Getting trashed at Trash: How a new book on noughties ‘Indie Sleaze’ remembers the last great London indie nightlife scene

“I remember one night in this squat in South London when a really early version of Foals played in the basement,” recalls Blaine Harrison, frontman of stalwart UK indie band Mystery Jets.

“During the set this wall was destroyed and everyone got covered in brick dust and blood. I was chatting to these people over a tinny in the garden and they were TV researchers, and then a few months later, I remember watching Skins and being like, ‘Oh shit, you're creating characters based on all of our friends’. What was going on on screen was basically a replication of what us and all our friends were doing, being sold to the younger generation.”

When Skins first appeared on TV screens at the start of 2007, it pointed towards a change in the temperature of ‘00s alternative British culture. The Libertines frontman Pete Doherty would announce his short-lived engagement to the country’s most famous supermodel Kate Moss a few months later. The seismic youthquake of guitar bands that began with The Strokes and soon travelled across the Atlantic with The Libertines, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and more had already begun to yield a slew of second wave major label signings like The Kooks. Soon, social media would mutate from a nascent, rose-tinted place of Myspace and rudimentary, fan-centric message boards to another means for the industry to regain total control. What had begun as a sexy, hedonistic antidote to the turn-of-the-century beige wave of Starsailor, Travis et al had gone commercial.

But for a pivotal window at the start of the decade, says author Janine Warren, “it felt like there was a really exciting energy. For a while, it really did feel as if culture was something young people could make for themselves.”

It’s this rise and fall-out of the last great British indie boom that Warren - who worked directly as a PR with bands including The Strokes and The Libertines - has documented in The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect: a new book compiling first-hand testimonies from artists and key players, looking back on the period now often affectionately known as ‘indie sleaze’.

Like Meet Me In The Bathroom before it, it walks readers through the scene via memories and anecdotes told directly by those who were there. But where Meet Me In The Bathroom’s eulogy of noughties New York still contains a sort of sketchy, underground glamour, there is something infinitely more homespun and charmingly haphazard about its British equivalent. Here, we get Wakefield sibling trio The Cribs throwing up in a plant pot after taking a meeting with Tom from Myspace, and The Libertines turning up to early gigs with their first drummer - a 70-year-old pensioner nicknamed Mr. Razzcocks.

Glorious, noisy, drunken

Crucial to the atmosphere of The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect (named after a track by London post-punks The Rakes) is the London nightlife at its centre: club nights like Trash, AfterSkool, White Heat and Frog, where you could dance most nights of the week with like-minded souls, get pissed for a tenner, and very possibly bump into someone who’d be on the cover of the NME the next month. If those sticky walls could talk, they would doubtless need their own, even heftier biography.

“There was this brief period where [the trends] felt like they were coming from the young people in the clubs and it was them making the decisions about what was cool,” says Warren.

Leonie Cooper, former NME journalist and current Food and Drink Editor at Time Out, spent her formative years rattling around the capital’s vibrant indie club circuit. “I went to Trash once and Grace Jones was there, she just looked me dead in the eye, lifted up her skirt and then put it back down. I was like ‘All right, decent, just been flashed by Grace Jones’,” she recalls.

“Another time, Kings of Leon were there. My friend Jo was wearing all these bangles that she had made, and she gave some of them to the band and then, two weeks later, they were on the cover of NME wearing the bangles. Nobody ever told us to fuck off, and I don't think it was because we were teenage girls because we were all quite goofy back then. I think everyone was just really open to having a chat. And they knew if you were in this place as well, you were probably on the same wavelength.”

For fans, bands and budding music industry bods alike, these nights became a hub and an entry point to a world that, suddenly, was all around you, in glorious, noisy, drunken technicolour.

“I met journalists from NME at Trash, and I think I got an internship at The Face because I’d see them there. I thought I was just being a slightly annoying teenager shouting at people, but in fact, I was networking,” says Cooper.

Hey scenesters!

“Going out five nights a week was a huge part of it,” agrees Harrison.

“That was how a lot of bands [like Mystery Jets] found an audience in the first place. When you were at school, you maybe had your clique of three or four people that liked the same music as you or dressed like you. But suddenly, when we arrived in London and started going to places like Candybox and AfterSkool and Trash, it was like, ‘Oh shit, it's like the ‘me’ of every town and we're all here’.”

Originating from Twickenham curio Eel Pie Island, it was through their affiliation with Trash that Mystery Jets would form a friendship with DJ Erol Alkan, who would produce their second album ‘21’ and its big hit ‘Two Doors Down’. Almost 20 years later they’re still going strong, having just released their seventh album ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’.

Up north, meanwhile, Nick Hodgson - original drummer and songwriter of Kaiser Chiefs, and now vocalist in indie supergroup Everyone Says Hi, whose new album ‘Funny ‘Cos It’s True’ lands on October 9th - had spent the early years of the noughties running Leeds club night Pigs. Its community became so integral to Kaiser Chiefs’ story that, following a particularly rowdy gig with fellow Leeds band Black Wire, Hodgson was inspired to write their breakthrough hit ‘I Predict A Riot’.

“Pigs created a big gang of people in Leeds who could be identified by their hair or clothes, and I think that’s my favourite memory of that time - walking about feeling like you were part of something new,” Hodgson recalls.

“I do feel very grateful that I was able to start a band in the early noughties and not now. Despite it being easier now to get your music out there, it feels harder to find an audience.”

Harrison agrees: “I don't think genres really exist or have the same relevance as they did and, in some ways, that's a good thing. But it does mean that it's hard to build a fan base as a new artist because people might know a minute of one viral song, but they won’t have necessarily taken a deep dive if they're not invested in everything that you're about.”

Noughties nostalgia

Pre-Spotify and TikTok, there’s a sense of tribalness to the scenes of The World Was A Mess that seems unlikely to return.

“It was always important to me, that sense of belonging,” says Warren. “It was never just about the bands. It was about the people and the places that allowed those bands to mean something.”

And as the cost of living rises, with the average price of a pint in London sitting at £6.50 according to the British Beer and Pub Association, perhaps even the notion of affording to go out multiple nights a week is the noughties’ biggest cause for nostalgia.

“I had the educational maintenance allowance from the government which was £30 a week so I would stay in secondary education and go to sixth form, and I feel like that got me out for five nights a week,” Cooper remembers.

“Drinks at Cheapskates in Soho were 60p and they were rank but they had alcohol in them. They did work.”

“At White Heat you could get a bottle of Smirnoff Ice or a Becks for two pounds, and you'd already drunk half a bottle of wine on the bus to get there,” Harrison agrees. “Most of our clothes just came from charity shops. It was cheap.”

It’s easy to see why, in a world of Ozempic and photo filters, when people’s digital footprint is more highly curated than their real life existence, a less manicured approach to the world might also appeal. The images in Warren’s book are candid snaps of dancing revellers and backstage photos of bands piled on top of each other, sharing an experience in the moment.

“There's a kind of messy decadence to it: the chaos, the imperfection, the creativity, the optimism. Yes you’d plan your outfit, but by 3am no one was worrying about their eyeliner because no one was going to be seeing you on TikTok the next day,” says Warren.

“Now, when you look at people sharing pictures on Instagram of them in the club, everyone's so polished and they look fucking great. Whereas we sort of looked like sweaty little rats in a 1980s rah-rah dress,” says Cooper.

“We all look sort of dreadful, but we all look so happy.”

The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect is out now via Omnibus Press.

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