Out of Time

Now, their elderliness comes as a surprise. How careful they are as they get out of the car, the time it takes, the probing for the pavement with extended foot, how they grip the door frame to pull themselves up and out. Every time they come to stay, and I notice their slowed movements, I have to readjust my image of them, overlay it with the reality. They have changed shape. My dad, once slim as a reed, is rounder. My mum has grown thinner. Their hair, their teeth, all different. They have the accessories of the senior citizen. Age-related discount cards. Spectacles: off-the-shelf, from Boots. Mouth plates, with odd teeth on them, like sparse standing stones. Hearing aids. Sudoku.

Despite all this, they are not as old to me as they once were. When I was a child, when my parents were younger than I am now, they were ancient. But now the gulf is not as wide.

I knew that my parents – my adults – were not like other grown-ups. They were special because they were mine. They loved me, as I loved them. Though I couldn’t truly fathom how they could love each other – not as a separate unit, not without us children to mediate, to inspire passion. I loved my parents in a devoted but patronizing way, convinced that nobody else could want such battered specimens. They were like old teddies. The only people who valued them were those who’d cared for them for a long time.

Other children’s adults were bewildering. Their nostrils were enormous – you could see the hairs in there, sometimes the bogeys. They breathed at you and asked you questions to which there were no proper answers, such as: Haven’t you grown? How’s school? (I do this now.)

They told you off for different faults from the ones your parents chose. Leave your shoes out the back! Don’t blow bubbles in your drink! Use a teaspoon for the sugar! The women wore make-up that made their faces all slidy, the men dressed exclusively in shades of mud-brown, from shoes to spectacle frames. Those slurpy noises they made when they drank their tea, the ‘oof’ when they sat down, said in a comedy voice, to get a giggle. How old were they? Who knew? 25? 42? 117?

At junior school, I loved a few teachers. Mr Buckley, who had a beard and liked a laugh. Miss Braben, who taught us stories. Matronly, shaped like a peg doll, with a shelf bosom and padded hips. Once, she stopped the class to tell us all to look through the window. There was a horse, somehow free to roam south Manchester, galloping past the school, sweaty and wild-eyed. Its enormous head flicked and twisted through the air, its legs glistened; an astonishing sight. We stared. Then we went back to I Am David.

But most teachers – most adults – were scary. Horror-story characters. The headmaster resembled a giant winged insect, striding around in his billowing black gown, leading us in succinct, reasonable prayer at assembly: ‘Dear Lord, we ask you to grant us … a GOOD day … Amen.’ When I went to senior school, there were science teachers with stains on their shirts; a maths teacher who smelt so rank that, when you asked a question, you held your breath as he talked you through what you should be doing. He crouched down to check we understood, kind, careful man that he was; we let out our breath dramatically when he moved on.

One teacher had an enormous pus-filled spot that moved daily from the side of his nose to the space between his eyebrows. One, who taught sports, a woman, made sexy jokes that we didn’t quite understand. One, a Latin teacher, eccentric and funny, was so well-known as a pervert that whenever he told me, or any of my gang of five girlfriends, to stay behind for being naughty, another of us remained too. We didn’t even talk about it, just made sure there were two of us. We backed around the desks as he advanced.

Though I liked many of them – the Latin teacher was one of my favourites – they were all, fundamentally, repellent. Coarse, bloated, unsmooth, hairy. But it wasn’t just their looks. They were Other, a different species from me and my friends, and we were happy with that. I was an anti-adult bigot. I believed in child/grown-up apartheid. I didn’t want to think of them as anything other than alien. I didn’t want them to think of me at all.

Even as I grew into my early twenties, adults remained off-putting. They operated outside us, in their different world. We were in our own gated community, within theirs. This suited us. We looked inwards, we liked our prison. But sometimes our elders would crash across the invisible fences. It was always uninvited, always a surprise.

During the summer I was 21, I worked for a few weeks teaching English as a foreign language in a residential school in Kent. The school was like a stately home, and we taught children from all lands: Italy, Japan, Israel, what was then Yugoslavia. Any child whose rich parents chose to go off shopping in London rather than risk a week’s holiday with their offspring.

