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Now We Are 40
Tiffanie Darke


What happened to Generation X? Millenials dominate our Facebook feeds and people bang on about the baby boomers – but what about us? The lost generation, the middle youth, the middle child of today. Are we still cool?

Generation X? Remember them? The kids who believed they'd never grow up. The generation Douglas Coupland immortalised in his novel of the same name. The wry, knowing navel-gazers obsessed with cool and being cool who today are sandwiched between the boomers of the 60s and the millennials.

Gen X'ers came of age against a backdrop of Britpop and the Spice Girls, Tarantino and Pulp Fiction, Madchester and the Stone Roses, acid house and rave, super clubs, Ministry and Cream. They holidayed in Ibiza high on hooch and E and never ever believed there'd be a comedown.

So whatever happened to them?

We turned 40. And as Tiffanie Darke points out in this witty exploration of the generation who defied generalisation, we're not handling it all that well

Where once we wore floaty skirts and Doc Martins, now we’re sporting Scandi fashion and 'interesting' trainers. We still party in Ibiza but now bodyboard in Cornwall. Where once mixtapes were the ultimate mating call, now we take selfies and swap Spotify playlists all the while conspicuously wearing large Dr Beats headphones and casually leaving old packets of Kingsize Rizla lying round our open plan kitchens.

More to the point, Gen X are now in charge. In government, in business and the creative industries. The most anti-establishment of generations has now become the establishment. But as tech overtakes the arts as society's great shaping force, Tiffanie ponders does cool and its pursuit still matter? If Gen X had it sorted, gave us Barack Obama and downward facing dogs, why is stress the new flu? Why are we working not for love anymore or cool but to avoid negative equity and depleting pension pots?

In Now We Are 40, Tiffanie interviews some of the most iconic Gen X’ers such as Pearl Lowe, Richard Reed and Blur’s bassist Alex James to look at how Gen X live their life in between being young and old, and how it feels to want to burn down the establishment only to realise that now you are the establishment.










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HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Tiffanie Darke 2017

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Tiffanie Darke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008185329

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Version: 2017-02-07




Epigraph (#u83ea2665-dfc5-55b9-b89d-a5b454d29081)


The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. ‘Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.’

Douglas Coupland, Generation X




Contents


Cover (#u1cac3145-6622-5ac1-8680-2e26a7f2e874)

Title Page (#udacc11ae-3b0e-58f8-a84a-c21b0bc5eba2)

Copyright (#u3efb1ee1-9b0e-57b3-ae5f-e61adb7de9bb)

Epigraph (#uf9be8ccd-1e01-59f7-af43-9d4d5f33a546)

Going Up, Going Down (#uf8ad87a5-11cd-5c2d-b130-8fb12bba86b9)

Introduction: Don’t Grow Up – It’s a Trick (#ufc63a28f-1c98-5ffa-9262-26eba35b9438)

1 I Was Eight in the Eighties (#u9d55d2ae-7146-51e2-adf6-7aaf97c2d596)

2 Four Go to Ibiza (#u7cce07ef-0076-5c01-b7ad-1008b7e59388)

3 Just Be Good to Me: How Business Became Sexy (#u3d888635-3bfd-5c63-a123-a149167e23b1)

4 When Noel Gallagher Went to Number 10 (#ua87fa3e0-178a-5d6e-8414-6ed936175a95)

5 Clinton’s Cigar (#uecbdc264-a002-570e-ad6b-6b5f6c2ec5c3)

6 Let’s Get Digital (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Three Lions (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Sex: The Consequences (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Meet You in the Gastropub (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Never Complain, Never Explain (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Namaste (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Alexander Is Dead, Long Live McQueen (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Flat White (#litres_trial_promo)

14 Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels (#litres_trial_promo)

15 Is It My Go on the iPad Now? (#litres_trial_promo)

16 Amy Winehouse, RIP (#litres_trial_promo)

17 Going Green, Finally (#litres_trial_promo)

18 Will House Prices Ever Stop Going Up? (#litres_trial_promo)

19 The Speed of Things (#litres_trial_promo)

20 Where We Are Headed (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Going Up, Going Down (#u83ea2665-dfc5-55b9-b89d-a5b454d29081)


When I edited the Sunday Times Style magazine, the ‘Going Up, Going Down’ column became something of a cult read. Readers furiously measured themselves against it: were they still wearing one of the trends we would cruelly consign to ‘Going Down’? Were they already ordering the cocktail that we would crown in ‘Going Up’? A shortcut to everything that is in and out of favour, like the best journalism the column was born of instinct, wit and inside knowledge. Or just how ravaging our hangovers were on a Thursday morning.

This is my version of what it’s like being in your forties.

UP

Boden

Strangely good these days

Zoopla and Rightmove

Better than sex

Food

OBSESSED. When your buckwheat risotto says more about you than your vintage Prada

Witness the fitness

The Iron Man entry form is the new trophy wife; sleeveless dresses the status symbol of acceptable upper-arm tone

Paaarty!

The skills are honed

Our kids

A confetti canon of love on permanent explosion

Home economics

What you used to spend on shoes, you now spend on mid-century modern furniture

Wise, but not smug

Yep – we know stuff now. But we still want to know more

Cool

Still like it. Love it actually

DOWN

Hangovers

Crucifying. And getting worse

Luxury labels

So new money. Unless it’s Gucci. Or Balenciaga. Do keep up

Having it all

Overrated

Smartphones

Remember that time when we used to go places with people and do things? Walk along the street without bumping into people? No, me neither

Botox denial

Don’t get left behind, pruneface

God

Who?

Parenting

Torturous, difficult, exhausting, boring, life-limiting, endless

Money

Suddenly, irritatingly, an issue

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.

Before it became polluted by gangs and bad drugs, marketing and commoditisation, the house music scene had a very positive effect on society. It quelled the football terraces, brought down class, sex and race barriers, and imbued an entire generation with the belief they could go out and express themselves, do something they believed in. ‘It was a Do It Yourself culture,’ says Rampling. ‘We created our own industry and scene, which allowed people to create their own jobs and follow their dreams, whereas punk, which certainly had great energy, had been all about anarchy – leave your job and stick two fingers up. It was very destructive. Acid house, by contrast, was all about positivity, hope, optimism and bringing people together.’

The DIY nature of the movement – that it was happening despite government and law – was profoundly influential. Why trust and accept the structures around you, if they don’t trust or accept you?

The size of the scene eventually became too much to ignore, and led to the Criminal Justice Bill. Bizarrely wide-ranging, the bill sought to criminalise offences previously termed as ‘civil’, giving police and the courts greater powers to prosecute. It included everything from extending the definition of rape to include ‘anal’, to the criminalisation of the use of cells from embryos and foetuses. However it drew the biggest objection for its response to the free parties put on by the traveller community, whose occupation of common ground was causing middle England some distress.

Plenty of Gen X youth were extending their summers of love at these parties, the most famous of which was a week-long festival at Castlemorton in Worcestershire. In May 1992 tens of thousands of travellers had already amassed in the area for the Avon Free Festival, which the police cancelled, fearing a noisy party that would get out of hand. All the groups ended up settling on Castlemorton Common. As the sound systems cranked up, the police were left powerless to act, marooned helplessly at the bottom of the hill. The media swarmed around the event, which had now become something of a spectacle, but their headlines and front-page coverage only served to swell the numbers.

