A tribute to my indie phase, part one.

09:47

As the raging emo I can promise you I will always be, I have a massive, humongous spot in my heart for nostalgia. Weirdly enough, I'm not often one to cringe about my past, and if I do, it's usually over in a matter of minutes. I don't mind laughing at myself.
A usual pattern in my train of thought is to cringe, be embarrassed, and when the initial part is finished, then I can start laughing at my own shortcomings and obsessions, and in the laughter lies nostalgia. Don't ask me why. The brain is a funny place.

I found a playlist on my Spotify that is about six and a half hours of tunes I used to listen to during my indie phase (with the odd pop-punk song thrown in the middle, but I'm sure there was a context for that). I pressed play, just for the fun of it, maybe to remember if I still knew them off by heart the way I used to, or maybe to check if I now understood the lyrics better than when I was a seventeen-year-old girl with a completely different English accent.


Let's take it back to the year 2007.
Before I go any further, I often forget that 2007 was almost a decade and a half ago. I know I have accumulated thirteen years of life experiences since, but a part of me still feels like I have never left high school. But the truth is, I'm really fucking old, and 2007 almost marks half of my life. (God, I'm ready for the retirement home)
Now the interlude is over, let's take it back to the year 2007. Seventeen-year-old me has only just had access to the internet, and she is about to pass her baccalauréat (the French equivalent of the A-levels, I guess. I don't know what it is for the rest of the world. Finals but in high school? SATs?). She has only just spotted her first white hair (now, that's depressing. The worst part is that I remember when and how it happened. I was sat in P.E, and my school friend was sat behind me. Out of nowhere, she went "hey, Charlyne, you've got white hair." Thanks, Charlotte). She is obsessed with One Tree Hill (nothing much has changed), the Harry Potter universe (I'd rather not dwell on that bit), and Nouvelle Star, the French equivalent to American Idol. She isn't 100% familiar with illegally downloading music, so she borrows CDs from the local multimedia library, right next to her school and the shopping centre. She probably still chills at the record store (really a fancy word for the FNAC, the French equivalent to HMV) for no valid reason, just so she can take the same bus as her crush (i.e, a guy she's never spoken to and looks at from the other side of the cafeteria, the bus. I will not disclose his name, but he broke my heart before the Halloween break because, through a lot of hearsay, I found out he'd called me ugly. (Thanks, Charlotte) I spent the following English class sobbing. It was a bit embarrassing, I'll give you that. I know seventeen-year-old me used to wear football jerseys and purple tights, not at the same time, but she didn't deserve that kind of disrespect).


At the time, the bulk of my friends was found online, and we used to spend hours on end talking on the good old MSN. Some of these people are still my good friends, some others have drifted into the unknown. At least three of them now have children. At least one of them has got a divorce. I told you I was old. Through their influences, as well as the television programmes I used to watch, the films I found myself interested in, and the people at my school I deemed the epitome of cool, I entered what I like to call my indie phase.
If we're honest, I wasn't all that indie. It took me a while to see that a lot of the music I listened to at the time was either entirely old school (therefore, no one under the age of fifty liked it), or super mainstream, but not the charts type of mainstream. I was the French, mid-noughties equivalent of Fiat 500 Twitter, minus, well, Twitter, the Fiat 500, the bucket hat, and the Strongbow Dark Fruits. (Seventeen-year-old me didn't get invited to parties, and, when she did, she pretended she couldn't physically drink because she didn't want to get drunk and in trouble with her mum and brother) I was the 2007 equivalent of the kids who send you a Spotify playlist with "bands you won't have heard of," but, instead of being filled with The Courteeners, Gerry Cinnamon, Catfish and The Bottlemen, Liam Gallagher, or whoever indie kids listen to these days, I felt different because my favourite band was...get ready for that one...The Beatles.
Aged seventeen years old, my favourite band was quite literally the single most famous band in the history of music, and I still felt misunderstood, angsty, and unique with my music taste. You can't make that one up.


