Beat Happening

Beat Happening formed in Olympia, Washington, in 1982: Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford, swapping instruments and never bothering with a bass. Johnson's deep, unschooled baritone, Lewis's plain singing and the barest of drum kits made songs that sounded like children's games and late-night dares at once, and the point was that anyone could do it.

Johnson also ran K Records, which put out their records and became the centre of a do-it-yourself scene in a small town that would soon produce Nirvana and riot grrrl. Their homemade sound became the American root of twee, and of lo-fi more broadly, long after they stopped recording in the early 1990s.