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Weight
Hmm. Getting a little harder to shift …
Music
Rubbish now. How are you meant to find anything good in this sea of overchoice? No, I do not want another fricking app
Time
Just gone
Introduction
Don’t Grow Up – It’s a Trick (#u83ea2665-dfc5-55b9-b89d-a5b454d29081)
In the summer of 1991 I was waitressing at Pizza Hut on Bournemouth High Street. It was before I went up to university, and I was living at home, saving everything I could to go backpacking around some third world country. In the background R.E.M.’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ was playing, as was the KLF’s ‘Last Train to Trancentral’. The Soviet Union was breaking up, Operation Desert Storm had come to an end, and Sega had released Sonic the Hedgehog. Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web project, but not many people noticed. It was also raining rather a lot.
Those waitressing wages were not great, nor were the tips, but they were enough to fund an adventure around India, where my money would go far and my experiences would be all my own. Well, mine and all the other thousands of backpackers shacked up beside me in the Lonely Planet hostels. Once there, I would live in tie-dye trousers, wonder at the extraordinary cacophony of religions, dance at full moon parties, drink a lot of chai latte and inevitably buy some dodgy drapes.
That summer I was also reading Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X. Only recently published, it was already something of a hit. In the book, Coupland portrayed our generation as a listless, directionless, cynical bunch of slackers who drifted from one McJob to the next in search of a thrill. It perfectly encapsulated my life at the time, as I saw no inconsistency between serving the Four Cheese pizza to a bunch of post-pub Bournemouth lads and studying Ancient Greek at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. That was me, that was us.
So what has happened to Generation X? Have we been forgotten? If you check your emails and Facebook feeds, your Google alerts and hashtags, you will see that most conversation now is about this group of people called Millennials. Millennials, we are reminded constantly, work hard, are annoyingly entitled, love an artisanal coffee and a skinny jean, and are changing the culture, reshaping society and rewriting the rule book of living.
Or everyone goes on about Boomers. How they’ve got all the money and all the houses and really are only just getting started, because everyone lives for hundreds of years now, and their big, fat final-salary pensions mean they have decades of Saga holidays ahead. Not cruises – no one goes on cruises any more, that’s so Pensioners from the Last Century. Boomers go wolf trekking in Eritrea and swipe right on silver Tinder. Pass the Châteauneuf, old girl!
Where are Generation X in all this? The generation also nicknamed ‘Middle Youth’ because we were young and cool for so long, and so good at it no one could beat us at our game. No one, that is, till those pesky digital natives came along, who were suddenly so much better at the internet and stuff, and the Recession hit, which turned the tables, and quite a few of us have kids now, which makes the pursuit of cool and youth look a tiny bit tragic. And tragic is the ultimate Middle Youth crime.
But, I would argue (particularly as I am one) – Generation X are still cool! Cool not just by a hierarchy of self-expression ranked through our fashion, music, design and friend choices. The important thing about our coolness is our irony. We fully embrace irony, in as much as we see things exactly for what they are, and we stand just a little apart from them. It makes us more knowing, and we value that. We can even do it about ourselves – we laugh at our own Middle Youthness. The only slightly self-aware Millennial is Lena Dunham. But we are Caitlin Moran, Tina Fey, Sharon Horgan, Simon Pegg, Amy Poehler and Sheryl Sandberg.
(Okay, maybe not Sandberg. One doesn’t imagine a whole lot of irony going down there. For those of you who have never read Lean In because the thought of it makes you feel tired: I am told it is a very good female tract on living and not bossy at all. I myself have ordered several copies on the internet. They are stacked, like intellectual trophies, next to my bed with all the other books I should read and don’t because I’m too busy being TATT (tired all the time) or more likely, leaning in, checking my Instagram feed. By the way, it was a Millennial who invented Instagram. Kevin Systrom. He was 26 years old.)
It is not just irony that has distinguished us, but our liberalism. Britain today is a very different place to the country we inherited 25 years ago. Yes, many people have grumbled about ‘political correctness’ along the way, but the facts are we currently have a female prime minister and female leaders of the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. The US voted a black president into the White House and narrowly missed voting in a woman; senior political party members, heads of business and Church are now openly gay. Race, sexuality and gender politics have come a long way, thanks to us.
We have also placed a much higher value on emotional intelligence and happiness – everyone you know might be retraining as a psychotherapist, but that has given us the tools to be better behaved to our loved ones, to know ourselves a little more.
We have advanced the idea that looking after ourselves extends not just to the emotional, but the physical too. Okay, so dancing all night wasn’t quite the fitness training we wanted it to be, but we all do triathlons, bike rides and bootcamps now. We try and eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, we know sugar is bad, we check our breasts for lumps and men even know where their prostate is (if they haven’t actually found it yet).
We were the first to make food a mainstream cultural art form, to democratise fashion, to insist on a soundtrack, to recraft our living spaces, to search meaningfully for spirituality outside the confines of the Church, to fuel the proliferation of art, television, restaurants and nightclubs. Our love of rave went on to inspire the hip hotel trend of dressing every lobby like a chillout room, while our love of travelling has fuelled a truly globalised culture in food, fashion and design.
