Past Blast Musique digs out The Whip before MySpace disappeared
The 2000s was a time of really great experimental indie music, heavily influenced by the ’80s. One of the great bands to come out of it for that moment were The Whip.
Sadly, since this era landed right in between the analog world and the new digital age, a lot of the live performances are lost. So when we discovered newly remastered uploads from the TV show The Daily Habit, it brought back some very rare bands — and this performance of “Fire” is exactly the kind of thing we mean.
Past Blast Musique
The Whip — Fire
A rare piece of late-2000s indie-electro television history resurfaces in remastered form.
Some links may be affiliate links. INYIM may earn from qualifying purchases.
The Manchester electronic-rock band formed in the mid-2000s and landed squarely in that glorious stretch when indie rock, electro, synths and club music were crashing into each other everywhere. The lineup around X Marks Destination was Bruce Carter, Danny Saville, Nathan Sudders and drummer Fiona “Lil Fee” Daniel. Carter and Saville were the group’s founding core, having previously played together in Nylon Pylon, while Sudders and Daniel rounded out the four-piece that carried The Whip through their breakout era.
“Fire” also found a whole other audience through Need for Speed: Undercover, where it appeared on the 2008 game’s soundtrack. For a certain pocket of gamers, that placement helped make the song much more familiar than The Whip ever became in the mainstream — one of those tracks people knew from hours of driving very fast through a video game before they necessarily knew the band behind it. Another very 2008 sentence, honestly.
Except they didn’t.
That is what makes this resurfaced Daily Habit footage so fun — and honestly, this show was new to us too. Despite the vaguely Canadian-action-sports energy, The Daily Habit was actually an American half-hour series on FUEL TV. Hosted by Pat Parnell, it ran from 2005 to 2011 and was built around surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX and other action sports, but it also brought in celebrity guests and cutting-edge bands for in-studio live performances. Basically: part action-sports show, part talk show, part music showcase.
And yes, check out the MySpace URL for the band right there on the video. This clip is about as rare as the MySpace profiles that survived the purge of all our memories.
Images: The Daily Habit / Fuel TV.
There is also something almost shocking now about how casual the whole thing looks. No vertical-video framing, no endless on-screen captions, no algorithm-ready setup. A band walks onto a television set, plugs in and plays live. That was it.
The Whip’s debut was produced by Jim Abbiss and Liam Howe, and the band became part of the same late-2000s indie-electro universe that was turning acts like Digitalism, Simian Mobile Disco and Friendly Fires into dance-floor neighbors. “Fire” still sounds like that moment without being trapped by it.
So dig out The Whip, the MySpace URL and one beautifully preserved little piece of 2000s indie history below.
The Whip perform “Fire” on The Daily Habit
The April 29, 2009 television performance captures The Whip in their X Marks Destination era, complete with a very period-perfect MySpace address on screen.
Source: The Daily Habit / Fuel TV; Southern Fried Records.
