Pony Club, 'Family Business' (Setanta) Released 24/02/04

This is indie music today. Play it on Jo Whiley and it will get somewhere, but not necessarily anywhere interesting. It’s jangly and the piano or trumpets or orchestration swell as the guy sings about ‘A&E’ and ‘joyriders’ and ‘forecourts’, as if Morrissey hadn’t killed all that off as he invented it, or was that Babybird?

Didn’t British lyrical wit emigrate to UK garage or UK hip-hop anyway? It pretends to be emotional, it sometimes is. It’s likeable. It’s completely unlikeable. This is indie music. The lead singer is too nasal, if Al Green sung this you’d swoon, even though you think you might be fed up with all of this. The people who buy it and hear it on sports round-ups and read about it in passing, they will call it ‘indie’. The people who like what used to be called ‘indie’ won’t. This is indie music. It’s valid and is more of a genre than you realise. As such, you will probably want to own some examples, cautiously displayed on your shelves. As you realise it’s more definite than you thought, you’ll want to look deeper than Coldplay – the Trojan box sets of commercial indie – and, if and when, then Pony Club are a bit of a treat. Course it’s rubbish, like.