Hello, it’s been a while since I posted here and that’s because I spent 2023 writing a book. It’s called Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s. In the photo above you see me in my late teens after an attempt at getting “Elastica hair”. This mission, which went on into my 20s and 30s, and you might say still persists, was forever thwarted by my naturally curly locks. I describe in the book my admiration/envy of a friend’s accidental “Britpop hair” and the frustrating way that, in contrast, my own fringe “curls away from the thought”. I wanted to be slick and angular like Justine Frischmann adjusting her microphone stand or Johnny Dean stubbing out a fag beneath a pointy boot.
But like you (probably) I was just another kid with chubby cheeks gazing from a suburban window. In the photo you can see that I am still a child with puppy-ish eyes. Only now do I admire/envy my unspoilt skin. It is true that youth is wasted on the young. It is also wasted on the wasted: in the book you’ll find me puking cider through the slats of a pub bench, chucking a “whitey” while my friends play Star Wars Monopoly, and rolling through clubs and festivals with my head often in the clouds, my eyes blood shot, my hands occasionally being massaged by a kindly stranger. These things really did happen in the 1990s because – without the constant pull of a mobile phone screen on my attention (and yours) – I had more time to look up, look around and meet new people.
I hope that reading my story will take you back to the rollicking guilt-free decade you may have lived yourself, or heard about. It is certainly very ’90s by the end when I am nicking Moby’s beers and waking up in post-rave woodlands with a grin on my face. But these are not the ’90s that you see in those countdown shows on Channel 5 at Christmas. It’s not set in the Hacienda or The Good Mixer, it is set in my bedroom. For once, Noel Gallagher can’t claim to have been there.
Mostly I am just that kid trying to build something to believe in from Just 17 stickers and scraps of paper stuck onto peeling walls. If you grew up in a provincial town with one terrible nightclub, I am probably you. If you looked too young to get into a pub until you were nearly 20, then I am definitely you. Instead of kissing men called Gareth, I went home and covered the panels in my loft room with gig tickets, and the back pages of the NME with its adverts for Blur’s The Great Escape and the new Marion single.
My posters are carefully detached from the centrefolds of Smash Hits and later Select magazine and sometimes – ‘The Anfield Rap’ and Moon Safari – pilfered from the ex-display rack at the back of my local record shop. My room becomes an evolving gallery of idols from John Barnes to Boris Becker, Jason Donovan to Nicky Wire. I never pin up a picture of a woman, sadly, save for my framed Kenickie postcard with Emmy-Kate’s plectrum, caught mid-air at Leeds Cockpit.
This is the story of pop music in the ’90s from the viewpoint of the unjaded fan.
Across the stairs from my indie cave, my little sister Kerstin brushes the pink hair of a My Little Pony and puts up images of Kylie Minogue. Eventually she migrates to the back room to allow me more time to consider important things like culture, alienation, boredom and despair.
Connection is a Song follows me from the sunny, hopeful days of early 1990, via the tissuey thinness, yet forever evocative ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (the Candy Flip version), through to the joyous days of Italia ’90 and a New Order summer that will, of course, end in tears. I grow up a little, but not much, and listen to East 17’s ‘Deep’ on a loop while covertly smoking from my friend Lisa’s window ledge. Later I faint while watching the Manic Street Preachers and come round to find myself covered in black feathers. Later again I find myself in deep, very personal, chat with another good friend, Yorkie, on nights spent on the passenger seat of a blue Mini Cooper parked in the marketplace. Radiohead are often in the cassette player (We do it to ourselves, we do), and only occasionally swapped for the Spice Girls or ‘Don’t Speak’ by No Doubt, which seems to say it all.
The point is that in this book I am very probably you. This is the story of small-town and suburban life: dreams of glamour and danger kept neatly in shoeboxes; secret crushes kept hidden in code; haircuts acquired via a woman on the high street who squints as I point to the Elastica CD inlay I have brought for guidance. This is the story of pop music in the ’90s from the viewpoint of the unjaded fan. I was never in the Groucho Club drinking champagne with Alex James, because I was in Superdrug buying Impulse body spray.
