Simon Mills on the 90s: ‘It was an exciting, hedonistic time... a socio-cultural sweet spot’

As 1980s elitism vanished in a wave of euphoria, rave culture exploded, art shows were like rock concerts and even war seemed a thing of the pastI began the decade as editor of the teen pop culture magazine SKY, writing about acid house music, Naomi Campbell and Vivienne Westwood, moved on to The Sunday Times Magazine where exciting new young British artists, actors and directors were my editorial quarry, before transitioning into the Noughties as the co-writer of a weekly, Evening Standard gossip column with Nicky Haslam. Call me shallow if you like, but pop music, pop art and champagne-popping parties was pretty much it, back then. The crucial difference being that suddenly everyone seemed to be invited. After the go-getting 1980s when elitism, minimalism and materialism were our aesthetics and aspirations, the 1990s seemed like a cultural democratisation. Raves not private clubs were where we went. And style-wise, we weren’t looking to America or Europe any more — we had our own thing going and, matey, it was going off. For me (and probably many of you) the 1990s started in 1988, the fabled Second Summer of Love, when the whole city seemed to be moving to an unzt-untzing, four-on-the-floor beat and a Roland TB303 squelch for months on end. The 90s gave us Spice GirlsMirrorpix via Getty ImagesEvery weekend that summer, and subsequent 1990s summers, I went to warehouses (Clink Street and Battlebridge Road), to far-away Essex fields and even bussed out to an equestrian stables in Henley, to lose myself, shake a leg and throw hands in the air. Everyone could do the dance, feel the rhythms, catch the vibe. House was uniting, pacifying and euphoric, and the capital quickly co-opted this black Chicago music for its own multi-coloured soundtrack. Yes, we felt fuzzy on Mondays but jobs were held down and mortgages paid. (My own, being a 60k, 100 per cent/no deposit deal on a nice two-bedder in Kensal Rise — yep, good times.) I know it sounds trite and sentimental to suggest that pop culture can influence the moods and ideas of a whole nation, but people really did change. Football terrace violence was down, men learned to kiss and hug one another and, inspired by the house music explosion, British pop music embraced its own black, white and brown influences. History frames the 1990s as all Oasis, Suede, Blur, Elastica and Pulp, but for lots of us Londoners it was also The Young Disciples, Omar, Jamiroquai, a music scene that sparked connection, unification and feeling — what curator Edward Enninful calls a “shared impulse”. This was a decade of attitude not wardrobe. Laughs not labelsThat new spirit had a trickle-down effect on other areas of lifestyle. Where 1980s fashion had been all monochrome power dressing and sartorial brutalism, colour made a comeback in the 1990s. This was a decade of attitude not wardrobe. Laughs not labels. And in the financial recession of the early 1990s, why go to an expensive designer store when a Rachel haircut and a long-sleeved Hanes T-shirt hoodie, or a smile and pair of Birkenstocks — just like that girl Kate Moss was wearing in The Face magazine’s Corinne Day shoot — was much more the thing? Over in east London — large parts of it still a wasteland back then — the YBAs were making art that was visually impactful and easily disseminatable, but more importantly, approachable and un-snooty. I’d attended Damien Hirst’s first-ever solo show, 1991’s In and Out of Love, staged at a vacant shop on Woodstock Street, just off Bond Street, enjoying a quiet and modestly attended affair. The Royal Academy’s famous Sensation exhibition in 1997? It was more like a rock concert — the landmark show of work by Hirst, Marc Quinn, the Chapman Brothers, Mat Collishaw and Tracey Emin drawing over 300,000 visitors (a whole Glastonbury weekend’s worth!), setting a British record for a contemporary art exhibition. Tracey Emin’s A Second Life Yui Mok/PA WireIf you wanted to, you could easily go and see Sensation when it travelled to Berlin. The 1990s was when easy and accessible, cut-price air travel became part of our collective schedule — cheap flights from London not just to Ibiza and Corfu but to exotic Mittel-European and Scandinavian destinations as well. Shameful to think that the potentially planet-ruinous concept of one’s carbon footprint wasn’t much of a consideration back then, but travelling to Eastern Europe to check out the rave scene in Prague or Gdansk for the weekend, on a whim, sometimes for as little as £15, seemed like an unmissable bargain. We generally admired and approved of the Americans for doing