C86 and all that

The Urban Spaceman, Volume Two, issue Eleven, August 2025

C86 and all that

It’s a long one!

Apparently the NME released the (in)famous C86 cassette in May of 1986. You had to buy it mail order from the paper and I must have sent in my coupon and postal order straight away, because in my memory I associate the tape with hot spring and summer days, listening to it on my £10 Asda imitation Walkman on the long walk from our house in Sowerby to my friend Noel's house in Ripponden, where we would spend Sunday afternoons playing Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu.

If I'm honest, I was more inspired by the other tape NME released at the same time, a tenth anniversary of punk compilation called Pogo-A-Go-Go. But 1976 was two-thirds of my life ago, and although bands like The Damned and The Stranglers were still having hits, the revelatory excitement of the first-wave punk on that tape clearly belonged to a long-vanished era. For better or worse, C86 was the sound of today's DIY musical underground.

If an unavoidable direct comparison revealed that the uncensored aggression and energy of punk was all but absent on C86, then that very lack of macho aggression was one of the most welcome and welcoming things about it. I'd heard what punk sounded like in 1986, via a cheap hardcore compilation with sleevenotes by The Sun's Gary Bushell, and I didn't much care for it. In contrast, C86 sounded fresh and light; a bit flimsy and inconsequential in places maybe, but there were 22 bands represented, and I was inevitably going to like some more than others.

It was a way in, a ground zero for discovering and exploring music by bands whose members were mostly not much older than me, whose lives were probably not that different to mine, and who were more likely to be found playing in the back room of a pub in a nearby town than appearing on Top Of The Pops. It was a world I could even aspire to being part of.

Before receiving the cassette, the main way I would have heard bands like The Wolfhounds, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Close Lobsters and McCarthy would have been on the weekday evening Radio 1 shows by Janice Long or, more likely, John Peel. Peel was the benign gatekeeper of DIY music: you made a record, you posted it to him and, if he liked it, he played it or offered you a session. In retrospect, it seems bizarre and unfair that one man should have such power: there were few other options for airplay, so if your music wasn't to Peel's tastes then you just didn't get heard. On the other hand, his tastes were pretty broad, and it wasn't like being played on Peel was any guarantee of a career in music. Most of the bands he played quickly faded back into obscurity, and Peel wore his tastemaker status lightly. He wasn't in the business of discovering tomorrow's stars and often went off his "discoveries" if they made it big. He just played music he liked and would have welcomed the opportunity for more DJs to do the same.

On the plus side, there were no intermediate hoops to jump through. You sent the music to Peel, not his secretary or PA. The legend was that he listened personally to everything he was sent, and might well phone you up himself if he deemed you worthy of a session. They were simpler times, for sure. Was there the danger of a cult of personality developing? Oh yes, and to a degree it did, but Peel's on-air persona was so ego-free and down-to-earth, in contrast to his daytime Radio 1 comrades (later parodied with pinpoint accuracy by comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in the characters of Smashy and Nicey) that at the time it seemed harmless. Peel was just your mate on the radio. You knew he hated Thatcher, supported the striking miners, loved his family and enjoyed a vegetable biriyani. You didn't necessarily feel that any of these things applied to Noel Edmonds.

The NME. John Peel. Alternative comedy shows like The Young Ones and Blackadder. There were a few things that you clung onto as an 80s teenager, as evidence that not everyone in the wider world was a racist, sexist, homophobic, gung-ho capitalist bent on mutually assured nuclear destruction. Punk was ten years ago: it still informed our aesthetic and ethical outlook, but it had obviously failed in whatever world-changing mission it may have had, overwhelmed perhaps by its in-built self-destructive nihilism at the unstoppable yuppie dawn. We were looking for something else: something with the same sense of permission to make your own noise, speak your own truth, regardless of musical proficiency, experience or the gear you had access to, but something without the rules, boundaries and intimidating atmosphere of male violence that had grown up around punk in the decade since it emerged. We wanted something that was ours. C86 may not have been it – even at the time, many recognised it as a deeply flawed document – but it was a start.

