I heard about your band

I don’t envy artists. At the age of 10 I’d admire them, look up to them, possibly lust after them but never envy them.

There is one exception to this rule I so dogmatically adhere to and that is Brakes. I want to be in the band. I want to stand up next to Eamon Hamilton as he chants about Scarlett Johansson in his contrived nasal tone. I’d like to strum a chord, hammer a string, pluck at a double bass (I’d consider going down the less dignified maracas route) next to Thomas White and Marc Beatty. To hear the guitars tune in rehearsals with their magnificent sheen that drew me (along with many others) into their mutation of great British rocknroll. I’d like to stand so close to Alex White that the reverberations of the bass drum shake the backs of my thighs, to hear the crashing of cymbals bounce onto my ears every day ’till deaf do us part. Their rapport onstage is electric and I want to be apart of it.

They play big rock riffs, they shout, they dance, they’ve released with Rough Trade (now Fat Cat), they play a lot of shows, they release records regularly, and they’ve been doing it long enough to be fully paid up professionals – if I were to play 100 shows a year I’d want to play Brakes songs with Brakes band members.

How come then do I struggle to like the songs? Why do I find the new single practically unbearable to listen too when there’s several box-ticking reasons to like it? “I don’t care that this world’s corroded/I’ve got a good hand to hold too,” is one of several couplets that should have me reeling by the stereo in (fan)boyish excitement. The guitars rattle around like youngsters in a moshpit, when the riff breaks out into an improvised spazz-out it should be an effervescent, menthos in the cola moment but it just isn’t – it fails on a monumental level. What they need to realise is that anyone with a guitar can start with a simple riff and end in a sea of dissonance, and most people with a guitar do it, but they need to do it with more style and more articulately too.

I reckon there’s a couple of factors for my newly presented disdain for indie rocknroll. Firstly and most obviously, the genre is so over-run with copyists, both genuine and synthetic that the so called quality has been lost in the mire. Secondly and probably as a result of the first, the whole scene has – especially in the case of Brakes – stagnated. Even their old label has dropped them on the grounds that the band are not worth the money:

Rough Trade Records had released Brakes’ first two albums, but was unsure whether it could afford to release Brakes’ third in the credit crunch.

Fair play but Rough trade can’t be that cash strapped since Duffy started printing money last year. When I read this on the band’s biography page it seemed that Geoff Travis and Co. were saying, “No-one is going to buy this record, and we don’t care about this band any more.”

Now before I dismiss Brakes as another band who tried to fly but couldn’t and sign off on this obituary, it’s worth considering one thing, their legacy. In years to come they will be heralded as a great band that were never of their time. They achieved the goals of a real band, tour, make records, release records, write timeless music, it’s a shame that sometimes this just isn’t good enough.