If you’re like me and you’re of a certain vintage where random parts of your body are starting to hurt then I highly recommend this book. Nostalgic without being mawkish.

Highlights

[Oasis’s] songs were ready to be sung on the terraces; out of the windows of late-night taxis; wobbling, drunk and teary, along the high street after closing time, with your arms thrown to the sky, bellowing the chorus into the faces of your friends. They were songs that had lived inside you for years but you hadn’t quite been able to locate them. Until there was Liam on the stage, chin up, hands hidden, beautiful and intimidating, singing those songs out into a crowd full of people that somehow knew them too.

Britpop was a celebration of British culture, everything you’d seen before all rehashed again, but also like a requiem for British culture. Like, all this is gonna go, from teds to ravers and everything in between, it’s all gonna be sold off to the internet to the global marketplace and sold back to us in chintzy Instagram influencers. There’s gonna be a fire sale of youth culture. The party’s over.

– Irving Welsh

Now, because of the internet, music is like air, or water: everyone wants access to it all the time and doesn’t think they should pay for it. The assumption is that the internet has meant the devaluation of music, but I htink it’s the opposite. We banged on so much about music that everyone was convinced. Music is valued so highly now that it’s deemed essential, a life necessity that should be on tap. You don’t get water from a well any more; you don’t traipse across town to get music. Music is no longer a privilege, it’s a right.