'Dear Nicholas," began the unsolicited email I received last summer. "Were you in the Love Act? If so, I'd like to contact you." My mind hurriedly spooled back nearly 30 years. Was this a prelude to blackmail? No, but I was being accused of something that many people might rather forget. The email claimed I had helped to invent indiepop. And I had – sort of.
The Love Act was me and my friends' mid-80s college band. We were part of a scene that later became known as C86, the name coming from a promotional NME cassette featuring more or less kindred spirits. It included the likes of Primal Scream, the Pastels and the Wedding Present and has since been both celebrated and castigated for giving birth to indie as a genre of music. One set of received wisdom draws a direct line from its jangly guitars and perfect pop tunes to Nirvana, Manic Street Preachers and Arctic Monkeys; others just see a mess of weedy moaning and incompetence – "anoraksia nervosa", as one sceptical observer put it.
The email was from Neil Taylor, who in the 80s was an NME journalist and the guiding spirit behind C86. Although the Love Act were not on the original cassette, he had shown interest in us at the time and now, he explained, he was putting together an extended three-CD reissue and wanted to include one of our songs. This was an unexpected turn of events, as it must have been for many of the other bands. Few of us thought we would still be engaged with this stuff nearly three decades later. Although the Love Act attracted some attention from the music press and industry, I don't think we were untypical in the relaxed way we husbanded our career.
Just how relaxed? I once missed a gig to attend my first opera – Madam Butterfly at ENO, since you ask – and the gig simply went ahead without drums. As for the video we made back then, it shows us enjoying ourselves and smiling a lot. Well, we were young - and thin! - but everyone knows serious musicians shouldn't smile.
Our song Hep Clothes, "both biting and jaunty", according to one contemporary critic, turns up on the reissue as one of 50 bonus tracks, all recorded between mid-1985 and 1986. The sheer comprehensiveness of the exercise may dispel some longstanding misapprehensions. Almost since C86 was first released, those who followed the scene have been obliged, largely ineffectively, to explain that it wasn't just fey young men and their jingle-jangle guitars.
To be fair, you can see where the idea came from. The first few tracks feature the aforesaid guitar sound and lyrical refrains such as "Leave me alone" (Primal Scream), "Catch me when I fall" (the Mighty Lemon Drops) and "There's nothing I can do" (the Wolfhounds). But even on the original cassette there was plenty that wasn't poppy and instantly accessible. Nor were we as apolitical as has been claimed. Many of the bands formed in 1984 and 1985, at the same time as the miners' strike, and it was rare to see a guitar on stage without a yellow "Coal not dole" sticker attached. The June Brides, who declined to be on the original cassette out of a fear of being typecast - but who are on the new version – gave their 1985 album There Are Eight Million Stories the working title The June Brides Destroy Capitalism.
And we definitely weren't a Londoncentric invention of the NME. My view came from south-east London – where the cellar bar at Thames Poly in Woolwich was a key venue – but there were other centres of like-minded activity all over the country, connected by scratchily produced fanzines. Our generally low-tech approach was partly because none of us had any money – neither the bands, nor the audiences, nor the promoters, nor the tiny record companies, with the slight exception of Alan McGee and his fledgling Creation records.
It would take a few years for the mainstream music industry to really pay attention, and then, as Taylor says in his 12,000-word liner notes, it set about a ruthless process of "theft" and "asset stripping" that has left C86 forever tarred with the brush of begetting landfill indie. And so if you have found yourself miserably standing in a field while some floppy-haired tosser with a guitar sings about bedwetting, then I really am very, very sorry, but that wasn't my intention at all.
C86 was a snapshot of a moment; the new release shows it was fresh, honest and suprisingly durable. I may not have given it much thought over the last 30 years, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
• The deluxe three-CD edition of C86 is available from Cherry Red Records. The Wedding Present, Yeah Yeah Noh and other C86 bands play 229, London W1 on 14 June.
