Loaded, Britpop and Cool Britannia – in the 1990s we had it all. What’s happened to our country?
When I was young I never thought I’d become someone banging on about how much better the past was, and I have no desire to go back in time – but here we are
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When people ask me what was so great about the Nineties, as they have been doing a lot lately, it’s very easy to point to the things I loved back then. The festivals, the football, the music, the comedians, the overriding sense of freedom and excitement as the century – the millennium, even – drew to an end.
It was a decade that was calling last orders on a century that began with the horse-drawn carriage as the most popular form of inner-city transport and ended with the news of “broadband” video phones, as if two totally separate time-travelling episodes of Star Trek or Doctor Who had been welded together into one. The Nineties were a last chance saloon to have as much fun as possible – yet despite this hedonism, it always felt like things were progressing for the better.
A new generation of creative and sporting talent meant my magazine, Loaded, launched in 1994, paying back its budgeted three-year business investment in 12 weeks. It was never short of an interesting cover star: from Gary Oldman to Kylie, Will Carling to The Simpsons, Vic and Bob to Pulp Fiction actor Uma Thurman.
Cool Britannia, Britpop, Oasis at Knebworth, Gazza at Euro 96, Blur and the Spice Girls bouncing about in the charts – it was a generation defined by (and made for) people full of hope and youthful exuberance.
Licensing laws were relaxed, night clubs were fuelled by a love drug and saw the rise of the DJ, cheap flights determined how and where we holidayed, there were brilliant new books like Trainspotting and The Beach to read on Stelios’s planes. Britain felt like a vibrant, exciting place.
The first year of the decade saw the demise of Margaret Thatcher and – after John Major’s grey buffer period – “new” Labour roared in; filling the political arena with optimism, schools with more books and hospitals with more beds. And suddenly it felt like very much the best acts around were also the biggest. From No 10 to No 1, boundaries were redefined and records broken. I don’t think anyone could have predicted the unbearable slump Britain now finds itself in.
The worst of it plays out in the rotten byways of Twitter, with its muck and tinsel in constant conflict. Brexit brought to the surface a sense of dismay, an ever-widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” – and yet those with the least to hold on to now seem to think it is people crossing the Channel in rubber dinghies who are the cause of all their economic woes.
People who were once respected – like Gary Lineker, Tony Blair and even Prince Harry – are now permanent and frequent targets for the hurt, the bitter, the confused, the frustrated.
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Two touches of the screen can take you from the app-happy clutter of your home screen to an open sore of anonymous abuse spat out by little gangs of echo chamber-dwelling figures; emboldened by mealy-mouthed, like-minded followers and the opportunity to spew forth anything they feel like from behind a made-up name and an avatar of their political heroes from eras they neither knew nor experienced.
Spend even 10 minutes on Twitter and you’ll find a country at war with itself. Look at the Tory party conference and you’ll see a puppet show, not a leadership base – a crumbling array of incompetents intent on gaslighting the population.
When I was young, I never thought I’d become someone banging on about how much better the past was, and I have no desire to go back in time – but here we are. I’ve genuinely no idea if it will get better or worse. History backs the latter. What happened to our country?
James Brown’s memoir, ‘Animal House’, about his career in publishing is out now. It’s less apocalyptic than this column
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