These free parties were quite something when you consider they were all organised in the pre-internet and pre-mobile world. Living in Oxford at the time, I also got caught up in this scene, and it was thrilling to be a part of it. Word would get out to meet at service stations on B roads, sketchy directions would be distributed by Chinese whispers, shouted through car windows at traffic lights – as an overloaded Vauxhall Astra playing house music off a mix tape on a tinny stereo would pull up beside you, clouds of spliff smoke pouring out of the windows. We would sometimes just literally head off into the dark, following the tail lights of the car in front, listening out for the distant thumping of a sound system.

Finally, when it didn’t look like we could get any closer, we would abandon the car and head across fields towards the noise, blood pumping through our bodies in expectation of the revelry ahead. There was such an illicit thrill to the whole thing – the idea that there was this self-created network, unchecked by the authorities, creating a scene beyond their control, connecting people and beliefs through ‘ley lines’ and ‘energy centres’. We were another, alternative lifestyle, a different community; this was our new world, beginning under the moonlight, in fields, warehouses and squats all over the country. As the sun came up, our new best friends from the night before would still be dancing on the top of cars, grinning from ear to ear with the innocent joy of discovery, drugs and the sense of being part of something new. It was huge, and it was beautiful.

It reached its apotheosis in that May of 1992 as the police looked on at the ravers, crusties and their dogs bouncing around on the top of Castlemorton Common. All the sound systems amassed together that week – Spiral Tribe, Bedlam, Circus Warp and DiY. Me too, although my memory is, funnily enough, patchy. I do remember the generator running out of power at one point and some dreadlocked dudes doing a whip round with a bucket. Some time later I saw the same dudes chasing a guy down the hill before beating him up viciously with fists and sticks. I think he had tried to nick the bucket of money. That bit definitely wasn’t beautiful.

The public–police stand-off at Castlemorton provoked the Criminal Justice Bill – in particular Section 63, which banned ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. This lit up the music industry. The band Autechre released a three-track EP labelled ‘Warning: “Lost” and “Djarum” contain repetitive beats’. Orbital released a mix of its track ‘Are We Here?’ that it titled ‘Criminal Justice Bill?’ and which consisted of four minutes of silence. The Prodigy included a track ‘Their Law’ on their album Music for a Jilted Generation, which was introduced in the sleeve notes with: ‘How can the government stop young people having a good time? Fight this bollocks.’ Meanwhile Dreadzone released the single ‘Fight the Power’, which sampled Noam Chomsky urging people to think about ‘taking control of your lives’, and advocating political resistance. The ruling party was as culturally divorced from its youth as it was possible to be.

The bill didn’t just target ravers – the legislation also attacked hunt saboteurs, squatters and football fans. Essentially it amounted to a judgement on people’s lifestyles – which enraged us. It repealed the councils’ duty to provide permanent sites for travellers; police would have new powers of stop and search; the right to silence would be affected; and the criminalisation of ‘disruptive trespass’ had consequences for squatters, travellers and protesters alike. Uniting in protest, formerly unrelated movements began to come together in coalitions: students, trade unions, sound systems, traveller communities and direct action groups.

Three marches were planned in central London, the first two of which passed peacefully, with Tony Benn standing on a box in Trafalgar Square. Raves in London squats and on Wanstead Common took them into the night. The third ended in a riot. Tear gas was deployed, civilians were beaten up by police, dogs died, and any impression the groups had given the establishment that they were a civilised bunch with a civilised point of view was seriously damaged.

Once the bill came into effect, the free party scene withered. Instead, the right to party went overground and became a thriving industry. Nightclubs, DJs and festivals were the ultimate winners. Festivals still loosely embed political and socially conscious messaging into their line-ups, in a nod to the DNA of the scene that birthed them, but actually they are more about having fun and taking a break from normal life than raging against the machine. Your alternative lifestyle in one three-day £150 ticket. Sponsored by Vodafone. If you go to a festival now you are part of an entertainment culture, with nice bathroom facilities, wrist bands, glamping and fancy cocktails. It’s a long way from those crusty sound systems and cans of Strongbow. Those sound systems headed into Europe, making way for Paul Oakenfold, Carl Cox and their progeny – Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Tiesto – to embrace a life of money and fame.

Ibiza went on to flourish. Surviving the scandal of Ibiza Uncovered, the television series that exposed the messy ‘Brits on tour’ years, it has remained a hedonist’s destination. It continues to supply a 24/7 smorgasbord of distraction, and when the low-cost airlines opened it up to weekend clubbers, no one ever caught their flight home. It was like a super, sunny, brown-limbed version of Castlemorton, with glamour, glitter and sand.

These days Ibiza is mostly off limits except to the super rich. It has risen above the raving riff-raff by hiking prices, and much of the partying takes places in expensively built private villas rather than the clubs. Many who built and bought those villas passed through the raving nineties – Ibiza’s hippie values and dance music culture suit their millions very well, even if they have built their own private nightclubs underneath their tennis courts. They no longer smile at strangers as the sun comes up, but at each other on board a yacht back from Formentera where they have just blown a grand on a rosé-soaked lunch at the see-and-be-seen beachside restaurant.

For the rest of us, there is ‘glamping’. Evolving the notion of abandoning yourself to the countryside for a night of hedonism, Generation X has consciously curated the experience – applying all the signifiers of cool to the original idea of striking out and leaving societies and communities behind. Being out in the open, ignoring the rules around night and day, creating your own environment to suit you, somehow morphed into £400 bell tents and Cath Kidston bunting. ‘Wild’ camping converged with the ‘free’ party experience, and we styled it up with duvets, double-lilo blow-up beds, tealight chandeliers and yurt hotels to make it as luxurious as possible. If your urban experience traps you Monday to Friday, you can load up the car on a Friday night and head off with your mates (and kids) for a weekend of (relatively) comfortable escape. Someone can always bring a sound system.

Some of the activist momentum was retained, however. ‘I remember being in Shepherd’s Bush when Reclaim the Streets took over the roundabout,’ says Martha Lane Fox. ‘Which I guess was to do with politics loosely, but it might just have been a massive rave. I’m not sure we had a sense of social purpose. We didn’t want to change the health service or change governments. We were just like, Fuck Thatcher, here’s a new way of being.’ However anti-establishment and vaguely political the movement felt, it was more a feeling that we were different from the world we had been born into, and that we were going to express ourselves differently. ‘We were culturally ambitious, but not politically,’ says Martha. ‘We went because it was a laugh, not because everyone was really up in arms.’

The Criminal Justice Bill succeeded then – despite the protest. It forced music and dance culture to be legalised, regulated and commodified, so it could be moderated and taxed. But it didn’t kill the music. Far from it – the Nineties were a period of incredible musical creativity, producing wave after wave of new music culture, from rave to Britpop to house to trip hop, to acid jazz to trance and drum ’n’ bass.