At the end of the three weeks, there was a staff party. All of us teachers got drunk; I jumped, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. In the corridor by the kitchens, another teacher, our team leader, a man in his forties, said something irrelevant and plonked his lips on mine. He had a moustache. It was like having your mouth explored by an adventurous damp nailbrush – as sexy as that.

That same summer, I used my TEFL money, plus cash I’d earned as a cleaner, to get a train to Barcelona with three girlfriends. We hung out on the Ramblas, at a square where tourists mingled with black-clad heroin addicts. Another middle-aged man with another moustache: this one grabbed me on the way to some restaurant toilets.

Why did drunk older men think that snogging was an inevitable consequence of having fun? The way they kissed wasn’t sexual, but controlling. It was as though they clamped their mouths on yours to shut you up. But we hadn’t even noticed them before they talked to us.

Adults are outsiders in young people’s real lives, until we make ourselves known, by forcing our way in, by telling them what to do. Until we blunder over, unwelcome gate-crashers at the party.

On the front of a magazine, I see this: ‘Adults Suck and Then You Are One’. A slogan on a jumper. I would like to own this jumper.

Because now I am an adult – one of those inappropriate, frightening, physically bizarre people. I’m quite good at talking to kids, but isn’t there something creepy about that? There’s no hiding my sagging skin, my English teeth. I don’t stick my tongue down anyone’s throat unless I’m married to them. But when I grab my son’s friends as a joke, pretend to chase them round the kitchen for a kiss, COME HERE, LITTLE BOY, MWAH MWAH MWAH, a lumbering dinosaur great-aunt, I wonder: Is this funny or am I properly freaking them out?

What is it about adulthood that is still so unappealing? I don’t want to go back to school, with its bewildering, kid-enforced social rules, so rigid they couldn’t be broken, so fluid they changed every day. But I don’t want to be like the grown-ups I grew up with. So … separate, in such an unappealing world. Dull. Rule-bound. Constricted by paying bills and by convention. Even in what you wore: no one had many clothes then, and what adults wore was practical, designed not to stand out, except on special occasions. Despite the outré flamboyance of some grown-ups’ going-out wear, their working clothes were joyless: suits and sensible skirts, overalls, pinnies.

Adults, teenagers and children were all demarcated when I was young. But something happened between then and now. Children got older (they gained status within the family) and parents got younger – if not actually younger, then in the way they looked, their approach to life. Everyone’s a teenager now, and for a lot longer. The teenager has become revered, absorbed into our normal. Parents and their older children go to the same places to eat, to dance, to hang out. They listen to the same music.

Those teenage tenets of non-conformity, of staying true to your beliefs, rather than compromising them for an easy life, of rebelling against rules that you know are worthless and mean nothing … These are now the attitudes that we all respect. Even in adults, even in politicians. Authenticity is all, and authenticity means an anti-establishment, punching-up strength of character. Tedious, conventional adulthood, that refuge of phoneys and scoundrels, of lecherous old men with moustaches, of the boring, the selfish, the power-hungry – that doesn’t cut it any more. We have extended youth so far that its values have become universal and nobody interesting can ever fully grow up.

3. Never Mind the 90s

Back then, culture was relentless. New music, new ways of dressing and dancing and being would rise with sudden force, crash and break and sweep away all that had gone before. You would see a band in some horrible dive, or hear a track on a dance floor and that was it: everything changed. And somehow everyone knew about it, though there was no internet, no mobile phones. There were magazines, but they came out monthly, or once a week. There were pagers, but they were for drug dealers or on-call doctors, not for telling everyone about a brilliant club that had opened, a squat that was holding free parties, a place where it was all going off. There were radio shows that helped, record shops to hang around in, hand-drawn flyers, but really … We just all knew.

It felt like we were constantly on the cusp of something. A revolution. A change. We’d push at doors and they would open easily. We would be let into places that only weeks before had kept us outside, pulling faces through the windows. And the new kept on coming.

The beginning can be so enthralling, so thrilling, you forget that, for anything to start and thrive, another thing must weaken. The end of the old way is still a death. Something fades, gives up, sits down and never gets up again. Or it fights and dies anyway.

In 1988, I got my first proper job – not cleaning, not TEFL, not working in a shop – and it was the best job ever. I started working for Smash Hits magazine, as a writer. In my job interview, the editor asked me if he should put Elton John on the cover of the new issue (Elton was Number 1 at the time). I said, ‘No way, you should put Brother Beyond on instead.’ That was my lucky break: the editor had, in fact, just done that very thing. I got the job because I wasn’t too far from being one of the pop fans who pored over Smash Hits. This was because I was a pop fan who pored over Smash Hits.

