the Ghetto, which had the Gay Club, Nag, Nag, Nag. This is literally off the top of my head. There was more, all of which had regular weekly nights. You obviously had Brewer Street, Madam Jojo's, where White Heat was before that. It was a club called Infinity on Old Burlington Street. All of these places physically closed. Tattie Bogle, which was off Carnaby Street.

All long gone. You're lucky if they're even a kingdom of sweets now. They're probably just a closed off nothing, a bit of property sold to Russian or Chinese investors. Like literally nothing. All they've been made for knocked down to make this high-speed rail that's never happened. I saw the Kaiser Chiefs headline the Eminem Store.

Ryan and they crushed it. This was actually physically happening and providing relatively inexpensive social outlets. I don't want to go as far to say it was community, but there were communities within these things. Trash at the end. Errol Alkins Club. You could list them all day.

The sad thing is, music aside, there were spaces that young or young-ish people could go and spend not much money in central London and get a night bus back to somewhere. If I was an 18-year-old now, I would definitely be on Twitch or something because there's nowhere to go. Especially not in central London, somewhere you could actually get home from

and spend less than £10 to get in somewhere and spend less than £5 on a drink. They weren't hugely commercial enterprises. They were club nights that the profits of which were just about covered the band and the promoter would take home a few hundred quid, do this four times a week and live on it. There was something real aside from the music industry

that was live music and club culture on a local scale. And this is before the kind of secret cinema and all this stuff that lots has been said about how nightlife changed and became something where you have to spend £60, four months in advance and dress up and bring your birth certificate to get into or whatever on nightlife has become now. And I know there's lots of good stuff and pockets of stuff

and I don't want to sound like the old guy shaking my fist, but there was lots to do and it was cheap and it was fun. And at least as central London's concerned, there's not so much to do. And now it's just the subject of oral histories. Even on this road, you had the Rhythm Factory where Libertines played lots of early gigs. Yeah, Rhythm Factory is massive.

My first band that we had to record a tape, a cassette tape to give the guy a demo to try and get a gig. And we came back the next week and said, oh, did you listen to our tape? And he's like, oh, you know what? I lost the tape, but I feel so bad. I'll give you a gig. And it's lucky you never heard the tape

because it was so bad we never got the gig. Had he done? But it was a more... There was something to it. I don't think it was necessarily better. Obviously now that we're talking about earlier, we've got the now have technology that anyone can make music at home

without needing to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds going to a recording studio, et cetera. In some ways, music has been democratized and we have access to everything through Spotify. But what we don't have, there was something to be said of like queuing outside somewhere on a cold November evening with a fake photocopied passport

where you'd change your... People didn't... The ID culture hadn't come in at the moment. I think at that point, I think it wasn't until David Cameron where they started having to have your passport or something. Actually, you could have a photocopy of your passport with the date change

and say you were born 100 years earlier than you were and they'd still let you in. It was different. You had 14-year-olds, 13-year-olds going to 18-plus nights and drinking and it was... No one cares. Because it was also... It was part of...

In terms of London, it was... In terms of to talk about it just from a Londoner's point of view, Indy was... It was also part of the story of Soho, which had always been this place, this place where you could escape into the night. And Indy was part of that.

And so, the sort of destruction of Soho, the sort of... Crowbar, board line, I just thought two more things. Yeah, yeah. There you go. I mean, it's... And Crossrail itself is essentially designed to empty out

the centre of London of organic life and people living there. In a way, it's raised on debt, is basically to have people living further and further away from the centre of London. But then for them to be able to get onto this train line that takes them into the centre to work, and then they come back out. Move to fucking Chelmsford, yeah.

You know, now... And again, just before... So this doesn't get too London centric, I've listed London venues, this is where I'm from, but ask anyone in Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, they'll be able to name you 5, 10 venues

that have closed in the last 10, 15 years. Well, I think this is where it gets very trashy, because we talk a lot about the sanitisation of urban centres and the way that's gone on. And I think it crystallised it for me a lot, living in Moscow, because I feel like the Russians do everything like 10 years later than us,

but at like four times the speed. And so like seeing in Moscow while I was living there, it was like that phase of like that kind of like late 2000s of just like every cool place being closed, like every like... There was a nightclub called Salyanka that everyone loved in Chinatown in Moscow, and it got closed and turned into

like some fucking oligarch's house or something. There's a really cool bar called Mayak, that was like a real like old intelligentsia spa, where it was like drinking and music like way into the night. It was like a restaurant during the day. It's super weird, fucking he will be able to be like, look like a World War II era French bistro. And that place got closed down

and turned into like fucking knows what. And just, yeah, you really felt that sensation of like literally, you could be going out from one week to the next, and you had to reassess what was still open, because stuff was closing at such a phenomenal rate. And in terms of, and again, we've mentioned the financial crash, and that was obviously a big part of it. And it was also, I suppose, a part of...