Much of that was to do with the growing multiculturalism of British society, and all the glorious influences that brought with it, in music, politics, fashion and community. Britain’s second generation of immigrant culture was just coming of age, and the social take of what those kids were offering up was absolutely the height of cool. As June Sarpong, a Ghanaian who grew up in Walthamstow, says, ‘Being in London during that time was so interesting. We were immigrants who had grown up and integrated with white people in a way that our parents just hadn’t. I was hanging out with Jazzie B and the Soul II Soul crowd at that time, and I found myself at the heart of this shift in the thinking of the city, the birth of a culture.’

Second-generation immigration culture was nowhere near the ruling elite economically or politically – but culturally they were absolutely centre. Economically, there was displacement, and violence and drugs. ‘I had a terrible car accident in 1989 that took me out of action for two years,’ says June. ‘I was hospitalised, stuck in a bed unable to move. Those big, formative teenage years were wiped out. All my friends grew up in social housing, they were doing drugs and getting wasted, things you do at that age. The accident was like a crazy intervention from the universe because I missed out on all of that. That’s the reason I don’t drink, or smoke, or do anything now, not because I’m judgmental but because the time I would’ve started I was ill. By the time I got better, I’d spent a lot of time on my own thinking in a way that would keep me from going mad. I had had to grow up.’

When June came out of hospital, Soul II Soul took her under their wing and got her a job at Kiss FM. ‘It was when Kiss had just become legal and they had all of the cool DJs from the illegal days – Trevor Nelson, Judge Jules, all those guys. I started working with them, going to Ibiza and Manumission. It was crazy, I used to go out dancing Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, out till 4 am and still manage to get to work on Monday!’

Kiss was the platform for all the new music coming through, breaking acts like Jamiroquai and providing a platform for labels like Acid Jazz (set up by Gilles Peterson to promote the music he found to play in the back room in Paul Oakenfold’s club). ‘The tide had changed,’ says June. ‘Kiss was a legal radio station playing the kinds of music our generation wanted to listen to. It went on to completely change the content of Radio One, and that brought cool into the mainstream.’

Scenes were taking off in Manchester and Liverpool too. Down in Bristol the Wild Bunch sound system birthed Massive Attack, Tricky and Bristol’s trip hop scene. Nellee Hooper moved to London and became a producer for Madonna and U2. Meanwhile Bristol University was bringing in a bunch of white kids from privileged backgrounds and mixing it all up. Ben Elliot, the Etonian who went on to found the luxury concierge company Quintessentially, got his first taste of clubbing in Bristol. Before he went up, he was working at the Independent; Massive Attack had just released Blue Lines and a copy had come in for review.

‘The Independent was brilliant at that point. Their Saturday Review magazine was running all these great, edgy black and white photos, reflecting a lot of what was going on. When Blue Lines came in I remember thinking, “That looks cool,” and nicking it and thinking it was incredible. Then I arrived in Bristol. Even though I went there with no friends, because of this scene I suddenly met masses of different people. I met a huge Pakistani guy from Somerset who sells furniture now. Another guy was a mature student who was really in with 3D and Tricky. I began to put on club nights and we’d get Daddy G [of Massive Attack] to come and DJ. I think at one stage I even had a pair of silver trousers. There were shops on Park Street in Bristol where everyone would go to get kitted up for Friday or Saturday night.’

It didn’t take long to spread north. ‘When I was 16 and growing up in Wakefield I remember going out to the local club, where they played terrible music – Stock Aitken Waterman,’ says Richard Reed. ‘Everyone got really drunk and I remember seeing this guy getting a glass smashed in his face. Later that night I saw the same guy in a kebab shop, still with the blood running down his face. It was dripping into his kebab, and he was eating it. No one was having any fun, it was all drunken aggression. A year later I went out again and the music had changed, everything had changed. Everyone was happy – smiles on their faces, hands in the air. House music had ushered in some kind of difference.’

The son of a nurse and a bus conductor, Reed was surprised when his school suggested he apply for Cambridge University. ‘I wanted to go to Nottingham because that was where all the best clubs and DJs were. I thought Cambridge was going to be full of posh people talking about rugby. I got to Cambridge and guess what? It was full of rugby blokes singing rugby songs, listening to terrible music. Everything I feared. I thought, we need a bit of house music here. I met Adam, from London, who loved the acid jazz scene, and this guy John and us started to put on house music nights. We realised we were having more fun organising them than the people who were queuing and paying to come in – at that point we realised we’ve got something here, this is what we should do.’ The three of them still work together today.

This time in our lives taught us influence can lie with the individual rather than the organisation. It empowered us, made us question the establishment. ‘The Criminal Justice Bill and the Poll Tax riots made everyone realise you can’t keep on telling us what to do,’ says Reed. ‘We can be subversive, question the status quo, do things differently from the way they have been done before. The Nineties roughed things up a bit – you couldn’t go out and dance all night in strict fashion, you needed to be comfortable in trainers. There was a bit of darkness going on with the political unrest and that helped people question things and reject the choice architecture.’

Cool, which we got from music, fed into fashion, film and everything else that sprang out of that scene. Cool was our possession, we loved it, nurtured it, crafted it. ‘Contrived it, yes, but that’s because we actually considered it,’ says June. ‘We cared. It didn’t matter what music scene it was, whether it was Indie, Blur or acid jazz, all of them were cool. You just wanted to be part of them, didn’t you? I wanted to be friends with Oasis and Meg and all that lot, they were just so fricking cool. Still are!

‘I think the legacy of that cool is, our generation will be forever young. My mother was late thirties, forties, at that time, which was like an old woman. Whereas we will be like this for another 20 years. I don’t think that’s the same for the younger ones. I think we’re going to catch up. When we’re 60 and they’re 40, I don’t think there’ll be much difference at all!

‘Also we monetised cool, exploited it, which is a good thing because for so many years interesting artists have been broke. Thank goodness the Damien Hirsts and Tracy Emins made loads of money. Great, why not? But at the same time, it meant that we lost some of the really important changes. And one of them for sure is making politics interesting for a disengaged group.’

With cool comes irony, and in the end irony is a great dehabilitator of progress. Irony eventually means you believe in nothing – it leads to nihilism. Maybe the reason we dropped the ball politically is because we couldn’t take anything seriously – even ourselves – in the end. The political denouement to all of this was starkly illustrated in the Brexit vote. The inclusive, liberal, multicultural society we thought we had built was rejected by just over half the country. Brexit was a shout from those whom this society did not benefit – or who did not understand its benefits. Those for whom multiculturalism was not a benevolent positive force; for whom the metropolitan acceleration was too fast and too self-oriented; whose sense of nostalgia and nationalism extended back to before this time. There’s a job to do now, to bring those two halves together, and a lesson for Generation X that when cool becomes too exclusive, it writes itself out of the system.

But politics aside, we had learned a lot from the dance music revolution – it was time to make a living out of what we had learned.



3




Just Be Good to Me: How Business Became Sexy (#ulink_eaf1afa3-1ecb-5481-83f2-ec484dc07ddf)


Like many X-ers I had no vocation. In 1993, when I left university, I had no clue what I was going to do. The idea that you dedicated your life to a company or institution then retired on a nice, big, final salary pension was being knocked out of the park – my friends’ parents were being laid off all over and there were chilling tales of suicides in the papers. The professions were unattractive to me – law looked boring, medicine was what my dad did. As I drifted about, I thought that probably the most suitable ambition was to try as many things as I could in order to build up as rich an experience of life as possible. Experience, after all, was far more interesting than money.