Slow dissolve. 39 years pass by in the blink of an eye. In the final weeks of the long hot summer of 2025, a middle-aged man with long grey hair arrives at a record fair in the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-On-Sea, and insinuates himself among the other middle-aged men flicking aggressively through boxes upon boxes of second-hand vinyl encased in slippery clear plastic sleeves. He is somewhat overwhelmed. He has lived with the addiction of record collecting for most of his life: ever since, in fact, he was a 15-year-old boy realising that he probably wasn't going to be dedicating so much of his time and meagre allowance to role-playing games and Warhammer figurines in the future.

He now has more records than he can possibly listen to in the years left to him, stacked up in crates and boxes and dominating the small front room of the house he recently bought with his partner. He knows he shouldn't buy any more. He's only here for the day out, he tells himself, because it's one of the last Saturdays he won't be working for the foreseeable future. But he's just had his mid-month payment for the copyediting work he did in July, a bigger payment than usual, so there's money in his pocket for once. He went to a cash machine on the way down from the station and withdrew what he set as his budget for the day. He doesn't have to spend all of it. He probably won't.

Once in the hall, a creeping anxiety grips him. Where to start? How not to miss out on the best deals? He circuits the room, deciding to briefly check out all the stalls before going back and methodically working through every crate. In the far corner, he notices one marked as 'John Peel Archive'. He recalls seeing a recent news item, or maybe it was a post on an online music forum, linking to the auction of the late DJ's record collection, over 20 years since he died of a heart attack while on holiday in Peru. Some of those records have already ended up here, it seems. He starts to go through the box. White labels by band's he's never heard of, albums he's already got; and then, there it is: C86. On vinyl!

I'm shocked back to the first person. C86 was initially released on tape only. This suited me fine as when I was 15 that was the only way I could listen to music without commandeering the family Radiogram to play my handful of vinyl purchases before the disapproving ears of my parents. Apparently Rough Trade put out an LP version at the end of that year but I'd never seen a copy, and more recently there've been multiple CD reissues with different or extended track listings.

My original C86 tape is in a shoebox under the bed. Of course I still have it, but I haven't had a tape player for many years and even if I had, I would be too worried about the cassette being chewed up to listen to it. I'd like to hear it again, I think. I'd like to have it on an LP, with all the original songs in the original order. And this was John Peel's copy? Was this the actual record he played on the radio, that I heard through tiny tinny speakers in my bedroom in Sowerby while doing my school homework, nearly 40 years ago, and which convinced me to order a copy of the tape for myself? Maybe I should buy it. It's £30. That's a big chunk of my budget for the day. But it's not an unreasonable price. I'll think about it. I'll look at some of the other stalls first. See what else is out there.

Ten, fifteen minutes later, I'm back in that corner. It's still there. I pull it out. I hand over thirty pounds. "This is a piece of history," I say, but the stallholder is unimpressed. Maybe because what I really mean is, this is a piece of MY history.

So what exactly did I buy? The cover of the 12" LP proclaims it to be a "Radio-only promo LP of NME's newest cassette – DJ use only not for sale". Otherwise it replicates the minimalist design of the original tape, but in green rather than brown. It has the catalogue number NME PRO 1 and is number 43 in a limited edition of 500 copies. There is a sticker in the top left-hand corner with 17450 written on in black marker, presumably the filing number for Peel or Radio 1's record library. Otherwise, the only evidence I have that the record once belonged to John Peel is the stallholder's sticker on the outside of the clear protective sleeve, with "John Peel Archive!" written on it.

I get home. I have something to eat. I make a cup of tea and I power up my old analogue amplifier. I place the record reverently on the turntable but, as a ritual of acknowledgement, I set the speed to 45 rather than 33.

