Guitar bands are over and girlie electro has triumphed. But dyed-in-the-wool indie-kid, Helen Sloan, finds this a cause for celebration, not commiseration.

Photo by Whittlz

Indie-rock is dead. The future, apparently, is lady-led electro-pop - Lady Gaga, Little Boots et al - together they form an invincible forcefield constructed entirely of glitter and hotpants that will keep the hordes of guitar bands at bay.

Not that the twitching corpse of your average indie band has any right to complain. They’ve all collapsed under their own weight; a mountain of mostly mediocre bands, all talk and trousers and not much else. There will, no doubt, be undeserving casualties. For every Joe Lean, currently limping back to obscurity, there is probably another band full of talent who will surface for a brief moment only to be told “sorry, but it’s not your time”.

Still, while it might seem perverse to be delighted at the demise of the music you love, there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. For a start, the world doesn’t need another Razorlight. But more importantly, true indie-rockers will have room to breathe once again at gigs without a load of haircuts getting in the way.

And as the tastemakers turn their cold, supercilious gaze elsewhere, alternative music will survive and flourish, as it has managed for the past quarter of a century.

Because for much of the past 25 years, indie music has been desperately, woefully unfashionable. (And by “indie” I mean guitar bands, but also folk, electronica, alt-country, psychedelia and rock). People who followed artists that could only be heard on the radio late at night or read about in the NME were viewed as being really quite tragic. It’s only occasionally that the wheels of fashion align with the cogs of the world of alternative music.

Until very recently, for example, telling people that you were spending your summer holidays flitting from one festival to the next was met with a wrinkled nose of distaste: people who went to festivals were patently Not Cool. And this certainly had some truth to it, take Reading for example. Festival goers were in two happily co-existing groups: the older die-hards in their ‘I was there’ t-shirts dating back to the early 80s, and the adolescents with their blue hair and Doc Marten’s.

Then, suddenly, the demographic changed.

In 2006 the site was crammed full of lanky lads with expensive haircuts and skinny jeans, and long-limbed girls in floaty tops and jewelled flip-flops. Glossy magazines started running fashion pages telling you what sort of super-expensive outfit you should be wearing to spend three days in a field. Glastonbury sold out in a second while smaller festivals with insipid line-ups and inadequate facilities cropped up all over the countryside like a disease.

A new breed of punter started appearing at regular gigs too, all tarted up in their Sunday best and braying loudly or looking bored throughout the bands’ actual sets. Teenagers who had previously sneered at their uncool gig-going friends overnight became fans of the Fratellis.

Then, over the past few months, it all ended.

What was the final straw? Was it the clear-eyed ambition of the Kooks, the unjustified swagger of Razorlight, or the countless watered-down facsimiles that followed in their wake? Or was it the fact that keeping up with the latest bands can be pretty exhausting if you don’t actually care that much? Gig venues have sticky floors, skanky toilets, and you’re unlikely to pull: being an ardent indie fan is not something your average fashionista is going to stand for too long.

Whatever the reason, after a brief moment in the sun for indie rock, it’s over. It will no doubt happen again in a decade’s time, but for the next few years at least, unreconstructed indie kids can breathe a sigh of relief that the chance of running into hordes of shrieking Peaches Geldolf-wannabees at a gig are now mercifully reduced.

Helen Sloan is a journalist. She is thinking of starting a blog.