about boy-racer teenagers and posh students. You could write about anything for The Face. They sent me – a writer with no fashion knowledge – to write about Fashion Week. After traipsing between several sniffy, dull events, I got to go to an Alexander McQueen show. It was in a warehouse and it was exactly like going to a rave: the scramble outside, the flat impossibility of entry. But I knew clubs. I knew what to do. I pushed to the front, talked my way in on the door. It was easy.
Nathan Barley had nothing on The Face back then. We gave out free wallpaper, designed by Björk: just the one magazine-sized piece. I think we thought readers would buy loads of copies so they could cover a wall. My flatmate started playing Tomb Raider and I watched him manoeuvre pixel-pixie Lara Croft, with her square-muscled bum and swingy ponytail, through Raiders of the Lost Ark caves to fight dragons. I thought: We should put her on the cover! We did: not a human version, the cartoon-game version of Lara. On the inside spread she wore Versace and Gucci.
We once did a fashion shoot that featured models wearing nothing at all. You were meant to infer the clothes from the marks they left on the models’ skin – the crease marks around the wrist, the redness left by a belt. But the printing was so bad you couldn’t see the detail. The shoot was naked models, accompanied by captions about what they weren’t wearing. A 90s’ version of the emperor’s new clothes.
All those kind-of friends you met through going out, who made films or music or danced so hard they made a club change its atmosphere, or were just funny and great-looking, had a way with clothes or a knack of being everywhere first … All those people, they were making the stories. Pushing the horrible youth establishment (Dave Lee Travis!) off their pedestals, forcing their own agenda.
We were so good at having a good time. Everyone noticed. Everyone wanted to join in. We didn’t mind too much. When you see your friends and friends of your friends take over music and art and magazines and modelling and comedy and films and books and clubs, you think, Great. This is what we want. We are going to win.
‘You know who you remind me of?’ says a mum in the playground. ‘You know those girls who used to be on TV, the tomboy ones. Zoë Ball, Denise Van Outen … They had a name for them …’
I remember the name: ladettes. I know the story of the 90s. I’ve made documentaries about it for radio. I’ve been interviewed about it for TV. My memories are my own, but they fit with the history that’s usually told, as long as they’re edited.
But the turning points are different, for me. Nobody really cared about Blur v. Oasis, except in an oblique way: look how BIG everything’s got! The people who made it in the 90s were from alternative culture. Not all of them – not Chris Evans, not the Spice Girls – but those who kept music close to their hearts. And that meant that when everything got big, when the full glare of the tabloids was trained on them, they didn’t like it. They couldn’t really cope. Even the ones who seemed to truly desire it – Oasis, Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, Damon Albarn – they had to move away from that light. It was too much. The establishment, the mainstream is scary and intolerant and more powerful than you might expect. It reduces everything to its basest motive: money-sex-power. Which is fun, for a time, but it’s not everything you want. It’s not what you’re about. You’re trying to make something new.
Blur fractured; Graham limped away. Oasis changed their entire line-up, apart from the Gallagher brothers. Pulp splintered. Suede stuttered. Elastica collapsed. Other bands had members kill themselves, or get very ill, or become overwhelmed with addiction, or withdraw.
The drugs changed. No more poppers and speed, no more weed and mushrooms and Feminax. Ecstasy, of course, cocaine, ketamine, and then, heroin. Weird stuff like PCP, which gave you flashbacks of little green men explaining the meaning of life. People started falling through the cracks, disappearing. Some were sectioned. Some died. Some went away and never came back. I wrote a piece about heroin and smoked it, though I hated downers, only liked the stuff that took you up and out. I got a cab home, was sick outside our gate and slept for fifteen hours. People got cross with me about the feature. Someone phoned me up and shouted at me about revealing he used heroin, even though I didn’t mention him at all, even though I hadn’t known he was on it.
I got shouted at quite a bit because of my articles. In one, I got methadone and methadrine mixed up, and a lead singer bawled me out backstage at a Rollercoaster event. In another, I put in a quote from one singer wanting another singer to die of AIDS and it caused huge problems. You just didn’t know what would blow up, really. I still thought I was only writing for people like me. People who were relaxed about drugs, who got the joke, who knew that the important bit was the music and the characters around it, and the highs and spin-outs and stupid stuff that came with it all.
The mainstream changed to accommodate us. It really did feel like we’d won. A Labour government got in, for the first time since the 70s. Bars started opening until 2 a.m., and some, all night. Working-class people were celebrated, allowed to be exceptional. Extraordinary ordinary people had become our heroes, and, after they moved aside, Big Brother started and reality TV became the way to make everyday amazingness into stars.
The other day, I came across a piece I’d written for The Face in 1996. It was called ‘Where Were You When the 90s Happened?’. It made me laugh when I saw it. It’s so hard to assess an era or a state of mind when you’re in the middle of it. It redefines itself from a distance, over the years.
The important thing about the 90s was that I was in my twenties, I suppose. We were good at being young. Our belief in change was the same belief that all young people have, but we were lucky. Our generation had the circumstances, the impetus, the gold-plated opportunity to be able to push our beliefs out into the world. Many of our ideas are still around.
At the end of the 90s, I’d moved flat ten times, got through four cars, two serious love affairs and a few not-so-serious. I’d gone away a lot, for work (Las Vegas, LA, New York) and for me, because I’d needed to open up my head. I’d been to Cuba, to Mexico, to Iceland, to the Scottish islands, to Australia, to Nova Scotia, all around Europe. I’d done a bit of telly presenting (I never saw the shows because I was always out), I’d interviewed a lot of musicians, I’d written umpteen features on going out and staying up, on trainers and driving. I’d danced all night, then carried on to the next night, over and over. I’d written a book, about suburbia. In the summer of 1999, on a tour designed to take books into nightclubs, prove that the chemical generation liked to read, I’d met S, who I’m now married to.
So much change, so much energy. I know it was me, but it feels like it wasn’t. And, God, it sounds exhausting.
We left the 90s behind and continued in much the same way as before. (When are you meant to stop? Is there a signal? How do you know?) On New Year’s Eve 1999, we met up at a friend’s flat and then rushed to the South Bank to goggle at the fireworks, high on the crowd – excitable, international, cuddly – as well as the exploding sky.
Afterwards, in the early hours of the new millennium, a group of us bunched across a packed bridge, straggled through closed-to-traffic tunnels to get to a club. We were blitzed, so it took us quite a while; anyone watching might have been reminded of Monty Python’s 100-yard race for people with no sense of direction. One or two of us freaked out on the way – everyone held hands and ran until it was better, like 5-year-olds in the park. And then we were there.
I don’t know how long we lasted, but long enough for the evening to splinter, to turn into individual adventures that you recounted later when you bumped into each other at the horse-trough washbasins,
