Those of us who spent our teenage years reading coffee-stained copies of The Catcher in the Rye or Tess of the d’Ubervilles while bitterly bemoaning the fact that not a single girl in our school, college, or workplace had the good sense of noticing the painfully shy Bookworm sitting tongue-tied at his side, often taking refuge in a particular form of popular music. Scorned and tormented, we wasted our teenage years in the self-imposed exile of our back bedrooms, taking solace there listening to a flurry of indie bands that had somehow cornered the market out of youthful angst and self-pity. We took perverse delight in the confessions of these kindred spirits, as they meekly extolled the trials and tribulations of loveless lives that mirrored our own tearful existence.

The Smiths, in this sense, were beyond comparison, and in Morrissey they possessed a songwriter without equal in the wretched pantheon of pop. However, there were other bands that had a lot to say on the subject of unrequited love. An entire genre of indie-pop, whether you call it twee, shambling, or C-86, after the legendary NME mixtape, I was absolutely immersed in it. While bands like The Wedding Present (and for me David Gedge was the unofficial mouthpiece for the legion of shy guys who couldn’t muster the courage to front the Friday night club) enjoyed a long period in the center of attention, many of its C-86 compatriots simply faded into obscurity. In some cases, no doubt, this was a blessing in disguise. However, bands like The Servants and Birmingham’s Mighty Mighty surely deserved to be more than a footnote in indie-pop history.

Pop Can: The Definitive Collection 1986-1988, in Cherry Red, tries to set the record straight. Comprised of all of Mighty Mighty’s excellent singles, B-sides and EP along with a few select cuts from their debut album, the disappointing Sharks, with a handful of tracks from the ‘lost’ second album The Betamax Tapes (finally released in 2013), Pop Can certainly does what it says on the tin, rounding up the best moments of this short-lived combo.

The album, though not arranged in chronological order, opens with debut single “Everybody Knows the Monkey,” an edgy affair that sets the tone (orange juice and a hint of vocal organ) for Pop Can’s frothy content. Other highlights from side one include the enhanced single “Built Like a Car”, which peaked at no. 6 on the independent chart, his highest-charting effort and supremely catchy follow-up, “Law.” Fortunately, it’s the C-86 version that appears here, rather than the inferior “dance remix” Chapter released on 12-inch in late 1987.

Side two begins with “Is There Who Out There for Me”, which is probably still the band’s best-known song, peaking at no. 44 on John Peel’s Holiday Holy Fifties of 1986. This is also the Mighty Mighty song that, unsurprisingly, appears on Cherry Red’s definitive compilation, Scared To Get Happy, The Story of Indie Music 1980-1989. The song boasts a terrifyingly effervescent chorus that also captures the brutality of teenage loneliness, with Hugh McGuinness haplessly pleading for true love to come his way.

‘Is there anyone out there for me, is there anyone else alone / I can’t take another summer alone.’

Other standouts on side two are “Let’s Call It Love” and a couple of tracks from The Betamax Tapes; “Touch of the Sun” and particularly “Unsteady” which brings to mind the cult/sophisticated pop of Lloyd Cole or Prefab Sprout. While lyricist Mick Geoghegan may not quite measure up to Cole or Paddy McAloon, “Unsteady” signals the more mature direction the band would surely have traveled in, had they continued:

‘Remember that letter of mine / When I changed my mind every other line / Now that I’m sure, you’ll condescend / to be introduced, as my unstable girlfriend.’

Strangely, Mighty Mighty achieved remarkable posthumous success in Japan, while remaining dishonorable prophets in their own land.

Well, now we are all great! Decades separate us from our former self-pitying selves. Gone are the days when David Gedge’s plaintive ‘aaaaaargh’ of despair reverberated through the streets of Leeds city center at closing time. However, even when taken out of its original context, the music still stands the test of time. Pop Can is packed with gourmand vignettes, effervescent stories of lost love that you can sing along to. Ultimately, this is a truly worthwhile trip down memory lane and a fitting tribute to one of the lesser-known practitioners of the genre.

While we’re on the subject of the genre that dares not speak its name, here are my top ten twee-related songs.

1. The sun, a little star: the servants

The distracted, dreamy vocals, sepia-tinged harmonies, golden splashes of guitar raining down on both verse and chorus should have ensured “The Sun a Small Star” became a mainstream radio staple for the next decades. way of “There She Goes” by The La. However, the track, which was taken from the sublime EP of the same name, stalled on release, managing just a solitary week on the independent charts peaking at no. 47 in November 1986.

