Anyone familiar with the 'underground' music scene will be familiar with the concept of garage bands, and 'alternative' music in general.

Most of these bands are fiercely independent. They have no budget, little formal training and they rail against the status quo. Boy, do they rail. Searching and striving for innovation, eschewing general consensus of what is considered popular - or, God forbid, commercial - they riff on different themes to what they perceive as the mainstream.

They take pride in knowing that the music they produce will be hated by 90% of the population. They are Alternative, not Commercial. They do not want your approval, they do not want you to regard them as easy listening, and they most certainly do not want to appear on pop music shows alongside five-piece boy bands.

These performing artists (because unless they only ever practice alone in a garage, and regardless of what they claim, that is what they are) not only deride the mainstream, but if any of their contemporaries should meet with commercial success - even on their own terms - they are held in equal contempt. They've 'Sold Out.' 'I don't care if you're Kurt Cobain or Diana Ross. You need an audience.'

Frankly, I find this absurd.

First, I don't care if you're Kurt Cobain, Diana Ross or John Cooper Clarke. If you're a performing artist, you need an audience. No performer is going to turn people away from their show. At small gigs in particular, every single one of those people who turn up helps to increase the band's takings for that night, and thus influences their decision to continue making music. Just try and picture any band in the world refusing their share of the door. Ain't gonna happen.

Second, something 'sell-outs' are often accused of - using the best equipment available, and hiring the best engineers and producers to help them realise their full potential - is what any performer wants to do. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying through his teeth.

It's ironic that garage bands are always trying to get the best possible results out of their meagre equipment, but feel jealousy when someone is 'given' inherently better equipment, as if they somehow haven't earned it. Their oft-espoused defence is that the old, classic bands never used all this advanced stuff, implying that they were in some way more pure than modern performers.

But those classic bands - Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles, to name three common examples invoked in this defence - always used the best equipment they could blag, and spent as much money as they could in pursuit of this. No matter how much crackle we might hear today, if they could get a cleaner, crisper sound back then, they certainly did.

And finally, what the hell is wrong with success? Since when was being paid well for your art a crime in anyone's eyes, except those tinted green with envy?

Note that I'm not defending manufactured, production-line pop here. Backstreet Boys have their place, and personally I don't mind them all that much, but that's an argument for another time.

I'm also not talking about bands that are most definitely underground by choice rather than circumstance - Foetus, Meathook Seed, Dukes of Stratosphere. These people are, consciously or not, natural innovators. Always two steps ahead of popular taste, you couldn't get these people into the Top 40 with a battering ram.

No, I'm talking about what happened to Nirvana. Marilyn Manson. Pink Floyd. Christ, even Genesis.

"I preferred their earlier stuff. Before anyone else listened to them."

It's a value judgement, entirely subjective, and one which no amount of reasoned debate will counter. But make no mistake, it's born out of jealousy. 'If a certain style becomes popular, at least people's horizons are expanding.'

It bugs the hell out of me. Because the people still in their garages, who shout the loudest and cry "Foul!" with a hefty sneer, know damn well in their hearts that in the same circumstances they'd take the same opportunities. Of course they'd do it differently, but that's more to do with the differences between individuals than any moral consideration. And you can bet that people would still accuse them of 'selling out' no matter how they did it.

But mainly it bugs me because these people refuse to see that the 'sell-outs' are still doing what they did before. If a certain style suddenly becomes popular, whether through a shift in the culture or the sheer power of marketing, then at least people's horizons are expanding, even if only a little.

Sure, the style will eventually become subsumed into the mainstream, assimilated with pop culture, remixed and diluted. Happens in every medium, all the time.

But for that brief period, people got a taste of what else is on offer. And you can guarantee that some of them will want more, seeking out the stuff that these bands were themselves influenced by, and buying records by similar underground bands they previously wouldn't have touched. In effect, going on to support - and perhaps even become - the next generation of alternative music. And how can that be a Bad Thing?

I made this point using music as a metaphor simply because it's a medium which almost everyone is familiar with. But it could just as easily have been cinema. Theatre. Prose fiction. Poetry. Or...

...Comics. Discuss.

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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