Backtracking 1986: NME's C86

My issue with musical genres is petty and misguided. Whatever happened to the primordial genres of pop, rock, and soul? And country and jazz and classical and rap? I enjoy yacht rock music, though I recognize it's just what we used to call soft rock or AOR, but I detest the pejorative dad rock as a classifier. Of course, I enjoy nearly all of the music under that big, big top. Sophisti-pop and synth-pop are favorites, but I never know if I'm spelling or hyphenating them correctly. (And if it even matters.) It bugs me that classic rock has up and swallowed the music of my teens, but I realize it's only me that's gotten older; the music has stayed the same age and, more importantly, rejuvenates this old soul when I listen to it. Call the nostalgia police.

When I expressed how much I was enjoying discovering lesser-known Britpop groups a couple of years back during the waning of the pandemic, a friend sent me a copy of Cherry Pop's (not a genre but with a name like that, who knows?) 2014 release, the 3CD Deluxe Edition of C86. She asked me to report back on any of the bands or songs that made an impression, so we could discuss them. Despite liking more than a few of the songs, I never reported back, and we simply moved on in our conversations. I'm surprising her with this 40th anniversary post of the influential and mythical twenty-two track mixtape known as C86, complete with the desecrated cover art that is a hallmark of our Backtracking 1986 series.

I had never heard of C86 until then, so I looked it up and was fascinated by its humble origin as a mail-order mixtape, a compilation of artists licensed from independent labels. The music was guitar-based post-punk alternative rock rather than the pop rock, glam metal, hip-hop, and new wave then dominating the charts and music magazines in the UK. For C86, three NME writers (Roy Carr, Neil Taylor, and Adrian Thrills) compiled a list of tracks in an effort to set the magazine apart from its competitors by creating a new musical genre. They succeeded.

Writer and compiler Neil Taylor was tapped in 2014 to expand the original C86 to an extended triple-disc set featuring 50 additional songs. Disc One is the original tracklisting of the C86 tape*, while the other two discs are filled with songs that couldawouldashoulda been included on the legendary tape. Taylor wrote a massive 500+ page book about the scene titled C86 And All That: The Birth Of Indie, 1983-86, published in 2016 with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. Nige Tassell's Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey, first published in 2023, is another book I read while listening to the Deluxe Edition of C86 over a few weeks. The latter book tracks down members from all 22 bands for interviews about their lives since C86. I found both books to be worthy rock history reads, as I was unfamiliar with the music and the scene that spawned it. (Yes, I sent my friend copies of both books.)

I'm glad I was introduced to C86, and while it would be cool to have an actual C86 cassette sitting here in the HERChives, I'm outta the cassette business. Since that 3CD Deluxe Edition of C86 in 2014, the Cherry Red label has run with the concept of an annual compilation of indie music (an audio yearbook?), issuing further 3CD sets. They even repressed the C86 set in 2021 for the tape's 35th Anniversary. I've managed to pick up four of these C-ollections and have my eyes peeled for the others:

C87 (2016)

C88 (2017)

C89 (2018)

C90 (2020)

C85 and C91 (2022)

C92 (2025)

In 2023, NME teamed up with Bose for C23, a limited edition double clear vinyl and cassette compilation initially given away at SXSW in 2023 and later at independent record stores. The fifteen tracks and artists represented got one listen via lossless streaming, but nothing clicked for this listener.

  

* = all are the same recordings from the tape EXCEPT for track 10. The Pastels chose instead to license a newer recording of their original song "Breaking Lines".