I wasn’t afraid of work – I had a Saturday job in a sweet shop from the age of 14, I waitressed all the way through my university days to pay my debts, I thought nothing of double shifts to save up for a holiday. X-ers are not shirkers – in fact I often curse myself for such a Protestant work ethic; it is uncomfortably at odds with a life of travel and a fondness for high-octane leisure.

A team of contemporaries noticed our generation’s demand for a high-quality lifestyle, but also that the world’s demand that we work for it was at odds with the life itself. They set up The Idler, a media brand in praise of intellectual pursuits and creating the time and place for reflection. They threw very good parties and its founder, Tom Hodgkinson, has tried to monetise it in the form of workshops, classes and a magazine (man and woman, it turns out, cannot live on poetry and fishing alone).

‘In essence it was about freedom,’ says Tom. ‘I felt stuck in a job I hated, in contrast to the experience I’d had at university, school and my first job working in a record shop. There I’d had lots of free time to play in bands, work on magazines, listen to music and engage in cultural pursuits and philosophy. I wanted to find ways to re-engage with that side of life.’

Following a hiatus in which Tom moved to the country and had children, the brand is now back, and enjoying something of a revival, particularly through its Idler Academy, a school where you take courses in everything from learning Latin to playing the ukelele. ‘We’ve narrowed it down to three fs now – freedom, fun and fulfilment,’ says Tom.

But at this rather junior point in my life, I was happy to accept that work was a means to enjoying a lifestyle, not building long-term wealth. Double shifts in Pizza Hut meant I could go travelling around India and Central America. In Douglas Coupland’s Generation X he called these ‘McJobs’: ‘A low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who had never held one.’

This way of working – of taking shift work to save up for a period of extended leave – has definitely stayed with Generation X. My colleague Anthony, now deep in his forties, turned up for work recently with a backpack on his back. After he finished his shift as a sub-editor he was off to New Zealand with his girlfriend for five weeks. She had a slot to show her art film at a festival out there, and they knew some friends of friends who said they could come and stay – and that was enough.

Thinking that my kids at home and my staff job afford me no such freedoms I felt uncomfortable pangs of envy before checking in with Douglas again: ‘Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programmes at parties.’ Note: written before the age of Skype.

But after university I did want to get ahead, get on with things. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do – I took a secretarial job in a PR firm as that was all I could get. This was 1993 and the recession had jammed everything up. But the job was in London and I could afford to move there with my friend Lara because back then housing was within our reach. The job paid about £13,000 p.a., which was not bad, and we rented a studio flat in Notting Hill off the boyfriend of a friend of ours. The rent was about £350 a month, which was just about do-able when we split it between us, especially when we nicked the toilet roll and teabags from work and had egg banjos for dinner most nights. We saved our money for Cosmopolitans and trips to Hyper Hyper. Obviously.

It wasn’t as if PR was my dream career, but clearly it was just the beginning of an exciting professional adventure that lay before us. The media was booming – glamorously, and what’s more it looked like the young and cool were in charge. Very few of my peers wanted to go into public service or the charity sector. ‘I think people were ambitious,’ says Martha Lane Fox. ‘They may not have been money ambitious but they were ambitious. But a lot of it was about ambition for yourself as opposed to that wider sense of the world. How that’s changed now.’

For Generation X the dream career was finding a job in one of the cool bits of youth culture that were exploding. Serena Rees, who founded the erotic fashion brand Agent Provocateur with Joe Corré, says her party and her work life were entirely intertwined. ‘Going out was dancing, wearing crazy outfits. But I worked really bloody hard too, in advertising, and had a lot of fun.’

For Rees, the clubs were her university of life. ‘I left school when I was 16 so I didn’t ever have that grown-up education where you’re hanging out with people and sharing your ideas. We did our sharing of ideas in clubs and bars. In the early Nineties I met Joe and started working with his mum, Vivienne Westwood. Everyone was grafting – even the people that were running the clubs.’

The work ethic, she thinks, came from Thatcherism. ‘There’s got to have been some good in the bad with Thatcher. That work ethic to get yourself out of the shit gave everybody the push to go and do it. We were also given the opportunity because we were in a recession and it was like, right, you’re brave and you fight and you’re not scared of failure. Just go and do it.

‘When we opened that first Agent Provocateur on Broadwick Street in Soho, Katie Grand, Stella McCartney, Giles Deacon – all that lot used to come and hang out. Isabella Blow and Philip Treacy would pop in for a cup of tea. All the people I’d known from my club years, all the kids at St Martin’s round the corner in Charing Cross, would come and sit on the steps and share what they were working on. Back then there was only a handful of places to go, whereas now I suppose it’s less congregational. Kids these days don’t have places where they go and hang out, because they are all on their devices. No one does an actual physical shop because you can do a shop online.’

For Rees, the path to retail goddess was organic. ‘Joe was trying to run his mum’s shop, but he was struggling so I went to help him. Everything is pretty fundamental about any business, I think – you’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and get on. Joe and I wanted to do our own thing, so we started researching this idea in our spare time. My first job was working for this company that produced all the books for the top models in New York, Paris and Milan, so I knew every photographer, stylist and model from all around the world. Every day I was seeing the best photography. Then working in the advertising agency, I learned about getting a photographer or an illustrator or graphics person, bringing an idea to life and making something. I’d had a good training. All the campaigns we did for Agent Provocateur, all the fly posters and shoots – I knew how to do all of that.

‘The difference between now and then, is back then we didn’t care about being successful or making money, that wasn’t what it was about. It was nice when it worked and there was a queue of people. But what was exciting was sharing what you think is great, and finding out everyone else thinks it’s great too.’

The brand grew, eventually to over 100 shops in 13 countries. Its success lay in the careful shepherding of its balance between sex and fashion – crotchless panties may have sounded tacky, but when they were shot on Kate Moss by Ellen von Unwerth, they were the acme of desire. Joe and Serena surrounded themselves with the coolest models, artists, film directors and celebrities, which powered the brand into the high end fashion arena, even though it was selling a bedroom fantasy. Where Joe brought the raunch, Serena brought the taste, with an uncompromising demand for quality fabrics and design. This brand was more Prada than Ann Summers, and in 2007, 13 years after they opened that first shop, a private equity firm bought an 80 per cent stake for £60m.

‘Kids now think you can be successful quickly – there’s too much Dragon’s Den giving them this false hope,’ says Serena. ‘It’s not going to happen unless you work your arse off and you’ve got a good idea.’ She now invests in and advises new businesses, and doesn’t like what she sees. ‘People are doing it because they want to be famous, to make loads of money. That’s their drive, rather than it being real.’

As Agent Provocateur proved, first you need a good product (and post Gerald Ratner everyone now knew that) and second you need to tell a good story around it. ‘The marketing guy used to be the least important person in the business,’ says Richard Reed. ‘But in the Nineties you saw the rise in priority of telling a story about your product. It’s got more and more important, to the point now where the marketing guy’s actually on the board. It’s product and story: the whole company has got to really care about what you are producing and serving up.’ Marketing became a creative art.

