THE GREAT LOST ALBUM OF LANDFILL INDIE?

The tale of the unreleased album from Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong as seen in the pages of the NME...

If you read the NME cover-to-cover every week in the mid-to-late-noughties, you’d be familiar with the music now known - uncharitably - as 'landfill indie'.

Some take offence to this term - whether it be the bands themselves (understandably), or the fans who grew up with these tunes as their soundtrack. It’s somewhat of an unfair categorisation, as the timeframe includes some genuinely great bands (or bands who made some genuinely great albums) such as The Futureheads, Young Knives, The Cribs, Klaxons and CSS. You can't honestly compare them with the deluge of boring indie bands that saw their careers burn brightly within the pages of NME for 6 months before being inevitably dropped by their label and ricocheted back into office jobs. While these bands are easy to mock, it’s also easy to feel sorry for some of them, especially when observing the classic NME trope of building a band up in their earliest stages, with undue hype around early gigs and singles, before brutally demolishing them by the launch of their first album - we’ve all seen it many times, and the ‘landfill indie’ era is no exception.

Not many people look back fondly at that period, particularly after the infamous VICE 'Top 50 Greatest Landfill Indie Songs Of All Time' article from 2020. Whilst VICE made some valid points, some of the aforementioned good acts of the time were unfairly plonked in their list. The post-Libertines slurry of mediocre white lads in bands (and it was 99% white lads. Source: Snopes) isn’t totally dissimilar to the ‘Britpop’ goldrush of 1995 which saw a frantic signing frenzy of blokes in shite bands. Maybe the difference was that the NME of that era wasn’t pushing Gay Dad or Menswear as much as they would push The Enemy or The Pigeon Detectives? I don’t know, I wasn’t alive to be reading it then.

"The mass-produced nature of Landfill meant there was a surplus of artists but a dearth of originality, which in turn bred contempt. In 2008, Andrew Harrison of The Word magazine coined the term “Landfill Indie”, essentially turning the entire sub-genre into a critical punching bag. In a 2009 essay partly attributing the appetite for electro-pop icons like Lady Gaga, Little Boots and La Roux to Winklepicker fatigue, Peter Robinson recalls the time he visited the Sony HQ off Kensington High Street and wrote “SCOUTING FOR GIRLS = SHIT” on a chalkboard. “All these bands!” Simon Reynolds similarly reflected in The Guardian in 2010. “Where did they come from? Why did they bother? Couldn’t they tell they were shit?”"- VICE, 2020

Landfill indie has its defenders, though - NME’s Mark Beaumont called the term ‘pure snobbery’ and ‘sneeringly reductive’. That’s a fair comment, but also one to be expected from one of NME’s most frequent bylines of the landfill indie era.

"Its core intention, though, is denigration. To lump together an entire decade of largely fantastic music into one easily dismissible mass and try to convince you that the brilliant time you had to it should be the source of a lifetime’s embarrassment. As if the teenagers and twenty-somethings of 2005 didn’t have enough to worry about with their rising student fees, rocketing rents and withering wages, now they’re expected to shamefully accept that their youths were wasted (or asted-way, as true veterans would say). Their formative tastes and experiences were illegitimate and foolish, that they fell for the ultimate musical con trick by having the time of their fucking lives at The Enemy gigs." - Mark Beaumont, NME, 2020

It’s also not uncommon for a movement or scene to have a name ascribed to it that the participants dislike. There’s few as demeaning as ‘landfill’ admittedly but ‘shoegaze’, for example, was initially a slur against the floppy fringed dweebs staring down at their pedalboards on stage.

The term is here to stay, no matter what anti-snobbery hacks say, and it is fairly accurate in terms of the disposable nature of a lot of the scene. The organic online growth of artists like Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen through MySpace enabled both A&R people and music journalists to see fans at early gigs singing every word to every song before the artists had any column inches or label meetings. Gone were the days of scouting for talent at gigs and receiving demo tapes - A&R now mostly searched MySpace for the next big thing, often leading to very underdeveloped bands being signed before they were given time for natural growth and development. Inevitably, they would be chewed up and spat out by the machine. This supply and demand issue was a major factor in the creation of disposable landfill.

In recent years, this period has been lovingly celebrated by the podcast ‘22 Grand Pod’, with in-depth interviews with bands and journalists of the time. Now that we are in the midst of the 20th anniversaries of many of these records, it is not uncommon to see some of these bands out there on tour again, or even on the creative-kiss-of-death nostalgic package tours like Radio X’s ‘Indie Til I Die’ tour of 2024 that saw a bill of The Enemy, The Subways and The Holloways. Oof (I apologise for being snobby and sneeringly reductive).

