No Tags – Details, episodes & analysis

Regular No Tags listeners will notice that we often talk about living through several revivals at once, but indie sleaze is one that doesn’t seem to be going away. So why indie sleaze, and why now? And what do people actually mean when they talk about an indie sleaze revival in 2024?

For this episode, Chal and Tom dug out their skinny ties and shutter shades (not to mention some brutal photos from the depths of their personal Facebook archives) to try and figure out whether this is a genuine musical revival or a cynical move from struggling millennial marketeers to reanimate an era when they were still relevant. And are we dealing with nostalgia for a genuine scene here, or simply a yearning for a time when city-focused alternative scenes were actually realistic and accessible? And is there actually a much more interesting scene from this era that we could and should be excavating instead?

In summary, this is an episode where we evoke both Mark Fisher and Agyness Deyn – a No Tags manifesto if ever there was one. Enjoy!

On No Tags 25, we meet Jonny Banger: T-shirt hustler, avant-bootlegger, visionary rabble-rouser, DJ battle champ and bossman of the anarchic anti-fashion brand Sports Banger.

From a certain angle, it can seem like the clothes are the main event at Sports Banger, from the original Free Tulisa tee and bootlegged NHS logos to wearable inflatables and a Chanel toilet seat headpiece. Naturally, Jonny has been asked a lot of questions in previous interviews about his designs and his philosophical take on bootlegs and infringement. But there’s another side to the Banger story that hasn’t been excavated: obviously, the music.

Flipping through Sports Banger: Lifestyles of the Poor, Rich and Famous, the book that charts the first decade of the project, you can find musical references on almost every page: pilfered record label logos, Skepta in a postie’s hi-viz jacket, descriptions of his studio’s fine-tuned sound systems, playlists of tunes that inspired the Sports Banger runway shows, and even allusions to Jonny’s previous life in the UK rap scene.

We invited Jonny to go deep into the musical side of his story, from tape packs to free parties to the “shit mix jar” that collected fines in the first Sports Banger studio. He told us about his teenage years as a scratch DJ, his previous life as a club booker on Brick Lane, his ravey links with Swamp 81, School Records, Shangri-La and his own Heras label, and how he finally fell in love with free parties. And, most exciting for our resident KLF dweeb, he gave us a hint of what to expect from Sports Banger’s forthcoming collaboration with K2 on the People’s Pyramid.

It’s been a wild ride, and he’s got the stories to prove it.

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As if we hadn’t gorged enough on lore last week, this time we welcome one of electronic music’s boldest world-builders, Iglooghost.

Iglooghost’s new album Tidal Memory Exo takes place in a punk-dystopian vision of a British seaside town that’s been cut off from the rest of society. It even comes accompanied by an online forum where users debate the politics and micro-genres of the local “tidal scene” (sporestyle, tektonikore, foamtek) and an online marketplace where people sell mysterious sea creatures and offer theories about their origins, among many other diversions. 

Something else that interested us about the project is that while Iglooghost’s early releases took place in full-on fantasy world, recently he’s started creating parallel universes based in Britain, bringing his lore-making closer to his own reality. Prior to Tidal Memory Exo, he created a whole world around “Lei Music” – a supposedly ancient musical style performed to summon “strange, squeaking entities” in rural Dorset, the part of south-west England where he grew up.

Naturally we spoke to him about all that and about lore in general, as well as getting his insights on the ever-changing nature of the online experience, his obsessive fans, TikTok as a ghost town, and the risk of world-building becoming too cynical. Never go full Marvel, basically.

As ever, if you enjoy what we’re doing on No Tags, please do follow, rate and review on your podcast app of choice, correspond with us on Substack, and consider subscribing to our paid tier. Now that we’re weekly, £5 a month works out to less than £1.20 per episode, which is basically a bag of crisps these days – and it really does help us out. Thanks for listening/reading!

We’re still reeling from last week’s Reynoldsmania, but in the wake of our conversation with the great music scribe about the past and future of electronic music, this time we’re firmly in the present.

First, Chal puts forward a thesis about the genre trend of the moment – a movement that brings together Taylor Swift, Disney Adults, A. G. Cook and Warhammer freaks. Welcome to the lorecore era.

Next, we wade knee-deep into the sludgy waters of NYC band Couch Slut’s new album You Could Do It Tonight, a must-listen for fans of metal and hardcore’s scuzzier side, equal parts uncomfortable and funny. We chat about why bands like Couch Slut feel so refreshing compared to so much of the extreme music that came before them.

Speaking of humour, is Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess the messy pop masterpiece we so desperately need in 2024? Maybe not, considering it actually came out last year, but we only just discovered it and we’re both obsessed. Old school FACT fans might remember our love for Miley’s Bangerz era and Sky Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time, and this LP is in that lineage, offering ridiculous tunes and modern dating advice to boot.

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing us on your podcast app of choice.

For millennial music journos like us, Simon Reynolds is one of the Goats. 

He’s a writer best known for his era-defining book on dance music, Energy Flash and the ultimate history of post-punk, Rip It Up And Start Again. But there’s barely a genre that Simon hasn’t touched, from hip-hop, shoegaze and glam rock to pivotal essays on Auto-Tune, “conceptronica” and the hardcore continuum.