I mean, the interesting... I mean, in a way, one thing about the Maccabees that's different to a lot of indie bands that sort of followed on after the Libertines is that they were given the chance to make four albums. They were given a chance to actually change and grow as a band. And that was quite unusual, I think, Fred,

after... Although Spectre, you've made, what, three, four albums now as well. But I mean... I don't like to count. But the support for them, I mean, and again, it wasn't an enormous amount of support. But they did have the opportunity... Tell that to the girls at my sixth one, colleagues.

Let me tell you. If we can get them back together for a focused group. We just have to hope that this support is being given elsewhere in other ways now to things that are hopefully inspiring people in the same way, I don't know. Well, I don't think that's the case. I just feel like it's probably not. But I don't.

But that's the sort of... The landfill ends up almost being inevitable in culture. Yeah, turn out the landfill is actually literal in landfill, indeed. It was the rubble move to make way for... What's the train called again? Keep calling it. Cross, cross, cross. I don't even know its name.

I think the person who the builders actually recently said, or the architect that they now having built it, or built a bit in Tottenham Court Rose, they realized they would never have needed to get rid of the whole block that had all these venues on to build it. So it was just this kind of ridiculous stuff that we're always planning this thing. It's probably used as an excuse.

It's the same way coronavirus is being used to kind of... Oh, here we go. Yeah, but yeah. But it's true. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's something to that that someone... I'm not wearing a mask. To be able to articulate better than us.

Make me breathe. I'm sure that's had a horrible underbelly of lots of sexual assault and kind of drug deaths as well. So we shouldn't be too rosy tinted about it. There's also obviously a story in India of these promoters who made somehow, did make money out of it. And some of them went on to do things like fan boiler room or start record labels that then had to change their names

because of certain associations. Yeah. It feels like going now in London now is very like DJ centric. You don't often hear people going out and seeing bands in the same way. Like people are very into like you. And I feel like that almost now directly correlates with the incredibly low overheadness of DJ and like the very easily placeable into like an easily defined space that it is.

That's true. Yeah. It's much more convenient to the needs of property developers to have people watching a DJ than watching a band. Right. And again, that's why I think if someone was charting this backwards and looking at things, they would be looking at a band like LCD Sound System or things in America or Klaxons here that actually were the beginning of that

rather than music that essentially was still aping kind of 70s poses and sounds. So maybe we really are just talking about a kind of the echo of an echo of an echo that shouldn't even be, won't even be discussed in 10, 20 years more. Yeah. You know, right now it seems like there's a huge difference between trash shoots and Red Scare. But maybe, you know, people are doing the retrospective Twitch stream about podcasting, a landfill podcasting of the of the 2020s.

Exactly. Maybe that way won't seem that way. I'm definitely keen for like a friend. If you have any like fun, fun stories that you want to throw in from your days as a musician, I'd definitely love to go for that. Let me see. That's that's a hard thing to think of off the top of my head. Yeah.

I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I thought that was what Oscar was doing earlier. So I'm more throwing back rather than. Oscar, you got any fun stories? Fun stories. I mean, there was a sort of, there was a sort of, there was a few years ago, a friend of ours, Ron Martin, who's in a band called The River Method. Started a thing on Twitter called the hashtag called the Indie Amnesty,

which was basically where everyone sort of shared. Shared their kind of shameful, shameful or not memories of being extremely indie. I mean, I'm, you know, for, for, you know, for, for some people, it was just everything. Their whole life. Yeah. I mean, all the stories I can think of are really sad, like I'm not fun at all. Like I went to a Pete Dockty signing when he did that single for lovers with Wolfman. And I brought a copy of the book, The Libertine, that they later made the Johnny Depp film of,

which I gave him as a gift and he seemed really thankful for it. So you obviously knew how to deal with fans. I was like, oh, thanks so much. And I was like, oh, you're, you're staying at the Royal Hotel, aren't you? You need an edgeway road. I don't know how I knew this. He was like, yeah, yeah, you should come round for breakfast. So I said this in passing and I went back to my friend.

I was like, oh my God, Pete Dockty's inviting us to breakfast tomorrow at his hotel. It's quite near where my parents live. He was like, okay, well, come and stay with you. We'll stay the night and we can leave extra early to make sure we get there in time for Dockty having breakfast and like turn up at this hotel. You know, 8am and go up to the desk and they say, hello, who are you? And like, oh, we're here to have breakfast with Pete Dockty. And they eyes up, we're probably like 15 to 15 year old boys.

