Indie Top 20

@indietop20albums

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Between 1987 and 1996 Beechwood Music and Melody Maker released a series of compilation albums that attempted to distil the essence of indie music or the "Spirit of Independents", as they put it on the early releases. The first few albums in 1987/88 plundered the preceding decade going back as far as post-punk 1979 but by 1989 it was no longer necessary to keep gazing backward to fill the track lists. Indie guitar music was fusing with acid house and by 1990 some strange new hybrids were emerging and Indie Top 20 became the go-to sampler for the new sounds. The hallucinogenic "baggy" trip burned out into the narcotic "shoegaze" comedown of the early '90s before somebody broke out the amphetamines and Ben Sherman tops and kick-started Britpop, which fuzzed and jangled through the mid-'90s until the bandwagon finally collapsed under the weight of all the jumpers-on and we had to turn to trip-hop and nu-prog for our thrills..