Reynolds’ newest book is a collection of essays, interviews and reviews on the idea of “futuromania” –his word for electronic music’s obsession with the manifesting the future. Futuromania kicks off in 1977 with Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and sweeps up half a century of electronic genius, with writing on household names (Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Future), underground icons (Acen, The Mover, Omni Trio) and nebulous trends like the ambient revival.

Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t squeeze all of that in a single episode. But we did talk to Simon about the lure of accelerationism, dance music’s middle-aged desires, Daft Punk’s yearning for the “mass synchrony” of the ‘70s, the uncanniness of Boards of Canada, and how he learned to stop worrying about retromania and start loving Dry Cleaning. Plus: he gave us the scoop on his next book! We think it’s an exclusive!!

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing us on your podcast app of choice.

No Tags is going weekly!

Since launching last year we’ve managed to stick to an episode every fortnight, but the time feels right to try and make things more frequent. So in that spirit, we’re going to be recording more regular Tom-and-Chal-only episodes. Anything you particularly want us to tackle in these? Email, comment or DM us.

This week: we tackle Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee and the revelation that Pitchfork isn’t only still going, is still able to break albums! Is it the best long-player since Fetch the Bolt Cutters, or is its success simply nostalgia for the last embers of the pre-streaming age?

We bed-rot with claire rousay and her new album sentiment, perhaps the most 2024 album of 2024 so far. It all boils down to porn bots and the numb, over-scrolled horniness of existing online in 2024.

There’s also thoughts on Coachella, the haunted nostalgia of the modern-day festival circuit, and why there might be more DJ sets like that Grimes disaster-class to come. 

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing us on your podcast app of choice.

Without Jamaican sound system culture, much of the electronic music we love wouldn't even exist. So why is it so often underrepresented when we talk about dance music history?

To tackle this and more, we brought in author Marvin Sparks, one of the UK’s preeminent experts on reggae and dancehall.

We also had topical news to cover: Vybz Kartel, currently serving a life sentence in prison, had his murder conviction overturned last month. As is often the case, press coverage of the appeal has been meagre, so we asked Marvin to explain just why this ruling is so important, and how Vybz Kartel became the most important dancehall artist of the 21st century.

Marvin’s also on form when it comes to the big picture stuff: dancehall’s influence on all the music you love, the problems with its press coverage in and out of Jamaica, and his expertise in a genre that, as he puts it, music fans don’t care nearly enough about.

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing No Tags on your podcast app.

It’s a question that crops up a lot: how do musicians move into video game soundtracking?

Lena Raine is one of the most respected game composers on the circuit, capturing the imagination of millions with her work for Minecraft and Celeste, one of the key indie games of the last decade.

Often with No Tags, we try to focus on people who haven’t had their story adequately told. That’s not the case with Lena. She’s given many interviews, and she’s always an excellent subject. But we wanted to ask some practical questions: just how does a musician enter the world of video games? And what do they need to know about pitching, contracts, copyright and the difference in process between releasing recorded music and working for video games? 

It’s an interview of two halves: the first serves as a practical resource for musicians, but in classic No Tags style, the second half goes somewhere else entirely, with Lena on fine form tackling Gamergate, the evolution of the modern internet (not familiar with the theory of the Cozy Web? You soon will be) and the sale of Bandcamp. She saves her most righteous response for the coming of AI, though – that’s worth the price of admission alone.

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing No Tags on your podcast app.

Dr Robin James is a philosopher of sound studies whose Twitter presence and blog, It’s Her Factory, are reliable sources of galaxy-brain takes on the discourse, from Taylor Swift Studies to “Brexit techno”.

We asked Robin to share some of her latest thinking on the forces that are changing how we listen to music, from vibes-based listening and the secrets of the Spotify algorithm to the connection between ‘90s alt-rock and the 2020s manosphere, as well as her recent book on American radio, The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence. Oh, and Dude Wipes.

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing No Tags on your podcast app.

Look – chances are you’ve never heard of Gavin Douglas.

But if you’ve had even one ear to what’s been going on in UK radio over the last decade, you’ve definitely felt his impact – as a curator, radio programmer, trainer and mentor. Snoochie Shy, Jeremiah Asiamah, Jamz Supernova, Tash LC, JK & Bempah, Reece Parkinson and CassKid are just a handful of the country’s prominent radio hosts that he’s had a role in developing, and that’s before getting into his wider roles as Reprezent Radio’s former Head of Music and Radar Radio’s former Director of Radio. Put simply, the contemporary UK radio landscape looks very different without him.

So where did Gavin’s journey start, and how did he get here? As we find out on this episode, it’s one heck of a redemption story – from scoring interviews with Destiny's Child and Mariah Carey and becoming the golden boy of Birmingham's '90s pirate radio scene, to reinventing himself after being let go by the BBC in the late 2000s.

Gavin has given very few interviews in his life, so we jumped at the opportunity to tell his story on No Tags. We get into a lot of big picture questions – what is the future of Black British radio? Should radio playlists exist? Does radio still even matter? – while getting the inside scoop on his time at the BBC, Reprezent and Radar. There’s also some great insight into the history of Birmingham’s pirate radio scene and its political impact on the city in the 1980s and 1990s, which is really worth sticking around for.

Thanks for listening to No Tags. If you like what we do, consider following us on Substack and social media (we’re @notagspodcast everywhere) or rating and reviewing No Tags on your podcast app.