This is Indie the way it really is.. of a time when Indie meant just that, when the NME covered acts that couldn’t sell out the Princess Charlotte in Leicester, and when the bands that played Arenas were people like Phil Collins, not bands operating underneath the payroll of a major on a fake indie label...

“This is our Live Aid”, someone said at one point. How mocking they were, I don’t know, but in some ways it is. The modern day, indie Live Aid, on a indie scale. I.e. Small.

“Four 4 Wiz” - a memorial show to celebrate the short life of Wiz (former vocalist of overlooked indie heroes Mega City Four) – is, unwittingly, very LiveAid. Short sets by reformed bands for a charitable cause. Unlike other shows, there’s no pretence to saving the world or being contemporary : almost every act here is the peer of the Megas themselves, defunct stalwarts of a time when Indie wasn't some mass-marketed youth movement. This is a hark back to a time when you knew most people in the crowd, because they always went to the same bands you did.

With at least four bands reforming for the occasion, it’s also a virtual Delorean back to 1991. I’m not really nostalgic, because these acts can hold a candle up to today’s crop of Great White Heroes – it wasn’t better then, but it was different. Then, there was a reliance on a wall of crunchy guitars and understated, sometimes lost vocals. The Senseless Things, making their only appearance since 1996, and also unannounced, manage to prove this point with a breakneck 20 minutes that covers six songs of enthusiastic, indistinguishable sludge that really only makes sense if you are jumping around in a sweaty crowd.

Andy Cairns appears with a short acoustic set. Whereas Therapy?, the dogged explorers of the maligned genre of Indie Metal, have always covered their melodic strengths in caterwauling guitars, stuttering drums, and a wall of angry suburban rock, here, stripped to just an acoustic guitar, Cairns shows that at the heart of it, Therapy? are a great, meaningful pop group despite themselves. “Screamager” and “Nowhere” and “Trigger Inside” are concise, important pockets of alienated feeling thrown out of the black holes that are our lives.

Next is Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, who these days are a hobby band for former pop stars with day jobs. Their set is a précis of 1990-1991, comprising four singles from a twelve month period, played to the type of venue they lived and breathed back then. With the honest vocals of Jonn Penny (who lacks range, but has feeling far in excess of any diva),  it’s an EP made flesh : the opening buzzsaw pop of “Until You Find Out” to the final, curt attack of “Kill Your Television”, the set is nothing more – and nothing less – than a quarter-hour jump back. In the olden days, it was easier. Everyone was smaller, thinner, and not so bald..

If you only had four songs at the biggest show of your lives thus far… you wouldn’t do a straight, identikit Nirvana cover version, would you? You would if your name is Reuben. So much for the great new hope of the night.

The Senseless Things appear, rather unexpectedly, and roar through most of “Postcard CV” in a blur of hair and guts. In 1994, I said I couldn’t remember anything about this band but a jumping hairball, and in some ways it’s nice to know nothing has changed. Mark Keds still looks lanky and with sunken cheekbones, but then again, he always has.

Perhaps the most anticipated appearance of the evening is Carter USM. The undisputed king of the indie slums at the time, Carter are the only indie act in this lineup to have had a number one record, to have headlined Glastonbury, or to have really been taken to the hearts of the general public. These days, an indie band getting a number one is almost expected. Back then, it was unheard of. Their short four song set eschews the established knowledge of greatest hits – there’s no sign of “Sheriff Fatman” or “Bloodsport For All” – in favour of superior album cuts and a rampaging blink-and-you’ll-miss-it take upon the anthemic “Only Living Boy In New Cross”. It all goes too quickly. But it is an exact reproduction of days yore : the blistering twin tub with guitar attack, the sometimes relentless cataclysm of noise from a DAT machine, and lights that could induce an epileptic fit in a blind man. And then, it’s over.

Mega City Four (as is) headline the evening. Shorn of Wiz, the band employ a replacement vocalist (who acquits himself fabulously), the guitarist from Midway Still, and various guests. The set is a sort-of best of, missing their biggest hit “Stop”, but including such oft-forgotten and neglected classics as “Iron Sky”, “Shivering Sand” and “Peripheral”. It’s a short, and timely reminder of a time when Indie really meant Indie, when the world was smaller and yet bigger, and where this stuff felt like it could change the world. Instead it changed our world. And it was all for charidee.

I blame Oasis, but then again, I blame them for everything. A fitting send off to a lovely man who wrote some of the best songs you probably never heard.

(photographs by Donna Nicoll and Pete Cole)

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