Elbow tagged incorrectly!!!!

im sick and bloody tired of them being called, rock, soft rock, britpop, pop, alternative (is probably the closest) ans most of all INDIE!!!! How dare people call them an indie band!! and thats the most common one theyre called!! what?!?!

they are the polar opposite to that maximo for girls load of shite!!

rant over

I completely and utterly agree with this I, myself think that there should be a genre called 'Elbow' as there's nothing that actually accurately describes them. they don't have a genre, they're just Elbow

so true. just the same as radiohead, ratm, muse and a select few others, they have their own genre. muse can be called electronic rock type thingy but their not, radiohead can be called... ... ...i dont know actually.

anyways, elbow are most certainly NOT an indie band...

this post was prompted by me trying to record that celebrity snatch thing. on the info it said " indie band elbow's bassist pete turner".

ARGH!!!!

i don't have sky or freeview if you're putting it on the computer, can you send me it?

what the programme? i dont know how to im afraid...

itll be on youtube within a few weeks.

okay, i shall check then

I wouldn't worry about it too much, tbh - "indie" has been shorthand for "non-mainstream guitar music" (rather than its original description of bands on an independent label) for thirty-odd years now.

And people love pigeonholes - I suppose Elbow are "indie" or "rock" in the same way that Burial is "dance", Neon Neon are "pop", or Scouting for Girls are "rubbish". (actually, Scouting for Girls ARE rubbish, but anyway...)

Edited: Fairy nuff, Lee. I need to type faster!

Leave longish hair alone i have long hair though i don't do it to give myself a label/category or whatever, i just prefer it

Grant wrote:

Leave longish hair alone i have long hair though i don't do it to give myself a label/category or whatever, i just prefer it

Y'see, it's exactly cos you're such a relative bairn in arms that I've no idea if you got me joke reference to the old saying about haircuts & knowing yer dad. Ask yer Mam

And good on yer for smashing the establishment via a rebellious 'do. We all did back in the day...

My mum's a complete nutcase who criticises everything i do so, i don't think i'll ask her

Poor Grant! Well... I s'pose that's pretty normal for parents of teens. It'll pass!

it's not fair!!! My girlfriend's parents are really young, so they actually understand her, but i don't think my parents can remember they're childhood

mrswoman wrote:

Leo & Grant, you two being younger fellas who probably don't know any different - - I've gotta stand up for Elbow rightly being classed under the meaning of 'indie' when it first came into common use, from the late Seventies onwards: i.e. anything produced sufficiently outside the pressure of mainstream nonsense and released on an independent label.

Hark back to Stiff Records for instance with stablemates so diverse as Kirsty MacColl, Ian Dury or Jona Lewie. Not to mention Mute back in the day with Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode in their naive electropop days, or Cherry Red with early Tracey Thorn even before Everything But The Girl, The Woodentops, Attila The Stockbroker or The Buzzcocks. 'Real' Indie 1.0 can't be categorised, unlike haircut band clones. Even Brit pop circa '95-96 was a later very distilled incarnation of what us old buggers mean by indie!

Thus endeth the lecture. "Get a haircut! I know your Dad!" etc etc.

Edited: Fairy nuff, Lee. I need to type faster!

i DO know what indie really meant, but nowadays its changed. Indie is being used to describe anything from QOTSA to the futureheads, to the red hot chili peppers to scouting for hirls.

elbow ARE an indie band; in the true sense of the word, but in modern terms, they are being compared to scouting for girls!! NO WAY!! ITS RIDICULOUS!!

Grant wrote:

it's not fair!!! My girlfriend's parents are really young, so they actually understand her, but i don't think my parents can remember they're childhood

Man this makes me feel really old

Innit, Bluey!

Leo, I know it's changed the other way too: The fun starts when you have journos who are in their 40s or more liberally using one term which means something completely different to each progressively younger group of fans staggered across the generations. Labels eh? At least they make for a heated debate!