Below is one of my chapters – A funny feeling – for you to get a taste. If you like it, you can order a copy here. Signed copies are available from Rough Trade! And you can listen to a 60-track Connection is a Song playlist on Spotify here.
Thank you if you’ve ever read this blog.
A funny feeling
Summer is about to unfurl its first buds. The air feels light and warm, so we leave our coats at home. It’s the middle of May 1993, the day my older sister and I will find a pop music portal in the back of Asda. We’re on our fortnightly trip to the supermarket in Harrogate, the next town along from ours. We go with our mum to help her carry the shopping, each of us older sisters handed two carrier bags to heave onto the Asda bus. It always seems to tip us forwards, this stubby little vehicle. We lurch, unbalanced by potatoes, our hands grooved by harsh plastic handles. We don’t want to be seen; we are embarrassed not to have a car for this sort of mission. But these trips have their extra rituals, and today is a day that we will talk about in thirty years’ time.
As our mum circulates with her trolley, our younger sister Kerstin riding on the wheels, Claire and I go to the music department. There’s no one much around, so we try out all the buttons on the hi-fi systems: graphic equalisers, super woofers, bass boosters. Black plastic towers of our dreams: CD, FM radio and cassette; Sony, Kenwood, JVC. We want them but we can’t have them, so we retune them all to Radio 1.
We head for a sacred space – the top forty wall with its new releases propped in angled grooves, the smell of cardboard and little plastic fronds that scatter from the middle of a CD like stamen. Pop’s new blooms. Ace of Base top the chart with ‘All That She Wants’.
There are gaps outside the top ten, but the number one shelf is well stocked. Ace. Of. Base. In big red letters. The song comes in four versions: the one we all know from the radio, a 12-inch extended play, a bhangra edit and a ‘madness’ mix, which is frantic like a fairground ride, a sped-up mess of hi-hats and squelchy saxophones. I like it, but I can’t afford to buy it. Our eyes scan for other treasure, but I am distracted by the televisions hanging above our heads and all playing the same concert.
I gaze upwards, entranced, my eyes darting from screen to screen. A rumble of bass. There’s a familiar high-pitched synth – in minor key, a steady note – that’s finding me like a searchlight. A shudder travels down my spine. There’s a rush in my head too, but it comes with a strange feeling. A dark, excited, slightly guilty feeling. Sassy finger clicks beckon. I am staring at legs and torsos moving in sync, black sequins, greased muscles; a wiry, powerful body, and the song – which I already know, but not like this – is bouncing at me with metallic ruthlessness from Asda’s neon rafters. I glance around, feeling watched. Claire is looking through a bargain bin of tapes and hasn’t yet noticed the state that I am in.
*
Three years earlier, the spring of 1990, I’m hiding inside a football comic as the moons of ‘Vogue’ orbit school life. Everybody in my class is trying out voguing. Madonna’s new song is at number one. A hymn to the freedom of dancing, stolen from the subterranean Latino clubs of New York City, we have no idea what we are doing. We are kids in the top class of primary school attempting to do the moves. Neil is in his Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles jumper. I’m trying it in my grey school cardigan. We strike a pose in the playground, right-angled arms first, then with a spiralling motion, we flail our hands around our heads. Our lips are pursed and we freeze-frame our bodies between each shape imagining we’re in the music video.
There’s a status to knowing the lyrics, especially Madonna’s coolly delivered spoken-word segment (we’re not sure if it’s a rap), which we recite but don’t understand. Greta Garbo, and Monroe, Dietrich and DiMaggio. They might be the lost Mutant Turtles. The names feel good in our mouths. Ruth, who is sophisticated and has her own make-up, reckons there is a double meaning to the bit about Rita Hayworth giving good face. I do not try to work it out. The song is all around us, it’s the sound of now. Madonna does the pose in every magazine, we see her weekly on Top of the Pops, and we watch again on the Chart Show; those piercing eyes, her dark lips parted, the gap between her front teeth, and her bouncing blonde curls framed by vogueing hands. Her image, this Hollywood movie-pop-star superbeing, in black and white, is everywhere, and on a small round badge, free with Smash Hits, that I keep hold of but don’t yet wear.
