"Every revolution eats itself"

"It was very organic at the start, but every revolution eats itself. All the copycat bands came. It went from being pure and genuine to suddenly becoming like the bloated carcass of Britpop all over again." A succinct and sound assessment of the early 00s indie revival spearheaded by the Strokes, undermined somewhat by the fact that it comes from Johnny Borrell, who clearly and misguidedly sees Razorlight as being among the vanguard of serious artists rather than symbols of what went wrong.

With the film Meet Me In The Bathroom (based on Lizzy Goodman's 2017 book) about to hit cinema screens, Borrell is just one of the people who Daniel Dylan Wray spoke to about the period.

Given that Turin Brakes, Kings Of Convenience and the "New Acoustic Movement" were being touted as the Next Big Thing, and (as Wray notes) beige saps Travis and David Gray were riding high in the charts, little wonder that people went wild for the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Libertines. But, as Borrell says, it soon descended into a cynical Britpop-esque feeding frenzy that resulted in the amplification of countless no-marks - see, for instance, the Others, whose Dominic Masters talks about being "business-savvy and organised" and proudly proclaims that "I had a lawyer before I had a manager".

For the Guardian's deputy music editor Laura Snapes, a teenager following things from afar via the pages of NME, it all seemed enormously exciting - until she made the disillusioning discovery that the reality was rather more prosaic: "When I finally made it to Camden, at 18, I found no indie thrills, just the smell of wee and incense. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Wray acknowledges that, as with Britpop, there were certain bands whose faces didn't really fit - and they were naturally the ones actually worth bothering with. Eddie Argos of Art Brut mentions Mclusky and Ikara Colt, and you could also certainly add the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. Argos presents himself as an outsider on the inside, a provocateur deliberately needling the scene's kings and kingmakers in much the same way as the Auteurs' Luke Haines did a decade earlier (as chronicled in his book Bad Vibes). Just a shame that Art Brut were never really any good themselves.