Recollections of a 1980s indie kid

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours. 

The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile indie fan in the suburbs of Chicago and cycling 20 miles to get this record that autumn. I could just get the 85 bus from Chorlton. 

The events of 40 years ago have been in my thoughts because of a recently released compilation album, Sensitive, curated, as they say these days, by music writer Pete Paphides, and featuring bands from a scene now largely forgotten. The best known you probably remember: Primal Scream, Orange Juice, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Wedding Present. Others, who were ubiquitous on the college gig scene, you probably don’t: the Pastels, the Bodines, Biff Bang Pow! Some I’m not sure I had heard of even at the time: the Sea Urchins, the Field Mice, the Nivens. 

To complicate matters, the June Brides don’t feature on Paphides’ album, though some members did appear at its launch party. Perhaps this is a licensing issue as, unusually, that album isn’t on Spotify either; or maybe it’s because, with their added brass, the June Brides weren’t typical of the genre. But they were my favourites from that scene, along with two other bands, the Loft and the Weather Prophets, who were in my mind one because they were fronted by the same singer, Pete Astor. And his two tracks on Sensitive have become my early spring 2025 earworms. This is particularly apposite because another of his Weather Prophets tunes was actually called ‘Worm in my Brain’. Astor also gives us ‘Why Does the Rain?’, which continues ‘always seem to fall on me…’ – a question so perfectly, drippily indie that a generation later Travis posed it again with slightly modified phrasing, ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’, and had a global hit. Another example of rain falling on Astor perhaps. 

These bands came at the very tail-end of post-punk new wave and were a small counterpoint to that mid-1980s mainstream Brit explosion of everything from Dire Straits to the Stock Aitken Waterman acts such as Kylie and Rick Astley. And it was only small because, unlike new wave proper, they rarely troubled the charts. Paphides opts for the catch-all term Sensitive (from a song title from those softly spoken Field Mice) to characterise the scene. At the time, the school of indie 1985-6 was more often described as ‘fey’. Both terms are fair. It was, looking back, strange that we could, say, read Camus or be conversant with punk but were too shy to talk to someone sitting next to us in the Poly canteen. 

Our diffidence was in danger of making us good for nothing. As Morrissey put it: ‘I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy.’ Paphides reports that, at that launch party, James Roberts of those Sea Urchins, prior to singing ‘Pristine Christine’, announced: ‘I was an awkward 17-year-old when I wrote this. And now I’m an awkward 56 year-old about to sing this.’ Later this shyness or awkwardness deepened to the point that the bands could not apparently look their audience in the eye – earning the next wave of indie bands the nickname ‘shoegazers’. Although Miki Berenyi from Lush would subsequently challenge this: ‘We weren’t staring at our shoes, we were looking at our pedals.’

Listening to all these bands again for the first time in years, the thing that strikes me as most extraordinary is how little they owe to the Beatles. Instead the sound comes more from fusing the three-chord riffs of the Velvet Underground with the tone of those American Phil Spector-produced girl groups of the early 1970s, and then anglicising it – or, in the case of Orange Juice and the Jesus and Mary Chain, caledonianising it. 

Visually the bands and their audience also looked less to the mop-top Beatles than their sometime American copyists, the Byrds, with their longer hair – ‘domeheads’ as an early Creation Records compilation described the style. And just as the sound was a British take on 1960s America, so was the look: we wore vintage suede jackets or zip-up monochrome jackets like James Dean in Rebel and imported worn-in, or often worn-out, Levi’s 501s. And – incredibly – no one wore trainers. Well maybe the odd pair of high-top soft canvas Converse – but most would be wearing monkey boots or crepe sole brothel creepers from Robot. Nike or Adidas were unthinkable: you’d look like you were doing sport. 

Just as the sound was a British take on 1960s America, so was the look: we wore zip-up monochrome jackets like James Dean in Rebel and imported worn-in, or worn-out, Levi’s 501s

If it wasn’t drippy stuff about rain, the lyrical idiom was often about honey, candy or other sweet things. Just that autumn we had Candy Apple Grey from Hüsker Dü – from the counterpart American scene – and ‘Just Like Honey’, ‘Some Candy Talking’ and Psychocandy from the Jesus and Mary Chain, who, briefly, felt like the biggest band ever (if your main media source was the NME). This tendency was so entrenched that it was even parodied, by Pop Will Eat Itself, with the lyric: ‘What’s so fucking good? What’s so fucking good about candy?’ I can tell them what was so good about it: it was because Lou Reed had made it cool, in ‘Candy Says’. In this context the implication was that we were talking about drugs rather than actual sweeties. 

But ultimately candy is an Americanism and even if hugely influenced by America, this was entirely a British movement – hence the 1990s Britpop band Cornershop whose name, as well as evoking British-Asian heritage, was also perhaps an assertion that Britain was about ‘sweet shops’ rather than ‘candy stores’. On this sweet shop theme, another obscure Sensitive band is called Dolly Mixture. 

The high-water mark of the scene was the NME cassette-only compilation C86, named for the year of its release. You had to send off a coupon and a cheque, which I did, and the tape came by post a week later. But in capturing the scene, as this compilation did, it also heralded its imminent end. 

This was for several reasons. First, the heavier and darker Jesus and Mary Chain came along and took the style to its logical conclusion – and after that the rest sounded not so much fey as feeble. Then things happened in America which had the same effect but even more so: their indie strain evolved from Hüsker Dü via Pixies to Nirvana and ‘grunge’ which exploded here and drowned out quieter indigenous indie. 

The final coffin nail came from dance music. In 1985, the decade-long disco boom had come to an end and nightclubs were in an interregnum lull with no real momentum. You’d get a bit of James Brown, or Prince or Cameo, whatever. But there was no scene as such. However by 1987 there was a new style coming, heralded by S’Express and the first house records from Chicago. That soon led to the rave scene which simply exploded, in Manchester as much as anywhere. Some indie kids, such as Primal Scream, the Beloved, Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, were able to adapt to this. But by 1990-1 you were either ‘all bound for Mu Mu Land’ or you were stuffed.

So almost all the Sensitive bands were history, a dead branch of musical evolution like previous generations’ skiffle bands or power pop. And today the scene is almost completely forgotten except by music historians like Paphides, and nostalgists like me. The Britpop of the mid-1990s which eventually followed would look elsewhere for its inspiration: to the Beatles and all that, not to three chords, candy and old Levi’s. 

That year, 1985, was exactly as close in time to the second world war as it is to today. Unsurprisingly much has changed. Astor is now a university lecturer. June Brides frontman Phil Wilson became a civil servant with HMRC. The Poly is now Manchester Metropolitan University. The £17-a-week rent is a distant memory, as are 45p pints. 

The absence of the June Brides from Spotify eventually drove me to seek out my vinyl copy for the first time in many years. As I took it from the sleeve a piece of paper fell out. It was a hand-written setlist from that evening in September 1985 which I had ripped from where it was taped to an amp at the end of the gig and then stored inside the record until forgotten. It was like receiving a postcard from my much younger self.