Radio Free Alice

Are we back? Were we ever gone?

Indie™ has, for some time, been relegated to the dusty back of the mainstream pop-culture wardrobe. After sickening itself on the hubris of its propulsion to top of the pop pile in the 2000s, it has aimlessly listed in a thundering ocean of false promise.

On the pointlessly creviced stage of The Shacklewell Arms, I’ve seen Fontaines before a legal workaround mandated DC be tacked on; a wiry Wolf Alice pad out their short set with a mesmeric cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’; the gnarled and naked forms of The Fat White Family writhe in nihilistic exaltation hours after an OG Field Day set.

Each time, we were back. The gates unlocked. And now you’re gonna believe us.

Yet, for every Indie™ winner, there has been a litany of noble Indie™ losers. The dream-pop of Childhood, led by the prolific Ben Romans-Hopcraft, never locked in. Kingsland Road stalwarts Peace made Birmingham cool with arguably the best guitar EP of the 2010s, but even that objective sorcery could not keep them from their fate in the Indie™ clouds above.

Unrealised greatness, though, is Indie’s™ lifeblood. This simple truth was forgotten in the mid-2000s, when Capital arrived with a bag of money reading: White Men With Guitars. The noble losers found themselves lured from the charity shop and into a Topshop honeytrap. No longer an answer at the NME Christmas Party pub quiz, they were planted on a Sky Sports sofa and forced to stare bewilderingly into a Tim Lovejoy-shaped abyss. Entire industries thrived on a cultural cache once fostered in the unseen edges of East London and New York before exploding in a devastating blizzard of mediocrity.

When Capital had finished sucking on the Marlboro Light-imbued bones of these earnest losers, whose previous definition of success was a Tuesday night support slot at the Leadmill, it crept away – the scent of rap and anything made on a MacBook tingling its lusty nostrils. This is not a eulogy. This is a warning: it happened to us and it will happen to you.

I first saw Radio Free Alice, a buzzy Melbourne four-piece who were then a five-piece, play to 40 people in Folklore, Hackney, more than a year ago. Tonight, for the second time in as many weeks, I watch them play to 200 people.

They’ve played to sold-out rooms on each night of this hastily expanded UK and Ireland tour. Rooms. Rooms, more than mere venues, are spaces where failure is elevated, even sought. The Sebright Arms, The George Tavern, The Windmill, The Shacklewell Arms are pubs that do music. Venues do weddings and Beyonce.

RFA open with ‘Empty Words’, an unashamed blitz of chop-change guitars, spiralling basslines and tit-tit-tit hi-hat that did the Strokes no harm. The lanky frame of Noah Learmonth then leans in: “Katie, from the schoolyard, she told me about the government, don’t trust them.”

We’re back.

If not for Learmonth’s alluring tone, which is pitched somewhere between early days Ian Curtis and a miffed Millwall supporter, this may not be the case. He screeches “I never liked you, or your mother, or your fucking father” with enough force that you’d be inclined to agree that, yes, these strangers must be egregious pricks.

RFA wear their influences on their sleeve because they’re young enough to do so. It doesn’t matter that ‘Paris is Gone’ could soundtrack a scene in which Gavin and Smithy down 17 shots of blue Aftershock in a Billericay nightclub. Like fascist boomers moaning about woke, RFA are oblivious to the difficult first-hand traumas of their forebears.

So, here, in ‘Toyota Camry’ you hear the clangy fizz of early Interpol. And again, through the guts of ‘On the Ground’, a lone punchy bassline nods to Evil by the same band. Later, a telling cover of Gang of Four’s ‘Damaged Goods’ prefaces ‘2010’, which is built on the foundations of New Order’s ‘Age of Consent’.

If, in some horrible vortex of Myspace top friends and deep-neck American Apparel tees, compilation albums were still a viable moneyspinner, ‘Look What You’ve Done’ would be track 1 on THE ALBUM. But RFA are unlikely to remember a time when having Gorillaz and JJ72 on a single disc meant something. Why should they?

‘I Gotta (Fall in Love)’ opens with a fun bass riff that teases the B-52s (retrospective Indie™ darlings during the mid-2000s) before launching into a taught, frantic replication of the Buzzcock’s best work.

Ten years ago, RFA might have been laughed out of the building. Pillaging the recent greats so openly, so brazenly. This was not the done thing in a post-landfill environment. We saw where that got us the last time.

However, when Learmonth invokes the wondering soul of Morrissey (RIP) to earnestly drawl “Johnny can you call me” over a track that leans as much on Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’ as Joy Division’s ‘Disorder’, all learnt lessons dissipate into a fug of irrelevance.

The tingly opening fuzz of ‘Waste of Space’ recalls The Walkmen and every Strokes song before 2003. A pacy bassline busts from those strictures before imploding to allow Learmonth’s yearning cry of “I tried so hard, I always do” offer the night’s only moment of real, communal, catharsis.

What happens next for RFA is unknown. Live Nation has already got its paws on them. Top of the world or heart of the sun, perhaps.

Regardless, in this room and others like it, the Indie™ losers will continue to try, then fail. No matter. We’re never going away.