The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect: Book Review

The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect: The Last Indie Music Scene 2000–2010 By Janine Warren

Published by Omnibus Press /Avaliable 3rd September
Pre-order here

Following on from her years at the coalface of the industry itself, first at Beggars Banquet and then Coalition, Janine Warren is ideally placed to tell the story of the UK indie scene that briefly made guitar music feel like the most exciting thing in the world again. She’s now turned that insider knowledge into an oral history of the movement, gathering the voices of the bands, producers and scene-makers who lived it.

There is a photograph in the middle of this book of the crowd at The Strokes’ first UK tour, 2001, pressed into the tiny Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff. Nobody is looking at their phone, because nobody has one. They are simply there, young, sweaty and pressed forward, watching something unfold that would likely change their brain chemistry forever. That image, more than anything else, captures what Janine Warren is trying to preserve in this vivid, generous oral history of the UK indie scene of the early 2000s.

Warren is ideally placed to write it. A former publicist who worked at the epicentre of the movement, she was in the room at the Heavenly Social the night The Strokes got their first NME cover, she accompanied Pete Doherty into the darkness of post-gig London, she watched Franz Ferdinand play Barrowlands, she brings an insider’s intimacy to the story that no purely journalistic account could replicate. Her introduction, tracing a personal journey from a small Yorkshire town, through Liverpool and London, to a job at Beggars Banquet and then Coalition, is one of the most candid accounts of what it actually took to work in the music industry of that era. It is also unexpectedly moving (and for this writer who lived through it, very nostalgic. Don’t miss skinny jeans though).

The book operates as an oral history: Warren largely steps back to let her interviewees, members of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, The Libertines, Maxïmo Park, The Cribs, The Futureheads, The Subways, The Rakes, Mystery Jets, The Long Blondes and many more – tell the story themselves. It is an approach that pays big dividends. Gordon Raphael, the producer of The Strokes, describes the first time he met Pete Doherty: “He got down on one knee and rolled his hat down his arm like a vaudeville trick and started singing a song to me to show me what he could do, and I was impressed. It’s not often I have handsome young men on their knees, singing me songs”.

Carl Barât, reflecting on the chaos that would eventually consume The Libertines, notes simply: “It’s an absolute fucking miracle we are still here”. He’s probably right there. These are voices that feel unmediated and alive, and Warren has a gift for drawing out confessions that a more formal interviewer might not have been trusted with.

The book is broadly chronological but organised thematically, moving from the arrival of The Strokes as a catalyst (“Pre-2001, the music scene was so lame,” says Maxïmo Park’s Lukas Wooller. “There was a real Britpop hangover that just wouldn’t go away,”), through the DIY ethos that animated the early scene, to the club culture of Trash and Optimo that gave it a dancefloor and a social life. Warren is particularly good on the geography of the moment – the way Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Sunderland and London all nursed their own distinct versions of something that felt, to those inside it, like a single unified wave.

The chapters on music and technology are among the most insightful. Warren traces with precision how the internet first liberated the scene, enabling bands to self-organise, fans to travel across the country to gigs they’d found on message boards, and entire communities to form around shared taste, before the same forces began to corrode it. The Arctic Monkeys’ breakthrough is positioned, correctly, as both a democratic triumph and the beginning of an industry gold rush that would ultimately flood the market with pale imitations.

“Somebody once said to me The Strokes were the beginning, and The Kooks were the end,” says Rakes drummer Lasse Peterson. It is, as Warren clearly knows, both deeply unfair on The Kooks but essentially correct. The 00s equivalent of when Robbie dropped Angels in 1997 and effectively nuked britpop’s ‘cool’.

The book also refuses to flinch from the scene’s more uncomfortable truths. A substantial chapter on gender, titled, after a Cribs song, “Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever”, gathers testimony from women who navigated an industry that was, as Dominic Masters puts it bluntly, populated by “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant boys”. Kate Jackson of The Long Blondes recalls being told “Sorry, we’ve already got another band with four guys and guitars”; other interviewees describe casual misogyny, physical intimidation and the particular exhaustion of having to perform impenetrability just to be taken seriously. Warren lets these accounts stand without editorialising too heavily, though her selection and sequencing make her sympathies clear. Similarly, the chapter on excess and mental health (Worry, About It Later) is handled with unusual care, honest about the glamorisation of destruction while remaining clearly pained by its human cost

This is a book that succeeds on its own terms, magnificently. Warren’s epilogue, returning to where it all began for her, a small smoke-filled room in Camden watching The Strokes, twenty-five years ago, is genuinely elegiac. “No phones were held aloft,” she writes. “No sense of documentation. Just noise, sweat and possibility.” That sentence is, in miniature, the argument of the whole book: that something was lost when music became content, when nights out became archives of themselves, when the ephemeral became permanent. The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect is the best possible kind of music book, one that makes you mourn the moment whether you were there or not

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Words by Thomas Sidwell, his author profile ishere