Out of Time. Miranda Sawyer

down on the ground and falling onto it head first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      I wrote for The Face about boy-racer teenagers and posh students. You could write about anything for The Face. They sent me – a writer with no fashion knowledge – to write about Fashion Week. After traipsing between several sniffy, dull events, I got to go to an Alexander McQueen show. It was in a warehouse and it was exactly like going to a rave: the scramble outside, the flat impossibility of entry. But I knew clubs. I knew what to do. I pushed to the front, talked my way in on the door. It was easy.

      Nathan Barley had nothing on The Face back then. We gave out free wallpaper, designed by Björk: just the one magazine-sized piece. I think we thought readers would buy loads of copies so they could cover a wall. My flatmate started playing Tomb Raider and I watched him manoeuvre pixel-pixie Lara Croft, with her square-muscled bum and swingy ponytail, through Raiders of the Lost Ark caves to fight dragons. I thought: We should put her on the cover! We did: not a human version, the cartoon-game version of Lara. On the inside spread she wore Versace and Gucci.

      We once did a fashion shoot that featured models wearing nothing at all. You were meant to infer the clothes from the marks they left on the models’ skin – the crease marks around the wrist, the redness left by a belt. But the printing was so bad you couldn’t see the detail. The shoot was naked models, accompanied by captions about what they weren’t wearing. A 90s’ version of the emperor’s new clothes.

      All those kind-of friends you met through going out, who made films or music or danced so hard they made a club change its atmosphere, or were just funny and great-looking, had a way with clothes or a knack of being everywhere first … All those people, they were making the stories. Pushing the horrible youth establishment (Dave Lee Travis!) off their pedestals, forcing their own agenda.

      We were so good at having a good time. Everyone noticed. Everyone wanted to join in. We didn’t mind too much. When you see your friends and friends of your friends take over music and art and magazines and modelling and comedy and films and books and clubs, you think, Great. This is what we want. We are going to win.

      ‘You know who you remind me of?’ says a mum in the playground. ‘You know those girls who used to be on TV, the tomboy ones. Zoë Ball, Denise Van Outen … They had a name for them …’

      I remember the name: ladettes. I know the story of the 90s. I’ve made documentaries about it for radio. I’ve been interviewed about it for TV. My memories are my own, but they fit with the history that’s usually told, as long as they’re edited.

      But the turning points are different, for me. Nobody really cared about Blur v. Oasis, except in an oblique way: look how BIG everything’s got! The people who made it in the 90s were from alternative culture. Not all of them – not Chris Evans, not the Spice Girls – but those who kept music close to their hearts. And that meant that when everything got big, when the full glare of the tabloids was trained on them, they didn’t like it. They couldn’t really cope. Even the ones who seemed to truly desire it – Oasis, Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, Damon Albarn – they had to move away from that light. It was too much. The establishment, the mainstream is scary and intolerant and more powerful than you might expect. It reduces everything to its basest motive: money-sex-power. Which is fun, for a time, but it’s not everything you want. It’s not what you’re about. You’re trying to make something new.

      Blur fractured; Graham limped away. Oasis changed their entire line-up, apart from the Gallagher brothers. Pulp splintered. Suede stuttered. Elastica collapsed. Other bands had members kill themselves, or get very ill, or become overwhelmed with addiction, or withdraw.

      The drugs changed. No more poppers and speed, no more weed and mushrooms and Feminax. Ecstasy, of course, cocaine, ketamine, and then, heroin. Weird stuff like PCP, which gave you flashbacks of little green men explaining the meaning of life. People started falling through the cracks, disappearing. Some were sectioned. Some died. Some went away and never came back. I wrote a piece about heroin and smoked it, though I hated downers, only liked the stuff that took you up and out. I got a cab home, was sick outside our gate and slept for fifteen hours. People got cross with me about the feature. Someone phoned me up and shouted at me about revealing he used heroin, even though I didn’t mention him at all, even though I hadn’t known he was on it.

      I got shouted at quite a bit because of my articles. In one, I got methadone and methadrine mixed up, and a lead singer bawled me out backstage at a Rollercoaster event. In another, I put in a quote from one singer wanting another singer to die of AIDS and it caused huge problems. You just didn’t know what would blow up, really. I still thought I was only