After listening to some of this playlist, still knowing some of the songs off by heart, and wondering if I was okay, sometimes, I have decided to write a little something about it all, a weird little analysis of the weird little seventeen-year-old I used to be. 


Teenage me wouldn't have been who she was if it wasn't for the French band B.B Brunes. The French people in the house will know who I'm on about, the others, not so much. B.B Brunes are a French rock band formed in the mid-noughties in Paris, and they were the most successful ones out of what we called the "bébé rockers" (baby rockers), a bunch of bands who played loud-ish guitars and fast-ish rock songs, played in small clubs, and made French rock music exciting for the first (and arguably the last) time in a very, VERY long time. They were good-looking and passed off as jerks, they knew how to write a catchy chorus, and they were pretty much an instant success. I played their début album, Blonde Comme Moi, more times than I can count on my old MP3 player. They were the reason why I went to my first festival (the long-defunct Furia Sound Festival, in Cergy, near my hometown), and they were my first show. My best friend at the time and I were obsessed, and we'd bought tickets to see them at the Zénith, in Paris, in November 2008. 
Their songs were about having sex, prostitutes, drinking alcopops and vodka, and doing drugs, which was, quite literally, seven hundred galaxies away from who I used to be. I couldn't relate to any of their music, and I'm not entirely sure I understood all the words at the time. (Frontman and singer-songwriter Adrien Gallo is quite the talented human with words, and I rarely ever understand French music anyway) My friend and I used to go on drives and day trips with her older brother, play our favourite album and sing along in his car, badly and loudly, and I'm pretty sure that if he could have abandoned us on the side of the motorway, he would have. He was just a simple guy who wanted to play Linkin Park in his Renault Clio, and we were the bane of his life.




Another band that was important to me when I was in my indie phase was The Kooks. I don't even know how I found them, but, because I was a teenage girl obsessed with football, who had just discovered the existence of YouTube, I will take a wild guess and assume I found one of their songs on some sort of video montage, looked it up, and boom, fireworks. It used to happen a lot.
I have always been very much into rock music, so it isn't surprising that all the tunes I used to download (rip off YouTube) for my MP3 player were of the rock persuasion. I don't think I spoke enough English at the time to fully understand what the songs were about, so I probably didn't relate all that much, and the truth is, even now, I have never really stopped for a minute to think about what they were talking about. I discovered about three weeks ago that I Want You features the word "females" twice, and I could have spent the rest of my life not knowing. (Realising a band you've loved for years has unironically used the word "female" in a song kinda feels like finding out how they make magic tricks) I know She Moves In Her Own Way was my favourite at the time, and just because of that, a small bout of nostalgia, it probably will always be. I still love Inside In/Inside Out and Konk, but through moving on to different spheres of the music universe, I have lost touch with what they have done since. I'd still like to see them live someday, not at a weird festival standing next to a girl screaming into her phone, trying to get ahold of her mum, and not under the pouring rain, hidden under a windbreaker.




