“Remembrance of things
past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” – Proust
Nostalgia is a drug and everyone’s an addict. The older you get,
the stronger the cravings.
We all yearn for a youth which, when viewed through the fog
of nostalgia, seems happier (and simpler) than it probably was, conveniently
forgetting that those years could also be incredibly confusing and frustrating.
Every generation looks back fondly at the period in their
lives which helped turn them into the person they are today – those crucial teenage
years where who and what they are (and want to be) start to crystallise, shaped
by personal experiences, their peers and, of course, the music they listen to.
For my parents, who were born in the mid-50s, this was the late 60s/early 70s. For
me, born with just over a month of the 70s left to go, it was the 90s.
We all remember listening to our parents (and even our
grandparents) waxing lyrical about how things were better in their day – and we
all remember thinking ‘yeah, whatever’ because, let’s face it, we knew it all,
didn’t we? We’d always have our fingers not so much on the pulse, but on the
jugular of popular culture. As far as we were concerned, things had never been
better (even though we had no real point of historical reference to work from)
and this was a good as it would ever be.
So, here we are in 2015 and it now appears to be my
generation’s turn to tell an undoubtedly indifferent generation below us how
great things were in the 90s, albeit the 90s as we’ve chosen to remember them. Such
is the circle of life (a 90s reference for you there).
In case it’s escaped your attention, there seems to be
something of a 90s revival going on at the moment. It’s by no means a full
scale cultural revolution – not yet (at least not in the way it happened with
the 60s, 70s and 80s), but there seems to be an increasingly favourable climate
for 90s bands reforming (Ride, for example) and the last few years have seen a
slew of 20th anniversary ‘deluxe’ editions of classic 90s albums hit the
shelves, orchestrated by record labels who know all too well that the teenagers
who bought them the first time (from Woolies and Our Price, naturally) are now
earning enough to buy them again in expanded versions at grossly inflated
prices.
It’s filtering through onto our TV screens too. TFI Friday,
a programme which probably encapsulated the boorish Britpop lad culture of the
mid to late 90s better than anything else, returned on Friday (June 12) for a
one-off special, supposedly to celebrate its 20th anniversary (it’s
actually 19 years, but hey…), picking up pretty much where it left off and sending
the Twittersphere into a Hooch-fuelled frenzy. And last night (June 13),
Channel 4 showed a programme called ‘The 90s: Ten Years That Changed The
World’, covering everything from the rave scene and Madchester through to
Britpop, the enforced grief arising from Princess Diana’s death and the
unrelenting cult of Beckham, in all their bold, brash, lager-swilling (and spilling)
glory.
Did the 90s change the world? That depends on your
interpretation of changing the world.
Did the 90s change my world? Irrefutably so.
For me, the 90s were when I started to discover who I really
was and where my place in the world might be (although the jury’s still out on
that one). While I started getting into music in the late 80s thanks to Top of
the Pops and Smash Hits, it was in the 90s that I started reading Melody Maker
and NME and venturing beyond the all-too-safe confines of the Top 40, buying obscure
but no less brilliant records that wouldn’t even trouble the Top 1000 – and not
from Boots or WHSmith but from independent record shops such as Way Ahead in
Derby, Selectadisc in Nottingham and Rockaboom in Leicester (sadly only the
latter remains open today).
It was during the 90s that I went to my first gig (East 17
at Nottingham Royal Concert Hall in 1993 – yeah, I know, sorry) and my first
festival (the free Heineken Festival in Wollaton Park, Nottingham, again in
1993, featuring a ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’-era Blur who were not yet big enough
to headline). I also went to my first Glastonbury (1997, a spectacularly muddy
year – it was 2010 before I’d return). I also bought my first set of decks and
learned how to mix two records together.
Secondary school in the early 90s was where I met the people
who are still my best friends today and who I have no doubt will remain my best
friends for life. I can say exactly the same for the friends I met when I
started university in 1998.
This was the decade of house parties (one of which I
accidentally brought to an early finish by headbutting a glass lampshade while
dancing to ‘Three Lions’), of venturing into pubs to see which ones would serve
people who were blatantly underage, of sending the oldest looking one of the
group into the off licence for beer and/or alcopops and then a few years later going
in yourself and only having to be able to recite a false date of birth in order
to complete the transaction. This was also the decade of girlfriends, in the
days when ‘going out’ with someone meant standing next to them during break
time, waiting for the bell to go so you could do that awkward, goldfish-style open
mouth snogging while all your mates cheered you on.
I passed my driving test in 1997 (second time lucky, like
all the best people) and being the first of my group to do so, nobly accepted
the duty of designated driver for my mates on nights out to Derby in my dad’s Peugeot
309 (for which he made me charge them frankly extortionate petrol rates). I
would also take them out on drives around the local villages, just for the sake
of it, blasting out happy hardcore tapes at an ear-shattering volume (usually
to drown out the protests of my passengers who wanted Alice In Chains or
Symposium instead).
In short, this was the decade that made me who I am today. The
decade where friendships were forged, tastes were acquired and refined, and
dreams were formulated (regardless of whether or not they were realised,
although I did achieve my goal of becoming a journalist, a job I did for most
of the noughties).
My parents’ generation had the 60s. My generation had the
90s and – I accept this may be the nostalgia talking here – they were FANTASTIC.
The 90s were my 60s.
