100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #65 Athlete – You Got The Style

Released: 2003

Ah, hitting those fashionable creases. There was plenty to dislike about British guitar/whatever music at the beginning of the decade, about it’s calculated weediness, about Coldplay, about Snow Patrol, about Keane, about the anthemic anaesthesia and the equation that indie + bland = £££.

Now, there’s being deliberately anodyne then there’s just being nice people. It’s a fine-ish line between the two, with often different consequences, but the shoot first, ask questions later nature of the music press (as was) had neither the guile or frankly the motivation to make a distinction between the two. Athlete formed in South London at the end of the previous century and, in sticking to some fairly traditional principles in making what they made, found themselves getting lots of stick in the process.

Those who act like champions when being right after the event got the chance to yuck it up when the quartet’s second album Tourist perched them on the same pedestal as many of those previously mentioned, but their debut Vehicles & Animals was more high street than boulevard, an affectionate nod to mid-90’s Blur and Britpop. The inspiration for You Got The Style supposedly came from the riots that blighted northern England in 2001, but it’s pint glass sounded half full, not the reverse. A singalong with hidden depths? The critics criticised. But although Athlete were never fashionable, they felt comfortable on just the same.