Our social fixes are charities like Comic Relief, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, War Child, Smart Works: organisations that actively seek to redress the inequalities in the world. This is what we care about the most. Fired by youth and entitlement, in its early years of power Generation X set out to create a world that did not judge you for your colour, your nationality, who you fancied or what sex you were. It is your values, your ideas and your thoughts that distinguish you instead.
And now, that world is beginning to look a little shaky. The year 2016 brought democratic earthquakes in the shape of Brexit and Trump that look like they may be undermining much of the progress we made and fought to achieve. And we are no longer young. We are, more or less, in our forties. And being in your forties certainly makes you look in the mirror and reflect. So this seems a timely moment for something of a calibration. Where have we come from (good times!), and where are we going (uncertain ones)? It’s hard to have a moment in front of the mirror these days that doesn’t feel tinged with nostalgia. For instance, it is rare you go ‘Look – wrinkles. What fabulous proof that I am so wise from experience and laughing so hard.’ Mostly it’s ‘Wrinkles – you bastards. Why is the Protect and Perfect not working?’ And you reach for another green juice.
The rebellion we felt in our adolescence and early youth is still there, but what are we going to do with it now? Have we really shaped society in the way we all wanted and, now we are in positions of power, how are we going to lay things down for ourselves and our children in the future?
Are we riven by midlife crisis or are we, in fact, only just coming of age? Excitingly, our best could be yet to come. As the designer Alice Temperley puts it: ‘I’ve got to the point where I feel I’ve grown up. Where I realise what’s wrong and what’s right and what’s important in life. I’ve worked hard to get to this point and now I feel poised to take it to the next stage.’
Danny Goffey, the musician once of Supergrass and now Vangoffey (Sample song: ‘Trials of the Modern Man’), points out it was not Coupland who coined the term ‘Generation X’ but Billy Idol, the musician from Middlesex who used the name for his punk band in the Seventies. Idol had sourced the title from one of his mother’s books, a study by two English journalists on Mod subculture in the Sixties. The interviews detailed a culture of promiscuous and anti-establishment youth, something Coupland saw as characterising the kids he was describing in his novel. Generation X is the child of the sixties, the child of punk. These movements before us evolved us, their values sit deep inside us.
Nowadays demographers commonly assign the X generation to those born between the Sixties and early Eighties; those after are known as Generation Y, or Millennials, and our kids are to be known as Generation Z, or Centennials (born after the turn of the century). Meanwhile our parents are the postwar generation, or Baby Boomers, born in the aftermath of the shattering devastation in the middle of the last century. Theirs has been a life of relative peace and prosperity, and they have benefited from enormous capital growth and social investment. The gap now between their experience and those of Millennials is perfectly illustrated in average income – despite being retired, Boomers have a higher income than the average working Millennial. Meanwhile it is the Millennials (and of course X-ers) who are paying those Boomers their income in the form of pensions.
What makes X-ers really interesting, though, is that we had the Nineties. The last decade before the internet hit, before smartphones connected us to everything, at every moment; the time when further education was free, housing was just about affordable, and, crucially, when wave after wave of youth culture crashed on our shores, each new wave a brilliant reaction to the one that went before. Oh kids, you missed out there. And Boomers – sorry you were too busy working to really enjoy them.
The Nineties were an adventure in cool. Out of grunge – a literal rejection of everything that came before it – came heroin chic (yes, drugs are cool – even the bad bits!), Britpop, logo-mania, Paul Smith, the Inspiral Carpets, John Galliano, Soho House, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, the Gallaghers, Quaglino’s, The Word, Blur, Marc Jacobs, Marco Pierre White, the Turner Prize, Loaded magazine, pickled sharks, rave, Liam ’n’ Patsy, Helmut Lang, superclubs, the Wonderbra, The Big Breakfast, Trainspotting, Chris Evans, Pulp, the Spice Girls, Tate Modern – I could go on.
In one short summer – let’s take 1997 – Tony Blair was elected, the Prodigy released The Fat of the Land, Oasis dropped Be Here Now and Diana died. That was in just four months, like the arc of a single night: the build, the high, the comedown. We were crowned Cool Britannia, because right then and there, there was nowhere else in the world culturally more exciting.
There is no such roll call of cool that exists for the Noughties (Ellie Goulding, anyone?), or indeed the decade we are currently in, because instant access and transparency now conspire to make culture a pretty homogeneous mass. There are no definitive fashion trends or musical movements as everyone has access to everything everywhere and tribalism has died. Working-class culture is pretty much consigned to the scrapheap as changes to the welfare state mean there is no lifeline on which working-class artists or musicians or writers can survive and thrive. They must instead take a zero hours contract in a call centre. The Nineties, however, were the product of the disenfranchisement our generation felt during the Thatcher years, strong responses to a changing economy and society.