The pursuit of money, or going into business, on the other hand, was not perceived in any way as creative at that time. It was for people in suits who carried briefcases and wanted to hang out with dreary bank managers. Besides it was all about money – and money, post Eighties, was vulgar. Business was Arthur Daley or Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney – only for the greedy and the brash. Post Eighties, we all know where that ended: Black Monday, a property crash, the collapse of the economy. Thatcherism was deeply unfashionable. Nevertheless, the idea anyone could now have a go – could propel themselves up the social and economic ladder – should they so wish, was embedded in Generation X. The subliminal message of Thatcherism struck deep. It was to supercharge the entrepreneurialism of the next decade.

‘It’s always been quite trendy to Thatcher bash, but for me the idea about freeing up the ability to do your thing was a really important part of my psyche,’ says the fitness trainer Matt Roberts. ‘As a 15-year-old, I had the idea for doing the business I now have. I grew up in the leafy county of Cheshire, a white, middle-class area. But my parents came from South Wales, my dad was from the Valleys, and only got out because he played football. First for Arsenal, then Wrexham, which was how we ended up in Cheshire. He had this great opportunity for leaving the Labour heartlands of the Valleys. My grandmother had a council house on an estate in Swansea but when my dad retired from football – and in those days you didn’t have anything like the cash you have now – my mum made the money by setting up a clothes shop. For my friends, that wasn’t the case. They’re from classic Labour-supporting families and didn’t believe they could go and do anything different. They settled for being in the same four-room box house.’

But the idea of what a business was and could be was about to change. There were already two trailblazers offering a different type of model: Anita Roddick and Richard Branson. The latter started out by setting up a record label (obviously cool) and the former was militant in using her business to promote a new kind of ethics: not testing products on animals. These two voices may have been alone in the idea that business could be a force for good, but they were also very loud and influential. It was not to be until the time of the Millennials – when business, aided by the digital revolution, became the new rock ’n’ roll – that the idea that business should help shape society took hold. Innocent was about to show how it could be done, how business could marry our values and social consciousness, and be interesting and fun at the same time.

Founded in 1998 by three student friends who met through their shared love of house music, it mixed up the cool of nineties advertising and marketing messages with the health of a generation on a hangover. Their cute, colourful bottles of mango and passion fruit, strawberries and banana and kiwi, and apple and lime juices, spoke directly to the customer, promising ‘to help you and heal you’, advising you to ‘shake before opening not after’ and even flirting with you: strawberries were included because they ‘go very nicely with your lipstick’ (‘wackaging’ or wacky packaging, as it came to be known). At the time, this challenged all the ideas of what big companies thought of as business. Innocent started with the consumer first. What do they want? What language do they speak? When they think of Innocent do they want to think of a boardroom of suits or someone like them?

Richard is now a handsome fortysomething who is still sporting scruffy hair, T-shirt and skinny jeans, exactly the same outfit that so disrupted the business community back in the Nineties.

‘Innocent was always just a little bit subversive,’ he says. ‘Other businesses were obsessed with supply chains and the bottom line, whereas Innocent was about thinking about the individual first. We are a very individual generation. In the Nineties we saw everything had started to change, that you could reinvent what it is that you want. You can say, Do you want a blue sweater or a red one? Or you can say that you don’t have to have either. Reinvent the choice architecture.’

What they did was pledge to donate 10 per cent of all their profits to charity. They also invested their staff in their company, gave everyone beer on a Friday and handed out £1,000 scholarships. Headquarters was ‘Fruit Towers’ in Notting Hill, a colourful building with astroturf, table-tennis tables and beanbags, and they drove around in funny-looking trucks covered in grass or painted in cow print. (This was just as Silicon Valley culture was beginning to make hoodies and office table-tennis tables a thing. Now of course, they are a total cliche.) Innocent caught our attention – partly because no one had been sold a fruit drink promising ‘ground-up cats’ before, and partly because the City and the business pages had never met ‘businessmen’ like this before. ‘If you’re going to turn up to a meeting in a T-shirt, you’ve got to be even more on top of your game than a guy in a suit, so people take you seriously,’ smiles Reed.

Being nice to people was the company culture too. It wasn’t solely about feathering your own managerial nest and hitting your profit targets, it was about having a nice time. After all, Reed and his partners, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, had started out in business putting on club nights together. ‘At Innocent we had ten babies out of it – everyone was copping off with each other!’ Business started to take on a new kind of shape. ‘Hippies with calculators’, is how one newspaper article described them, which Reed likes a lot. The father of hippie capitalism.

As their traction grew, so did the interest of the big corporates, and in 2009, pre sugar crisis, Coca-Cola invested in the company – going on to buy it out three years later for £100m. ‘When we cashed in I ended up with a big number in my bank account – and believe you me it was about 30 per cent bigger than the number we thought we could ever achieve in our wildest dreams. But far better than that was the fact that everybody in that building also had a number in their bank account that day,’ says Reed.

‘We made several millionaires, and that for me was the benefit of what we did. That was where I felt good about what we had done, and was worth far more to me than the 10 per cent profit difference in my own actual number. Do you need that extra 10 per cent or are you going to get more spiritual value for sharing that out amongst the people that got you there? I still don’t understand even today why other businesses don’t do that.’

The truth is, many new businesses now do build in an ownership or partnership structure. As the dotcom queen Martha Lane Fox says, ‘Everything I’ve started now is not for profit, but I like to think that the world has so dramatically shifted that unless you embed some wider social purpose right from the beginning, your brand would not be so robust. If I was starting my travel business Lastminute.com again, I think people would now expect that extra dimension of “Okay, so you’re doing all this travel, where’s the carbon offsetting? Why don’t you have more holidays to help clean up beaches?” You’d have to invent that right at the beginning, but it didn’t occur to us when we started that social purpose was something.’

It wasn’t just marketing and social purpose that Generation X brought to business, it was also design. Products and services needed to be cool if they were going to be at all desirable (whereas now in our world of frenetic speed, practicality is enough. Just ask Amazon – the ugliest and most successful service in the world).

Matt Roberts was single-minded in his pursuit of design and lifestyle cues when he was setting up his fitness brand. ‘I was fascinated by the cool stuff, about how you lived your life. I spent a lot of time going round anywhere that was cool to try and get bits of what they did. I got my hair cut in Nicky Clarke by Nicky because he was then the stylist. I used to go and stay at the Wilton Hotel in New York because that was the cool place to go – it was dark and moody. I’d eat at Quaglino’s, and when Conran opened the restaurant Mezzo, that was a big deal. I picked up things from magazines like The Face and Arena. That was a really formative time to be in London. It was the start of what happens now. This hotel here, this is the net result of all of those different things.’

Matt is sitting in the Mondrian, one of London’s latest ‘design’ hotels, in a modern lobby designed by Tom Dixon (X-er), drinking expensive coffee on tasteful yet slightly challenging furniture. Roberts is right at home. His tightly disciplined body is neatly clothed in Boss and Prada, while the scent of Tom Ford hangs about his neck. Initially, Roberts trained to be a sprinter, with his sights set on the Olympics. He dropped out when he realised his friend and training partner – Darren Campbell – was going to be a whole lot better than him. Roberts didn’t want to be second best, so instead he turned to business and for inspiration looked to America, which in the Eighties and early Nineties was way ahead of London both in lifestyle and business.

