Back then, culture was relentless. New music, new ways of dressing and dancing and being would rise with sudden force, crash and break and sweep away all that had gone before. You would see a band in some horrible dive, or hear a track on a dance floor and that was it: everything changed. And somehow everyone knew about it, though there was no internet, no mobile phones. There were magazines, but they came out monthly, or once a week. There were pagers, but they were for drug dealers or on-call doctors, not for telling everyone about a brilliant club that had opened, a squat that was holding free parties, a place where it was all going off. There were radio shows that helped, record shops to hang around in, hand-drawn flyers, but really … We just all knew.
It felt like we were constantly on the cusp of something. A revolution. A change. We’d push at doors and they would open easily. We would be let into places that only weeks before had kept us outside, pulling faces through the windows. And the new kept on coming.
The beginning can be so enthralling, so thrilling, you forget that, for anything to start and thrive, another thing must weaken. The end of the old way is still a death. Something fades, gives up, sits down and never gets up again. Or it fights and dies anyway.
In 1988, I got my first proper job – not cleaning, not TEFL, not working in a shop – and it was the best job ever. I started working for Smash Hits magazine, as a writer. In my job interview, the editor asked me if he should put Elton John on the cover of the new issue (Elton was Number 1 at the time). I said, ‘No way, you should put Brother Beyond on instead.’ That was my lucky break: the editor had, in fact, just done that very thing. I got the job because I wasn’t too far from being one of the pop fans who pored over Smash Hits. This was because I was a pop fan who pored over Smash Hits.
It was the era of Kylie and Bros, and the Smash Hits office was above the BOY shop in Carnaby Street. On my first day, I arrived at 9 a.m., and had to sit on the step outside for an hour until anyone else turned up. Once in, I was installed on a spare chair, in front of an electric typewriter, within a room that appeared to have been attacked by a litter bomb. Every single surface was piled high with paper and 12-inch singles and cassettes and overflowing ashtrays.
Almost all of the staff were from outside London – from Perth, Dublin, Belfast, Dundee, Liverpool – and none of them seemed so different from me. I kept looking around the room, peering between the teetering debris, wondering where the grown-up was – the suit, the scary person in charge. There wasn’t one. Perhaps that was why everyone stayed so late. They were having fun: a new concept when it came to work, for me. I soon joined in, and I didn’t really leave that room – not during weekday daylight hours – for the next two years.
The start of the 90s was marked by my flat burning down. It was a rented flat, three storeys above a pharmacy in south London. At the time, the road was a market street, full of fruit and veg stalls run by shouty locals. On weekends we would wait until the market was ending, then go out and blag cheap vegetables.
I shared the flat with four friends. Two of them plus another mate were in when the fire started. It was very quick. (‘In the time it takes to build a spliff but not light it,’ said D.) They had to climb out of a back window onto a roof. They were still in their pyjamas.
We never found out how the fire had started, though we had our suspicions. It had begun in N’s room, and she favoured floaty curtains, also candles, also leaving the iron on. But we all smoked, so who knows? Her room was at the front, on the first floor, directly above the shop. The fire took hold there and raged upwards, the central staircase that spiralled up the building acting like a very efficient chimney. The blaze took out every single room. Except mine, right at the top at the back. I’d shut my door when I’d left. It was a bank holiday weekend and I’d gone to see my parents.
N phoned me at my mum’s. She said: ‘I’ve got nothing left. It’s back to the brick in my room. We left your window open to let out the smell of smoke.’
That night someone climbed in through my window and robbed the flat of what was left: Levi’s jeans, Technic decks, trainers. Also my tickets to see Prince. I told the police which seats they were for. I thought they would send someone to pick up the ticket-holders, arrest and question them about the robbery. Maybe an undercover officer in Nike Jordans and a Keith Haring T-shirt. They didn’t do anything.
When I got back into the flat, I clambered up the floors, thinking I could salvage stuff. But everything was covered with soot so thick that it wouldn’t come off when you tried to clean it. It just streaked and striped, ingrained itself deeper. The water was cold, the electricity cut. In the bathroom, the disposable razors on the side of the bath had twisted in the heat, curled up like small orange snakes.
I climbed the black stairs to my room and shut the door. Nothing much in there had changed. Some of the photos had fallen down, my trainers and tickets were gone. But otherwise it was exactly as I had left it. It felt like a dream. Around the top of the door, scorch marks stretched, pushing out from the frame and on to the wall. They looked like the black fingers of a monster, scrabbling to get in.
After the fire, everything was different. We were uprooted, homeless. It felt liberating, rather than sad. That group of people split, some coupled up, some left London. I slept on mates’ floors. I left Smash Hits, for reasons I can’t remember now, and I bought a black London taxi. Its top speed was 55 m.p.h. I drove to France in it with N. We played the Stone Roses’ ‘One Love’ as we chugged, very slowly, into Paris.
But we fell out over a bloke. So I drove around France by myself for a month, met up with friends of friends, slept wherever they were, or bedded down in the back of the taxi on the floor. I spent a lot of time on my own in it, rumbling along long, straight roads through tall, straight trees, winding across plains, over mountains. In the evenings, I would drive into the middle of towns, park up and go out to the local bars. Play pool. Talk to people. One time, when I woke, mucky and hungover and too hot, having parked in a lovely quiet square, a whole market had been put up around the cab.
When I got back to London, I met someone who became my boyfriend. I stayed with him in a mate’s room, with all my mate’s stuff still in it. Our stuff made no impression; we didn’t have many possessions to add. When my dad came to visit, he cried.
I sold my taxi to an NME photographer who drove it to the south of Spain and swapped it for a bag of Es. I had no job, nowhere proper to live. Everything was in flux.
All around was fun, though. Raves in film studios that you got to at midnight, locked out until everyone stormed the doors and you were carried in on the tide of people. Gigs: small, drunk, violent events where the lead singer would throw himself off speaker stacks and roll around on the floor and the drummer turned his head to be sick offstage and wouldn’t miss a beat. Afternoons in Soho parks and pubs that would carry on into the evening and some do over east: grubby and empty then, apart from the beigel shops. A squat party at Brockwell Park lido where people were climbing over the walls to get in, sliding down the drainpipes in the corners. I saw a bloke on a bike ride straight into the swimming pool. And then try to carry on cycling along the pool floor.
There were sudden blags – a mate passing an ID bracelet past the PR frontline over and over until we were all in backstage. Festivals where it didn’t rain and you nicked a pass so you could park backstage, with pop stars arriving in helicopters right next to your tent.