Once again it is that time of the month for you to enjoy/endure another selection of tracks that have graced the Goose Studios office this month. As we move into March and our third instalment, it is time for Noughties Indie to come centre stage!

For me, this was the soundtrack of my adolescence. Back in the mid-Noughties when guitars were cool, Skins had just come out on C4 and everyone wore some variation of the fluoro-Topman hoodie (hands up if you remember Nu-Rave?!), life was all a little more simple…

Why ‘indie’ music and why now? Well because I’ve seen the return of the ye-olde recurrent 6-9 month existential crisis about my future and where I’m going in life! Don’t worry, we’ll keep this brief but in the same month that Sam has gone full melt down up North and is donning a legitimate shaven haven (those mighty fine locks are no more!), I’ve been left to ponder what’s next now I’ve finished my MA and what on earth do people do with their lives when they aren’t in education?!

In these moments of grave self-doubt I always find myself longing for, you guessed it, the mid-Noughties. People always say how they hated school and I was probably no different, but looking back on those heady days of teenage house parties, stealing ya Mum’s cooking Brandy and burning a CD-R of the finest early demo’s that LimeWire or MySpace has to offer, I can’t help but get misty eyed. So this month, in the midst of my very own existential crisis, these are some of the tracks that we should all be returning to in 2019 as we mourn a time gone by!

Taking in the sights of The White Stripes, The Strokes and The Libertines, the opening three rounds is dominated by the Indie heavyweights. The Strokes ‘Is This It’, released way back in 2001, was the one, the one that kick started it all with genuinely one of the coolest and best debut albums of a generation. Everyone (by which I mean me), wanted to be a Julian Casablanca. The hair, the swagger. Instead I got a mullet that developed into ringlets which I thought was sensationally cool. No rock’n’roll swagger here, just a 13/14 year old boy who lived in the countryside with shit hair. It’s the music that made you wanna start a band (and I did – insert yet another cliché of being a teenager) and The Libertines only reinforced all that –‘Time for Heroes’ – yes it bloody well was!

We easily could have had some Foals in the mix, Bombay Bicycle Club, Arcade Fire (all bands that will undoubtedly feature in a later playlist) but instead I plumped for the tour de force of Arctic Monkeys, The Maccabees and Vampire Weekend. I remember seeing Arctic Monkeys for £8 at the Zodiac in Oxford, The Maccabees followed with Jack Peñate in support a year or so later. This was when the smoking ban hadn’t even kicked in, so you got picked up by your parents smelling like a working man’s club, hoarse in the throat as you slowly developed some respiratory condition just before Sports Day.

The end of this playlist is a little bit slower, a little more melancholic as we check-in with the furiously cool Karen-O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the wonderful guitar of Bloc Party’s ‘So Here We Are’ and The Streets. The Street’s don’t have guitar I hear you proclaim?! A point for you kind Sir! But my Christ when Mike Skinner dropped ‘Original Pirate Material’ it was a trail blazer of a record. I remember hearing ‘Has it come to this?’ on a caravan holiday in Weymouth when I was like 13 and it knocked my socks off. If it’s good enough to draw that album to a close, then my golly it is good enough to end this little playlist.

So here we are, the tracks of my youth, the existential crisis about what I am doing with my life and my plea for you all to buy some t-shirts so I can do something fun/have meaning and purpose.

Rich x