This was reinforced by our methods of communication: in the Nineties we physically went places to meet up, swap hairstyles and be cool, whether it was a club or a record shop or a field or a street or a store. We didn’t connect on chatrooms or on WhatsApp groups. We did it face to face, in places where we met other people who expressed themselves like us, and we exchanged ideas and hung out with each other and felt our rebellion communally. Together, in self-selected communities, we practised large-scale irreverence and cynicism of everything outside of our own group, but together we were fiercely strong and loyal.
Physically showing up to something gave our communities a validity and a value that today’s virtual communities cannot share. Nineties tribes were not just about how you looked – they were also about how you actually behaved, where you went, who you were with, what you did when you got there. You couldn’t tell lies about that, like you can now on social media – there were no filters or hashtags. Communities were something you did together, on a dancefloor or in a pub, sharing a feeling, not alone in a bedroom, staring into a screen all on your own. As a result our communities, whether that be our friendship group or our cultural tribe, were awesomely strong and meaningful to us (while they lasted). We were the new, with the big ideas and the modern outlook and the future.
Yuppies, a job for life, Thatcherism – by the Nineties they were all over; a broken dream. The crash and Black Friday put paid to that, as did the housing market and negative equity and all those redundancies. Money was for losers, with hideous values – experience was what we valued. And government? It gave us the Poll Tax and the Criminal Justice Bill. Instead, we chose the Summer of Love and ecstasy and eco protesters and Swampy. We were Greenpeace and gay culture (not everyone was gay, not yet – it took the Millennials to progress that far, but lots of us were and the rest were our best friends), and we used marketing, PR, television and festivals to take everything that was cool and below the radar and counter-cultural and make it ours. We took it and celebrated it and commoditised it and marketed it and turned it into the mainstream – our mainstream.
Our idea of family was more fluid. Weddings got bigger and bigger as getting married became less about commitment and more about making a social statement and throwing a party. Sex and sexuality loosened, Europe opened up and cheap travel blossomed – no one batted an eyelid at a weekend in Prague, a night in Paris or the NY-LON (New York–London) commute. As the Nineties wore on, our liberal values became common currency. We were changing the world by the day and fashioning it in our own image.
London began, like a gravitational field, to attract everything from around it and pull it in as it accelerated into the future. Wealth creation was moving into the capital and the cultural benefits we enjoyed from Manchester, Bristol, Stoke, Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and more, were hoovered up. As Alex James, the bassist from Blur, says, ‘Although Britpop made us cringe and Cool Britannia made us want to self-harm, we were just so lucky to live in this tiny country with such a huge city in it. For the whole of my adult life, London has been the engine driving everything. At the beginning of the Nineties I arrived in London for my first term at Goldsmiths College. I’m getting out of my parents’ car with a guitar and Graham Coxon [also a member of Blur] is getting out of his parents’ car with a guitar and that was it – fasten your seat belt! It was, and still is, the place where anything can happen and dreams can come true. And they do, nightly.’
The Nineties were the launch pad for Generation X and we came out of it thinking we were pretty special. But not everything that happened turned out to be so good, and there were consequences that we are only just now beginning to realise. I’m 44, I surfed the media circus through my own career until, in 2002, I landed at the Sunday Times Style magazine where, as editor, I tracked the lifestyles of our generation for the next twelve years. Constantly on the lookout for a fresh trend, I was always baffled that it was our age group that continued to define the culture. I had grown up with The Face and Arena, two great channels to cool that did not survive the arrival of magazines like my own.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to find something unknown, or below the radar, as our generation was busy defining everything and selling it back to everyone. We quite categorically refused to make way for those coming up behind us, by giving them nothing to rebel against. The kiss of death, the goodbye to cool was if your mum thought it was good. Rock ’n’ roll, punk, gender bender, acid house and grunge were not liked by parents at all, which conferred on them instant cool. But as eternal Peter Pans, Generation X-ers have never found anything the kids have done distasteful. We share clothes now with our daughters, get breast jobs done together, even get matching tattoos. What’s the glamour in doing a line of cocaine if your dad does it? So the generation below have had to become dull, they have had no choice. They drink less, have less sex, go out less. The best they have come up with is ‘normcore’.
So are we, finally, in our forties, past it now? As Millennials and tech power us even faster into the future, are we going to get left behind? Many of us are embracing it, plenty of us feel paranoid about it, and some of us are being total dicks about it. One technology executive recently wrote: ‘Millennial is a nice stamp that marketers use, but it’s not necessarily about age. It’s more about looking at the things you have an affinity with, regardless of age. I’m 47, but I class myself as a Millennial because I have Millennial tendencies. I’m a lot more active on social media than my peers, for instance.’
God forbid we should be the sad dad trying to breakdance with the kids, but then how do we make sure our experience and the lessons we have learned meld productively with the passion, energy and excitement of the new youth? Millennials are not going to be able to pay us the sorts of pensions we are currently paying out to Boomers, so if that’s the case, how are we going to find the roles in society where we can work side by side and really benefit each other? How can we ensure we are not ‘bedblocking the best jobs’ (as one headline had it recently) but instead creating opportunities for all, enjoying what everyone has to offer and finding real, meaningful roles for ourselves, our parents and our youngers? What can we teach Millennials from our experiences about balancing work, life and family, job satisfaction, social cohesion, emotional stamina, physical fitness and social values?
