Last night I was sat up for an age trying to remember the 90’s, I was there although how does the old adage go? If you can remember then you weren’t there. This is all very well but it’s not true for one and for two, It’s bloody irritating trying to piece back together the 90’s when I’m pretty sure I was a part of a small corner of debauched behaviour in the back streets of early 90’s and mid 90’s and late 90’s Manchester. I was snapped by some photographer in some small underground (literally and metaphorically) and the photo was snapped up by some publisher within the Big Issue and I had a 1/2 page spread of me, in combat trousers and a black Adidas long sleeve top and skinhead, or buzzcut as my son calls it. But I have no idea what the place was called. Friends remember the ducts and pipes tracking along the ceiling dripping with sweat, Heavy Dub and Trip Hop pounding out of the speakers and pinning us to the dance floors, in green and purple lights peppered with blinding strobes, the Red Stripes sold in cans and the Filthy Drugs; a few of these memories part of the reasons aside from advancing years  I can’t remember the name of the place. It had a one syllable name and it wasn’t Home.

Those days had no respect for the weeks the pertained to belong within and the weeks bled across the months blurring the seasons into times I wore sunglasses and times I did not. Shoes were even an optional extra at times despite dancing for hours in sweaty rammed clubs grinning like a Cheshire cat, the kilos falling off my meagre frame night after night fuelled only by crisps, alcohol and pharmaceuticals. No longer the timid child of a decade before, but a man fully embracing the so called counter culture which I found myself revelling within. Had I not done what I did, I may have had a slightly better paid job, maybe, had I concentrated a little more at school, I may have found myself in a slightly different position. But I chose not to, I chose, to coin a cliche, life. It was the age of Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, The Acid House, Megadog, Whirly-Gig, Blastaways, Raves in fields and ecstasy in record shops on a Tuesday afternoon.

Spent Youth, well spent, fun times, and I wouldn’t change it for all the world, as I wouldn’t be right here, right now, writing this drivel. Thanks to all the past.