As I mentioned earlier, I used to be obsessed with the French version of American Idol, not called French Idol (we like to translate things into our language, something about cultural exception. That's how much we love ourselves) but Nouvelle Star. The concept was the same, four judges, dozens of thousands of candidates, only one, well, nouvelle star. The level of obsession was getting ridiculous, especially after I got the Internet at home (a little before my seventeenth birthday). I used to pick my favourite candidates, as you do, and then, depending on how much I liked them, I used to find the videos of their performances online and rip the audio so I could replay the songs over and over again on my trusty old MP3 player. (Trusty here is a figure of speech. I couldn't trust the damn device. It broke down every other week and my mum had to go to the supermarket all the time to get them to exchange it, again and again. I didn't get a proper iPod until I was nineteen and my friend's now-ex boyfriend gave me his because he didn't use it) 
I still have, somewhere on my external hard drive, a folder full of these .mp3 files and grainy videos. I refuse to delete them. I need the option of reliving my youth, every once in a while. (Since I first wrote this, my external hard drive had a bit of an incident, and some of those files were not recovered. RIP my youth)
My all-time favourite candidate out of all these TV shows was called Benjamin Siksou. At the time, he was very much the 2008, French equivalent of the white boy of the month. He had a soulful voice, a pretty face, had wowed the judges by performing Bill Withers' Just The Two Of Us on the acoustic guitar, and spent the remaining of the programme either performing songs originally created by people who had died before my birth or reimagining modern songs. (There was a cover of Outkast's Hey Ya that still holds to this day) He didn't win, he came second, and I was so offended, you would have thought someone had stolen my dog. I legit cried. The obsession lived on for a little while, especially as it took me a whole three years to see him perform live, which has happened three times since, the latest one being almost four years ago, in a cute little courtyard in Paris, for the International Music Day. He released his debut album two years ago, and despite it being miles away from my preferred genre of music, I still give it a spin every once in a while. I've always been the kind of person who loves things and people until the end of time, I just never had thought it would apply to reality TV contestants.
There's no such thing as the white boy of the month in my life. It's the white boy of the month, extended to forever. Nostalgia, eh.




I had another two favourite candidates out of that show. The first one, and arguably the most famous one in France now is Julien Doré. He was the odd one out of the season, the guy with long hair, hair clips, and a ukulele, and he almost didn't get in because he didn't really want to perform without an instrument. In true reality TV fashion, they made a huge point in making him sing in front of the judges, because they knew he had potential, he had something, and all that music mumbo-jumbo, and he went on to winning and becoming a hugely popular artist in France, fourteen years later. (And I still love him, though I don't really know what most of his songs are about.) 
The last one that deserves a mention arrived in my life (and on the show) when I was fifteen, but due to a friend's brother (the aforementioned brother who only ever wanted to listen to Linkin Park in his Renault Clio) burning me his album, he remained prominent all through my indie phase and nostalgic moments. His name was Pierrick Lilliu, and he was the Rock Candidate of his season. There was always one, someone with a bit of an emo side fringe going on and a raspy element to their voice, who had no option but sing rock'n'roll hits such as Nirvana's Smell Like Teen Spirit, Nickelback's How You Remind Me, or classics by the French band Téléphone. He was THAT guy. He came in second, apparently a curse whenever I like someone in a TV show, released an album, and kind of disappeared into thin air, but by this point, we all know that there's no such thing as the white boy of the month in my life, it's extended to forever, so, yes, of course, I still listen to his album every once in a while. Besoin d'Espace still bangs, probably only to me.




There were two artists I really loved at the time, and, to this day, I really don't understand why. Not because their music is bad, which it isn't, by any means, but because I didn't speak enough English to understand any of it, and they were both galaxies away from who I used to be as a person. At seventeen, I was painfully shy, and I spent my Saturday afternoons watching One Tree Hill and football games online in Chinese because that was the only way you could watch Liverpool play for free in 2007. Most of my friends were on the Internet. I still had Harry Potter posters on my wall. I didn't get invited to parties. I wasn't even allowed to go to Paris on the RER by myself. I was a good girl and a good student who wanted to become a teacher. I couldn't talk to boys. I was the single most boring kid on the planet. I was such a sad case that when there was a protest at my school, that one time of many, I was the only person who got an egg thrown at her by someone on the same fucking side as her. That's how tragic I was at seventeen.
WHY ON EARTH DID I LOVE JEFF BUCKLEY AND PETE DOHERTY THIS MUCH?
The main difference between my love for these two artists was that I very much knew all about Pete Doherty at the time. It wasn't hard. The man was always on television, and mostly known for doing drugs and not turning up to his own shows. (There's an iconic part of an old French TV show where they interview people who were meant to see him perform, and he wasn't there, and a girl shouts at him to go fuck himself. We knew the dude was never where he was meant to be.) Being into indie music in 2007 meant that you thought/were scared that Pete Doherty was going to drop dead any minute. Why did the boring kid that I was, all sensible scarves and ballet flats, worship the ground he walked on as much as I did? It's been fourteen years, and I still have no bloody clue. I loved Babyshambles, I loved The Libertines, and I grew to love his solo stuff, released a couple of years later. I even saw him perform twice, once solo, and once as part of The Libertines' reunion at T In The Park. (They played a six-song encore when they weren't headlining, and I'm still confused.) 