And just as importantly, how are we going to cope with life from here on in? What’s it going to look like for us post menopause (Christ!) or when we qualify for our free bus pass? The world is in disruption – our liberalism is under attack on both sides of the Atlantic, the model for everything from fashion to news is breaking down, Christianity is in rapid decline, extremism is on the up, whole populations are on the move, happiness levels are at their lowest ever recorded – how will we emerge?
What I do know is that I will still be working to pay off my mortgage (at least I have one), with no pension to support me in my beach habit (it won’t be golf). Sometimes I put on a miniskirt and (a lot of) make-up and I can go to a club where no one can see very well and I can party all night – but then it takes me a week to recover. I know the hippest place in London to order a slider and I can name Beyoncé’s last single and the first one to leave One Direction (Zayn, my friends). I am on Snapchat (don’t use it) and still collect rare trainers, but the truth is I am also a knackered mum who gets her kicks from surfing the specials on Ocado and shouting at the neighbours to keep the noise down.
Occasionally I’ll book a weekend away, but I’ll look forward to it not for the sex, but the sleep. I still go to Ibiza but these days it’s the yoga teacher’s number I have on Favourites. I have Mary Beard and Madonna’s unauthorised biography on my bedside table. (Mary Beard is filed under Sheryl Sandberg. Madonna’s biog is well thumbed.) I have even begun to order soup for starters.
I live life in between young and old. I am neither Boomer nor Millennial. I am still an absolutely cynical witch who likes to do naughty things and wants to burn down the establishment – except, I am the establishment now. From government ministers to CEOs, the family GP to my kids’ headmistress – they are all my age. Once the rulebreakers, now we are the rulemakers. Like a zombie, I teach my kids to be good and recite their times tables and respect their teachers and work hard so they can go to university and get a good job. For what? – as I might have asked 25 years ago.
So are we just a bunch of directionless cynics who have now hit middle age and feel a bit sad and conformist? Do we know what we’re doing next, or are we not sure, as all the exciting stuff seems to have migrated to either side of us? How have we retained our rulebreaking and innovation, how have we changed the world and how are going to go on changing it? Did we free ourselves from the daily grind as we always hoped we would, or just create a new cage to live in? And do appearances – the threads, the ’do, the language, the who, the what and the where – really still matter?
Here’s my evidence. You decide.*
* Rule Number 1 of a features journalist: it takes three examples to make a trend. And once you’ve got a trend, you’ve got a feature. Features journalism is based entirely on subjectivity and three randomly encountered examples. For the purposes of this book I have interviewed slightly more than three people, but I am claiming equal subjectivity – mine, and theirs. Any time you get distracted, just turn to the Appendix where you can learn fun things about the handful of people I talked to. It’s nice, easy reading – what we features journalists would call a ‘sidebar’.
1
I Was Eight in the Eighties (#ulink_f92489ed-dc6a-55ec-b958-a834981965f5)
I was eight when the Eighties began. Too young to live them, but old enough to be knocked around by what was going on. I got my info from John Craven on Newsround, Bruce Parker on South Today and Smash Hits magazine. I remember the Falklands War and the sinking of the Belgrano, probably around the time Wham! entered my orbit. Of course, Thatcher was a consistent backdrop (my parents, traumatised by the economics of the Seventies and being utterly broke, were breathless for her and would not hear a word against her in the house). The miners’ strike was a thing, but it was a long way away from Bournemouth, where my dad had taken up a job as a vascular surgeon. He was a big believer in the NHS being run by passion and vocation, and the importance of public services, but Maggie’s privatisation schemes were all good – and private medical practice served my dad pretty well.
Being an adolescent in Bournemouth was actually really fun: there were beaches in the summertime and boys with boats, there was a Wimpy bar that served Knickerbocker Glories and a cinema or two (I saw Desperately Seeking Susan on my first date), and there was an ice rink where my friends would have birthday parties. We’d hang out on bikes in the park – I had a Gresham Flyer, which was denim blue. My brother’s BMX had a much comfier seat but the handlebars were a bit weird.
Then a roller disco opened and that felt pretty edgy – a daytime nightclub and sexy women skating round in miniskirts and legwarmers. One was a steward named Hayley, with long, blonde hair and a pneumatic body. She had a red pleated miniskirt like the women in Bucks Fizz wore in ‘Making Your Mind Up’ and she was the prettiest girl in the rink. Ask any boy from Bournemouth what he likes best about his hometown and he’ll tell you it’s the girls.
