2015: an alternative review (part 1)

2015, eh? It’s been a year of ups and downs, and all that… blah, blah, blah. You’re probably sick of reading about the highlights of 2015 by now, so in keeping with my own personal tradition, here’s a slightly different take on some of the year’s events in the world of music and popular culture in general, with a tiny smattering of politics (but not too much) thrown in for good measure. Part 2 to follow very soon.

Adele

To be clear, I have no issue with Adele as a person. I’ve no idea what kind of human being she is but I’m more than willing to tolerate her continued existence. What I do have an issue with, however, is the hype which surrounded the damp sleeping bag of a third album she saw fit to unleash on us this year. I don’t think anyone was expecting a radical change in direction (a psychedelic jazz-funk opus, for example) but surely the most hardened Adele fan (I’ve no idea how such a concept would even manifest itself) was hoping for more than a tepid regurgitation of EVERYTHING ADELE HAS EVER DONE IN THE HISTORY OF ADELE BEING A THING? Everything about this album smacks of a total lack of imagination, from the uninspiring title (looking forward to ’86’) through to the same lazy preoccupation with trying to patch up shitty relationships. And that’s before we even get to the music, which is basically the aural equivalent of the bitter disappointment experienced on discovering that the cup of tea you’d be looking forward to has now gone cold. It’s a truly sad indictment on the British music industry when this utter puddle of whinge breaks all sales records. She’s getting away with murder and we’re all letting it happen.

Sam Smith

Maybe I just hear things differently to other people. I remember having a conversation with someone at university about M People caterwauler Heather Small and how her voice really grated on me – an opinion met with genuine surprise from the other party who genuinely felt she possessed a perfectly fine voice. History is now repeating itself in the form of Sam Smith. A work colleague agreed with me that his songs were dull, dreary and largely forgettable and then added “but what a voice though, eh?”. See, where a lot of people are apparently hearing the saviour of British soul music, I’m just hearing the incessant whining of a child about to break into a full scale tantrum because his mum won’t let him go to a family wedding dressed as Spiderman. His voice is not only unremarkable, it’s also downright unpleasant to listen to, like a shrill, never-ending apology for wetting the bed. Sometimes, if you listen hard enough, the sounds he emits form actual words. He also has the distinction of making a Bond theme worse than Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’, something anyone with ears had hoped wasn’t physically possible. Like I say, maybe I just hear things differently, but there are times when it would be preferable not to be able to hear at all.

Donald Trump

There was a time when The Donald was little more than a figure of fun because he didn’t really understand how hair worked and, let’s face it, Trump means fart (if you’re British). And fart jokes never stop being funny, right? In short, he was seen as an eccentric but ultimately harmless character, a bit like Simon Cowell, Lord Sugar or Mr Bean. Somewhere along the line, however, he’s turned into some sort of bright orange bouffant Hitler, spouting the type of venomous rhetoric which ended in old Adolf lying face down in a ditch, on fire. I don’t know whether Trump actually means it, whether he’s just saying what he thinks ‘his’ kind of people want to hear or whether he’s just trying to see what he can get away with, but one thing is clear: if you were standing next to him at a urinal, you’d sure as hell splash the fucker’s shoes.

NME

Yeah, it went free and, in the process, defied accepted science by actually being worse than it was before. Cover stars since they stopped expecting people to pay good money for the ‘pleasure’ have included Sam Smith and that gimp from Twilight who went back for seconds when they were handing out eyebrows. Inside, the magazine is so dumbed down that its few remaining staff may as well come round to your house and act out its contents using brightly coloured sock puppets. As a product, it’s clinging on for dear life but as the go-to music magazine of record, it died a long, long time ago. What a shame it wasn’t allowed to float off to the great newsagent in the sky with at least a modicum of dignity still intact.

TFI Friday

Admit it – if you had your own TV show, wouldn’t you just fill it with your mates and things you like? That’s basically always been the formula for TFI Friday, which made a long-awaited and much-trumpeted return to our screens this autumn following a successful anniversary special in June. But now the dust has settled it’s becoming all to clear that the new series has failed quite miserably to live up to expectations. The format remains largely unchanged and all the familiar ingredients are still there, but it no longer seems to work. Evans grates in a way that he didn’t back in the ‘90s (even when he was in the grip of his very public meltdown) and the whole ‘look at me, I’m rich, I have famous friends and can get away with anything’ vibe no longer feels like good-natured, laddish banter, but now has a distinctly vulgar tone. The music has been dire (U2, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, James Bay, Texas, to name but a few), making Later With Jools Holland look like the Bangface Weekender in comparison, while the celebrity interviews feel stilted and awkward, punctuated by pointless little skits and routines shoehorned into the show for the sake of it. In the 90s, TFI Friday worked perfectly because it captured the alcopop-fuelled lad culture of the Britpop era, but in the 21^st century it just feels like you’re listening to a particularly embarrassing speech full of jokes which fail to land given by an obnoxiously inebriated relative at a family party. Come in TFI Friday, your time is up.

The 90s were my 60s

“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.