6/12- McCarthy

Twee pop music about Marxism named with ironic purpose after Communist-hunting politician Joe McCarthy. Sounds like a picnic on the beach, doesn't it? Ah, but strangely, it is. In the mid-80s Martin Eden and Tim Gane met in school in the UK. Martin was a staunch political leftist, and Tim was a drummer who shared his views. Martin taught Tim to play guitar, and the two started layering 12-string, Byrds-like sundrenched, happy melodies under scathing songs of political protest, sung with a complete lack of macho rasp.

When they released their first album, I AM A WALLET in 1987, the British music press was having a tug of war between the upstart hard hip hop exemplified by Public Enemy and the like, and a little (and some say non-existant) group of guitar strumming college kids introduced on NME's infamous C86 cassette compilation. Many would say that C86 was the beginning of "indie" music as we know it - introducing us to early genre luminaries such as The Shop Assistants, The Wedding Present, Primal Scream and The Pastels, who were providing the much needed counterpoint to hip hop, and a return to guitar music, fey as it may have been. Others would say that C86 didn't represent a movement at all, but was a manufactured group of poorly-representative bands of music that no one listened to, and no one liked.

Several months ago, "Mojo Magazine" from the UK ran a cover feature on this era of music, and included a CD titled "BELOVED," filled with songs from C86 bands, and their contemporaries. The thing that comes to mind listening to the disc is how radical some of the bands still sound today. It seemed to be a time when the aesthetics of punk were driven into closets and bedrooms, and existed in isolation from the outwardly visible trends of music.

And while punk music itself channeled anger and aggression through loud, screaming passion and underachievement of their instrumental mastery, the feel of this remained with the British indie bands of the late 80s. The underachievement was still there, but now it was coupled with a quiet protest against new pop, politics, and the rigid masculinity of rock music. Indeed, this era was one of the first to break the gender line by featurning women as essential members of the bands, bowing to them as creatrixes of influential 'zines, and relying on them as managers, label heads, and bookers.

McCarthy came of age during this heady time. Sales figures were inverse to the music's glowing praise, but nonetheless, there was a following. McCarthy was joined on their third album by Gane's girlfriend, Laetitia Sadier, and soon after, called it quits. Malcolm Eden felt that they'd hit their creative apex on the last release, and drifted to other projects lost in obscurity by time. Gane and Sadier carried the political torch over to their next project, the much better-known indie giant Stereolab. It's not hard to hear the seeds of Stereolab sprouting in the music of McCarthy. Both the pop and the politics sound younger, more idealistic and untrained than the droned, spacefunk loops of latter-day Stereolab. And as such, McCarthy is an important part of our modern indie pedigree - presaging the gleeful intellectual tweeness of the likes of Belle and Sebastian, and more recently The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Videos of the band are a great time capsule of washed-out super8 splendor. It was another time, for sure.