C90: Various Artists, 3CD
Various Artists

• THE LATEST IN THE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL ‘C’ SERIES, RIFFING ON THE ORIGINAL C86 CASSETTE.

• FOLLOWS PREVIOUS BEST-SELLING COLLECTIONS C86 (2014), C87 (2016), C88 (2017) AND C89 (2018)

• SIXTY-THREE TRACKS CHARTING THE RISE TO DOMINANCE OF THE INDEPENDENT MUSIC SCENE, AS ONCE SHOESTRING ARTISTS AND LABELS BEGAN TO FIND AN AUDIENCE BORDERING ON THE MAINSTREAM.

• INCLUDES MORE HOUSEHOLD NAMES THAN EVER – THE CHARLATANS, THE LA’S, OCEAN COLOUR SCENE, BOO RADLEYS, SPIRITUALIZED ETC – ALONGSIDE SCENE FRONTRUNNERS LIKE PARIS ANGELS, WORLD OF TWIST, NORTHSIDE, THE SUNDAYS, FLOWERED UP, NED’S ATOMIC DUSTBIN AND THE SARAH RECORDS ROSTER.

• ALSO DIGS DEEP INTO THE LESSER-KNOWN 1990 UNDERGROUND, REVEALING COUNTLESS HIDDEN GEMS AND EXCITING REDISCOVERIES.

• PRODUCED BY THE TEAM THAT BROUGHT YOU ‘SCARED TO GET HAPPY’, ‘STILL IN A DREAM’, ‘ANOTHER SPLASH OF COLOUR’, ‘LOSING TOUCH WITH MY MIND’, ‘ELECTRICAL LANGUAGE’ AND COUNTLESS OTHER HIT COMPILATIONS AND BOX SETS.

Over a decade now since punk rocked the British musical scene to its foundations and caused an eruption of independently produced records, the scene and a new generation of figurehead artists began to let ambition in and head overground, playing to increasingly large crowds, working with bigger budgets and selling more copies, finding a footing in the UK’s Top Forty, venturing into the USA and, ultimately, creating a mainstream audience now primed for credible, guitar-tinged pop. Meanwhile, an underground revolution in clubland began to push towards the commercial same space, resulting in an inevitable fusion of songcraft and dancefloor aesthetics.

“C90” captures perfectly the moment these tribes began to coalesce. From the opening, club-friendly rendition of The Charlatans’ ‘Polar Bear’ to The La’s knowingly backward looking ‘Timeless Melody’ and all in-between, this is the sound of a scene dropping the raincoats, dropping acid and aiming for domination. 1990 was the start of a new decade when the Indie scene was dominated by Madchester and the arrival of Shoegaze and with nods towards grunge and what would become known as Britpop, plus hints of a proto-laddism peering out from between the cracks in a post-Smiths aesthetic, the sound of 1990, it could be argued, set the tone for the remainder of the decade.

“C90” is a snapshot of a unique moment in time. A piece of history. The sound of a country putting the hard-biting 1980s behind it, embracing the Daisy Age and looking to move forwards.