But mostly I remember Top of the Pops, and me and my friend Lizzie religiously learning all the words to the songs like they were lines in a play. I would record the Top 40 on Sunday night on a cassette tape so I could go through it all the next week copying the lyrics down into an exercise book – ‘Hey Mickey’ by Tony Basil, Howard Jones, the Thompson Twins. I had a picture of Wham! on my wall – my party trick then (and now) was to recite all the words to the ‘Wham Rap’. I properly fancied Andrew Ridgeley. He was my first crush. Smash Hits did a pullout centrespread of him and George that I tacked on to my Laura Ashley wallpaper. Then Mum had another baby and we got an au pair who had this really weird short haircut with a side parting and she loved the Human League. And so began my fascination with cool: something remote I didn’t quite understand but absolutely wanted to be part of.
This was a world with no internet, no mobile phones and just three TV stations. Everyone sat down together and watched Saturday Swap Shop and Tiswas, shows that would foreshadow The Big Breakfast and The Word. You couldn’t stream Dallas and Dynasty in bulk episodes, you had to wait until Saturday night, and watch them episodically week by week. They depicted Reagan’s America, an off-the-wall land of excess, where ranchers drank whisky and drilled for oil, women inhaled champagne and sported massive shoulder pads, and everyone was a total bitch to each other. The whole thing looked incredible. My parents wouldn’t let my brother and me watch either of them to begin with, but they were quite often out on a Saturday night, so we used to pour the babysitter enormous gin and tonics (my dad thought it was very important we knew how to pour a gin and tonic; it made us useful around the house) then sneak downstairs and watch them over her shoulder through the crack in the door.
The nation’s station was Radio 1: Bruno Brookes, Dave Lee Travis, Mike Reid and Simon Bates’s Our Tune. We did things together as a nation, communally, and we went places to meet each other face to face. Girlfriends would phone in the evening to chat on the phone and my dad would be furious to discover me still on the line 40 minutes later – not only was he footing the bill but he was also on-call to the hospital and there was no other way for emergency care to get hold of him. No Skype or mobiles back then.
Eventually I was allowed to take the bus into town on my own and watch the high street change around me. Bournemouth was a town that had been known as God’s Waiting Room when we arrived. It was full of retirement flats and blue rinses, but it started to thrive under Thatcher’s economy, and the average age of the population plummeted. I began to rebel against my mum’s choice of wardrobe for me – she loved all those Eighties bright colours. There was a big C&A at the top of the town that peddled this stuff, along with a Chelsea Girl, an Etam, Tammy Girl and Dorothy Perkins. The high street was not cool back then, not by a long way. It was cheap clothes in nasty fabrics with lairy designs.
Mum eventually relented and gave me a clothes allowance, and I got a pair of pixie boots and a trilby hat on a trip to London to Kensington Market. Then the Body Shop opened in Bournemouth and every Saturday I’d go there to buy peppermint foot lotion and cocoa butter. The Body Shop felt cool: it had all these messages about not being tested on animals, and there was talk of the tribal heartlands where the ingredients were sourced.
Social consciousness began to register. Sting brought an Amazonian warrior onto Wogan, Greenpeace set up shop on the high street, and my mum and I used to cry over the whaling footage on the six o’ clock news. We both signed up to Greenpeace and would cheer on the Rainbow Warrior. As the TV presenter and entrepreneur Richard Reed says: ‘Greenpeace were the great disruptors and agitators. They were really high profile when we were growing up – they approached everything in a way you couldn’t help have empathy with.’
Reed, who went on to make millions out of his company Innocent Smoothies when he sold it to Coca-Cola, still supports Greenpeace as publicly as he can. ‘It’s a charity that gets up people’s noses and creates problems and difficulties. And I say Yes, that is exactly its role. I went on a trip with them to the Amazon to look at the light they shine on deforestation. Multinational companies that ship the world’s grains and seeds, actively involved in illegal deforestation – how can they get away with that?’
The environmental movement was just being born: suddenly everyone was talking about the ozone layer, the CFC scandal kickstarting a boom in roll-on deodorants. Environmental protests against road-building at Newbury, Twyford Down and Fairmile, Devon – which made a hero of the hapless ‘Swampy’ – saw protestors tie themselves to trees and digging tunnels.
Nelson Mandela was also still in jail and, against a backdrop of sanctions and anti-apartheid campaigning, racism seemed the most illogical injustice the human race was capable of committing. I was old enough to go to Wembley for the Free Nelson Mandela concert, and lap up all the books and films – from Cry Freedom to Disgrace – that dominated our cultural youth. Over in the States NWA were fighting prejudice on different fronts, and rap and hip hop culture, threaded with political protest, was booming. The Rodney King riots were to burn all that home to me.
And then came the graphic pictures of starving Africans crawling across their drought-ridden plains, their bellies swollen, flies feasting on their saucer-shaped, tear-filled eyes. It was a new frontier in television reporting, prompting a scruffy rock star to leap onto news studio sofas and catalyse the rescue package. Band Aid, Live Aid: we were very aware as we were growing up that there was plenty to fix in the world, and it was going to be up to us to fix it.
