There’s a lot of hype around the ‘indie sleaze’ era of the mid to late noughties right now. According to the internet, the media and Tiktok, Gen Z are currently obsessed with the period from around 2006 - 2012; its fashion, its music, its icons. “‘Such a cool time to be alive’: why Gen Z is so nostalgic about ‘indie sleaze’” ran one BBC headline last month. There are thousands of videos on TikTok mythologising this period and heralding its revival, mimicking its makeup, looks, style and trends, with many posts having views in their millions.
Britain was very much the centre of this moment. The fashion was hipster subculture, performativley vintage, mixing 70s, 80s and grunge. Think Kate Moss and Alexa Chung at Glastonbury with their bum-cheek-grazing denim cut-offs; skinny scarves, skinny jeans, scruffy hair, band t-shirts, lashings of gold jewellery; Amy Winehouse with her winged eyeliner, tattoos and tennis dresses holding court at The Hawley Arms in Camden. Topshop Oxford Circus was the fashion mecca - and this month’s revival of the hallowed Brit high street brand, which closed its doors in 2021, has only intensified the indie sleaze revival. Last week, musician Kate Nash, who rose to fame at this time, released a BBC Sounds podcast, The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. The 6-part podcast features interviews with many of the musicians from the British bands that defined this era: The Libertines, The Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight, The Kooks. And while it was these male Brit musicians who provided the soundtrack to this scene, it was their love lives and the party kids surrounding them that provided the scandal. As Kate Nash points out on the podcast:
“By 2007 - the UK music scene had jumped from the pages of music magazines to The Sun, The Mirror and The Daily Mail and the girlfriends who played a big part in this” she says on the podcast.
And it really was Brit stars who everyone was obsessed with back then: Alexa Chung and Alex Turner, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss, Pixie and Peaches Geldof, Lily Allen, Agyness Deyn and of course, Amy Winehouse and her chaotic union with Blake Fielder-Civil. (While Amy’s records weren’t indie, her music and her presence was a fundamental part of the scene.)
I was a young journalist during the peak indie sleaze years. First as showbusiness reporter at The Mail on Sunday then as news editor at Grazia magazine and these celebrities were our lifeblood. At Grazia, we’d glamourise and sensationalise everything from their style to their scandalous love lives week after week, plastering pap pics of whichever famous woman was in the headlines on the cover. And myself and my team got to know them all, partying with them every night of the week at whatever showbiz party, club or gig was going on in the capital, seeking out exclusive interviews and scoops. At the time to be so embedded in the zeitgeist, to have access to the scene and all its key players was thrilling - not to mention exhausting, high-pressure and terrible for my liver.
I played pool with Amy Winehouse at a Brits after party, went on pub crawls with Agyness Deyn, swapped clothes with Peaches Geldof in the porter loos of a festival, got into a blazing row with Lily Allen in the VIP area of the same festival and got a death look from Kate Moss at fashion week. And these are just a mere handful of some of the many memories from a wild era of my career.
But was it really such a ‘cool’ time to be alive? I’d argue, looking back now at the grand old age of 44 that no, it wasn’t.
On her podcast, Kate Nash describes how while it was definitely a liberating, fun and unique moment, it also, “contained a lot of darkness and chaos” adding, “I feel lucky that I grew up in it and lucky that I survived it too.”
We missed you.
And while I really don’t want to be a buzzkill, here are some key points that I believe might prompt the younger generation to reconsider romanticising this unique moment in pop culture history.
Sleaze. The clue’s in the name. Although this moniker has been bestowed on the era posthumously, there’s no getting away from it - it was a sleazy, seedy, grubby, druggy and dangerous time. It was also a horrendous time to be a woman in the public eye.
Yes, I’m talking about the very real, very pervasive and very shitty attitude to women’s bodies that was very much the norm. This was peak toxic diet culture, a time pre the Body Positivity movement (although RIP to that in 2025, thanks Ozempic). The notion that we could actually love our bodies and celebrate them whatever size they were and have women in the public eye extolling exactly that, was completely alien. Skeletal thin was the aspiration. And yes, I know that it was perpetrated by the magazines of the time (who can forget Heat magazine’s circle of shame?) and working in that culture is not something I am proud of. In fact, I remember Amy Winehouse giving an interview to Grazia, published around the end of 2007 and shockingly saying that she believed she only got really famous when she got really skinny. And we now know that eating disorders were just some of the many demons she battled with in her short life.
Also, the very real and pervasive shitty attitude to female celebrities at that time in general - not just their bodies. Nineties ‘ladette’ culture was still hanging around and famous women were held to toxic and damaging double standards. No one spoke about mental health ( and I mean, no one) and the abusive behaviour and predatory power dynamics in the entertainment industry that eventually led to the #MeToo movement of 2017 was standard.
Speaking to GLAMOUR, drag queen, DJ and music producer, Jodie Harsh, whose memoir on the noughties, You Had To Be There is published this September, says: “[back then] everything was a little darker, a little later, a little more smudged and ripped-up…" Jodie, who was a staple on the London party circuit - and who was once famously pictured handing out cups of tea to paparazzi with Amy Winehouse outside her Camden home - also recalls how misogynistic it was. “The noughties were a really strange time to be famous and female. The paparazzi were up-skirting eighteen year old girls and hurling abuse outside people’s front doors to rile up a reaction, and images of broken dreams seemed to be what sold the most. It was of course misogynistic, and famous girls were almost expected to put up with the behaviour, as if it was part of the fame contract - a trade-off for making lots of money. We know what happened to Amy, and I don’t know that we’ve learned from it yet.”
