100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #93 The Futureheads – Hounds of Love

Released: 2005

The phrase “Indie landfill” was coined by The Word magazine’s Andrew Harrison, one which rapidly became a blanket to throw over anyone using guitars to make music in the wake of The Libertines and the Arctic Monkeys rise to prominence. Simon Reynolds helped contextualise it more, summing up the public’s general sense of meh-ness with the rhetorical questions ‘All these bands! Where did they come from? Why did they bother? Couldn’t they tell they were shit?’

The Futureheads came from Sunderland, a city which the music industry couldn’t find with both hands and a map, but that suited them just fine. If Alex Turner had made regionalism cool, then more power to them: interviewed in 2005 by an intrepid Telegraph journalist who’d managed to make it all the way to the pub directly opposite Newcastle’s Central Station, singer Barry Hyde explained that singing in native accents had “Initially..got us attention because of the sheer audacity of it, then people started using it as a way of making us second-best.”

The success of their version of Hounds of Love meant that didn’t last for long. Kate Bush’s Fairlight-heavy original was barely recognisable after being given a terrace ready intro and jerky post-punk-pop guitar treatment which swang it brilliantly from indie disco to festival field and back. Bush even rang to congratulate the Wearsiders as it took off, but Hyde later admitted he was too scared to take the call and then mistakenly deleted the message she left. It didn’t matter, as the track won the NME’s Single of the Year award and suddenly changing for gigs in the car park and jokily threatening to kidnap Steve Lamacq for publicity were just another band’s problems.