Peel was known for occasionally playing records on air at the wrong speed, by accident. He did this far less often than posthumous legend suggests, but I do remember it happening. So in tribute, I play the first track, Primal Scream's 'Velocity Girl' too fast. It sounds like the Chipmunks. Then I lift the stylus, move it back to the beginning, correct the speed, and settle down to enjoy the record properly.

It sounds terrible.

I don't mean it's scratched or crackly. The album is in mint condition, which is just as well as I really have to crank up the volume to hear it properly. There are 11 songs on each side of the record and even though several are less than two minutes' long, that's still over half an hour of music crammed onto each side. Most of the songs were primitively recorded to start with, and while my memory is of them sounding lively enough on tape, the vinyl sounds like it was mastered by a newspaper editor.

That said, this was designed solely to be played over 1980s British medium wave radio, where you had to use a manual dial to find the station and to keep the signal steady. It was heard through tiny speakers where everything but the mid-range would be lost anyway. It's totally fine for the purpose it was intended for.

Sound quality aside, what strikes me listening to C86 now, with the benefit of a lot more knowledge of musical history than I had at the time, is how little new ground is being broken. Most of the bands seem happy to continue in the mode of post-punk acts of a few years earlier, chiefly Buzzcocks and Orange Juice. There are some enjoyable, even memorable songs, but they're variations on an established form rather than something new.

The notable exception are six bands – three clumped together on side one, another three on side two – that I think of as the album's awkward squad. Peel coined the term "shambling bands" for these groups and others like them: a portmanteau of "shambolic" and "rambling" that was fondly intended if inadequate to describe the barely controlled chaos, spiky atonal riffs and urgent yelps that seemed the common thread linking Stump, Bogshed, A Witness, Mackenzies, Big Flame and The Shrubs.

Latterly this scene would be chronicled in John Robb's 2009 book Death To Trad Rock, and for a few years there seemed to be a lot of it about. Now it sounds like an intriguing dead end, a musical evolutionary path not taken. Of the six "shambling bands" on C86, all but Bogshed (who were based just up the road from me, in Hebden Bridge) were signed to Nottingham's Ron Johnson Records. Robb tries to make the case that these bands were the UK equivalent to the emerging American noise bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Big Black, but although there was a mutual regard and sympathy between these bands, truthfully the UK groups were their own thing: more amateurish perhaps, but also more free, more politically radical, and certainly less career oriented.

The shambling six apart, the other C86 bands wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that wasn't apparent to me as a teen just discovering alternative music. It was quite a shock to realise just how blatant a Syd Barrett homage 'Transparent' by The Servants is, for instance. But between them they manage to pretty much map out all the major musical enthusiasms I'd experience in the years to come, from the classic Byrds chime of 'Velocity Girl' to the breathless punk-pop of The Soup Dragons' 'Pleasantly Surprised' and the gothic psychedelia of 'Console Me' by We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Going To Use It (not entirely representative of their usual sound, but my favourite track on the tape at the time).

There's proto-shoegaze in the shape of The Pastels' sublime 'Breaking Lines', Bunnymen-Teardrops-type new rock from The Mighty Lemon Drops, and even folk – I'd forgotten The Shop Assistants' gorgeous 'It's Up To You', but now the melancholy acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and whispery female vocals evoke nothing so much as the gentle wistful sound of Vashti Bunyan. Wilful noise and even free jazz is somewhere in the shambling bands' DNA, and amid the understated, quaintly British Beefheartisms of Stump's immortal 'Buffalo' you'll even find the repeated line "Mind the oranges, Marlon!" – a quote from Alan Moore's 1984 2000AD comic strip, 'D.R. & Quinch Do Hollywood'.

Admittedly there's no soul or dance music, except perhaps for the stiff, buttoned-up funk of Mighty Mighty's 'Law'. There's nothing electronic, as the remit of the compilation was to focus exclusively on guitar bands, which made it somewhat retrogressive even at the time. Leeds band The Age Of Chance claimed Public Enemy as their biggest influence, but you wouldn't know it from their (still thrilling) contribution, 'From Now On This Will Be Your God.'