Spiritually, questions were beginning to come up. I went to church a bit as a girl, and opted to get confirmed when I was around 13. Ironically, it was this process – even if I did in the end take my confirmation, and still do receive communion when I take my kids to church – that prompted me to question a faith that until then I had accepted readily at the hands of teachers and my parents. Slowly, I became aware of other faiths that were beginning to blossom around me. A trip to India several years later, during which I volunteered at a Christian orphanage, finally put paid to my sense of belonging to the Anglican Church. The orphans were brought in to the orphanage from a wide area in and around northern India: Buddhists from Tibet and Ladakh, Muslims from Kashmir and Hindus from Himachal Pradesh. All were whitewashed with Christianity. There was no tolerance or liberalism towards their native faiths. Spiritually dislocated, I eventually ended up doing what many of my generation did – turned to yoga and healers.
Meanwhile my girlfriends and I were reading Jilly Cooper novels. Our parents didn’t really talk to us about sex – why should they? It wasn’t in their culture to do so – no one had ever talked to them about it. My mum muttered something to me about getting myself down to the ‘FPC’ (I think she meant the Family Planning Clinic) when I left home and that was that. School gave us a clinical biology lesson but no one, no one talked about it honestly. For that, we had Jilly.
We – I – owe a lot to Jilly Cooper. Books passed around like contraband at schools were so much more informative than biology. And since when did the facts of sexual reproduction prepare you for the world of dating, dumping, mating and marriage? Romping in haystacks, undignified rolls in the back of horse vans and jodhpur-clad bottom-slapping removed much of the glamour around bedroom antics and allowed us to experience a more realistic view of life between the sheets. As Jilly herself said:
‘I remember my editor saying: “Darling, do you think you should have this bit about sperm trickling down the thigh?” I mean, it’s not nice. But we were in this little pocket – from the Sixties to the mid-Eighties – where people weren’t worried about sex. We had contraception, it was before AIDS; it was joyful and exploratory.’
For glamour, we had Rupert Campbell-Black (‘Greek nose, high cheekbones and long, denim-blue eyes’), just the sort of cad/hero a girl wanted to drop her knickers for (or play nude tennis with). Cooper’s sex scenes were wondrously frank, from blowjobs to extramaritals, sexual dysfunction to orgies, and the heroines completely hapless. But Rupert and all Jilly’s cads were incredibly seductive. Cooper girls were up for it, and either knew how to enjoy themselves or were desperate to learn. Crucially, they were also often utter failures and total embarrassments to themselves. Oh, how we identified.
Those girls that graduated to Jackie Collins (under the duvet, with a torch) were given instructional manuals in how to practise fellatio; meanwhile Shirley Conran legendarily told you something about a goldfish that went on to become female folklore (Lace, page 292, but then X-er girls probably know that already). And then there was Erica Jong’s zipless fuck, Judith Krantz’s Scruples, even Barbara Taylor Bradford had a useful message or two – just the sort of sex education to prepare a woman for the world. Way better than the diet of internet porn around today. The most we saw of porn before we came of age was a glimpse of our brother’s Razzle under his sticky bed.
Cooper, Collins, Conran and their crew were women’s women – their writing took care to focus on the female orgasm, allowing what, to our mothers, had partly seemed a myth to be put in the spotlight of our own pleasure. When Pagan works out in her unsatisfactory marriage to Robert in Lace that she can bring herself to orgasm in five minutes (she measures it with an egg timer), there were no longer any excuses.
Fast forward to now, and Mickey, in Judd Apatow’s Netflix series Love, is masturbating in her hipster dungarees on her bed in front of the cat. Who is distracting her by licking its own pussy. Those Eighties bonkbusters – several hundred well-thumbed pages of sex, sin and scandal – produced a generation of women primed to take charge of their own sexuality. It’s hard to stress how new this was – although the Sixties had supposedly been about free love, it was only really happening down the Kings Road with the Rolling Stones. Most Boomers did not behave like this – they married young and that was that (until they had an affair or divorced, and many of them did).
Then along came AIDS. Just as we reached the age of consent, the playing field became fraught with danger. Although terrifying for the gay community and heterosexual men, I wonder if it wasn’t actually weirdly liberating for women. Suddenly there was a jolly good reason to insist on a condom – every public health announcement and piece of sex education insisted we ask, removing much of the stigma. Following AIDS, there was no longer any inhibition or shame in asking him to put something on. Women were licensed to take charge.
And if we were in any doubt about our ability to ask for what we wanted, or explore a little further, there was Madonna. Cavorting around on stage with her male dancers and her Jean Paul Gaultier conical bras, she showed us all what we could ask for, and how we could ask for it. And for reference, she published Sex, a high-fashion, high-gloss tome packed with beautiful black and white photographs shot by Steven Meisel. Now everything from bondage to role-play was on the menu. She might have been scandalous, and confrontational to the Catholic Church, but for her fans Madonna was two steps ahead of the path we were on. If Madonna could have it every which way, then why couldn’t we?
And so we asked for it. If the Eighties were all about swinging your man around the boardroom by his tie (doing it his way, in other words), the Nineties became about girlie sex. What did we want? Could we reinvent sex as something sexy, rather than as a sport? Could sex finally be about us, and what we wanted?
