The 90s.
What a time to be leaving school, working in a clothes shop that sold Diesel, embarking on some college and listening to the best music a teenage guitarist could get since the 60s & 70s.
What a time to be an 18 year old.
I remember arguing with a friend of mine over the virtues of Oasis versus Metallica. What’s The Story (Morning Glory) had just been released and we were standing on Cross Avenue in Dublin. He was saying Metallica’s Black Album from 1991 was by far better than the new Oasis album. I was not. I was firmly in the Oasis-are-the-best-thin-since-the-Beatles-camp. Albeit a camp that I have subsequently left.
We remained friends but it was a close call.
This book was like reading reminder notes posted all over my fridge about some of the best days of my life. It has it all in there split out over the momentous year that was 1995, the same year that I left school.
That feeling.
It’s also a reminder of just how censorial and packaged up Rock’n’Roll and society has become. How nearly every word we speak let alone sing, can have negative and wide reaching connotations in our (puritanical) culture (wars). It also remind me how a good bunch of drug addled rock stars cranking out some great rock songs are now being labelled misoginistic, knuckle dragging, racist, and all sorts of other superlatives that tend to remind me of just how bored I am of the music and the arts these days. I am not saying any of these things are ok, I am saying we need space in our world to converse, learn and move on. We also need to remember people being ‘a product of their times’ and not necessarily responsible for their time.
Can you imagine if the Velvet Underground released Heroin in 2024? Imagine how many clutched pearls would be flying around the internet!?
Someone asked me the other day what I thought was the problem with today’s bands, my answer always contains “not enough drugs” and there are not enough mavericks.
I want my rock stars to be awful.
We’ve lost our way, we’re under so much surveillance now that even a recent night out in The Groucho Club a few weeks was a careful and quiet affair…
No more heroes any more
