tabbycat wrote
@beaker
haha, beaker don't you know that ride is a four letter word? the other one being blur. though you are entitled to your vices.
i always think of those two particularly as being the key bands that killed off shoegaze, though it's a personal and partial memory thing.
as i remember it (being at art college at the time) before those two bands turned up the so-called 'scene that celebrates itself' (that later came to be known as early shoegaze, even spacemen 3 fitted in there) was just a barely and badly co-ordinated rabble of scuzzy art students playing white noise thunder to other scuzzy art students in underlit half-empty mid-week student union bars. by and large reacting against all those twee sarah and postcard c86 bands (with their cardigans and thumbsucking) and looking to the mary chain and sonic youth for something with a little bit of contrasting energy and attitude.
then ride and blur turned up, added beatles melodies and pudding bowl haircuts to the mix, and suddenly smash hits were interested and schoolgirls started turning up at gigs with their mums.
obviously once a demographic with disposable income started to take an interest the sell-your-soul huge advance cheques began to be waved around and in no time at all the whole scene degenerated into the smash hits teen-scene that inevitably became the clusterfuck that was britpop.
but it was as if the market demographic for what had previously been though of as indie (mail order and cartel stuff, under the counter in brown paper bags, under the genteel stewardship of john peel) suddenly changed overnight to smash hits covers and top ten singles in woolworths.
obviously there were a few other factors involved (our friends from the north) and the brit music papers turning into tabloids, but that's sort of how i remember it, though the feedback, strobes and smoke machines.
so even though i have just checked and found 'like a daydream' and 'taste' on my mp3 player, i still totally blame ride and blur for the beginning of the end of the great days of indie. no quarter!
I
I'm not sure blur and ride killed shoegaze.... As I recall, many of the more celebrated bands simply disappeared (e.g.mbv) or put out increasingly poor albums. Ride are pretty pedestrian, but by 1992, there weren't many bands of that kind of sound still putting out decent music.
I have a copy of Select magazine somewhere (remember it?) from 1992 featuring the Rollercoaster tour (mbv, jamc, dinosaur Jr and blur) which paints blur as fairly interesting innovative band, pinching lots of different musical styles (they acknowledge they deliberately copied the baggy drum loop for "there's no other way" as a joke) and not exactly aiming for pop stardom. The first album didn't sell much, the critics loved the second one but it didn't sell, and it wasn't until the third album in 1995 that their gig audience was anything other than indie kids of both genders. Interestingly, the same issue features a joint interview with bobby Gillespie and Kylie minogue, in which he eulogises about kyle's pop success and criticises indie-snob attitudes.
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