When it comes to Jeff Buckley, arguably, I had no idea what any of his songs were about. Watching hours on end of television-based music contests, at the time, meant that you would hear Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, famously covered by Buckley, performed about five hundred times, and just like it was for any indie kid of the mid to late noughties, it was my sad, sad jam. From then on, I listened to Grace, and I guess I just loved the vibe because it took me years to realise how deeply depressing these songs were. (Sometime last year, Lilac Wine came on shuffle, and my first thought upon understanding the words for the first time was "Was I okay?" The answer is probably no.)




Another two staple bands of my teenage years that I find myself chucking together, even though they don't really belong together, are Oasis and Coldplay. I suppose that, if you know adult me, even if you've only ever known adult me, you know how much I love Oasis. You know I've desperately waited after the break up for them to come back because one of their relatives (their dad?) had said they wouldn't ever be apart for more than five years, and now it's been twelve, and I feel lied to and like I need financial compensation for the emotional distress. You know I would commit six back-to-back felonies for a ticket if they ever came back. You've seen my Oasis tote bag everywhere. At this point, everyone on the whole planet knows I love Oasis. The main question is...where did it even start? How did I go from "there's a band in this world called Oasis" to "my favourite song in the world is Wonderwall?" God knows. I just loved Oasis, and I have no idea where it started, and, yes, as a basic indie girl of the times, my favourite song was Wonderwall. (I know it's caught some heat, and, apart from that one time I saw Liam Gallagher live, the closest I've been to hearing it performed live was shouted on the last train back to Watford on a Saturday night by drunk men coming back from watching the football, but it's still a fantastic song, and I will not tolerate Wonderwall slander in my life.)




Coldplay was the same. I loved Coldplay. I remember my mom giving me a bunch of vouchers she'd got from her work, and you had to spend them before New Year's Eve, and, at this point, it was the 28th of December, and I didn't have a lot of options for places I could go to, so I went to the local record store (not the aforementioned FNAC-equivalent-of-HMV, but a place called Le Grand Cercle, which sells everything cultural from books to records, DVDs to art, stationery to magazines) and bought a bunch of CDs, including Coldplay's X&Y. (If you must know, I also got Simple Plan's ...Still Not Getting Any, Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, Christina Aguilera's Keeps Getting Better and an album called Wow by a French band called Superbus. I had an open-minded indie phase.) To this day, as uncool as it is, as controversial as it is, I still love Coldplay, and, not to be that girl, but I find it hard to relate to duets with The Chainsmokers as much as I loved songs like Yellow, The Scientist, or A Message- my absolute favourite Coldplay song, played live, last time I checked, a grand total of once. I have no idea when I even decided I liked Coldplay, but God, seventeen-year-old me loved them. (And twenty-two-year-old me flew to Hannover without a ticket to see them live, and it was worth it.)




A MESSY LIST OF SONGS I EITHER GOT THROUGH MSN, REALITY TV, OR FOOTBALL EDITS ON YOUTUBE


  • Remember how I mentioned that I used to be obsessed with football? In the summer of 2007, which is, arguably, the start of my indie phase, I made my first ever online friends, and, through talking on MSN and the comment sections of our old, defunct blogs, I discovered the existence of a song called Ya Nada Volvera A Ser Como Antes by a Spanish band, El Canto Del Loco. (An actual Spanish person told me once they weren't really a cool band, but I think I generally puzzled a lot of Spanish citizens in my life when telling them what artists I knew from their country) The music video featured football player (and, more importantly at the time, brand new Liverpool FC striker) Fernando Torres, and, by just checking it out, I started liking the song. All these years later, I still listen to it every once in a while, and I can almost understand the lyrics now- I speak enough Spanish for that.


