A decade on from Nu-Rave's biggest triumph, the glow sticks may have dimmed, but the magik remains.
January 2007 marked the beginning of one of UK indie’s last real perfect storms. All around the UK, teenagers were infatuated with a band, their style and what they stood for. Klaxons, originally rising to prominence in 2006 with the limited release of ‘Golden Skans’ and ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, finally let loose their debut on January 29th; the Mercury Prize winning album, ‘Myths Of The Near Future’. Though this benchmark certainly helped accelerate the explosion, the real instigator came in the form of the Channel 4 show ‘Skins’ a week beforehand. Depicting the lifestyle every sixth former and high schooler alike yearned for; sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, it influenced a generation into not giving a fuck and going against everything their parents wished. While the visual representation of this was almost a training video, it needed a soundtrack, something tangible to take away and help this fire burn away from the television.
Thus, the reign of Nu-Rave was born.
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As the tenth anniversary of both the album and this scene approaches, it’s worth having a look back, though not in retrospect mind you, but instead with the same youthful excitement as was felt back then. What the time between now and then stands for is not only the freedom of expression that music and other cultural forms bring when twinned, it also shows the spontaneity with which it strikes. The consequential release of a debut album and a TV show's first series birthed a strong movement that saw fashion, cultural stylings and attitudes aligned as a generation. Like the Mods, and Brit Rock before it, Nu-Rave, while not on as grand a scale, certainly held its own.