In some ways Peel, as much as the NME, made C86 happen. All the bands featured on the album recorded sessions for his show, and two tracks from the compilation featured in the 1986 Festive Fifty, the best records of the year as voted for by the show's listeners (these were 'This Boy Can Wait' by The Wedding Present and 'Therese' by The Bodines, at #18 and #19 respectively). After taking delivery of a "rare vinyl DJ promo version" of the album on 31st May (and changing the running order of his show on British Forces radio to play three songs from the LP, without having heard them first, to his mostly German audience) he played almost every track, some repeatedly, on his Radio 1 show throughout June and July, and discussed the album, and the scenes it represented, in his regular column in The Observer.

But is the album I bought really the actual copy of the album that John Peel was playing on Radio 1 in the summer of 1986? Given that individual albums from the Peel collection sold for hundreds of pounds in the recent Omega auction, £30 seems suspiciously cheap. Lot 174 in said auction, which went for £340, actually consisted of three LP copies of C86; one was the Rough Trade edition in a brown sleeve, while the other two were green-sleeve promos like mine, all with the same '17450' sticker in the top left-hand corner. But one of the promo LPs was described as a test pressing with hand-written notes on the centre label, while the other was #20 of 500. Mine is #43.

If it was a con, though, it was a pointless one. A check on Discogs reveals that £30 is a good price for the album even without the John Peel association. The other LPs in the box were similarly priced. Why then would you go to the trouble, and the risk, of claiming that they were from the John Peel Archive if they weren't?

I wish I'd asked more questions about the record's provenance. As I said, the stall also had many white labels with notes, press releases and such attached that certainly seemed to be addressed to Peel, and it wasn't like I was handing over a huge amount of money, or buying the record as an investment. I knew that there was no physical proof it had ever belonged to Peel. But I'd decided in my mind, poetically, that this was the record I'd heard over the air all those years ago.

After a day's deliberation, the most likely answer to my mind is that there were multiple copies of the C86 promo sent to Peel and the BBC. The auction photo suggests that they were all filed with the same code. So when Peel wanted to play a track on air, he could have pulled out any one of several copies for a given show. Maybe the one I have now or maybe one of the others.

Records that had passed through the hands of John Peel weren't always worth hundreds of pounds. Back when he was a working broadcaster, he'd sometimes mention that he'd been sent more than one copy of a particular disc. If you wrote to him and asked nicely, he'd sometimes send you his spare copy, maybe with a signed Radio 1 compliment slip inside. You didn't even have to pay postage. I know; I did this a couple of times.

The copy of C86 I have could have been acquired from John Peel or Radio 1 long before the current auction, for much less than it might have fetched there. With no proof of its authenticity, the owners wouldn't be able to hike the price up excessively. Or it could just be a promo sent to a local paper, with a fake library sticker attached.

Ultimately it doesn't matter and I'll probably never know for sure. But for me, it will always be John Peel's copy of C86. And acquiring it feels like coming full circle. This was, for me, where it all began. Is this where it should end? I should probably stop buying records now. Maybe put my own archive in order rather than adding to it. Maybe sell some of it off, or give it away. I don't know. Writing this essay is a start. The point is, it's about what the record means to me. What I choose to make it mean. A magical talisman or a piece of history recovered, a social media talking point, or a wake-up call for a habit that's maybe becoming a source more of anxiety than of joy.

John Peel had his dark side. C86 was a flawed project. Record collecting can take over your life. Bands will let you down. Sometimes it scares the health out of me. But then again, when the needle hits the groove…

"Now it's summer, there's nothing left to show

Looks like something's going to happen, but I must confess

Nothing ever happens…

It's up to you."

- The Shop Assistants, 'It's Up To You'.

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