It was the era of Kylie and Bros, and the Smash Hits office was above the BOY shop in Carnaby Street. On my first day, I arrived at 9 a.m., and had to sit on the step outside for an hour until anyone else turned up. Once in, I was installed on a spare chair, in front of an electric typewriter, within a room that appeared to have been attacked by a litter bomb. Every single surface was piled high with paper and 12-inch singles and cassettes and overflowing ashtrays.

Almost all of the staff were from outside London – from Perth, Dublin, Belfast, Dundee, Liverpool – and none of them seemed so different from me. I kept looking around the room, peering between the teetering debris, wondering where the grown-up was – the suit, the scary person in charge. There wasn’t one. Perhaps that was why everyone stayed so late. They were having fun: a new concept when it came to work, for me. I soon joined in, and I didn’t really leave that room – not during weekday daylight hours – for the next two years.

The start of the 90s was marked by my flat burning down. It was a rented flat, three storeys above a pharmacy in south London. At the time, the road was a market street, full of fruit and veg stalls run by shouty locals. On weekends we would wait until the market was ending, then go out and blag cheap vegetables.

I shared the flat with four friends. Two of them plus another mate were in when the fire started. It was very quick. (‘In the time it takes to build a spliff but not light it,’ said D.) They had to climb out of a back window onto a roof. They were still in their pyjamas.

We never found out how the fire had started, though we had our suspicions. It had begun in N’s room, and she favoured floaty curtains, also candles, also leaving the iron on. But we all smoked, so who knows? Her room was at the front, on the first floor, directly above the shop. The fire took hold there and raged upwards, the central staircase that spiralled up the building acting like a very efficient chimney. The blaze took out every single room. Except mine, right at the top at the back. I’d shut my door when I’d left. It was a bank holiday weekend and I’d gone to see my parents.

N phoned me at my mum’s. She said: ‘I’ve got nothing left. It’s back to the brick in my room. We left your window open to let out the smell of smoke.’

That night someone climbed in through my window and robbed the flat of what was left: Levi’s jeans, Technic decks, trainers. Also my tickets to see Prince. I told the police which seats they were for. I thought they would send someone to pick up the ticket-holders, arrest and question them about the robbery. Maybe an undercover officer in Nike Jordans and a Keith Haring T-shirt. They didn’t do anything.

When I got back into the flat, I clambered up the floors, thinking I could salvage stuff. But everything was covered with soot so thick that it wouldn’t come off when you tried to clean it. It just streaked and striped, ingrained itself deeper. The water was cold, the electricity cut. In the bathroom, the disposable razors on the side of the bath had twisted in the heat, curled up like small orange snakes.

I climbed the black stairs to my room and shut the door. Nothing much in there had changed. Some of the photos had fallen down, my trainers and tickets were gone. But otherwise it was exactly as I had left it. It felt like a dream. Around the top of the door, scorch marks stretched, pushing out from the frame and on to the wall. They looked like the black fingers of a monster, scrabbling to get in.

After the fire, everything was different. We were uprooted, homeless. It felt liberating, rather than sad. That group of people split, some coupled up, some left London. I slept on mates’ floors. I left Smash Hits, for reasons I can’t remember now, and I bought a black London taxi. Its top speed was 55 m.p.h. I drove to France in it with N. We played the Stone Roses’ ‘One Love’ as we chugged, very slowly, into Paris.

But we fell out over a bloke. So I drove around France by myself for a month, met up with friends of friends, slept wherever they were, or bedded down in the back of the taxi on the floor. I spent a lot of time on my own in it, rumbling along long, straight roads through tall, straight trees, winding across plains, over mountains. In the evenings, I would drive into the middle of towns, park up and go out to the local bars. Play pool. Talk to people. One time, when I woke, mucky and hungover and too hot, having parked in a lovely quiet square, a whole market had been put up around the cab.

When I got back to London, I met someone who became my boyfriend. I stayed with him in a mate’s room, with all my mate’s stuff still in it. Our stuff made no impression; we didn’t have many possessions to add. When my dad came to visit, he cried.