During the heyday of landfill indie, I was 7 or 8 years old with a weekly NME subscription courtesy of then-editor Conor McNicholas after I sent in a drawing of one of the covers to the letters page (thank you Conor). I watched MTV 2 and listened to XFM most days - a bit precocious maybe, but I was neck-deep in the landfill nonetheless. I had kept every issue of NME from those years and recently realised that it wasn’t worth the hassle of lugging around boxes of them for the rest of my life, and decided to get rid of most of them. I kept a few issues, sold all the ones with Oasis and Arctic Monkeys on the cover (£58 total, not bad), and for the mountainous pile of the rest of the issues, I went through with a pair of scissors and cut out various articles and full-page ads. It was fun to relive that period of music and music journalism, and be reminded of so many bands I had completely forgotten about - many for good reason, unsurprisingly.

One of those was Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, a stupid name befitting a stupid band.

I remembered one of their songs, Lucio Starts Fires (#25 in Vice’s Landfill Indie article), and even the video from watching MTV 2 a lot back then. I recalled that they were treated as a bit of a joke - maybe by the rest of the music press, but clearly not by the NME. Going through all of these NMEs, I was surprised to see that their debut album received a score of 8.

As ex-NME editor Conor McNicholas admitted in an interview on 22 Grand Pod, a 7 is a non-score, so an 8 isn’t really as good as it seems, but even still I was assuming that it would have scored far lower. I remember seeing the second Scouting For Girls album receive a score of 0 in NME which was something I'd never seen before then - I miss that sort of savagery.

Reading the review, I vaguely remembered that Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong had shitcanned the album shortly before it was due to come out. I cut out the review to remind me to investigate whatever happened to Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong and wondered if I could listen to the album online somewhere - was it as good as the NME said it was? Sure enough, I came across plenty of landfill journalism reporting on the shitcanned Joe Lean album for the next year or so’s issues of NME. It was a big event in the mag, just like when Klaxons’ Jamie Reynolds broke his leg. The NME were even counting the days on a 'Jang-O-Meter' since the album's cancellation. My interest was definitely piqued now, and so I cut the rest of the Joe Lean articles from the pages; clues leading to a potential lost masterpiece. Would these collated words herald a resurgence in the popularity of Joe Lean and, indeed, the Jing Jang Jong? It was an exciting twenty minutes.

The NME's coverage drops off after the album fails to materialise, and by the time Krissi Murison takes over the editorship and the paper focuses on a new crop of artists, the landfill era was well and truly buried. My questions weren't answered within the pages of the NME - what happened to Joe Lean, Joe Lean, Joe Lean, Joooe Leeeeeaaaann?

I remember seeing Joe Lean himself in a few episodes of Nathan Barley as a Shoreditch media twat and in a few episodes of Fresh Meat as a drama student twat - very believable performances, to his credit. He was clearly a budding actor before and after the Jing Jang Jong, but what about the music? I took to the information super highway to search up Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong and what happened - did they ever release new material? Were they still going, re-recording their album nearly 20 years later, with Joe Lean as a sort of Lee Mavers perfectionist character?

Unfortunately not. It transpires they split after a while and the re-recorded album never materialised. Gutted. On Discogs, I searched them up and there’s an entry for the album with two different promo CDs listed. None were currently for sale but it had been sold before - the highest sale for forty quid!

I wanted to listen to the album, sure, but not that badly. So I took to good old Soulseek to look for landfill indie's holy grail and sure enough, it was there as a 320kbps MP3. I hit download, and it slithered into my iTunes library in between Joe Ely and Joe Strummer. Despite my high hopes for this album, it felt dirty to separate those two Joes with this Joe (and the Jing Jang Jong).

Seventeen years on, was Joe Lean worthy of re-evaluation? Was this the great lost album of the landfill era?

Were the NME right to have hyped themselves up into a frenzy, as the Jang-O-Meter climbed even higher?

Smile, Human Highway, Lifehouse, Homegrown, The Pornography Of Despair, Rat Patrol From Fort Brag, Crazy Wisdom Masters, Belmondo... all the great lost albums were whizzing through my brain as I hit play, hoping for a revelation. Did Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong join the ranks of the lost classics?

No.

It was shit.

Current update on the Jang-O-Meter: 6304 days and still no Joe Lean album.

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This outtake article was written (and rejected) for SECRET SAUCES Issue Two, which you can purchase here. It appears in the Two Month Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition of SECRET SAUCES Issue Two (NOW SOLD OUT).