Gotta Hear This, #8

It is 1986, and I'm a club-prowling music writer in London, spending my youthful energies in Hammersmith and New Cross, Kilburn and Ladbroke Grove. There are four weekly music papers coming out of London (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror) and there's an intense churn of ideas and contenders plus a pressure to find fresh bands, new subcultures - anything that will give the freelance hack some distinction.

So I find myself at the Clarendon venue in west London, searching for the tremors of a new movement. The adherents have pudding bowl haircuts and wear anoraks or duffel coats. Many of them sport Pastels badges and get their information from The Legend! fanzine and their cues from the seminal C86 cassette, issued by NME. It's all a bit Enid Blyton, an indie Narnia. Writers are talking about the "shambling" ethos and in a monumentally pretentious article by Simon Reynolds, we learn that this scene is "a revolt against the sophistication and hyper-sexuality of mainstream pop culture, a revolt into innocence".

I'm on the hunt for some kind of development, and there are whispers of a factional split, a subculture that is even more child-like and twee. They're calling it "cutie" and I find a few people at a Soup Dragons gig who fit the bill. I cop some quotes and get the photographer to deliver the evidence. The scenesters are appalled, and a humorous piece eventually runs under the headline "Are You A Cutie Or A Shambler?" According to Bob Stanley, I am the villain who killed cutie.

Anyway, there was a band near the heart of all this called Talulah Gosh. They came from Oxford and seemed rather posh. The girls called themselves Marigold and Pebbles, but they were really Amelia and Elizabeth. The music sounded like a Brownie convention staged by Andy Warhol, which was ok, and they had an outstanding song, called 'Talulah Gosh'. The lyric was about perilous dreams and the payback of fame and you can see a video here. And hilariously, there's an old interview with myself and the band here.



The single was eventually released in 1987, after Pebbles had quit and the cutie ethos had been bloodied and consumed. But I think the tune still resonates. A sweet, intelligent song, somehow surviving in the scrum of commerce, novelty and venal misbehaviour.