Hitting play on a piece of music is an act of magic. The noise may be entering your own space and filling up your ears, but in fact it’s the other way around; it drags you, willing or otherwise, to a world usually much more interesting than your own. Over a quarter-of-a-century on, pressing play on the C86 mixtape still has that transporting impact – it opens up a portal to a different world.
In May 1986, NME readers witnessed what was considered as the “birth of indie-pop”. Across 22 tracks, the NME-curated mixtape united various DIY scenes that were scattered across the UK, showcasing some of the most exciting new bands on limited-edition cassettes. Months later, famed independent label Rough Trade would press the compilation to vinyl to cement its legacy.
Compiled by NME staffers, the mixtape highlighted emerging bands with a common sound: breezy, sometimes sardonic, vocals backed by jangling guitars. It would not be the first – or last – time that the magazine’s staff would seek to manufacture scenes to boost their readership. On C86, many readers got their first introduction to The Wedding Present, Half Man Half Biscuit and more. Most famously, the mixtape opened with a track from Primal Scream – 1 m 22s ‘Velocity Girl’ which featured a young Bobby Gillespie on vocals.
Many of the threads heard on C86 are audible on C23 too. It’s not hard to imagine The Shrubs’ distorted, discordant vocals cropping up in today’s noise-rock scene, while the wonky rhythms of the Stump song ‘Buffalo’ provided a rough blueprint for guitar music’s whole-hearted embrace of the dancefloor in the ‘00s.
Within months, C86 would become infamous and still sparks debate today. At the time, the mixtape was emblematic of the publication’s warring factions at the time: the indie-rock writers vs. those embracing hip-hop, house and music emerging from the clubs. None of the latter’s flourishing scenes would appear on C86. Gillespie, told Uncut in 1999, said that it barely constituted a worthwhile scene anyway, bemoaning that their contemporaries “can’t play their instruments” and “can’t write songs.” Ouch.
But by uniting the muddled sounds of “indie” under a single albeit contested banner NME stamped a unique moment in British music. Journalist Nige Tassell, author of 2022 book Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey, would write in The Guardian: “These groups laid the foundations for later outfits such as the Stone Roses, Oasis and Arctic Monkeys who took indie ‘overground’, swapping upstairs rooms in pubs for headline slots at the biggest festivals.”
In the ensuing years the C-series would lie largely dormant, but the appeal of discovery via curated mixtapes will always remain. It’s a magic trick that never gets boring.
Stay tuned to NME.com/C23 for the latest on the return of the iconic mixtape