*
Back in Asda, Claire is rooting through the discounted cassettes. I am still standing, staring, an alien sensation fi lling me. I look down at myself to check I’m still me. I’m in the clothes my mum has put me in. Green corduroy trousers. Hi-Tec trainers with a plastic logo. Madonna is in a pointy bra and tight black shorts with a chunky leather belt, her hair in blonde ringlets. She’s performing to a massive crowd that moves like a murmuration of starlings, somewhere far away. The venue is huge and echoey. The cameras cut to close-up adoring faces as she arches her back like a cat. Madonna, the dominatrix, with her army of dancers, is pushing her body towards them and towards me. Asda’s checkouts blip bleep in the background. I look around again and Claire is there, with a tape in her hand. She looks at me and then looks at what I’m looking at, with a blank expression. There’s a pause. ‘She gives me a funny feeling,’ I eventually tell my sister, my voice more wistful than I expect, but these are the fi rst words I fi nd to
explain myself.
Claire has found a Saint Etienne single that she read about just the other day – ‘Five best sounds of the moment’ – in the Independent on Sunday. Mum and Dad’s newspaper has given Claire, and me, an important lead. A clue, a sniff of fandom, a disco beam into our
new pop life. The cover is Battenberg-mysterious in pop-art stripes of pink and orange. ‘S.a.i.n.t’ spells itself in diagonal white letters. You may be in Asda, the tape says to us, but this is not Bon Jovi. Step this way, we’ll meet you on the other side, next to the café with the Pepsi sign.
*
Sarah Cracknell is dancing, superimposed over a cityscape. It’s probably London. Claire and I often dream of London and its strange place names. Portobello. Angel. Elephant. We imagine mugs of tea on plastic tablecloths in cafes with Italian names. In our minds, it’s always spring there.
We’re watching the Chart Show again on a Saturday morning. A heart-shaped buckle gleams from Sarah’s belt. She’s wearing a black choker around her neck. On her t-shirt, it says ‘Hysteric Glamour’, a fashion brand from Japan, says Claire, who reads Elle magazine and knows these things. Sarah is dancing in that floaty pop star way, but there’s something self-conscious about her too. She doesn’t terrify me like Madonna. Sarah is the singer in Claire’s new favourite band. Pete Wiggs, the keyboard player, is wearing a plastic golden crown that looks like it came from a children’s dressing-up box. A pretend king. Debsey, the other singer, shimmers in pink and white stripes. We want to dance like Debsey, with her Northern Soul shuffle and eyeliner.
Fluty synths flutter skywards. The video cuts away to Pete and Sarah sitting in a windswept Trafalgar Square. Pete, the fake monarch, is in cheap ermine. Sarah is the heartbroken girl of the lyrics. Someone’s done her wrong. It’s not fair, they don’t care. Eventually we see Bob, the other boy in the band, gazing intensely into the camera lens. These are people we’d like to meet. They seem to be pop stars playing at being pop stars.
*
Claire’s treasure turns out to be a beautifully sad ballad called ‘Hobart Paving’, released as a double A-side alongside ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, a cover of a ’70s track by a band called Candlewick Green. Saint Etienne’s is a disco-pop reworking, glittery but, like its sister track, mournful, a soundtrack to a film. Claire is a nearly grown-up, has her own money and buys the tape. Soon we are reunited with our mum and little sister. They know nothing of our dual pop epiphanies. I don’t know either, but I know that being a music fan is about much more than listening to songs. It’s about powerful feelings, adventure and exploration. A flirt with the unknown, it makes you secretive. I am falling in love with the idea – and danger – of Madonna, but I’m also visiting London’s parks and the dreams of another time and place with Saint Etienne.
