What is The Scene That Celebrates Itself?

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The Scene That Celebrates Itself was a term used to describe a social and musical scene in the early 1990s within London and the Thames Valley area.

The term was invented by the Melody Maker in 1990 in a slightly contemptuous gesture. The popular indie and shoegazing bands, producers and journalists of the time would gather in London and their activities would be chronicled in the gossip pages of the music papers NME and Melody Maker. Due to many of the bands' relative obscurity the clubs they attended were often indie discos where admission and drink prices were very low and thus affordable. The most famous club and focal point was Syndrome which was located on Oxford Street and ran weekly on Thursday nights. The scene could be compared to a (much) lower scale version of the expansive showbiz parties reported by other gossip magazines such as Hello! and the music press would report it in a similar style with cider replacing champagne. NME, in particular, embraced the scene and the unity of the bands was probably advantageous to their careers because when one band had a successful record, the other bands could share the publicity. The scene was extremely small and revolved around fewer than 20 regular individuals.

The term can also refer to the music of the bands involved, predominantly the shoegazing bands of the time. Some bands disliked the term, but others thought that the idea was amusing.

Ironically, rich Japanese music fans were said to travel to London sometimes to witness and excitedly partake in the social scene they had read about in British papers.

Many London based guitar bands of the time could be said to be part of The Scene that Celebrates Itself. Notable members were Chapterhouse, Ride, Slowdive, Moose, Lush, Spitfire and early Blur. The workings of the scene were often banal, but provided a subject for the music papers to write about in the early 1990s when British indie guitar music was at a lull in popularity between the successes of Baggy and Britpop.

Matters have now come full circle however. The term is now parodied by one London club, 'Sonic Cathedral' (an allusion to the parodies of the Simon Reynolds school of music journalism which used to appear on Steve Wright's Radio 1 show), which in direct homage to the shoegazing era refers to itself as 'The Night That Celebrates Itself'.

See also

• Sonic Cathedral