‘The first time I went to New York, in the mid Nineties, I thought it was the coolest place on the planet,’ he says. ‘I started doing courses there and I’d come back fired up. But then London would drag you down slightly. It didn’t have quite the same drive. What the US did was package things well, the front sell was really good. Behind it, the substance wasn’t that amazing, but it looked incredible.’

What was happening in America wasn’t that exposed over here – there was much less media to tell you about it, which gave New York cool hunters an opportunity in Europe. What Roberts saw in New York was a swelling fitness industry – better standards in terms of what was on offer in gyms, and greater engagement in the population. If getting fit could be made to look a little more attractive, and it could fit in with people’s lifestyles rather than the other way round, maybe it might just catch on. So he launched a bespoke training service in Mayfair, made his gyms high design and hi tech, and started attracting aspirational clients like Geri Halliwell and Elle Macpherson.

Roberts had his opportunity. Celebrities began to take on personal trainers, and paparazzi pictures of LA gym bunnies like Madonna, Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth in their sportswear ramped up the idea fitness could actually be a fashion choice. With no cool gyms to go to, people turned to books, which served Roberts well: ‘In my prime, we’d sell 40,000 copies of a book a month. One of my books was selling in 26 countries, doing phenomenal things.’

The marketing plan was working.



4




When Noel Gallagher Went to Number 10 (#ulink_e1891ffb-221f-5ad4-a515-549b7f8db1cc)


Marketing, advertising, PR, and any of the media that relied on those things, from magazines to TV stations, were proliferating. Digital wasn’t happening yet (we weren’t even using email – imagine that), nor were mobile phones much of a thing. But media was growing – mass media as it began to be known. Media studies courses became absurdly popular, because media looked like it wasn’t just about making money, it was about being creative and having a good time.

‘I remember after uni some people were going off to get jobs in management consultancy,’ says Richard Reed. ‘What was management consultancy? They said they were going to get jobs in the City and I was like, “What? London?” I didn’t even know the “City” existed. I went for an interview with P&G to be a sales person, and I thought, “Really? Drive round shops selling shampoos? No thanks.” I went into advertising because it sounded fun.’

For those then that couldn’t sing or dance or write or act or draw or paint or take photographs or design or make – there was advertising. The advertising industry would like to think of itself as one of the cornerstones of Britain’s creative industries, but Britain’s creative industries would be horrified to include it in their midst. ‘I remember making this ad for a car brand,’ says Reed. ‘It was pictures of ordinary people holding placards with surprising things written on them. A picture of a guy in a suit holding a sign saying “By night I’m Melinda” – that kind of thing. At the time the artist Gillian Wearing had done exactly that and won the Turner Prize. The advertising creative had totally ripped it off.’

The advertising industry regards itself with astonishing self-importance. They hand out awards for bravery. Bravery, in advertising. When I started in the advertising business a few years ago, my Sunday Times colleague Marie Colvin had just lost her life in Syria reporting on the atrocities. I found it very hard to swallow someone being awarded a gong and a cash prize for their ‘bravery’ in rebranding an estate car.

But advertising can make a positive contribution to culture. You always remember the great ads – You’ve been Tango’d, Budweiser’s Wassup? and Marky Mark’s Calvins were Nineties classics. Nowadays the John Lewis Christmas TV spot, Nike’s sponsorship of young creative collectives and General Electric’s reporting on scientific innovation are all just as influential. But the advertising world is now largely swamped by digital: irritating pop-up ads and low-grade, interruptive creative that is actually prompting us to install ad blockers.

Those that commission advertising are being seduced by the online world of cheaply made content, prioritising the scale and frequency of distribution over what you are actually distributing. Just shout – shouting anything will do. The Nineties world of ad men and women would never have let a client get away with spending less than six figures on a creative. An advertising spread in a magazine requires care: thought, craft and budget. And how much memorable it is than some annoying bit of programmatic clickbait.

The halcyon years of the Nineties yielded so much creativity, and so much creative media to transmit and report on it. This boom in youth culture was a gift of the recession. As Noel Gallagher once said, ‘In the Eighties and Nineties it was really easy to start a band. We’ve got to thank Thatcher for all the disused warehouses we could rehearse in.’

Jamie East, founder of gossip website Holy Moly and now a radio presenter, started out as a singer in the indie band the Beekeepers. ‘We got a record deal in the mid Nineties, because we had been able to support our rehearsing on the dole. The dole was the lifeblood of the music industry, as it actively nurtured creative talent,’ he says. ‘You could sign on and be creative – artist, musician, designer – it gave you the luxury of time to do that. When they introduced Job Seeker’s Allowance, all of a sudden you couldn’t claim housing benefit and get your £37 dole. I remember we were front page of the Derby Evening Telegraph on the same day I was having to go and lie about having to sign on. The headline was “Derby band heroes go off on 4-week tour”, and I was down the dole office having to say I was actively looking for a job. It stifled everything.’ In the end East left the band and went off to work at Sky TV.

Media went from three TV stations to the national launch of another two terrestrials (Channel 4, Channel 5), then came satellite and cable, the launch of commercial radio stations (Kiss, Virgin), and the expansion of magazine publishing houses (Arena, Frank, Esquire, Q, Red and Elle Deco) and more national newspapers (the Correspondent, Today, the Independent).

TV was exciting – there was The Big Breakfast and The Word, anarchic, youth-oriented shows where the kids were in charge, and there were no rules. Paula Yates could seduce Michael Hutchence in bed live, bands could swear at Terry Christian, Amanda de Cadenet got a speaking part. Of course it wasn’t all creative, and someone had to pay for it. Canny types saw the opportunity to marry up brands with this new sexy media. Brands had the money, Britain was brimming with creativity. One of the most canny was Matthew Freud, whose PR agency brought the two together. His agency could place a packet of crisps on a TV show, or a toothpaste tube on a magazine cover; celebrities could be bought and sold; a soft drink could sponsor a film premiere. It gave PRs and brands the illusion they were in control, and gradually, they were.

Kris Thykier, Freud’s right-hand man, remembers Planet 24’s Christmas parties as ‘legendary’. The year Planet 24 launched The Big Breakfast, its other show The Word was in full flight. Two of the most anarchic TV programmes that had ever been made – produced and presented by young people, for young people. This wasn’t any longer middle-aged men in expensive suits in Madison Avenue and Soho telling young people what was cool. The kids were doing it for themselves.

‘We took over the Ark in Hammersmith, which had just been opened and was the building of the moment. We threw a party on the top floor and it was the first moment where you sensed there were young people in charge. It was the year the Groucho was up and running. I was 20 years old and already representing the programmes, the presenters and the production company, talking to all the newspapers. It was mad. But the media were encouraging it and we were storming it,’ he says. ‘That party that year was the meeting of the teams that made The Word and The Big Breakfast. Two shows, one first thing in the morning and one last thing at night, talking to a generation that hadn’t really been talked to by television before.’

