Forget the Eighties, the Nineties were the best decade of all - Gaby Soutar

Yuppies aren’t for me

INDIO, CA - APRIL 13: Singer Jarvis Cocker of Pulp performs onstage during day 1 of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Field on April 13, 2012 in Indio, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella)

My colleague recently wrote about his favourite decade, the Eighties.

This is when I swoop in, to insist that he was wrong, and that the Nineties were way better.

I’ve been thinking about those times recently, as, earlier this month, we marked 30 years since Kurt Cobain’s death. In the same way that many people remember where they were when Princess Di or JFK passed on, I had a flashback to being in a Cowgate bar when I heard the news.

I was a big grunge and indie fan in the earliest part of that decade. The more obscure the music, the better. My playlist didn’t really include Nirvana, since I was snobby about them becoming mainstream - the worst insult, back then - though I appreciate them now. I snubbed their legendary Edinburgh Southern Bar impromptu gig, though most of my friends made it along.

However, in the later throes of the Riot Grrrl movement, I did go see Hole - Courtney Love’s band - at a venue at Tollcross, probably circa 1992. That was fun.

At my school prom, while everyone else was glammed up to the max, I wore a grunge uniform of long button-up cheesecloth check dress and DMs. This outfit was rounded off with black eyeliner and a knock-off version of Clinique’s Black Honey lipstick, naturally.

It was such a great decade for music.

Though I wasn’t a fan of the Britpop genre in general, I did love the glossiness of Pulp. Not Oasis, or Blur. The whole sexist ‘lad’ culture thing turned me off. Still, despite the grip of Loaded and FHM, the time felt generally a lot more optimistic than the Eighties. While the Thatcher years seemed grey and depressing, the Nineties were technicolour.

It was The Word, Spaced, Brass Eye and Vic & Bob on telly, and Pulp Fiction, True Romance and The Virgin Suicides at the cinema.

Maybe it was my age, but I felt optimistic about the year 2000, when we would be fully grown.

The clothes were great too. I was never into the heavily hair-sprayed Eighties look. The shoulder pads, Pat Butcher earrings and white stilettos. Nah. I loved the Sixties and Seventies styles that were revived in the Nineties. The money that I didn’t spend in record shops or on alcopops, was splurged at charity shops and Armstrongs vintage, on Wrangler flares, skinny rib striped tops and furry-collared leather coats.

It was a decade that came in with The Stone Roses, and went out with Westlife.

Now, is anyone willing to stand up for the Noughties?