Paul was like, hi, is that Peter? Yeah, there's two boys here to have breakfast. And he put the phone and he's like, I says, come back tomorrow. So we're like, okay, we'll go out. We're like, well, let's, let's wait at my parents' house because you live in our way. So we can come back tomorrow because then we'll definitely get to have breakfast with him and wait another 24 hours, go back at 8am the next day. And they're like, they look at us with a sad look and like, hey,

well, we're here to have breakfast with Pete Dockty. And they're like, you checked out last night. Pete Dockty reverse nonce, absolutely desperate to avoid meeting two young boys. That's not a fun story at all. That's just a glimpse into the pathos. Because the story of Pete Dockty, I thought it was going to be depressing about Pete Dockty. I've got lots of those ones as well. But this is just more like the life of a fan before being a musician.

Nah, I mean, I remember, I remember there was a guy called Joe Lean who became a kind of byword for the excesses of the music industry. He was probably, yeah, the ultimate Lamphillindi figure because this was a deal that may even reach seven figures for an album that never came out. Oh, wow. So, you know, that's, that's its own story. Yeah, he, and he kind of, yeah, they gave him all this money and then didn't release his album. And at some point, he ended up living on my sofa for six weeks

and eating quite a lot of Happy Meals, McDonald's Happy Meals. Ironically, not a very happy thing to be known. No, and I think he probably wouldn't, I'm not sure he would even recognize it. Getting any good toys, was he trying to assemble a particular Yeah, I mean, he's very happy now. He's very happy now. Yeah, he's, which is good to know. I mean, this is us desperately trying to squeeze out a funny story to see if we can get it.

No, they're all depressing. All of men broken by time. Well, I don't know if you want to wrap it, Milo, but that, yeah, I mean, I think this has been a fascinating journey through Lamphillindi. Thank you for tolerating our digressions. It's been really fun just talking to you. I didn't want to talk about it anymore. We could talk about it.

Really, because we, a friend and I had a, this is a fun story for me. Working for the cash machine. Yeah. Living for the weekend. I think it was the album called Stars of CCTV. We live in a society. It wasn't Mark Fisher, but it was someone like Mark Fisher who made a quite a good case for hard fire, not necessarily championing them as great artists,

but basically saying that they were denigrated for class reasons. Unfairly denigrated for class reasons. I think that's... The lower middle class were often denigrated unfairly at the time. That's probably fair enough. That probably does make sense in a way. Hard to beat. I mean, it's hard to get out of your head.

They were, yeah, they was the underlying political message with them. Working for the cash machine. Yeah. And they proved their own point. Over rakes. 22 grand job. We were talking about 22 grand job today. One and the other is lacky.

I don't want to be a lacky in a job that doesn't pay. And apparently he got the job that Alan from the rakes had left the 22 grand. He took it next and they both ended up in these bands. We just testament to the small population size in London. Future hands, decent days and nights. Yeah. Decent, decent nights. Block party, something weekend.

They have one something about the weekend. Not to talk about the weekend's political, but you know. No. In a way. They're in a way. A five day working week is a product of trade unions, I suppose. In a sense. Yeah.

I remember, yeah, a friend and I had this really weird comedy radio show at university. And our whole thing was we would only play music, which was objectively bad. So we were going through a drink that I remember like hitting on this rich vein of remembering hard-fi. And my co-host still a bigger friend of mine going like, this is music for estate agents. I felt like there had never been a more damning indictment of a band. But they're worth mentioning because each of those bands would have had, you know,

some real super fans. I feel like I have loads of stories that I've forgotten, but as it, and when it turns out. I'll send off some stories in on Voice Night. When I, when I, when I, but having said that, when I, when I've told them, it's really, I've realized that they're either depressing, libelous, or a combination of the two. Well, that's the trifecta that we love on this show. Yeah. I mean, it remains for me to thank Fred and Oscar very much for coming in and joining us.

While we still have this space. Thank you very much. Yeah. Is there anything that you guys would like to plug to announce? Anyone you'd like to libel? I'm just seeing if there's anything in the notes. Plug. I hear Oscar's got some great podcasts on open democracy.

Rich Nate produced. That's a couple of years old. I, you know what? I'm, I'm okay for plugging my, for plugging my. I'm still a practicing musician, but I wouldn't advise checking out any of the music unless you want a, you know, journey back to the depths. Fred, how is it? How has an indie tour changed in, you know, from when you were first playing?

I think the, well, I'd be tempted to say the sex and drugs and rock and roll are still quite few in far between and that's the, you know, sad reality for most touring musicians. All right. Well, thank you very much for listening to this and being a Patreon subscriber. Appreciate that. Thank you for being a subscriber. All the sex and drugs on this show is that noise that I do. Certainly all the sex anyway.

Yeah. And we will talk to you later this month with yet another Brunology. Oh yeah. Catch you later.