Indie In The Wild: A Dive into Indie's use in Mainstream Media

Words: Tom Gensler

Hi, I’m Tom Gensler, and welcome to this exploration into Made in Chelsea, written in the vein of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, but with an eye towards indie music within the modern cultural landscape. If you don’t know what the aforementioned book is, it's essentially a coherent and deep look into the interconnectivity between mathematics, art and music, and so in these articles I will be exploring the interconnectivity between indie music and some random aspects of life. In this article, I will be exploring the strange connective tissue between indie music and the soundtracks of film and television, starting with Channel 4’s hit, long-running reality TV show: Made In Chelsea, and why this tissue exists and what benefits it has for both worlds, and how this all connects to the large debut of a new band.

WHAT IS MADE IN CHELSEA?

Made In Chelsea is arguably the crown jewel of trashy drama-based reality TV. With a serialised season-based structure, it's had 25 seasons of the core show, with spin-offs starring lead characters on holiday and, more recently, a separate show entirely with the exact same concept but set in Australia, entitled Made in Bondi; it's extremely popular here in the UK and is a staple of the TV schedule. The show centres around the lives of rich young people in and around Chelsea. It's simple - an easy pitch. Just get some attractive people with iffy personalities to act out stories. Now, I say act out, but it's never really been confirmed to be either scripted or unscripted, it's described as ‘structured’ by Channel 4, which means that the producers and team influences the events, so effectively, dialogue is improvised but the stories aren’t so much, or most of them aren’t. I mean, it's a fairly dystopian concept, having your life and perception by the public influenced by a few people behind a camera.

HOW IN ANY WAY DOES IT CONNECT TO INDIE MUSIC?

Well, this is the somewhat strange part. The show’s soundtrack and the music that accompanies its adverts are made up of indie and alternative songs, and not to make assumptions, but these aren’t really the kind of songs I’d expect the average fan to be into. For example, the latest series features music from Inhaler, Jadu Heart and Fontaines D.C., amongst many more modern indie and alternative acts. It's a very conscious choice, and at times it feels very forced, almost as if the producers are just given the songs and shove them in anywhere, but you get used to it when you watch it. Made in Chelsea uses primarily British and Irish indie, and Made in Bondi uses primarily Australian indie music, to match the scene there. It's the same concept globalised, really. It's good to see and hear these songs used in the context and setting of mainstream TV, but it is rather strange.

DON’T A LOT OF TV SHOWS AND FILMS USE INDIE SONGS?

Yes, a lot do, and to give two big recent examples: James Gunn’s Superman uses Noah and the Wale’s 5 Years Time, in arguably the film’s best and most bizarrely fantastic fighting sequence, and the film’s finale and end credits are set to Punkrocker by Teddybears and Iggy Pop, which is used to anchor the film’s themes as it ends, and the 2024 Amazon Prime-produced and distributed romantic comedy Upgraded features Newdad and Wet Leg amongst others in its soundtrack, used to mirror the protagonist’s artistic tastes. But these all have a clear purpose and make sense in context.

SO, MADE IN CHELSEA’S INDIE CONNECTION IS WEIRD TO YOU?

Maybe it's just me that thinks it, but it is an interesting connection whether you think it's weird or not. The show’s producers would’ve had purpose for it, and maybe the deeper purpose is to draw people who like indie music into the show’s world, a siren song in the form of Grian Chatten and company. So that’s one explanation, and the most viable song, an audio draw-in, though I don’t know anyone personally that is hooked on this show that’s an indie head, but maybe that works. However, this lack of connection between content and audience is where the rather new band Punchbag come into the picture.

CREDIT : KITTY QUINTON

WHAT HAVE PUNCHBAG GOT TO DO WITH ALL OF THIS?

Well, in a way, they actually debuted on Made in Chelsea, in an extremely bizarre episode where absolutely nothing is a coincidence. S29 x E9 centres around a lot of drama erupting and a few characters talk about going to a Punchbag show in the evening. The last 20 minutes of the episode take place fully at the Punchbag show, with a huge focus on the band and their songs and nearly every single main character of the series is at the show. And a very key piece of information to help make sense of this is the fact that Punchbag are not a huge band yet, and at the time the episode was out only four songs were on Spotify. They’ve been around since around 2024, as far as my research shows, and haven’t released until this year, 2025. So it's not like everyone going to a Lewis Capaldi gig, they’re a brilliant act, but a small act. In fact, I’d never heard of them until I watched this episode and then deep-dived, and through this discovered their fantastic EP. Essentially, as far as

I’ve figured out, there must be some connection between the management of Punchbag and the producers of the show to stage this event. To make it clear, a lot of major events happen and the whole episode leads up to them, and when they’re on screen, they’re on screen, full focus, loud. It's a move to draw attention to them and no doubt skyrocket them. But they’re a small indie band, who no doubt will soon move to huge incredible things, and they’re doing a lot already, a lot of Europe shows et cetera. So, yeah, we have a mainstream reality TV show giving total spotlight to a new and upcoming band, who seemingly have manifested from nowhere, with an inconsistent social media presence up until the single releases leading up to the EP release and the Made in Chelsea appearance.

The funniest explanation I’ve come up with in my head for this is that it's part of some time travel plot to save humanity, and along the line someone needs Punchbag to be famous to save us all. However, I do think it's great that bands are given these opportunities and none of this is said negatively, it's just strangely fantastic.

SO, WHAT DO YOU CONCLUDE ABOUT ALL OF THIS?

Honestly, I’ve come up with two explanations to everything:

1. The producers are indie-heads and self-insert themselves into the show via the soundtrack, making it a part of them. One producer saw Punchbag one day and fell in love and wanted them on the show just to see them gain more traction.

2. The producers just want to get more people to watch it, and feel that the best way to appeal to an indie audience is by shoving in indie buzzword bands into the soundtrack, alongside lesser known ones. Either way, both of these have come from a lot of lost time on my part chasing rabbit holes that have genuinely come from trying to find a reason for the central focus of one episode being Punchbag. This whole article has been a bit like the brilliant A24 film Under the Silver Lake for me, but instead of searching for answers about a disappearance in sunny Los Angeles, I’m tracking down strange truths about a band’s one time emergence on a mainstream UK reality TV gem on my laptop in currently cold and rainy Nottingham. If you’ve actually got this far into this sprawl of weird thought, thanks so much for reading and hope you’ve enjoyed.