The same thing was happening in the print world. Newspapers began to expand to accommodate all the new advertising streams, with features and lifestyle and fashion sections starting to appear. These sections naturally invited in more staff, many of them young and female. This was where my career took off: I went from being an unpaid work experience on the listings section of the Observer (a job I had blagged through a friend of a friend of a friend), to a paid researcher on their Life magazine supplement. From there I went to the Telegraph as a commissioning editor in charge of food (where my patrician, silver-haired boss called me ‘The Infant Tiffanie’ as I was, as far as he was concerned, outrageously young to be in the job).

Courted by PRs, riding the London cocktail circuit of launch parties and openings, it was the ideal spot to watch the Nineties unfold. Like Thykier, I went to some legendary parties and witnessed some great moments. I remember attending one party in Cannes at the film festival, hosted by MTV in Pierre Cardin’s space-age villa, a collection of pink Teletubby pods built into the edge of a cliff on the Cote d’Azur. Ostensibly the week-long festival in Cannes was a showcase of the film world’s upcoming releases – and they were so exciting, as directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie were bringing a rock ’n’ roll edge to Hollywood.

In 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was released, giving London an international film voice – and making it very attractive to brands looking to cash in. There were probably about a thousand people at the MTV party that year, every named DJ in the land playing, and endless test tubes of Absolut Vodka going round. Everyone was cool, young and fashionable. At three in the morning they closed the party down and emptied out the villa – and at four they started it up again, for those that remained. We danced on the terrace as the sun came up over the Mediterranean and there was nowhere cooler or more at the centre of things on earth than that terrace right then – we were all exactly where we wanted to be.

As such a source of economic prosperity, the thriving creative industries, which had previously been dismissed as a bit ridiculous and inconsequential, were now being embraced by the establishment. They were part of Brand Britain – something we could sell on to the world to drive our economy and elevate our national pride. Taking his cue from America, which was so good at marketing itself, the newly elected Tony Blair held an event in 1997 that was to become the pivotal moment of the Nineties. He celebrated his election with a series of parties at 10 Downing Street, and all these artists who had set themselves up as anti-establishment, disruptive voices, were invited to Number 10, the heart of the government.

Blair was Cool Britannia – he had rebranded politics and reinvented it for our generation. For a generation so expert on and obsessed by cool, Blair’s relative youth and embracing of the creative industries was intoxicating. He must be a good thing. One of the first things he did in government was celebrate British design and creativity with a party – a party! Suddenly the emblems of what had previously been considered fringe culture were invited in to be celebrated by the establishment itself. Thatcher had had little time for culture. After 18 years of Tory rule, there were clear changes afoot.

‘It was an exciting time, to have so many people from all these different industries included,’ says June Sarpong. ‘Architecture, design, he had them all. It wasn’t just the obvious musicians and fashion and art.’ Geri Halliwell had just brought the Union Jack in from the cold, Blur and Oasis were fighting it out for cool points, the cast of The Full Monty were on set, the ‘Sensation’ exhibition was about to open at the Royal Academy, Loaded was in full swing. Tony Robinson, Vivienne Westwood, Ben Elton, Chris Evans and Kevin Spacey all trooped up the street to that famous front door. Blair hit cool paydirt when he got the photograph of the decade – chortling over a glass of champagne with Noel.

‘The fact that a guy who’d been in a band, owned an electric guitar and has probably had a spliff was prime minister really meant something,’ said Gallagher later. ‘He might be one of us.’ And Blair knew how to handle himself. When Gallagher asked him how he had managed to stay up all night on the night of the election, he quipped, ‘Probably not the same way you did.’

‘That government, because they were all so young themselves, understood how important shaping British culture was, not just for Britain but as a message to the rest of the world,’ says June. ‘They understood the importance of selling that image so that the world wanted to be part of the UK. It was quite American thinking.’ Politics, then, began to use marketing too: the age of spin was born. Blair’s PR man was Peter Mandelson, a silver-tongued figure hated by the media for his slippery talking, whose responsibility was to cast the New Labour project as the bright dawn of liberal thinking. The danger was that the shiny sheen Mandelson applied to the policies and personalities left them open to suspicion.

Momentarily, Blair brought that disengaged group in from the outside. Ultimately, though, politics did not benefit from its embrace of marketing – in the end its reliance on spin just earned it distrust. By the time Cameron came along with his lookey-likey ‘Cool Britannia’ party (Eliza Doolittle and Ronnie Corbett: the guest list didn’t have quite the same cachet), the cultural zeitgeist had moved on. He would have done better to invite Millennial vloggers and the Silicon roundabout digipreneurs, but of course that just isn’t as sexy or cool. Cameron was a posh boy who went to Eton (nobody likes privilege) whereas Blair presented himself as classless. He may have come from a relatively affluent background and even gone to public school, but Blair was socially much harder to place – the level playing field we all wanted so much.

It was to be some time before the scales were to fall from our eyes. As Private Eye had it so perfectly, Tony Blair was our saviour. Working on a national newspaper, I was not only party to all the cultural changes happening around me, but was on the inside track of the political ones too. I felt like I was living right in the middle of it – and physically I was. I had moved in with a boyfriend (TV producer for one of the myriad new satellite channels) who lived in Primrose Hill, not far from Islington and the street where Blair lived up till the election. I used to visit one of my writers who lived near the Blairs’ old home, and pass the door Cherie Blair famously answered in her nightie on the morning of the election.

Creation Records opened their HQ in Primrose Hill village, and for a while the genteel street that was then lined with greengrocers, tearooms and bookshops also housed pop stars, paparazzi and music industry types. The ancient bohemian ladies of Primrose Hill, who dined at Odette’s in their hatpins, beehives and endless necklaces, were rather a pleasing backdrop to the northern swagger of the Britpop scene. Everything, it seemed, was being overrun by the noisy clash of modernity.

Round the corner was The Steele’s, a pub where Kate Moss and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream would drink; The Queen’s played host to Chris Evans and Oasis; David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Sadie Frost and David Walliams all lived nearby and would pass in the street. It felt as if I had landed in the heart of everything, that I was part of this new world. By now I had moved on from the Telegraph to the Express features desk, where we could be reactive to the news unfolding around us. Racism in the police, the care of the elderly, the shenanigans at Westminster were all fair cop, although my finest hour was probably ‘Too posh to push’ – the truth behind Victoria Beckham’s caesarean.

I definitely gravitated towards the more fluffy side of news: my boyfriend at the time was producing a TV series with the comedian Leigh Francis (who now portrays the comedian Keith Lemon), and a pilot on video gaming with Dexter Fletcher. I was literally living next door to Liam ’n’ Patsy and I think I was rather blinded by the glitz and the excitement. While tabloid culture is a clever mix of both hard and soft news, it wasn’t clear to me at the time how we were shaping the future. How Saviour Blair was, or was not, paying it forward. How distracting and eventually corrosive celebrity culture would become. How Blair’s ‘New Deal’ – a cornerstone of his welfare reform in his first term, which withdrew benefits from those ‘who refused reasonable employment’ in exchange for training and subsidised employment, and the introduction of tuition fees that withdrew free arts education, stifling social mobility – was to have such far-reaching consequences for talent and creative culture.

