Whenever and wherever it is you are in the world right now, it's time to take a walk down Memory Lane and find ourselves revisiting and having a little chat about the UK rock scene of the early 2010s.

It's not as niche as you might think.
If, at the time, you were an avid Kerrang! reader and glued to Scuzz TV, you know exactly what corner of the music universe I am on about. It's time to delve into a world that crashed and burnt as quickly as it first exploded onto the scene and left us with a solid collection of music, all sorts of regrets, and one question: why. 

Out of the multitude of bands we used to jam to at the time, the ones we used to read about in Big Cheese and watch at defunct festivals such as Hit The Deck or Takedown, or any of the other copycat day ones, only three are still around. 

Leaders of the pack for a solid decade, You Me At Six are the only ones who have managed to retain a similar level of fame to what they had back in the day. They still easily sell out Brixton Academy (pre-COVID, that is), and, last summer, they headlined Gunnersville, a brand new festival in West London. Their seventh album, SUCKAPUNCH, is set to be released in the first few weeks of January.

Norwich natives Deaf Havana are still around, sound-wise light years away from what they used to sound like when their first record, Meet Me Halfway, At Least, hit the shelves. They have branched out of the post-hardcore, then pure rock genre, and mixed their heartfelt brand of pop-rock with electronic sounds in 2018's SINNER.

Finally, hailing straight from Scotland, Twin Atlantic are still doing their little thing and doing great for themselves. They kicked off 2020 with a great fourth full-length, Power, which, not unlike Deaf Havana's direction, mixed their typical, gritty pop-rock with more electronic sounds, reminiscent of the eighties. They are one of the few bands I managed to see live this year, and they haven't lost their energy or fun in the change of sound.
Everyone else... Well, everyone else is gone.

(You could, I suppose, argue that, logistically, Young Guns are still a band. They are due to play Slam Dunk 2021, if we ever have a Slam Dunk in 2021, where they will perform their debut album, All Our Kings Are Dead, from start to end. Apart from that, they have pretty much disappeared off the grid.)

Ten years ago, this fringe of the UK rock scene was all I listened to.
I was still at university and absolutely obsessed with You Me At Six. I used to play my Hold Me Down CD on my old stereo while getting ready for my classes, and I remember one of my classmates telling me about in-ear headphones because I was listening to Canterbury too loudly in the elevator, on my old blue iPod. My wardrobe mostly consisted of Kids In Glass Houses t-shirts worn under The Blackout hoodies and paired with Blitz Kids plastic wristbands (remember those?) Every time I found myself on the way to the United Kingdom for a few days, you could be sure that one of those bands would be waiting for me on the other side, and I would come back with piles of music magazines, because nothing compared back home. The amount of absolutely tragic cities I visited for all these tours is beyond me. When people my age went on holidays in New York and on cruises around the Mediterranean, I ended up in Coventry or Darlington on my own volition if it meant Young Guns, Mallory Knox, or We Are The Ocean were on the local stage.
My life revolved around this part of the scene.
And I kinda miss it. 

I miss the hope we all had, the thought that we were watching something big happen, something real. I remember, clearly, in 2012, when Young Guns did THAT big tour off the back of their second album, Bones. They topped it off by headlining London's Shepherd's Bush Empire, which can hold two thousand people. I remember all the fans being ecstatic and excited because it felt like history being written. I remember everyone saying that there was no doubt they would become big, not big for the Kerrang! scene, but big for real, stadium-headliner big, that for their next tour, they would be playing Brixton Academy.
And it just never happened.
That's the part I miss the most, the hope of it all. When you saw your favourite bands start playing venues that could hold over a thousand people, and they weren't a support act. When you saw them at a random all-dayer, somewhere even more random, and people in the crowd would be singing along, because they hadn't just got lost on their way to watch someone more famous. If I take it back to Redfest 2012, I remember exactly how it felt like overhearing people behind me singing along to Mallory Knox's Oceans, as if I could watch something shift and move right in front of my eyes.

For a solid four years, uninterrupted, music felt like an adventure soundtracked by all my favourite UK bands. I remember attending a stupid amount of day festivals, even though the line ups were just a constant rotation of Kids In Glass Houses, Deaf Havana, Young Guns, and Lower Than Atlantis, but one of them would have Canterbury on the line-up, and the next one, a month later, on a different university campus, had We Are The Ocean, so I felt like I had to go to them all. I could have picked favourites, but...These bands rarely ever found their way across the Channel to my neck of the woods, and, when they did, they didn't get a thousand people in the crowd, they got less than a hundred, and I knew the vast majority of them by name. 

I feel things started shifting in 2013, when I attended my first farewell tour for one of these bands.
I'd travelled to London to watch Welsh rock band Attack! Attack! (unrelated to crabcore legends and Caleb Shomo's humble yet iconic beginnings in the scene) play their last show, and after that, it felt like it never stopped. Kids In Glass Houses called it quits in October 2014, Canterbury bit the dust two months later, and then it was Save Your Breath, and The Blackout, and Blitz Kids a little later on during the year, and that's only counting the ones who played farewell shows. (I'm looking at you, Francesqa.)
In the space of two years, all my favourite bands disappeared just as quickly as they had arrived in my life. In the blink of an eye, I had them all, and a blink later, they were all gone.

The big question is- why? What happened?

