Hi! I’m Keris. I’m an author writing about writing and books and music and life, and this wasn’t the last song I listened to but I can highly recommend I Sing the Body Electric from Fame as a running song.
Do you have a decade that you think of as yours? Mine is absolutely the eighties.
We saw The Terminator recently and the scene when Sarah Connor and her friend are getting ready to go out - huge hair, Walkman - and the scene in the club, I got a feeling like I’d time-travelled out of there and needed to get back. I felt it during Purple Rain too. And the opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick.
I wonder if most people feel it about the decade in which they were a teen? All that hope and promise? Please please tell me now. Do you feel the same? cos you don’t let it show
Having said that, I’m still reminiscing about the nineties…
This is why I didn’t work in A&R
Before I worked at London Records, I worked for a music industry accountants. My original job title was, sigh, Girl Friday. And then I was a secretary and then I was Assistant PA to the boss.
I loved the job at the start. The office was in Soho Square. The clients were very, very famous and we dealt with them directly. Bob Geldof gave me a kaleidoscope for my birthday. I once had to go to the airport to give something to Bjork and she was tiny and sweet and the most beautiful person I’d ever seen in real life. Paula Yates told me actor Steven Dorff would shag me (“He’ll do anyone”) and also taught me the word louche (when describing Michael Hutchence).
It soon became a living hell, but, f•ck it, it was years ago, I’m over it. (I’m not.) (But still.)
There was a junior accountant called Neil who was kind of laughably hopeless. Even now, when I spell ‘stationary’ I remember someone saying the best way to remember it is to think of asking Neil how to spell it and him sitting on his arse, refusing to get up, and saying “Eh?” But he went to a lot of gigs. Small gigs. New artists. And one day he came in RAVING about this Manchester band called Oasis. He was OBSESSED. Sure, I thought, if you say so. Didn’t attempt to listen to them.
And then I worked at London in the mid-90s when Cool Britannia was all kicking off. I remember the first time I heard Common People - I was standing at the fax machine in front of my boss’s office. Same place I heard You Oughta Know for the first time. Great stories. I should do after dinner speaking.
I loved the Shine compilation albums. I loved Pulp. By that time, I had a boyfriend - who became my husband (and then, eventually, my ex-husband) - and he loved Pulp too. We saw them at Brixton Academy and I remember absolutely nothing. (You know who else we saw there? Mike Flowers Pops.)
I’ve just realised writing this that I associate both Pulp’s Different Class (walking down the hill from Highgate Station) and Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill (making dinner in the brushed concrete kitchen) with house-sitting at my boss’s house on Shepherd’s Hill. (He had a pool. At the bottom of the garden. They didn’t even use it.)
Me and the boyfriend got married and, in 1997, moved back up north. A friend from work told me her friends’ band had a single out and we went to the Virgin Megastore on Market Street in Manchester so she could buy it.
“They’re really good!” she told me, excitedly. “You should buy it too.” I remember standing in front of the singles rack. Looking at the cover. Thinking, no. Terrible cover. Terrible name. I genuinely remember thinking I’d never hear of them again.
I wasn’t wrong about the cover though.
Or the name.
Noodles news!
She is still mostly under the 20yo’s bed. Except at night when she seems quite dedicated to trolling him. Crying to be let up onto his bed, making biscuits on his chest - an attempt was made on his head - hopping off the bed and then crying to be let up again.
This morning I noticed the bag of cat litter was at the foot of the stairs. Harry just came down and said that, during the night, Noodles kept running across the room to pounce on it.
And then he had to try to sleep with this view.
In case you missed it, last week I started writing about the contents of my Mum’s Suitcase
Next Mum’s Suitcase post is coming up this time next week.
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The 80s were my teen decade, so hugely formative.
But I emigrated from Aotearoa NZ to London at the start of 1990 and stayed in the city for a decade, pursuing a new career (comics editing), making new friends and building a whole new life on the other side of the world. So the 90s kind of felt like a second teenage, but with added work and cash.
I saw Pulp at Wembley Arena. I was pretty near the front, able to jump high. So I did. And Jarvis Cocker pointed at me and sang at me for about 20 seconds while I kept jumping.
As for Brothers & Sisters, I still have it going around my head to this day. Magic. But, yeah, that cover...