  • Another staple of the slightly sad, emo but doesn't want to label yourself that, indie kid of the mid-to-late noughties was Damien Rice. The only actual fact I know about him is that he did the Closer soundtrack, and I haven't even seen it. Just like all the sad indie girls of my time, I loved Damien Rice, and I had a top three favourite songs: Volcano, 9 Crimes, and The Blower's Daughter. I have no idea where I even found those songs, how I ended up there, but many, many a year later, they still tug at my heartstrings a little bit, even though there was no way seventeen-year-old me could ever relate to lines such as "What I really need is what makes me bleed." I can promise you I used this as my message thing on MSN. Why did I act like this man could see into my heart with that line? The closest thing I knew to heartbreak at the time was when the boys I had distant crushes on found themselves new hangout spots and I couldn't stare at them like an idiot while I was waiting for the cafeteria. I truly was just an emo in disguise. 


  • I used to listen to a lot more French music and a lot more music of varied genres. Not that I've completely become narrow-minded since I was 17, quite the contrary, actually, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I used to listen to basically anything. In 2007, a French band of the electronic music variety exploded onto the mainstream: Justice. And, just like everyone else in France at the time, I loved D.A.N.C.E (and, to this day, I still think it's one of the greatest songs created by a French person/group of people), and another less-known track on the record, DVNO. I have no idea where I even found it (my guess is MySpace), and I know I didn't listen to the whole of Justice's self-titled album. Just D.A.N.C.E and DVNO. And I have no explanation for it. Justice was electronic music for the cool Parisian kids, which was what every suburban kid of my time was aspiring to be. I didn't have the street cred, not in purple tights and Liverpool FC jerseys, but I had the soundtrack. Better than nothing, I guess.


  • Remember the reality TV-based white boy of the month, extended to forever, Benjamin Siksou? Our boy wasn't only a singer, he was an actor, and he starred in one of France's attempts at romantic comedies for teenagers, 15 Ans et Demi, the story of a scientist who comes back to France to spend time with his daughter, Eglantine, and ends up taking a course to better understand teenagers. That all comes from Wikipedia, as I actually have never seen the film myself, not any further than the trailer and a further scene. The extra scene features a house party, with characters slow dancing to a song I thought was really lovely, and that's the story of how I became obsessed with Love For Granted by Phoenix. It still is one of my favourite songs on the planet to this day, and through these turns and roundabouts, I have discovered a band I truly like now. But seventeen-year-old me only cared about this song, and I have no doubt teenage me quietly dedicated the line "Oh, my love is easy, you are everything I need" to boys who didn't even know I existed.
    (Also, upon researching 15 Ans et Demi, I (re?) discovered that the song DVNO by Justice was part of the soundtrack. The plot thickens. Also, it is a single with a music video, so I have no business calling it a "less-known track")


  • I feel like the whole point of being a teenager was having songs, preferably on the slow and sad side of everything, that you would be listening to on a moving vehicle (for me, the bus), longingly looking out the window, and picturing yourself the heroine of a film. One of the best ones for this game was Someone New by Eskobar & Heather Nova, which remains one of my favourite songs in existence. I don't exactly know how I could have been a protagonist in that song, but I had a vivid imagination to make up for it. Believe me, when I was seventeen, no one was out there falling in love with me and being broken up about it ending, nor were they wishing I would find someone new because they adored me. Almost fourteen years down the line, I still can't help but feeling like that girl when I listen to this song, which is a regular addition to playlists, to this day. Just like many other songs of the time, I have no idea where I even discovered it. Was it ever popular? Did it get radio play? Was it on a football edit on YouTube? Did I find it on MySpace? Did a friend send it to me on MSN? Your guess is as good as mine.



Stay tuned for the next episode of "Making fun of teenage Char". In the meantime, have a playlist.


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