2. Is There Someone Out There For Me: Mighty Mighty

The song that recorded the soundtrack to a succession of summers in love in South Wales in the rain as Thatcher pounded the valleys into submission. The dry humor, self-pity of sixth grade poetry, and a starry tune that still manages to send shivers down your spine, as well as bring tears to your eyes!

3. Almost prayed: the prophets of time

The sun-dappled guitar licks, alone, were enough to give many of the light-skinned wallflowers who bought this, The Weather Prophets’ debut single, a bad case of sunburn and the passing decades have made little to diminish its luminescent beauty.

The group, consisting of Peter Astor and Dave Morgan, after The Loft went up on the roof for the last time, achieved a minor chart hit when “She Comes from the Rain” peaked at no. 62 in March of ’87. Their second album, Mayflower, from which this track is taken, is arguably the best album in a subgenre that (wedding present aside) can’t be said to have produced anything resembling a classic 33rpm record.

4. The word around town: Westlake*

Having fired his Servants, David Westlake released a self-titled Mini-LP, via Creation Records, before embarking on a career in academia. “The Word around Town” is the album that reserves Westlake’s place on the list of the best British lyricists of the decade, along with David Gedge, Robert Lloyd, Elvis Costello and Morrissey. A cult pop masterpiece that includes this ironic self-analysis:

“The word in the city among those to whom nothing is sacred / Is that the Emperor’s clothes don’t exist but he’s beautiful naked.”

* Be careful to avoid the demo version currently circulating in the Small Time build.

5. My favorite dress: the wedding gift

“Some rare delight in Manchester city / It was six hours before you let me down / See it all in one drunken kiss / A stranger’s hand on my favorite dress.”

David Gedge, the George Clooney of indie pop, can resist the company he’s asked to keep here. There was always something fundamentally more muscular and unhealthy about this angry young man’s amorous musings, allied to the bellicose bursts of guitar that characterized songs like “Brassneck,” which put his C-86 compatriots to shame. For starters, there was a sense that Gedge’s dysfunctional relationships were actually with real women, rather than the imaginary girlfriends his faerie counterparts and, in most cases, his devoted followers sickly fantasized about. .

The band released two classic albums, George Best and Bizarro, before the law of diminishing returns took effect. However, they enjoyed spectacular chart success, racking up half a century of hit singles between 1988 and 2005.

6. Pristine Christine: The Sea Urchins

This gleefully upbeat single was the debut release on Sarah Records (twee’s unofficial home) and spent six weeks on the independent charts. Her love affair with Sarah was short-lived, however, and they sought solace in Cheree’s alluring arms of records at London venues, before parting ways for good in the summer of 1991.

7. She always hides: the servants

A passively beautiful pop song, set somewhere between Galaxie 500 and Real Estate, with a final guitar solo that glides languidly, like an Indian summer, before dissolving into the shimmering haze of our subconscious. Why David Westlake traded the sublimely elegant sound of these early Servants singles for the more claustrophobic tones of his scruffy albums will forever remain one of pop’s most perplexing career moves.

8. Disorderly Towns: The Blacksmiths

Though newcomers to the “anorak” scene (the Melbourne-based combo only formed in 1993), the group can claim to have produced the most consistent body of work the genre produced on either side of the world. These shy guys recorded eleven mostly good albums before parting ways with the company in 2009. Influenced by all the usual suspects (The Smiths, Orange Juice and The Go-Betweens), they also acknowledged a debt to bittersweet love songs. from Britain’s most underrated wordsmith. , Billy Bragg. “Untidy Towns” is a random selection, there are more than a hundred soft vignettes as touching as this one hidden in her backpack.

9. Fabulous Friend: Field Mice

If New Order hadn’t discovered Arthur Baker and the New York club scene, as they struggled to come to terms with the death of Ian Curtis and Joy Division, they would have been forever frozen in time as The Field Mice! Little tunes like “Sensitive” and “Emma’s House” couldn’t defoam a pint of bitters, but that’s all part of the band’s fragile allure.

10. I’m in love with a girl who doesn’t know I exist: another sunny day

The title alone deserves its inclusion on this list, since it manages to sum up the whole raison d’être of the genre in one indisputably painful sentence. However, Harvey Williams, the young Werther of twee, deserves credit for his work as an ASD and as a guitarist with fellow Sarah Records stablemates The Field Mice.