Listen: Fanzine: 'Susan'

There was a brief and bright moment a few years before Britpop when our national alternative music entered an intense peiod of colour, experiment and creativity. It fell from a star, somewhere between Isn’t Everything and Loveless, taking in the early pre-first album EPs from Lush, Curve, Slowdive and Ride as well as Teenage Fanclub’s A Catholic Education…..the nascent scene birthed by MBV, Dinosaur Jnr, Galaxie 500 and pushed into overdrive by the looming grunge threat from across the sea. It was vital, luminous and filled the heads of its listeners with an ad infinitum loop of beatific noise.

It was an escape. A last chance attempt to hide from the snarling proletariat of the Manchester machine, of that fucking ‘Fools Gold’ beat, that seeded the Britpop monster. It was a refuge from the forever years of Thatcher. Britpop came of age with New Labour and matured into an physically Audenesque dinosaur but shoegaze fell before it could even talk.

And it was gone. Bereft, I spent the Britpop era in mourning, slamming doors whenever the strains of ‘Morning Glory’ or ‘Parklife’ echoed through the corridors of my University halls.Thus began my years as a musical exile; I turned away from the then to discover the previous five decades of music, stopping only briefly to catch the last gasp of Slowdive, who flew the flag for a few more years with a developing vision culminating in the epic Souvlaki before jumping ship for a distant and beautiful alt.country rubber ring called Mojave 3. No bad thing.

The kids found it again though. Somehow – looking back at their folk’s record collections? Into the dusty corners of Spotify, Last FM and beyond? They saw the sparkling underneath of a maligned, forgotten beer coaster moment in musical history. This is the way we reinvent, improve and move on.

Why now? Variations on a theme of shoegaze have been on the back burner for some time. Didn’t we call it nu-gaze a few years back? Hadn’t we decided that chillwave was the natural progression? And what the hell is glo-fi anyway?

‘Susan’, by almost unknowns Fanzine, returns us to a purist vision of the moment when shoegaze became tinted by late eighties US college rock. Hell, it even sounds like a lost track from A Catholic Education. It is by turns a post-show walk home in the rain after seeing that girl you want for the hundredth time go home with the other guy. A perfect two minutes distilling moments of aspiration, coy sentimentality and muted production.

Now, as then, it’s characterised by a joyous and celebratory execution – kids in love with their guitar and the sounds they can make. Vocals don’t matter – they only exist in this world to augment the guitars, like some deep whisper. Sometimes you even forget they’re there.

Listen and remember the girl you never got to kiss.