I think Indie fits Elbow, but i don't think it fits all this crap thats getting called indie which is just bubblegum pop with guitars and a bloke who can't sing.

Leo, you really hate scouting for girls, don't you?

Good chap. You'll like this review then - such bile, it made me chuckle.
Drowned in Sound review - 1/10

As for categorising Elbow, although they may be indie in the true, original meaning, the fact that the likes of Coldplay get described as indie makes the term pretty meaningless nowadays.

In fact Elbow being compared to Coldplay really annoys me personally. It is just so lazy, but then all pigeonholing is is suppose. Maybe it's just because I find listening to Coldplay to be such a hollow, cold experience. Even Eno - he who managed to make U2 seem relevent again back in the day FFS - even Eno couldn't make Coldplay sound interesting. And don't get me started on Chris Martin, the self righteous ...

Sorry, I think I may have had too much coffee this morning. Think I'll listen to TSSK and chill.

I am so old and decrepit that I can actually remember when the term "indie" didn't exist in relation to "beat groups".

Until the late 80's, you couldn't go to an "Indie" night as there was no such thing! You would to go to an "alternative" night to listen to music that was from outside the mainstream. I think I still prefer "alternative" to "indie" as it is a more accurate description for the music rather than how it came to be released into the world.

The term "indie" became adopted as a catch-all term for the music because all the new,exciting stuff of the middle-to-late 80's - the sort of thing you would get on John Peel, for example - tended to emerge on independent labels. By the late 80's IIRC, the terms "alterrnative" and "indie" became blurred to the point where the two terms became synonymous and the word "indie" ultimately eclipsed the word "alternative" as a means of describing the music instead of the record label. Wrongly, IMHO. I blame the NME.

The obvious paradox with using the term in this way is that you can have so-called "indie" bands releasing music on major labels (Radiohead etc) and yet have poor quality chart fodder being released on "indie" labels: Pete Waterman correctly used to boast that PWL was an "indie" label. An examination of the independent charts from the late 80's will show that his acts did indeed dominate.

So, the term "indie" is actually meaningless today as it appears to apply to artistes who play commercial and non-commercial music across a whole range of musical genres and who release their music independently or via a major label.

To some, however, it just means skinny boys and girls with funny haircuts.

All very interesting stuff. Back when I used to play in a band (and one day I will again) the most asked and most hated question was...

"What kind of stuff do you play?"

I could never pigeonhole our stuff, so I couldn't answer the question very well other than to say "Come to the gig and you tell me". Not many people came to our gigs.

Ever since that, I kind of decided that I don't care what category people want to put a band or an artist into.

I have two catagories: "I like it", and "I don't like it".

However, thinking about this now, some things are easy to define (jazz, classical, metal, prog etc) and others are not so easy, and I think Elbow are a band that are not so easy to pigeonhole.

To paraphrase Howard Moon, they span the genres, they are Genre Spanners.

Mr_K wrote:

Leo, you really hate scouting for girls, don't you?

Good chap. You'll like this review then - such bile, it made me chuckle.
Drowned in Sound review - 1/10

That's one of the best reviews I have ever read.

Mr Woman wrote:

Until the late 80's, you couldn't go to an "Indie" night as there was no such thing! You would to go to an "alternative" night to listen to music that was from outside the mainstream. I think I still prefer "alternative" to "indie" as it is a more accurate description for the music rather than how it came to be released into the world.

I'm with Mr woman on this one.
I much prefer to call them "Alternative" because as far as I'm concerned they are a great alternative to a lot of the sh*t you get in the mainstream media.

Mr Woman wrote:

To some, however, it just means skinny boys and girls with funny haircuts.

...and guitars...usually!

didnt elbow once say that they were prog without the solo's... thats not a bad description i spose

They're just great. Pure and simple.
Music's so blurred and integrated these days trying to cateorise and subcategorise genres becomes impossible. Granted there are obvious places for obvious bands, but why worry..lifes too short !