People have often thought that pop music peaked in their youth. If you were born in 1950? Beatlemania. If you were born in 1960? Punk rock. If you were born in 1970? Take your pick. 

For those of us born in the early 1990s, though, this trend came to a screeching halt.

In 2001, The Strokes released Is This It — resurrecting guitar music to the loud relief of music journalists across America and Europe. It was a fine album — derivative, yes, but memorable and charismatic.

The race was on to find their British equivalent. The Libertines hurtled to fame on a wave of jangling riffs and post-imperial romanticism. Up the Bracket was a striking debut album, to be sure — confident yet chaotic. The band’s love of “guerrilla gigs”, even in their homes, fuelled a sense of anything-could-happen cultural excitement. 

Almost as soon as the band had appeared, though, it collapsed under the weight of co-frontman Pete Doherty’s heroin addiction.

For this author, that moment — about two decades behind us — spelled the doom of Britain’s indie revival. Sure, it continued. In fact, it had barely begun. But it was a shambling aesthetic zombie of a cultural trend.

Sure, a lot of great songs appeared. “Take Me Out”? Of course. “Hounds of Love”? Glorious. “Retreat”? Yes. (Or am I the only person who remembers that one?) There were even a few great albums. Silent Alarm is a classic, in my opinion, and Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not holds up despite its shocking title. Yet the good stuff was drowned in trash.

Every age has had forgettable albums and forgettable bands as well as classics, of course, but the forgettable/memorable ratio in the noughties was absurdly unbalanced. It would be cruel to bring up names here. Few of the members of such bands even have careers now. Their success rose with the sun and then died in its glare. Besides, you can’t blame young people for doing their best to achieve fame and fortune. The real villain of the period was the NME — the Bible of British guitar music.

Print magazines had begun to suffer in the face of the digital age. The NME’s solution, it appeared, was to latch on to any quartet of underwashed twenty-somethings in skinny jeans and hail them as the second coming of John Lennon, Richey Edwards, Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ. For every Arctic Monkeys — bands, in other words, that would achieve lasting critical and commercial success — there were ten thousand bands with names beginning with “The” which had a half-decent single, an underwhelming album and an imminent date with office jobs and wistful regrets.

“Landfill indie” was the term which came to describe this depressing genre. Its genius as a descriptor lies in the fact that it doesn’t refer to bad music as much as to disposable music — disposable songs, disposable albums and disposable bands — which seems fun but loses its novelty before you can say “bargain bin”. The NME’s Mark Beaumont protested against this term in 2020, writing that it aimed to “crush the spirit of the young”, which was an odd accusation when anybody who was 18 when Up the Bracket was released would have been in their mid-thirties.

Yet it was the NME that did a lot of the disposing — building up bands and then knocking them down. The case of The Others is a poignant one. With their guerrilla gigs and their drug references, they seemed like the second coming of The Libertines. Yet they lacked one thing that Doherty and friends had had, and an important thing — good songs. “Lackey” was a fun single but the rest of their album was only good for irritating your neighbours. Undaunted, the NME celebrated its release with an 8/10 rating, and described the group as “Britain’s most worshipped new band”. When the album flopped — the public failing to be impressed, never mind worshipful — the magazine turned on the band with embarrassed spite.

The sad fact is that British guitar music paralleled the course of Blairism

In his defence of the era, Beaumont protested against the idea that “an entire generation, for the first time ever, feels ashamed of its youth”. Well, I’m sorry, but you can imagine a dad in the nineties impressing his kids with “Wish You Were Here” or “Anarchy in the UK” — depending on their tastes). Can you imagine a dad today impressing his kids with “I Predict A Riot” or — God forbid — “America”?

The sad fact is that British guitar music paralleled the course of Blairism. In 1997, it had the swaggering hubris of “Be Here Now”, by the mid-noughties it was running on PR and stale gimmicks, and by 2008 it had entered the Great Recession. What had seemed so modern and forward-thinking was culturally and spiritually exhausted. 

Unlike Blairism, landfill indie did at least have the grace to go away.

As a millennial, it is a bit sad not to have some sort of cultural Golden Age to remember. But perhaps it shouldn’t be. The ageing person who is morbidly convinced that civilisation just so happened to reach its zenith when they turned 18 wallows in nostalgia. To have come of age when Razorlight released “America” should at least have freed us from our adolescence.