The website Wikihow advertises itself as "the world's how-to manual": a user-generated guide to doing everything from maths ("factor second-degree polynomials") to medicine ("check your health by stool colours"). It even offers advice on "personality types and youth style", which brings us to the indispensable page How to Be Indie (For Girls), a veritable mine of thought-provoking information. It offers wise counsel on what is indie: "curly or wavy hair", "knick-knacks", perfume ("indie girls won't smell bad") and "books that you don't see other people reading", under which heading comes the work of obscure novelist Stephen King, read by no one except the 350 million people who've bought copies of his work. And it is firm about those things that are not indie, a category that includes, a little confusingly, "indie music": instead, it advises, "90s rock is a great genre of music that has that indie vibe".
Those who find their faces arranging themselves into a WTF? expression at all of this might hold it as evidence that the term "indie" no longer has any real meaning. Then again, on the evidence of this 5CD box set, perhaps it never did. Scared to Get Happy purports to tell the story of the rise and fall of what's variously called indie-pop or C86 or shambling: the undernourished DIY guitar music that held sway in the music press and on John Peel's show in between the end of post-punk and the rise of Madchester, the point where the word "indie" ostensibly stopped referring simply to a method of distribution and started to embody a sound and a sensibility. But the story it tells is confused and confusing. That's partly because some of the biggest names are missing, not least Orange Juice, originators of both the era's anti-macho aesthetic and its weird musical tension between reverence for the past – they worshipped the Velvet Underground and Creedence Clearwater Revival – and punk-ish iconoclasm: "no more rock'n'roll for you!" they chanted on the 1980 single Poor Old Soul. But it's also because the compilers' definition of indie seems strangely unfocused: occasionally, you get the impression it includes anyone with a guitar who at some juncture in the 1980s made a single that wasn't on a major label. You look at the track listing and think: hang on, what are Lloyd Cole and the Commotions doing here? Or for that matter, baggy also-rans the Milltown Brothers? Aren't Prefab Sprout a bit offended at having their Steely Dan-inspired sophistication lumped in with the Pooh Sticks and Talulah Gosh? Actually, aren't Talulah Gosh a bit offended at having their bold attempt to reimagine pop music utterly drained of maleness and machismo lumped in with the Steely Dan-inspired sophistication of Prefab Sprout? After all, a certain lack of sophistication was rather the point of the C86 bands.
Depending on whose version of history you believe, it was either a terrifying nadir of underachieving hopelessness, or the last time indie music could call itself genuinely underground, alternative and principled. It was devoid of the gimlet-eyed commercial ambition that fuels your average NME cover star in 2013. Its DIY ethos offered "socialism in practice" under Thatcherism: "no jobs, no cash, no choice but to do everything yourself within your means", as writer and musician Bob Stanley once noted. It was fired by the same egalitarian anyone-can-do-it philosophy and attitude-over-ability spirit as punk. As Scared to Get Happy unwittingly makes clear, this was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, a single such as the Shop Assistants' 1985 debut, All Day Long, still delivers a primal, thrilling rush because it sounds like the band are just clinging on to the song by their fingernails. On the other, there's One of Those Things by Bubblegum Splash!, who had the incompetence but not the inspiration and featured a frontwoman who clearly wasn't prepared to let a trifling matter like the fact she was tone-deaf prevent her from singing. Anyone could do it, but why would anyone want to if the results sounded like this?
Contrary to the belief that everyone was just killing time until the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays turned up, there were genuinely fantastic records made: Hurrah's paean to optimism in the teeth of recession, The Sun Shines Here; the Loft's compellingly jittery Up the Hill and Down the Slope; the effervescent 80 seconds of Primal Scream's Velocity Girl. But it's clearly an area of musical history best served by being picked through gingerly. Instead, Scared to Get Happy manages to be simultaneously over- and underwhelming. It's six and a half hours long and contains 134 tracks: for every lost gem the compilers have unearthed – not least the Lines' haunting 1980 single Nerve Pylon – there's a huge tranche of stuff that's audibly languished in obscurity for a reason. While the desire to rifle through arcane corners is laudable, even the best of the era's artists were, for the most part, not built for the long haul: they had it in them to make one great single then vanish. There's no shame in that – it felt genuinely refreshing in a post-Live Aid world, where mainstream rock music seemed ever more blustery and self-important – but it makes poking around in their B-sides and unreleased tracks a pretty enervating business: there's something about seeing the name We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It in close proximity to the words "unreleased demo version" that causes a certain sinking of the spirits.
Still, against a backdrop of generic jangle, the mavericks' stars shine brighter: McCarthy's game attempt to propagate the overthrow of capitalism via the medium of sparkling guitar pop, the lyrics buckling under the weight of the Marxist/Leninist rhetoric crammed into them; the Bachelor Pad's equally spirited efforts to press a Jesus and Mary Chain-esque wall of feedback into the service of an idiosyncratic brand of psychedelia; the Clouds, who on the evidence of their solitary single, Get Out of My Dream, were one of the few bands who had the potential to be bigger than they were.
Scared to Get Happy has clearly been put together with love – perhaps a bit too much love – by people who think 80s indie deserves a similar status as the 60s garage rock collected on the Nuggets box, from which it takes its inspiration. They have a case, although it's nowhere near as watertight or self-evident as they think, and it would have been better supported with a bit of judicious editing. It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are dewy with nostalgia.
