Song, by Toad

On the subject of women in indie, I remember that I never did get into much female fronted music as a kid.  It was all R.E.M., Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Bob Dylan and stuff like that.  Not much that was current and, for no obvious reason, not much stuff made by women, particularly with lead female vocals.  Maybe if I’d been more into Motown and soul that might have been different, but I never really crossed paths with Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez or Marianne Faithfull either, who were all working in the same basic territory which I was exploring at the time.  Sandy Denny was one of the most conspicuous exceptions, but I can’t think of many others off the top of my head.

This didn’t really change until I went to university.  All that was really different there was that I became considerably more aware of popular music which was popular away from the dominance of the likes of MTV and so on.  So I started getting into bands like Saint Etienne and their ilk and I was sort of interested in the Cranberries without ever really clicking with them.  The real sea change was of course the explosion of sassy, lady-led groups which came with Britpop.  It became such an obvious phenomenon that I seem to recall Louise Wener of Sleeper wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Just Another Female-Fronted Band’ at some point, although my memory is far from definite on the subject.

Anyhow, I got really into Sleeper (although perhaps only really from their second album onwards, rather than their first), I loved the first two Echobelly albums and I really liked Belly as well.  Elastica were around at the same time, but I never quite got into them, and the Cocteau Twins were really good too, but not quite Britpop I guess.  If you follow those links then you’ll be able to pick up almost any of these albums for a pittance on Amazon Marketplace, and there’s some amazing stuff there.

Maybe it’s because it was the first popular movement I engaged with at the time, but I still have a real affection for Britpop, despite its foisting the likes of Menswear on us.  It was brash and confident, and maybe that was the attitude which I responded to the most in this plethora of female-led rock bands.  I know that same attitude was largely the undoing of the movement as a whole in the end, as it got all tangled up in itself.  And with the decline of Britpop most of these groups disappeared from the scene to a large extent.

It was fun though – lots of fun.  It was the first time I’d really engaged with the thrill of anticipating new music, as opposed to exploring what was already out there.  It sounds dated as hell listening back to it now, and maybe that’s why those albums are all so cheap, but there are too many memories for that to matter much.

Sleeper – Lie Detector

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Echobelly – King of the Kerb

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Belly – Untitled and Unsung

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Cocteau Twins – Tishbite

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There are some more people to vote for in the Digital Music Awards, so get going. If you actually go to the site and see the excruciating list of utter shit listed under ‘blogs’ then you will see why it’s so important to get actual blogs by actual people with actual brain cells voted for on this bastard. Unbelievable, the shit that is listed there – preening, self-important, utterly vacuous and dripping in corporate jism. Fuck them, and the horse they rode in on.

So, vote for me.

And the Growl.
And the Hum.
And the Dance.
And the Rawk.
And the Sex.
And the Sweep.

And the tunes:

As a shameless incentive, I’ve thrown together a wee pile of songs from my first couple of years in Glasgow. I bought loads of CD singles at the time, half of which got pinched, but there was some cracking stuff around at this time, really there was.

The Bluetones – The Fountainhead
Blur – There’s No Other Way
Elastica – Vaseline
Sleeper – Vegas
The La’s – Son of a Gun (No, I checked, and apparently this one is a little debatable. When it’s a plural of a word as a word, rather than the object it represents then you use an apostrophe. So fuck off, smart-arse. Besides, The Las looks like a different band altogether.)

Song, by Toad has been nominated as Best Music Blog in the People’s Choice Awards. I didn’t actually have to nominate myself, but you can, so it’s hardly an Earth-shattering achievement, however I think it’s important we muster a bit of a turnout at the voting booth for reasons I’ll allow Tim from The Daily Growl to explain:

more importantly, I want to see proper British music blogs occupying that top 10. Not like last year where the top 5 was taken up by ‘blogs’ by top-selling artists which I cynically see as just another promotional racket (yes, I’m looking at you Mike Skinner and Dave Gilmour) and others that weren’t really music blogs at all.

…let’s see a proper music blogger – i.e. a non-professional, just writing for sheer love of music – on the podium come 2 October.

He’s right – bollocks to the well-funded, slick-arse, sphincter-polishing, devil’s shilling-grubbing professionals. That’s not what a fucking blog is, dammit. However, fortunately it turns out you can vote for numerous different blogs using the same email address and it also turns out you can vote with as many different email addresses as you have, so get out there and vote for me as often as possible. Then make your friends do it too. Then go to The Daily Growl and Fucking Dance and vote for them as well – let’s make a dent for the amateurs this year, eh! Any of my other blog pals who are in the running, let me know and I’ll link to you buggers too.

And, of course, the reason for all this bollocks in the first place – the tuuunez! And it’s nearly beer time. Woo hoo!

Depeche Mode – Everything Counts
The Siddeleys – You Get What You Deserve
Elastica – Connection
Gene – I Can’t Help Myself
Cold War Kids – Passing the Hat
Decoration – It’s OK to be Fickle
Thomas Truax – Inside the Internet