What is indie pop? The genre, the sound, and the British bands that defined it

What is indie pop? The short version is pop music made outside the major-label system, where the melody matters more than the volume and the recording budget is audible. The longer version takes in a Glasgow record label, a free cassette given away by a music weekly, and forty years of arguments about whether jangle counts as a genre.

Where the genre came from

The genre starts, by most accounts, with Postcard Records in Glasgow in 1979. Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera made records that took punk's do-it-yourself licence and pointed it at Motown and Chic rather than at the Ramones. The label lasted about two years and released a dozen singles. Its influence is out of all proportion to its size, which is the pattern for almost everything that follows.

The next landmark is a cassette. In 1986 the NME gave away a compilation called C86, twenty-two tracks by bands including Primal Scream, The Pastels, The Wedding Present and Talulah Gosh. It was meant as a snapshot and it became a label: the word C86 is still used for a particular kind of thin, fast, hopelessly melodic guitar record. Sarah Records in Bristol pushed the same instincts further between 1987 and 1995: a hundred singles, most of them by bands nobody had heard of, several of them perfect.

By the mid-nineties the strand had produced Belle and Sebastian, who took the whole aesthetic (cheap sleeves, soft voices, a deliberate refusal to look like a rock band) and made it commercially enormous without changing very much about it.

What indie pop actually sounds like

The sound is easier to describe than the genre. Guitars are clean and bright, usually played high on the neck, often with a chorus pedal and rarely with distortion. The bass carries countermelody rather than root notes. Drums are simple and sometimes a machine, and the snare is frequently too loud, because the record was mixed in an afternoon.

Vocals are the giveaway. The singers do not project. They talk, or they sing slightly flat, or they sound like they are apologising for the microphone, and a good half of the canon involves a man and a woman singing the same line an octave apart. Songs are short. Two and a half minutes is normal, three and a half is an epic, and a chorus is optional.

Underneath all that is a production ethic. A record that sounds expensive has broken the contract. The thinness is not incompetence — it is the point, in the same way that the noise is the point in hardcore.

The British bands that shaped it

Any list of British indie pop bands has a core almost everyone agrees on: Orange Juice, The Pastels, The Field Mice, Heavenly, Talulah Gosh, The Wedding Present at their fastest, and Belle and Sebastian. Around that sit the ones people fight about — The Smiths, who are too big and too guitar-led for some; Saint Etienne, who are too electronic for others; Los Campesinos!, who arrived in 2006 with seven members and too many words.

British indie pop was also, from the beginning, a scene rather than an industry. Fanzines, seven-inch singles, mail order, and a circuit of small rooms above pubs. That is the infrastructure a band like The Victorian English Gentlemens Club came up through twenty years later, even though their records are far noisier than anything on Sarah — the seven-inch as the default format and the small independent label are direct inheritances.

Indie pop and indie rock: the argument that never ends

The two terms overlap so heavily that plenty of writers use them interchangeably, which helps nobody. The useful distinction is what the record is built on. Indie rock is built on the riff and the rhythm section; indie pop is built on the tune. Turn the guitars up on a Field Mice song and you do not get an indie rock song, you get a loud Field Mice song, because the architecture underneath is still a pop architecture.

Where it genuinely breaks down is with bands who use pop structures and punk volume at the same time. That is the territory covered on the page about the sub genres of rock, and it is where art punk sits: pop bones, aggressive surface, and a set of labels that never quite fit. Asking what is indie pop eventually turns into asking what any of these words are doing, which is the honest answer and the least satisfying one.