Sometimes conflated with soundalike sub-genre Jangle-Pop, C86 was the term given to a very specific strain of introspective, lo-fi, Byrds-influenced indie power-pop.
The name was derived from a cassette tape advertised in the May 1986 issue of the NME and sold to eager readers in exchange for a £2.95 postal order to cover post and packing.
A belated follow-up to their C81 comp from five years previous, C86 – short for ‘the class of 1986’ – was somewhat narrower in scope than its eclectic post-punk predecessor, featuring a gaggle of (often Scottish) bands that it was easy to mock as fey twentysomethings with pudding bowl haircuts and paisley shirts strumming Lovin’ Spoonful riffs on second-hand Rickenbackers.
Soup Dragons
That said, not every song on the 22-track cassette conformed to that pasty-faced, solipsistic stereotype, with Stump, Bogshed, Big Flame and The Shrubs all sharing a similar political punch. And indie wags Half Man Half Biscuit never quite fitted in with the Beano punk of I Hate Nerys Hughes (From The Heart).
Compiled by NME staffers Roy Carr, Neil Taylor and Adrian Thrills, C86 didn’t invent that jangly pop sound (if The Smiths had formed just a few years later, they’d have certainly been lumped together with the C86 crowd), but it did give it an easily identifiable tag.
That fanzine-fuelled first wave helped define the sound of indie for years to come, influencing such bands as Belle & Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes.