But that’s not to say the pleasure wasn’t hard won. Tell me a good ‘losing my virginity’ story and I’ll show you a satisfied nun. The problem with untutored sex and early relationships is no one has a clue what they are doing. The emotions are disproportionate; the sex is pretty unmemorable, although I did have one boyfriend who insisted on playing Prince every time we made out. That was cool.
But we were lucky, so much luckier then than now, as the playing fields were relatively safe. Leaving aside AIDS, there was less sexual disease, condoms were de rigueur (you could buy them in the Body Shop) and there was no internet porn teaching kids that a shaved pubis, boulder breasts, hair extensions and a repertoire of groans and grinds was normal. Or that anal was normal, or threesomes, or goats, or gang rape or abuse or whatever else gets passed around in the playground these days. I think, when it came to sex, our timing was very fortunate indeed.
So from the Eighties we had economic prosperity, but we saw the pain of its cost in the strikes, the decline of manufacturing and the polarisation of the working class. We had social consciousness in Band Aid, Greenpeace and the anti-apartheid movement. We knew what it was to come together as a society in great national moments, either via the TV, or Live Aid, or politics, or pop music. The progress of sexual equality in the Eighties was teeing us up nicely – I was educated to have a career, unlike my mum and many of her friends, who were educated to get married and be good at sewing on buttons.
Sex was an adventure that was ours for the asking. Life seemed positive, progressive, relatively peaceful. The wrongs in the world were being put right. Famine, prejudice and environmental destruction were being held to account. Life was not unmanageable, things were not moving too fast. So what would Generation X do next? What, as they came of age, would change? What did we have to give?
As the Eighties drew to a close, up in London a whole new scene was happening – a cultural cutting edge that was about to explode into the mainstream and change what we all thought forever. But that was still a long way away from me in Bournemouth, in 1989, aged sweet sixteen.
2
Four Go to Ibiza (#ulink_0cceef0e-3a29-577f-9d7e-b60accf3779b)
In the summer of 1987 London’s nightlife scene was fractured. The Leigh Bowery performance art scene at the Blitz was burning itself out and the music of soul boys, hip hop, rare groove and pop was progressing independently of each other. Four friends who worked the scene as DJs and promoters decided to celebrate a birthday with a trip to Ibiza. The birthday was Paul Oakenfold’s, and his friends were Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker.
They had been to Ibiza before but had never experienced the ‘after hours’ scene that people were beginning to talk about – the places people went to after the clubs had shut. They had heard of a place called Amnesia, an old farmhouse out in the countryside that was an outdoor club for those in the know. It opened at 3 am and went on till noon the following day. They had also heard about this new drug, ecstasy. None of them felt inclined to take it until they got there – but under the stars, in the warm summer air, ‘hearing this amazing mix that DJ Alfredo was playing’, and finding themselves in the middle of a scene not even they could have anticipated, everything changed. ‘I was really anti-drugs in those days,’ says Nicky Holloway. ‘I used to chuck people out of my clubs for having a puff. But everyone round us was doing it, and it looked like so much fun. I was like, alright then.’
‘There were no laws: people were making love on the dance floor, drinking and dancing, taking litres of liquid ecstasy between them,’ reported one of the barmen at Amnesia, a German by the name of Ulises Braun. ‘It looked like a Federico Fellini movie; every personality was different. Everyone was dressed up. I dressed like d’Artagnan, in high boots.’
In the middle of the dancefloor was a mirrored pyramid, around the edges were bars and chill-out areas with cushions and plants. It was like being in a tropical garden.
‘It was a complete revelation to all four of us,’ says Danny Rampling, ‘out there in the open air, on that dance floor on that Mediterranean island. It was all about music and hedonism, but what was so unique were the people – they were really cosmopolitan. Even the DJ, Alfredo, was a maverick on the run from the junta in Argentina. He had fled to Ibiza as a political refugee.’
‘We would never have gone to a place with 40- or 50-year-olds back in London,’ says Holloway, ‘but Amnesia didn’t have any barrier – of age, colour or country. There were people from Switzerland, Holland, Singapore, Germany, Brazil. And the music was completely different, too. It was Balearic, which means it would go up and down. There was house music, but then Alfredo would play Carly Simon or Kate Bush – things we would turn our noses up at, at home. But on ecstasy, in that euphoric club, the whole thing made sense. At 7 am, in the morning light, Alfredo put on U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. It opened our ears and our eyes. Everything fell into place.’
‘All four of us changed that night,’ says Rampling. ‘In Ibiza I got my brief to do what I wanted – I wanted to play to my own crowd of people.’
‘We came back like salesmen,’ says Holloway.
Within five months of their return to London Paul Oakenfold started Spectrum, Danny Rampling started Shoom and Nicky Holloway started Trip. ‘At that point the London club scene was based in the past – funk and soul and things,’ says Rampling. ‘When house music came along it completely changed everything. It was revolutionary. It brought with it a wave of empathy and unity, fuelled by one thing and another. Ecstasy, yes, but also the political and economic situation in the mid Eighties. At that time Great Britain was very depressed – there was high unemployment. A lot was changing around the world: the apartheid regime in South Africa was imploding, the Wall was coming down in Berlin – there was change going on and we all were experiencing it.’