The recent death of the actor Alan Rickman brought this into sharp focus: could a comprehensive boy who had grown up in a council house make it to the summit of the acting profession now? Twenty-five years ago, if you had no money you could live in a squat and draw dole to fund your rehearsal time, and you could beg, borrow or steal cheap studio space.

‘We rented a whole floor of an old disused mill for band practice back in Derby,’ says Jamie East. ‘It cost us £40 a month that we made back by sub-letting it out to other bands.’ These days ‘disused studio space’ has been turned into loft-style apartments. Bands can afford no such luxury, but it was a luxury afforded to Generation X talent: the YBAs, Kaiser Chiefs, Oasis, Jarvis Cocker et al. Where are the Alan Rickmans of today? Is it any wonder Eddie Redmayne, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis all went to Eton?

Or that the best pop can offer is a new hierarchy of talent decided by shows like The X Factor?



5




Clinton’s Cigar (#ulink_e2d2d436-3fce-5c1e-8c2e-596e2e248be5)


With greater transparency comes greater accountability. As the media exploded, and the traditional respect for privacy and restrictions around reporting on authority began to melt, power fell victim to the truth. Celebrities, once revered beasts of glamour, found themselves exposed as the humans they actually were. Tom Cruise was a cult Scientologist, David Beckham was a suspected adulterer, Jude Law was a wife-swapper, Jennifer Aniston’s marriage was on the rocks. But it wasn’t just the A-listers who were morphing into tragic soap stars in front of our eyes – it was the highest levels of government and those who had once been utterly untouchable, the Royals.

The Monica Lewinsky affair in the States seems incredible even now in the excruciating level of its detail. It was perhaps the last deliberately careless act of an American presidency that relied on secrecy. Back in 1998 Bill Clinton underestimated the growing power of the internet, the scrutiny of an ever more powerful press, the advance of technology in collecting DNA evidence. It was also the moment popular culture took on politics. Clinton’s affair struck at just the moment when technology, science, the press and popular culture came together.

Rumours of the Lewinsky affair first surfaced on the Drudge Report, at that time a fairly insignificant politics blog. Picked up by the Washington Post, it was enough for Clinton to utter the eleven words that were later to bring him down: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ An investigation was set up on the popular satirical sketch show Saturday Night Live. The internet hummed with rumour and speculation. The presidency of the United States was now reduced to a conversation around blowjobs and cigar dildos. And then investigators found DNA evidence on a blue dress. There was to be no cover-up this time. An independent investigator was appointed to ascertain whether the president had lied. Eleven months and acres of media coverage later, both parties were left shamed and broken.

Over here in the UK, we had already witnessed the unravelling of Charles and Diana’s marriage in similarly glorious detail. Charles found himself the victim of a leak of phone tapes, caught red-handed talking to his mistress and expressing a naïve (aristocratic? who knows!) desire to be her tampon. Pretty hard to command future kingly respect following that one. Diana played her hand as the wronged siren, finding lovers in surgical operating theatres and on yachts with the sons of Middle Eastern billionaires, turning up at openings in drop-dead gorgeous designer gear. Charles sought to rescue his credibility with TV confessionals but he was no match for his wife, who was much more in tune with the times.

It was the endgame, as we now know, and as the final acts of both events played out to a watching world, they ended in spectacular tragedy: impeachment for the president and the self-proclaimed prophecy of death for Diana. Diana’s ride around the Med on Dodi Fayed’s gin palaces ended in horror as the paparazzi chased her to her death on a midnight flit from the Ritz in Paris. The gradual erosion of authority that had kicked off the decade had ended it with shame for the British Royal Family and the American political establishment. Nobody believed anything any more about our inherited structures. The old ways were broken. But what did that leave us?

‘We are the first generation for whom the level of media scrutiny has made it impossible for anyone to make a move into political life,’ says Kris Thykier. ‘Until the election of Donald Trump last year, we have only had people in government who have been in politics all their lives – because unless you’re in politics all your life, you haven’t run a life that will allow you to be in politics. It may have been possible in the Sixties and Seventies, even the Eighties. But it stopped being possible in the Nineties.’ The life of JFK was no less colourful than Clinton’s – but that was no impediment, far from it. ‘When Clinton came to power in 1993, the “I didn’t inhale” line was a fudge, an indication of what was to come.’

What followed was two decades of scrutiny on our politicians that has possibly manacled some of the free-wheeling entrepreneurialism and colour that kept the political populous and discourse lively and diverse. While Generation X was busy ushering in a period of intense cultural change, the establishment failed to find an alternative route. The year 2016, however, saw all that turned on its head. Fed up with the status quo, fed up with a government that effects incremental change that seems only to be in the best interest of the elitist few, the British electorate voted themselves out of the European Union, and the American electorate voted in a man who was the antithesis of what we thought was acceptable in a politician. Dismissing liberalisation and globalisation in a great sweep, America now waits to see what kind of change a Trump presidency will bring. And Britain faces years of legal wrangling and paper-pushing as it attempts to disentangle itself from membership of the EU. Where change should and could happen is through politics – perhaps as we head into the latter years of this decade this is where we will begin to see it again. Because for a long time our attention was diverted from the political to the personal – it was, after all, much more fun. After the Clintons came the Osbournes. MTV’s reality series of life at home with a bonkers rock star began the era of ‘Reality’. Svengali of the series was Ozzy’s wife Sharon; portrayed as the long-suffering partner of a drug-addled, unfaithful star, it soon turned out that truth was stranger than fiction when tales of her defecating into a box and leaving it on people’s desks turned out to be leaked by none other than Sharon herself. She was manipulating a willing audience into believing her pantomime family was as off the scale as it appeared.

Hardly anyone who watched The Osbournes could name a single Ozzy song, but it didn’t matter. This lunatic rock musician, famous mostly for biting the head off a bat, now turned out to have a domestic life that was fascinating in its gross absurdity and yet also its mundanity. Celebrity rockers have marriage problems just like the rest of us, and they also have untidy houses and stroppy teenage children. It was a revelation.

‘The Kardashians have got nothing on the Osbournes,’ says Jamie East, founder of gossip site Holy Moly. ‘The Osbournes made us realise we didn’t like the gloss of the celebrity world. What we liked instead was watching Sharon call her husband a bastard and crying about his drugs or the time he threatened to shoot her. People could watch The Osbournes and think, “I had a similar argument with my husband. Okay, he didn’t earn a million quid and he’s not on cocaine but he spent our last 50 quid in the bookies and the kids didn’t have sandwiches in school for a week!” All of a sudden we realised celebrities left skid marks in the bowl just like the rest of us.’

East at this time was a lowly mole working at Sky TV. Celebrities and tasty morsels of gossip used to pass by his desk, and he needed somewhere to pass them on. That place was Popbitch. Starting out as an email newsletter of crude and rudimentary – yet dehabilitatingly hilarious – stories, it rode the wave of media from print to digital.

East saw the opportunity to set up a rival website, Holy Moly. ‘We were riding this wave of snark. Nick Denton was doing it overseas with Gawker, but our remit at Holy Moly was that we would always go where no one else would go – we were blunt.’




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