I sold my taxi to an NME photographer who drove it to the south of Spain and swapped it for a bag of Es. I had no job, nowhere proper to live. Everything was in flux.

All around was fun, though. Raves in film studios that you got to at midnight, locked out until everyone stormed the doors and you were carried in on the tide of people. Gigs: small, drunk, violent events where the lead singer would throw himself off speaker stacks and roll around on the floor and the drummer turned his head to be sick offstage and wouldn’t miss a beat. Afternoons in Soho parks and pubs that would carry on into the evening and some do over east: grubby and empty then, apart from the beigel shops. A squat party at Brockwell Park lido where people were climbing over the walls to get in, sliding down the drainpipes in the corners. I saw a bloke on a bike ride straight into the swimming pool. And then try to carry on cycling along the pool floor.

There were sudden blags – a mate passing an ID bracelet past the PR frontline over and over until we were all in backstage. Festivals where it didn’t rain and you nicked a pass so you could park backstage, with pop stars arriving in helicopters right next to your tent. And you lost all your mates and then you found one, at 6 a.m., trying to put on a top hat by placing it upside down on the ground and falling onto it head first.

Everything kept getting swept aside. Acid house swept away rare groove. Madchester took over. Indie bands – shoegazing and baggy – were suddenly irrelevant when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out. Somehow everything was allowed, except poodle rock and bad pop. Dance music was mushrooming and morphing, taking in rock and hip-hop and ambient and prog and perfect pop and film scores and songs from children’s TV. It churned them all up and spat them out. The beats got faster, darker; the sounds became scary.

Some time in the middle of the decade, Parklife and Definitely Maybe and then The Great Escape and (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory became a competition, and that side of stuff died, really. Britpop became Cool Britannia and was hijacked by the tabloids. Antics that seemed like a laugh when they happened in front of a small group of like-minded people were suddenly a national talking point. Jarvis jumping onstage during Michael Jackson’s performance to make fart signs came from the same instinct as sometime Pulp member Antony Genn streaking during Elastica’s gig at Glastonbury that same year. But it was different because more people were watching. People who didn’t think the same way.

Still. At the beginning of the decade you would see the Roses and the Mondays on Top of the Pops and it would feel like victory. Or Jarvis would wipe the floor with everyone on Juke Box Jury and you would punch the air. Or the Chemical Brothers would get to Number 1, with a video where a girl became a saucer-eyed dancing devil … Something was changing. Someone as quixotic and wild and other as Tricky became a genuine pop star for a few moments.

You couldn’t quite believe that the stuff that was brilliant – and it was patently brilliant – was pushing through into the centre, that the mainstream was taking notice, that bands you knew were amazing but off-beam and awkward were being adopted by everyone. But they were. And the feeling it brought was … correct. We knew we were right.

There was a slow creep upwards during the 80s and early 90s until, whoosh, everything tipped over the edge. And we were rollercoastering, zooming down, arms in the air, our bodies whipped to the side and flung up so quick that we lost our stomachs as we flipped over and over.

No one really had a proper job. Some people were not working much at all, doing the odd day helping out at a mate’s promotions company, or taking shifts at a record store. I was freelancing, writing for Smash Hits, and then other magazines: Q, Time Out, Select, The Face.

Select, a magazine that wrote about alternative music in a pop way, was on the floor above Smash Hits. It was populated by young men, which was a change for me – Smash Hits was mostly women. The Select boys knew a lot about music in a trainspottery way. The only way to push past their knowledge, to be noticed at all, was to talk a lot and never sit down. So I did: I stood up for days and days, chatting, making jokes. I wrote at home, at night.

Select, like Smash Hits before it, was a laugh. But unlike Smash Hits, which had a big circulation and a never-ending array of pop stars willing to be photographed with pineapples on their heads, Select had a limited star squad. The same people on rotation, really. Our job was to come up with interesting feature ideas, because there weren’t enough bands who’d talk to us. We did features on groupies and ecstasy, and how porn was taking over. I wrote pieces about bootleg T-shirts, about stars’ other halves. Once, an entire issue run of 60,000 copies had to be pulped because an article on legal highs included Feminax. The publishers thought a reader might overdose and die (on Feminax! Even if you snorted it, as my friend Gavin did, you only got a little tickle).

I wrote for The Face 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.