I don't think there is a clear-cut answer to this.
There is a part of this scene we have failed, big time, because we refused to give them the space to change and evolve in their own right.
In 2012, We Are The Ocean announced the departure of one of their founding members and vocalists, Dan Brown. It's always a tough change when a singer leaves a band, especially in a case like We Are The Ocean's. The dual vocals were their signature, and losing their screamer ultimately meant leaving their Alexisonfire influences and post-hardcore tinges behind to try out something new and different.
Musically, it worked. 2012's Maybe Today, Maybe Tomorrow, and 2015's Ark were two solid records who deserved the time of day and more success than they got, even though they were miles away from their first releases.
But the truth is, in January 2016, almost four years after Dan's departure, when the band found themselves on Sunday Brunch, of all places in the world, in between risotto-making and an acoustic performance, the journalist still asked them about Dan and the change in sound.
(Can we also take five to think about alt-rock bands being on Sunday Brunch, somewhere in between bland cooking and segments about skiing and cottages in the Cotswolds, or whatever was going on in that programme? The time Blitz Kids were on it still stands as one of the strangest mornings of my life. It could also have been the hangover. Probably both.)
And we didn't give them space to grow, and we haven't learnt our lesson, because we did the same to Mallory Knox after vocalist Mikey Chapman parted ways with the rest of the band. As a scene, we pressed, complained, and assumed they were as good as gone, and we didn't give them a chance, and we failed at understanding that a band's talent doesn't solely revolve around their frontman, and that everyone changes.
We, as humans, don't expect our peers to think we're going to be the same forever, so, why do we hold musicians to such unrealistic standards?

There are other bands the scene failed, not necessarily because of the audience, but because of the media that came attached to it.
The biggest and most notable example of this is Canterbury. To their fans, the four-piece is still one of the greatest things that have come out of this UK rock scene of the 2010s, and their music truly stands the test of time. I might be slightly biased, but they have never made a bad song, and they were great lyricists, musicians, and people. They, quite simply put, never did anything wrong at all.
So, why did the music press never pick up on it?
The poster boys of the pack were undeniably You Me At Six, probably the only ones who became a household name. Everyone else, especially smaller acts like Canterbury, was failed by a music press that used to run on a three-band rotation. Their covers consisted of You Me At Six, All Time Low, whoever was flavour of the week in metalcore (usually Asking Alexandria, though Bring Me The Horizon were strong contenders), Metallica or Slipknot around Download season, and, like, blink-182 before Reading & Leeds.
And that's it.
Anyone else gracing the front pages, most of the time too late, was an event, something rare and unheard of. The band in question would probably be introduced as a "newcomer," or the "future of the UK scene," even if they already had two albums out. Bear in mind it was a time when the music press still had an influence, when Kerrang! had not stopped printing and people still bought it every Wednesday. It was a time when traditional music press mattered, and when a band's rise or fall didn't only depend on the fans and social media.
By misusing their platform, giving the bulk of their attention to established acts who didn't need the promotion quite as much, and operating on a safe rotation of bands to put on their covers, the music press quite simply failed those artists. They failed Canterbury, and they failed Kids In Glass Houses, and they failed Save Your Breath, and they failed Straight Lines, and they failed countless others who never got the support they deserved.

Whoever lasted and didn't was all a mystery. You couldn't predict any of it.
The ones you thought would be the biggest crashed and burnt in the blink of an eye, and the ones you thought wouldn't last ended up successful.
Save Your Breath were definitely ahead of their time. When they announced their split, another Welsh pop-punk outfit, Neck Deep, who weren't as big as they are now, even though you could barely exist at a show without someone bursting into an acapella rendition of A Part of Me, whether Neck Deep were playing or not, credited Save Your Breath for being an inspiration and doing a lot for the UK pop-punk scene. A then tiny band called As It Is were main support on the farewell tour, at a time when most of their fame stemmed off Patty Walters' YouTube channel. I was at the Cardiff show, and the room was basically empty during As It Is' set. How times have changed.
I'd also argue Me VS Hero were majorly ahead of their time, but considering the size of the crowd they played to at Slam Dunk 2018, we all know that by now.
Though I objectively understand their desire to break the American scene and make a name for themselves on the other side of the Atlantic, I sadly believe it was the catalyst for Young Guns' end (or whatever is going on right now.) Quite simply put, they had it all. They had a dedicated fanbase, they had absolutely massive tunes, they came across as a kind band who would put in the work, but they disappeared to another continent for three years. During this time, they only played a few shows in support of Bullet For My Valentine (which hardcore fans understandably were reluctant to go to), some festival sets, and an odd three-song, fifteen-minute slot in the middle of the 2015 Kerrang! Tour to announce their comeback. (Real talk, what in the HELL was that? I remember them being sandwiched between Bury Tomorrow and We Are The In Crowd, playing three tunes, and...Leaving?) The problem was, at this time...Everyone had moved on, and they had to start all over again. The UK scene in 2015 was not the same as it used to be in 2012.
On the other end, Natives, (deep into their cultural appropriation phase), bagged a tour in support of Busted. (I'd imagine this one was down to Charlie Simpson, who surprisingly has always been in the know of what was up in the small band circuit). I also remember Yashin signing for Sony, but it was such an odd moment it could have been a collective fever dream.

I miss the hope of it all, and the adventure of it all.
It was such a time and place kind of situation, and nothing else in my life, however great it's been, compares to those few years of overnight Megabus journeys, sticky venues in Swindon or Coventry, and what it felt like to see your favourite bands rise. Whenever this world is okay, I will resume following my bands around and turning up in stupid places like Southampton, where I will likely have a brush with death and/or too much to drink, but it will never be the same as these years.
I remember the rise and the fall, the daytime radio plays and the farewell shows in stupid places like Plymouth or Dover, the packed large venues and the half-empty ones, the albums getting in the charts, and the disappearance from everyone else's mind. It was the strangest of times, the soundtrack to some terrible times in my personal life, the light in the dark.

Some of the music still holds to this day, some of it doesn't, but that's a story for another time.
In the meantime, dig up your old merch, jam to these oldies but goldies, and let's pretend it's 2010 again, but with better haircuts.