Shoom became a legendary success. There were 50 people on the first night and twelve weeks later 2,000 people were queuing down the street. Spectrum and Trip were similarly groundbreaking. ‘It just caught a wave,’ says Holloway. ‘It couldn’t have happened without E – let’s not pretend – but overnight it went whoosh! We were doing Tripping the Sin at Centrepoint, and everyone would empty out of the club in the morning and start dancing in the fountain, singing songs and hugging each other. The police just stood there – they didn’t know what to make of it.’
Without the internet – with only word of mouth, flyers and some helpful PR from the tabloids – the scene still went national. ‘I remember the Sun doing a story on evil acid house and how bad it was,’ laughs Holloway. ‘They had pictures from a rave at an airfield – but by putting it on the front page they were unwittingly advertising it to everyone. Everyone was thinking, “That looks fun. I’ll have some of that!”’
Every kid who dropped one of those tablets – Doves, Rhubarb and Custard, Pink Cadillacs, Mitsubishi; they were given cutesie names to describe the experience they gave – felt the ‘shoom’ as the rush tore through their body, and the transitory, almost hallucinatory feeling that they had found the secret key to a better world, one where everyone could come together and live in sweet harmony.
‘There was a lot of spirituality in the music. Songs of hope, like Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land”, were gospel-driven records. All these records out of Chicago and New York were made by former disco producers who were really into gospel and great songwriting, and that fuelled all this optimism and hope and unity – and change. With everything that was going on, this was quite overwhelming to some people.’
There were a lot of sweaty hugs and ‘I really love you, man’ uttered in the early hours of the morning on heaving dance floors, often just to the stranger standing next to you – whoever they were. ‘You’d go out with one set of friends and come home with another,’ says Holloway. ‘It smashed down the walls,’ says Rampling. It helped everyone feel everyone else’s importance, it put us all on an equal footing.
There was one apocryphal moment in Shoom when a punter opened a page in the Bible and insisted that Daniel – Jesus’ disciple – was in fact Danny Rampling. ‘This is you! This is you! This is what’s happening now!’ he insisted. ‘These people were using a lot of LSD,’ grins Rampling.
Parts of the country that did not have access to nightclubs were just as involved – in the form of illegal raves conducted outside in fields or inside in disused warehouses. They were staged by the traveller community, do-it-yourself DJs, sound systems and party collectives, as the craze spread like wildfire through the towns and country.
‘I was living in the Somerset countryside at the time,’ says the fashion designer Alice Temperley. ‘It was like discovering this underground culture. The whole thing started with the music and that sense of liberation, that you felt like you were able to express yourself. It was like being swept up in a cult-like movement, you felt you were part of something, part of a pack. I was about fifteen or sixteen, and in some sense it was just kids wanting to misbehave – getting into a car and ending up in a convoy in some field and partying until sunrise – but it was very seductive.’
A couple who straddled both scenes, fields and clubs, were Pearl Lowe and Danny Goffey. Pearl was a fixture on the London club scene, Danny was a schoolkid in Oxford. Both went on to form successful bands and become part of the tapestry of Nineties culture, but this was where it started.
‘I was expelled from Wheatley Park Comp in Oxford just at the start of the illegal rave thing,’ says Danny. ‘The sound system Spiral Tribe was going all round Oxfordshire. I didn’t tell my parents I’d been chucked out of school. Instead I signed on and started to hang out at travellers’ sites, going off in convoys to Gloucestershire or wherever the next rave was happening. I went to stay in a caravan with some travellers called Chris and Julie. I used to smoke dope with them and listen to techno. They had an Alsatian dog called Skewer. It was a bit like a second home for a while. I started a band called the Jennifers. Chris played guitar; he was in a band called White Lightning after the acid. We used to sit up and play really mad music, lots of Hawkwind and rave. He was into thrash metal – that was the crossover of those two scenes – sort of crusty dance.’
‘I was putting on nights in Chelsea with two friends,’ says Pearl. ‘The three of us hosted these raves for this dodgy guy. We would go up the Kings Road with flyers, and he would make loads of money – there were queues down the road. We’d go to Subterrania on Friday nights and my friend Jasmine Lewis, who was quite a big model, and I would dance on the stage. Joe Corré, Steve Strange, Jeanette Calliva were all there. Then there was the Limelight that everyone went to, Boy George and Rusty Egan and Philip Salon. Es had just come out, so we would end up at Ministry of Sound at 5 am.’
‘In London things were trending quite quickly,’ says Danny. ‘Where I was, there were no clubs, or one in Oxford. So when that all kicked in it was a scene like punk – everyone who was my age got really into it. Everyone who could drive would go off on these two-day adventures. Then the band started kicking off, and Oxford seemed quite small, and I wanted to move to London. We got signed and then I met Pearl and went to live in her house.’ The tribes started to move together.
