Days of Future Passed

I realized recently that my musical taste took an odd sabbatical in the 90’s and much of the music from that era that I enjoy today I discovered only in the last 10 years. It prompted some reflection as to what was happening to me while I was studiously ignoring all this great music. Suburbia is what happened. Being a parent of very young children in the USA forces one into suburbia, that plus the British desperation to live somewhere else than a rainy and grey island off the north coast of France. So we had to have a house with a pool, which was above my pay grade in San Francisco or New York and so we lived in Moraga for the first half of the 90’s and Weston in rural Connecticut for the latter half. Moraga is only 45 minutes from San Francisco but pre-Uber it might as well have been 4 to 5 hours. In the first half of the 90’s I saw three live concerts, in the second half one. That’s as a big a statement about how my musical commitment had waned as any. I saw Costello at Concord Pavilion, one of three occasions I saw him live over the years and probably the most enjoyable as Nick Lowe came on for the encore, they played Lowe’s “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?” so I went home happy. I saw REM there too. The strangest choice of the only gig that we actually ventured into San Francisco to see was with our 19-year-old English au-pair to see The Orb at the Regency Ballroom which was, and still is, in one of the shittiest parts of downtown. We were the only people in the audience not enjoying better living through chemistry, and two middle aged dudes on a relatively empty stage, behind a table covered in laptops and the odd keyboard, is hardly compelling entertainment.

The one time we went into New York from Weston to see a live act in the 4+ years we were there was to see St Etienne, at the Bowery Ballroom, who were touring Good Humour. We went with Eric, a friend and neighbor, and his wife, as Eric was looking to do production for them. We actually got on the guest list and went backstage after, which was cool, even though I am sure everyone else could smell the suburbia coming off us. Giana, Eric’s wife, got completely shit-faced at a bar afterwards and spent most of the drive back up to CT throwing up. Eric played on and produced Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi), the standout track on their next album but they never used him again. What was completely weird was reading an interview with Bob Stanley after the album Finisterre was released in 2002 where he said that the vibe that he was looking for was the feeling of Heart Failed, which Eric produced, so I always wondered why they didn’t just work with Eric. 

The most obvious influence on my musical explorations during the 90’s was having babies and then young kids in the house.

I studiously avoided the hard edges of guitars and loud drums for more pop and quieter music in general. This led to some embarrassing diversions into chill singer songwriter territory and dare I say the words, verging on “Alt-country”. I favored pop and dance to some degree especially as they got older. So I played more ‘Exit to Guyville’ than ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’, more ‘Dummy’ than ‘Slanted and Enchanted’. Julia Fordham sadly figured more than PJ Harvey and for that I have no excuse. 

I was also isolated from good influences not the least being the depressing rigidity of US ‘format’ radio. This is where the US radio market, being commercialized, dominated by national chains and franchise driven is rigidly broken into quite tight genre segments where each station has a target segment and only plays approved songs for that segment. The obvious benefit lies with the large record companies and the radio station owners and not the listening audience. You only really appreciate the chaotic genius of the late, departed much loved John Peel and the likes of other Radio 1 DJs and now Radio 6 in the UK, where you can enjoy eclectic mixes of the new and varied as opposed to the old and cliched. I had started to be dependent on the British rock magazine ‘Q’ which had its own heroes and biases. I had a subscription and so a month or so after the UK publication the new magazine would rock up in my mailbox; but as Zappa had aptly critiqued music journalism “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. On my few forays into record stores I was buying CDs that I had read were good from ‘Q’, blind buys really and like all rock music publications they were driven by what they thought was the hot new thing. Hot and new trumps good far too often. The other thing that happens when you are isolated from good diverse influences is that you get stuck on former favorites, buying music from the fag-end of an artist’s career, live sets and b-sides collections as opposed to the new outburst of the young and angry, desperate to thrust their way to stardom. So, my music collecting in the mid 90’s became a mix of Zappa re-issues, Neil Young’s 3^rd effort at Harvest, Costello’s descent into self-parody, REM’s increasingly focused study of their navels mixed with dancy, techno-pop that the kids would enjoy on large car journeys.

We missed most of the excesses of Brit-Pop so that is something to be thankful for, I had the Oasis first album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory but never really liked their Beatles-lite power pop. I did enjoy Blur’s Park Life and its Who-lite power pop. My daughter was an aficionado of the Spice Girls, so we had that bouncing around in the background and who could not like Bjork? I did get into Pulp and enjoyed all of their excesses; Common People is an incredibly well-judged dig at the ruling classes that still resonates. I was happy to hear that Jarvis Cocker has lost none of his splenetic wit, his latest outing as ‘Jarv Is’ is excellent. I started to get more into electronic and dance music as the 90’s rolled on which was at times the most innovative and interesting things I could get hold of. It was certainly more innovative than grunge which I studiously ignored. That’s probably why I ended up at The Orb gig, I loved that trippy spacey “Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld” and played to death “ Little Fluffy Clouds” with the Rickie Lee Jones sound bite. I managed to completely miss the marvelous Richard James, much to Rachel’s mystification although I do have a batshit Aphex Twin remix he did of Underworld’s Born Slippy, with Pink Floyd and Woodstock soundtrack dubs. I was introduced much later, by Dan when he went off to college, to the world of 90’s old-school hip-hop but again I was not really exposed to it during the 90’s. I tried blind buys of LL Cool J and Common, both highly rated but they left me cold, who knows what would have happened if I had heard Biggie Smalls, Tribe or Digable Planets then, maybe another avenue would have opened.

The joy of discovery of new music that the interwebs have brought us has allowed me to get better acquainted with what I missed in that decade in suburbia. The recent renaissance of vinyl has provided timely 20^th Anniversary excuses for much of the good stuff from that decade to be re-issued on vinyl as well as numerous CD box sets. The following is my selection of 20 great songs that the decade offered us, looking back from the distance of these 20 odd years. “Great”, as defined primarily as what has aged the best and worth exploring again, but also biased towards the bouncy and braggart. Some of these folks are still churning out good material, some disappeared back into obscurity. Half of it I remember fondly from that time, half I missed completely and have had the joy of discovering them since. Enjoy it here.

St Etienne – Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Pulp – The Trees

Beta Band – Dry The Rain

James – Sometimes

Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945

Mathew Sweet – Girlfriend

Modest Mouse – Heart Cooks Brain

PJ Harvey – Down By The Water

The Fall – Jung Nev’s Antidotes

Sonic Youth – Kool Thing

Ash – Girl From Mars

Supergrass – Sun Hits The Sky

Sleeper – Inbetweener

Bjork – Army of Me

Radiohead – Climbing Up The Walls

Massive Attack – Teardrop 

Banco da Gaia – I Love Baby Cheesy

Chemical Brothers – Where do I Begin?

Underworld – King of Snake ( Fat Boy Slim remix)

SeeFeel – Plainsong