Hotel Lux – The Bitter Cup: New Music Friday

Artwork for Hotel Lux's album The Bitter Cup

Hotel Lux have released The Bitter Cup on New Music Friday – revisit Live4ever’s review and stream the album right here.

David Cavanagh’s book The Creation Records Story will tell you, although it isn’t the first and won’t be the last.

Dismissed out of hand by former label supremo Alan McGee as, ‘The accountant’s version’, it pinpoints the moment thirty-five years ago when both independent labels and the concept of ‘indie’ music itself essentially ceased to exist.

The reasons were many, but the villains were the same: the major labels who took over the market by a combination of stealth and money at the beginning of the nineties.

Overnight, the principles on which those who valued creativity first were compromised, followed not long after by the likes of Rough Trade, Factory and indeed Creation itself.

Doing it for the kids, as McGee had once claimed self-righteously, was yesterday’s news.

The reason this is important is that you can trace a straight line between the decline of artist freedom which began then to the techbro hegemony of now, such that if you’re a musician without a second or possibly third job you start to arouse trust fund suspicions amongst your peers.

It’s also contextual here because, self-releasing, Hotel Lux as a band have made a second album that you sense would delight some of the indie scene’s original provocateurs, one with a lack of conformity, melding together influences and with seemingly a collective disregard for the algorithmic nature of the modern game.

So, who are these throwback mavericks? Originally from Hampshire but having gravitated to London, they’re a quintet fronted by singer/writer Lewis Duffin.

Click here for the review in full