I researched and wrote the piece that follows in the mid-1990s. At that time, UK indie and its North American cousin, alternative rock, had only recently moved from the cultural margins to something like the mainstream.
The early history of Anglophone alternative rock recounted here involved fragile institutional and aesthetic counter-hegemonic alliances that were forged in the wake of punk. These alliances brought together audience fractions from the working class (often affiliated with youth subcultures of various kinds) with a subsection of educated (lower) middle-class youth. Independent record companies were fundamental to the varying notions of alterity embraced by these different groups: hence the growing popularity of the term indie, though this was mainly applied to the more middle-class end of the musical continuum.
The institutions that sustained those more subcultural musics in the years following the 1977 punk explosion had taken shape in the post-war, post-industrial r...
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