'Ok', say sarah and everyone else outside the M25, 'but why should I give a fuck?' And fair enough. You don't have to care. You just have to realise that

Xfm's

death is another sign of indie failure, that it brands us as losers, a tag that I thought we didn't deserve. Xfm gave massive exposure to bands like, hey, Salako, Snow Patrol and Belle and Sebastian, and helped them sell more records, and establish them as, erm, moderately known bands. What happens to the next generation of Jeepster signings? You won't hear them on 1fm, certainly not before Midnight, anyway. Most of all, it's a sign of the growing chasm between 'their' music and 'ours'. Without a voice in the heart of Europe's music industry, there's nowhere indie can go except back into it's ghetto. Which means more of your favourite bands being dropped from majors, record shops going to the wall, and ten more years of shit on the TV and radio. But hey, I don't care, 'cause I don't live in london...

I don't care on the grounds that if XFM's idea of "Our Music" are bands like Snowpatrol then frankly they can keep them. I'd rather Fleetwood Mac than Jack at this juncture. Another "Indie failure" is a natural problem in that 99.9% of the music simply isn't good enough. It's definitely a good thing having people broadcast new music - I mean, I for one am all for the likes of John Peel playing anything and everything on his show. But frankly haven't been able to actually listen to his program since having to sit through a Terminal Cheesecake session in 1988. In any case, for the few years that XFM's been running, all I've really seen happening in the music scene in Britain is a great big thing called britpop when loads of bands from London copied loads of bands from the sixties... Grrreat. I haven't seen any great improvement in the scene at all. I'm afraid though that I'm just not of the opinion that if you get some bloke on the radio who'll play absolutely anyone - that they're some sort of a hero. You say Radio 1 won't be playing these bands before midnight, well they've certainly played plenty of Belle and Sebastian, and I can't say I really care about them not playing the other bands. Anyway again I'm not having a go - I just can't say I care about a radio station going down when it's a) shite (what I've heard of it) b) I don't get it anyway (like 50 million others) and c) has had no noticable positive effect on the "scene" at all. Thanks, Keith. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". For list archives and searching, list rules, FAQ, poor jokes etc, see http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +---+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +---+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+