The media was most certainly a different beast back then. This was the era of phone hacking and frenzied paparazzi swarms chasing famous women’s every move. Round-the-clock celebrity news websites were also in their early days, the Mailonline for example, had yet to explode into the behemoth it is today. So, the print tabloids and weekly magazines still reigned supreme and really were - before social media - the only source of information about celebrities.
On the BBC Sounds podcast, Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell reflects on the media behaviour during this era pointing out how the kind of thing they were doing would not be allowed now. “There was no alternative source of media so they could just do whatever they wanted,” he says.
The film is a fantasy that masks the wretched reality of Amy's drug and alcohol dependence, says one GLAMOUR editor who witnessed it first-hand.
What you also have to remember is that this was also an era of the precipice of social media self-documentation. Instagram didn’t really kick off in the UK until 2011, and while Twitter was in its infancy, it wasn’t really for sharing photos. Yes Facebook was exploding, but there wasn’t the immediacy of the social media-dictated and recorded lives we live today.
And while this is clearly one of the reasons that the younger generation today are romanticising this time, because it was incredible to live life unencumbered by documentation, it also meant that everyone partied hard and there was zero accountability. Everyone behaved as they damn well pleased - and this involved a hell of a lot of drugs. Of course every music scene in history is rife with drugs, but the pernicious addictions that took hold of the celebrities in the noughties was terrifying.
I often saw firsthand how frightening, dangerous and even fatal this dark side of the scene was. Most memorably while working on a story at The Mail on Sunday involving Pete Doherty. In 2006, Pete - who at the time was at the height of a tempestuous on-off relationship with Kate Moss - was embroiled in the suspected murder of the actor, Mark Blanco. Mark fell to his death from the balcony of a block of flats in Whitechapel after a night of partying and with Pete and friends at a flat in the building. Pete and his minder, Johnny ‘Headlock’ Jeannevol were captured on CCTV running away from Mark’s body on the pavement.
It was a tragic story that dominated the headlines in December of that year. I was dispatched by my news desk to get the first interview with Johnny Headlock about what happened on the night, just days after Mark’s death. The interview became front page news and I, then just a 25-year-old reporter, had to then ‘babysit’ Johnny from Thursday evening when we conducted the interview, until the first edition of the papers came out at midnight on Saturday to prevent him from speaking to our rival, The News of the World. In those 48-hours I drove Johnny from his ‘hideout’ halfway up the A1, on a tour of east London drug dens and even a brothel - although I didn’t know it until I got there (Johnny was friends with the prostitutes there). He also took me to the scene of Mark’s death and inside the flat where the party had taken place, introducing me, without my prior knowledge, as a ‘high class hooker’ (I was undercover) to the assembled group smoking crack cocaine at 11 o’clock in the morning. All in all, it was a pretty frightening experience. But I’ll also never forget my editor instructing me to also get as much information on Kate and Pete’s relationship as I could, because it was truly extraordinary that one of the world’s most famous supermodels was so embedded in such a scene. And it truly was.
Doherty was questioned by the police but no more came of it and he has always denied any wrongdoing or involvement in Mark’s death. Johnny, who initially denied any involvement, then weeks later confessed to Mark’s murder at Bethnal Green police station, before then retracting it claiming he was intoxicated and stressed, was also questioned but faced no further action.
The Metropolitan Police investigated Mark Blanco's death as an unexplained incident, revisited the case after the coroner’s inquest, questioned key figures and ultimately concluded that there wasn’t sufficient evidence for criminal charges. Yet even after all these years his family still have questions over how Mark died, with a BBC Newsnight investigation in 2012 and a Channel 4 documentary in 2023, spearheaded by his mother, Sheila Blanco.
After that I had quite a few more encounters with Johnny Headlock as well as many of his and Pete’s cronies and every time there were mad tales of Pete, Kate, bust ups, drugs and brushes with the law. And there was always a sinister, frightening and seedy side to it all.
I attended two of Pete’s drug-offences court cases in both 2007 and 2008 as a reporter. I also sat through Amy Winehouse’s husband, Blake Fielder-Civil’s, week-long trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court in July 2008 reporting for Grazia, in which he was sentenced to 27 months in prison for trial fixing and grievous bodily harm. Amy would sporadically turn up to support her ‘Blake incarcerated,’ a teetering, tottering, tiny beehived mess, swarmed by paparazzi.
On what would have been the star's 40th birthday.
And it was the words of Blake’s Barrister, just before his sentencing, that have stayed with me to this day, that really throw light on just how devastating these famous figures’ descent into drug addiction had become.
Jeremy Dean KC, told the judge that his client had a “long and wretched history” of substance abuse. Dean told how despite a number of past suicide attempts, Blake was determined to rebuild his life with Amy. "It's their ambition to divorce themselves from hard drugs, not to separate themselves from each other,” he said. "He knows that if he fails, an appointment with calamity awaits, not just for him but for his wife as well." And while Blake is still with us today, we all know what happened next to his wife.
Amy’s death in 2011 at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning and then the death of Peaches Geldof aged 25 from an accidental heroin overdose in 2014, were undoubtedly wake up calls for everyone in that scene. I think Amy's death not only marked the beginning of the end of indie sleaze, but also a much-needed culture shift in the way women in the public eye were treated by the media.
To lose two such vibrant, talented women at such young ages was devastating. It also, I believe, will come to be the legacy of those years where sleaze - defined as immoral, sordid and corrupt behaviour or activities - really did come to encapsulate the era above anything else.
For more from GLAMOUR's Assistant Editor and Entertainment Director, Emily Maddick, follow her on Instagram @emilymaddick.