After helping Mum unpack the shopping, Claire plays her new cassette to death. We peep out through the windows to see trains emerge from the dark mouth of the railway tunnel under the high street, streaks of light shooting by: people, going to cities. Outside my window, leaves from the sprawling Virginia creeper rustle in the night air. It is home to several birds’ nests. My room is directly above Claire’s room. When she hits play on her ghetto blaster, her soundtrack is my soundtrack too.
I have my own cassette deck, but I find myself listening through the floor instead as I lie on my bed, looking through the diagonal window up to the sky. Muffled, bass-heavy versions of Claire’s songs wire themselves to my brain. ‘Starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam . . .’ sings Prince. ‘Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine, and a side order of ham,’ I reply. Claire also listens to All About Eve, a folkrock band whose singer’s voice weaves up through the leaves on the side of the house. Claire spends hours by the window, making the same eyes with purple eyeshadow and powder, her face pale, surrounded by dark bangs of hair. But there’s something more direct about this other sound.
With each play of Claire’s new band – our new band, with the name of a French football team, St Etienne – the rising, twinkly notes of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ pierce the floorboards and shimmer through the carpet, into my mattress, up into my body, to my cheeks and into my ears. It’s there when I’m doing my homework, and again when I’m laying out my uniform on the banister, ready for the morning. I hear it as I pack my bag: heavy, plastic-covered textbooks for science and maths, soft pencils for art, a slim homework diary that my mum needs to sign, my pencil case and my calculator with its Tipp-Exed label. I don’t mind the song on repeat. In fact, I want it on repeat. I want to stay in the world of the song. ‘Who am I? I’m just a girl, who only wants to try to do what’s right.’
*
I dare to return to Madonna. I can’t shake the uneasy Asda feeling and so I fi nd a way to acquire her albums cheaply from the underground market in Harrogate. There’s a music stall at one end, with CDs and cassettes, with the feel of a forlorn tape carousel in a motorway service station. The cassettes are locked away in plastic columns that squeak as they spin. One of them lurches in and out of elliptical orbit as a man with a carrier bag swivels in search of Genesis. I save up to buy two Madonna albums at a time. But it’s awkward because only the shopkeeper, an older man with a permanently puzzled face, can unlock my choices. ‘At the top, the one where she’s in her bra,’ I mumble, my face feeling hot, crushed by the sound of my own voice, and pointing at Like a Virgin, hoping no one from school walks by. He wraps it in a brown paper bag, like market fruit, and hands me my change.
Saint Etienne are still very much my sister’s new thing and, unlike Madonna in her far-off mega dome, they bring with them a Monopoly board of reachable places and possibilities: London maps, cafés with squeezy bottles, a glimpse of the beehived ’60s viewed through the Technics decks of a rave. It’s through them that connections to other bands begin to unfurl – Denim, Kenickie, Pulp and Blur. Bands who sing about cups of tea and odd but harmless characters that we recognise from our town. This is a world we might already know. But Claire is four years older and leaving me behind.
The Madonna feeling hovers at the back of my mind. Is it a crush? Am I scared? I think it’s partly a terror that someone so sexual and confi dent can exist. I am afraid but I know I must follow the feeling to see what happens next. I see Madonna performing again when I’m round at Jenny’s house. I’ve cycled over, past the swimming pool and the school, confused by houses that all look the same, but relieved when I spy the crescent and her mum’s red Astra parked just beyond the tree on the front lawn where we climb and sit in summer. Jenny’s parents have satellite TV, an exotic thrill, and we binge watch the music channels while eating microwave chips in little boxes.
An old MTV Awards performance is on. This time Madonna is bewigged and powdered, swirling through a faux-Viennese ball. She sashays between dancers in silk pantaloons, a powerful grande dame in a bustle, wielding an ornate paper fan in perfect sync. It is ‘Vogue’, of course. Madonna is completely, terrifyingly, in control. She’s like no one else on Earth that I have seen, and she is telling me the dancefloor is my escape route.
Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s – out 9 May 2024.
Anna Doble, April 2024
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