All you individuals out there with your eyeliner and your problems are going to love Tim's article. E-mail your complaints here.

From the moment Richie Manic carved ‘4 Real’ into his arm to show he was ‘serious’ about his music, he condemned himself to being the idol of hundreds of kids who wanted to be as much as a fuck-up as him, but didn’t...well, just didn’t have the guts. I can only assume his disappearance was an attempt to get away from all the mascaralikes who hounded him during his entire short career and got in the way of his guitar practice. Last month, a national music weekly informed us that last issue’s Baggage cover star, Brian Molko of Placebo, has made it ‘OK to be fucked up again’. Oh great. All we bloody need is loads of sixteen year-old lads wearing make-up and girl’s clothes and ‘experimenting with their sexuality’.

It’s a story we know back to front with our eyes closed- the tortured genius, the beautiful loser, the loner, the misfit, the guy who sits in his bedroom churning out songs, be it on an acoustic guitar or a computer (a reclusive, undiscovered techno trainspotter in his basement tinkering with envelope filters in a new and exciting way), shut away from the outside world until one day someone discovers this treasure-trove of talent and unleashes it on an unsuspecting world. And then the nutcases come out in force and drive the delicate little things back into hiding.

Being messed up is what rock stars are for. They’re messed up so we don’t have to be. Dressing funny, taking drugs, smashing up hotel rooms, writing songs are all part and parcel of what it is we pay them for. But they aren’t supposed to be any kind of role model. I’ll admit that when I was about 16, Richey Manic struck some kind of a chord with me in a childhood that was nowhere near as tortured as I thought it ought to be, but I never felt any need to express my cultural alienation, boredom and despair in any other way than buying the records and going to the gigs. I never thought that Richey would ‘understand me’. Hell, as far I can tell he didn’t really understand himself.

The real irony is that it is the individuality of these characters that inspires such a following, and it is that individuality that becomes diluted. Just think of the number of velvet jackets and bad dancers we saw just after Pulp got famous, count the feather boas on the front row of Manics concerts- it all reminds me of that scene in ‘The Life Of Brian’ where the whole crowd say in unison “yes, we are all different”, or of Glastonbury three years ago, when 30,000 identically-dressed Levellers fans danced in the same way whilst singing “There’s only one way of life and that’s your own”. It claims to be the antithesis of Oasis’ ‘all lads together’ approach, the fact that they don’t fit in, but in reality the only difference is the uniform. Most of these fans’ supposed ‘individuality’ is so fragile that it crumbles the minute their chosen band break the charts and reach a wider audience.

And this is something they just can’t take. The fact that people who aren’t as sensitive as them, who didn’t spend months locked in their bedroom contemplating the paracetamol bottle, who just...just don’t UNDERSTAND, are listening to the same band as them. Normal people are going to the same gigs, connecting with the same music, getting as much out of it as they are, and this undermines what made them special, what made them different. They start to worry they might actually be normal, that the individuality they cling to actually belongs to someone else.

You don’t need to be a mess of eyeliner and spraypaint to love the Manics, or just another nancy boy to be allowed to listen to Placebo, in the same way you don’t have to be from the ghetto to listen to hip-hop. Take inspiration from these bands by all means, but take inspiration from their individuality, not from the clothes they wear or the things they say. Real individuality stems from the courage to stick up for your own identity, not from badly applied nail varnish. Dare to be different.

Tim.