“I’m thinking about my school friend and how she makes a swooshing feeling roll through my heart”
BY ANNA DOBLE
Most tales about the music of the 1990s are set in The Good Mixer (Camden’s famed indie band pub) or the Brit Awards. This one is set in a small Yorkshire town, and mostly in my bedroom. In the photo above you see me in my late teens after an attempt at getting “Elastica hair”. This mission, which went on into my 20s and 30s, and some might say still persists, was forever thwarted by my naturally curly locks. One of my friends had a perfect yet accidental Britpop fringe which seemed unfair to me when it was me making so much effort, studying the NME weekly and investing in hair wax. I wanted to be slick and angular like Justine Frischmann adjusting her microphone stand or Menswear’s Johnny Dean stubbing out a fag beneath a pointy boot. In reality, I was a chubby-cheeked teen waiting for my time.
Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ‘90s charts my journey from shy junior school dreamer to confident 19-year-old. I am a football-mad kid who one day inhales the pages of Smash Hits and never looks back. All the time that I was falling in love with music, I was also just falling in love. Here is a chapter from the middle of the book. I am 16 and waiting for a first kiss from a girl.
I’m waiting for you
“The first time you see yourself naked, you cry,” sings James Dean Bradfield on Faster and I think of myself in a child’s vest at PE, shoulders hunched, strangely ashamed to be tall. I suppress waves of these feelings about who I am, and who I might become, and I send them back into the sky, the pinks and yellows of my favourite songs now blue and grey in the glass layers of my window. I look at the gap between the glazing and imagine myself trapped there, safe like a plastic figure in a snow globe, able to see outside, but pinned down, contained. I am warm and sleepy here, but I know I must shake myself into the world.
I am listening to my special edition CD of the Manic Street Preachers’ Generation Terrorists, which has a repeating image of Christ in a crown of thorns across the disc: a weeping and forsaken big-eyed Messiah, looking upwards eternally. Richey Edwards’ lacerating lyrics spray me like tiny beads of blood and sweat; his self-loathing finding every way into my increasingly self-critical teenage mind. I look in the mirror and see a dark skyline. I hate my crooked teeth. My hands don’t fit my arms. I want my friend’s Britpop fringe, but my hair curls away from the thought.
Despite my increasingly dystopian tendencies, a band that sings “pour your misery down on me” seems too blatant with its bleakness, and so I scoff a little at my friend Yorkie’s new obsession, Garbage. Now that I’m an absolute music snob, I declare I’m Only Happy When It Rains to be lightweight and continue to grapple instead with the Manics and their lyrics about capitalism, drug abuse, anorexia and abortion. But I trust Yorkie, who is in a band and plays guitar.
Her giant skater shoes (Vans, always new ones with enormous fat tongues) seem to enter the room before her skinny frame, which is angular and cool, fortified only by Pepsi and endless cigarettes. Yorkie represents the alternative scene in my school, almost single-handedly. She has a huge Kurt Cobain poster in her bedroom and various Star Wars models on a shelf, now gathering dust. Her band, Emulsion, plays in the main hall, S1, at lunchtimes and we all stand still as we watch, because any sort of dancing feels like a risk. Teachers pop by and nod along to Yorkie’s deliberately abrasive chords. I shrink away from their misunderstanding of the situation.
Soon enough I’ve changed my mind about Garbage. Shirley Manson’s minor chords have bundled me into the back of a speeding car that is travelling towards the hinterlands of my mind, and all because of one song: Milk. It’s only now, many months after Yorkie’s recommendation, that I am discovering the tidal wave of emotion hidden on the album’s last track. Tears will bring me home, Manson promises, but the route seems dimly lit.
I buy Milk on CD single and play it on repeat in my bedroom. I find myself falling into a dream-like state as I listen, almost intoxicated, and connecting to a sensation that there are people beyond my hometown that are feeling this too. I binge-listen twenty times in a row, drifting off into semi-sleep. The vocal always wakes me with a jolt, as if I’ve time-travelled into adult life, only to be catapulted back here. “I’m waiting, I’m waiting for you,” she sings with a piercing, pleading beauty. The song does things to me that I can’t yet compute. I have no idea what these lyrics really mean, or what they mean to Manson, but the waiting – waiting, w-a-i-t-i-n-g – seems to be a warning about my own future; the avenues I must travel, the connections I will make, the people I must try to find, the patience I will need. I already knew I was waiting for something. This song tells me that I am waiting not to be looked at, but to be seen. I want to look deeply into your eyes and for you to hold my gaze. I want to be the one. At school, I am still an extra to the circles of power and flirtation; I am swotty but quick-witted, boyish with a hint of brown eyeliner. I’m still waiting for my first, proper, kiss.
I first think I might be in love at the age of nine, lying on my sledge looking into the sky at the back of Knaresborough House on a school snow day. My sisters have set off home, pulling the other sledge back to our house along Raw Gap, the comically named off-shoot of the high street. Unlike the plastic trays of our peers, our sledges are proper Scandinavian-style toboggans, the type you see on Christmas cards. A seat, a ride, a snow hammock. At this moment, as I lie backwards, making myself weak to the winter air, I’ve deliberately stayed alone, planning one last ride down the hill, but also because I want to be with my thoughts, staring into the heavy sky. Fresh snow falls and I let the delicate flakes spangle onto my tongue. I’m thinking about my school friend and how she makes a swooshing feeling roll through my heart.
This same feeling follows me through school but I bury it, first under heaps of old snow that same winter, adding new powder when dark grit starts showing through the ice. Later, I put this feeling inside a football and kick it as hard as I can into the air, half revelling in the shooting pain it sends through my toe. As summers pass, these thoughts trickle alongside me, a woodland stream that I can’t see in the undergrowth but a sound that I can always hear. I cover up the noise by stamping my feet on the pebbles, then running with a stick through tall rustling grasses. But the voice in my head is always there, among the chiffchaffs and the rumbling sky. In the end, I let pop music fling open its doors.
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