Fancy a night out in 1994…?
GEN ❌ - remember what a glorious night out involved in the mid 90s..?
📵 No mobile phones - you arranged everything in advance… and stuck to it. Otherwise your Billy-no-mates mate would be angrily reversing the charges on the pub pay phone and giving you grief…
🎶 No Spotify or Apple Music - you got ready listening to vinyl - because that’s what *real* fans did. They *invested* in their favourite artists (then copied their albums onto blank tapes for free for all their mates…so…don’t be a hypocrite, Dave…)
💇♀️ No expensive salon prices. All anyone needed for the perfect going-out mop was a bottle of Sun In from Superdrug and the rave/grunge look was complete…(cos shades of burnt orange and primrose yellow were *totally* what you were going for all along…)
🍻 No extortionate bar prices - you could get a pint for less than a quid, sometimes chucking in a packet of cheese ‘n’ onion to boot…(you just disguised the cheesy smell with a blast of Body Shop Dewberry or Lynx Africa…)
🚬 No. More. Fear. You didn’t *really* believe ciggies could kill you. You’d just lived through the hellish 1980s public health campaigns and had enough of living in fear. So now, egged on by Terry Christian and Katie Pukrik (and possibly something dodgy stamped with a Japanese car manufacturer’s logo that your mate gave you down the pub), you truly believed you were INVINCIBLE
🧠 No mental health problems. Nope. None. Nobody had them back then. They didn’t exist. No. Not at all*.
*This is of course a lie. We lived in a thick hazy cloud of stigma and denial - regularly breaking down over a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 and Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ / Moby’s ‘Go’ as we desperately tried to stave off our anxiety, confusion and relentless existential crises. The 80s have a lot to answer for…
Halcyon days…. where we spent mornings pining for ways to cleanse our soul, daytimes pining for a bag of chips and a can of Lilt (too soon?) and evenings pining for the resurrection of our Lord, Kurt Cobain
It’s lovely from afar…
This lil clip is actually a book trailer I made for my 90s novels, The Twenty Seven Club and Parklife. It’s not sophisticated - it’s kind of scrappy and ‘homemade’ - just like the 90s. I hope you like it (sound up).
Please watch and enjoy. If you fancy having a read of the books and heading back to the 90s (minus the health risks), the link is below the video…