the right thing (imagine that!) Through this highly mobile, idealistic and hedonistic, rainbow-hued prism, the wider world appeared to be over the worst of itself too. From 1990 to 1994 South Africa dismantled apartheid, and the whole planet seemed very happy about it. In 1990, a USA-led air and ground initiative drove Saddam Hussein’s invading army out of Kuwait in just 100 hours. We generally admired and approved of the Americans for doing the right thing (imagine that!). There were the now largely forgotten Oslo Accords, interim peace agreements of 1993 and 1995 that encouraged Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to negotiate a framework for peace and coexistence (which would definitely be happening very soon). The civil war in the former Yugoslavia ended and in 1993, John Major, bless him, issued the Downing Street Declaration, establishing a core “principle of consent”, asserting that Northern Ireland’s constitutional status would only change with the majority consent of its population. A 1994 IRA ceasefire followed, making way for the Good Friday Agreement, finalised by Tony Blair in 1998. So, no more wars. Forever. Honestly, that’s how it felt. Prime Minister John Major waving a joint declaration on peace in Northern Ireland with Irish Taoiseach Albert ReynoldsAFP via Getty ImagesHow did we get along without smartphones and an omnipresent internet? Fine, thank you very much. When the digital age did arrive, proper, during the 1990s we took it in our stride, naively regarding our Nokias, Motorolas and Ericssons as simply useful and exciting social tools; providers, facilitators and accelerators designed for our convenience and communication, rather than essential appendages to dominate and distract us, weaponise our opinions and take pictures of our food with. We had the internet but no one really bothered too much about the wonky world wide web. Bereft of browsers, search engines and shopping channels, back then it was for airlines and banks to operate more efficiency, not to sidetrack and doomscroll us all into oblivion. Little did we know, but what we were experiencing was modern technology — just the right amount of it — at its exciting, untyrannised, benignly connected, socio-cultural sweet spot. When it worked in harmony with, say, music, media and retail — and wasn’t intent on wiping out everything fun, good, clever and creative (and forcing kids into their bedrooms for hours on end instead). The writer Michael Bracewell once noted that the 1990s were like the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s “whizzed through the blender of information technology”. Brit culture as an exercise in time travel, “from Swinging London revisited to nostalgia for an imagined future”. In hindsight, this might be true. It became fashionable to present as a sort of anti-intellectual, belief-shunning yobbo The downside of 1990s culture was its hipsterisation of what had gone before, other decades recycled with an added sneer — elitism via cynicism. In a blur of good times and Met Bar-flying there was a tendency to behave selfishly and irresponsibly, at our lowest ebb, almost wilfully intent on dumbing ourselves down. With so much good stuff and fast fun around, it became fashionable to present as a sort of anti-intellectual, belief-shunning yobbo, championing irony and Union Flag-draped Albion nostalgia. Ergo, lads and ladette culture, Loaded magazine, The Word and The Girlie Show. Lots of the stuff that surrounded us seemed a bit overly “knowing” and affectedly unbourgeois, a notion that peaked with the meta-heavy Fat Les England football song Vindaloo, its video a parody of a recent pop smash (The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony), the cast already referencing other familiar decadal images of sloshed It girls, Oasis bucketheads etc. Yes, by 1997, the 1990s had started to eat itself. Now, 30 years on? Some of the decade’s tastes and choices may seem regrettable. Much of it, the stuff one can actually remember at least, remains truly wonderful. Front cover of Loaded magazine in 1997LOADED MAGAZINEJust by chance, I read a recent missive on Facebook added by Meg Mathews, the former Mrs Noel Gallagher. In the light of newly announced Knebworth House dates for the band in 2027, Mathews was reminiscing about the original, pre-dynamically priced Oasis concerts at Knebworth in 1996 when she was put in charge of the band’s guest list. Over the weekend some 250,000 fans attended two gigs, more than 2.5 people applying for tickets. How many on Mathews’s guest list? SEVEN. THOUSAND. PEOPLE. That’s the 1990s distilled. A good time had by all. Elitism over. Everyone invited. ’Ave it.