Regular readers of my distracted piffle will know by now that I drive a red van with a tape player in it. This has led to a few changes in listening habits, not least because I hardly have any tapes left at all.  A bit like what happened to my vinyl back in about 1995, my collection has been shoved in a box at the back of a cupboard, and I honestly didn’t think I would ever play them again.

Unlike my vinyl, though, my parents didn’t eventually get bored of having it lying around the house and then throw it in the fucking bin.  Yes, they did that.  To my vinyl.  Not that I blame them really, I’d copied it all to tape (oh wait…) and was a student at the time, so there seemed little imminent prospect of me ever having a record player again.  How times change.

Now not only do we have a tape player in the van, we have actually bought one for the house, too.  I bought it off eBay for about fifteen quid a couple of years ago when I first got my hands on the Japanese War Effort’s brilliant Snowbird album, which exists only on cassette.  So for a long while, that tape player was simply a Snowbird Playing Machine, and in a sense the album itself, far from the eminently reasonable two pounds I paid for it at retail, had ended up costing me nearer twenty.

However, the box of tapes in our house is actually still stuffed away under the stairs somewhere, so at the moment the van’s tape player is subsisting on a pretty meagre diet.  In fact, due to the fact that even the van tapes have ended up buried under a pile of old crap somewhere under one of the back seats, I have actually only been listening to one single tape for the last month or so, over and over again.

I made this tape towards the tail end of the nineties and I called it, with tongue somewhat in cheek, Let’s Bop With the Brits.  It is basically just a collection of British music which, for one reason or another, was starting to sound quite old-fashioned by 1996 or so.  There was some Morrissey, some Inspiral Carpets, some Wonderstuff, some Gene, one solitary Stone Roses song, a couple of tracks from Parklife, hopefully you get the gist of it.

Anyhow, yes, for some reason I have had that one tape on repeat constantly for the last four weeks and I now know the words to most of the songs pretty much off by heart, never mind the playlist itself.  With modern music libraries comprising thousands and thousands of files, I am not sure when the last time is that happened to me.

Morrissey – Certain People I Know

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Blur – End of a Century

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m kind of curious to know what the 90s revival is going to spit out. I mean, it’s presumably inevitable that some time in about 2012 or so we all start looking back at that decade with a sort of patronising, nostalgic affection, but I am still struggling to entirely picture it.

Firstly, perhaps because of my age, I don’t yet look at the 90s with a kind of horrified fashion thrill that is something like revulsion mixed with fascination. This kind of curious horror preceded both the 70s and 80s revival, for me, but I can’t quite see what was so incredibly 90s about the 90s just yet. I’m sure it will come.

I also can’t quite picture the music that will have to be critically re-appraised. The 90s was the era of Britpop, basically, but Britpop doesn’t really sound either laughably old-fashioned or woefully misguided to my ears. Sure, there were shit bands, but the movement itself doesn’t make me cringe enough to be the pre-cursor to a good ironic reinvention. Maybe this will come with time.

Still, I may not be able to imagine quite what music the 90s revival will seize upon and drag back up to the peak of Mount Revisionism just yet. I can’t picture quite what that smug prick of a hipster will put on the stereo with an unbearable look of arch irony and condescending, self-satisfied superiority while all his friends gape in awe at his audacity. ‘Oh my god, dude, that’s like so nineties.’ Mind you, perhaps not. Because things being ‘like so‘ anything is just like so nineties to begin with.

Anyway, I remember making a tape once which I called Learn to Bop With the Brits, which was basically a 90s Revival tape made in about 1998. It had some Wonderstuff, some Inspiral Carpets, a bit of Morrissey, some Echobelly, a bit of James and god knows what else on it. The tape itself is long gone, and I barely remember what was on the thing, but it wouldn’t make a bad starting point for that 90s revival that we’re presumably all going to succumb to in the next four or five years.

Inspiral Carpets – Saturn V
James – Sound
Belly – Untitled & Unsung
Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Morrissey – Seasick, Yet Still Docked

I am a mere 32 years old. Some of you may be gasping at such superannuation, others chuckling indulgently at callow youth. In the world of music there seem to be a large clump of enthusiastic kids, a big chunk of people like me – getting a little too old to be indie kids but still are – and then another big clump of folk in their forties who decided a few years back that they were never going to be too old for all this and fuck anyone who suggests they are.

I seem to find myself easily identified as the middle category: not enough knowledge of Joy Division to be the latter, nor enough enthusiasm for Blood Red Shoes to be the former, and this is pretty much accurate. The problem is that almost everyone in this country of my age grew up listening to the sort of music that is being reprised right at this very moment, and I missed it. Spending your teenage years in Vienna and Singapore you just didn’t hear current music, ever. Beyond pantomime metal and shitty disco pop it just didn’t make the leap.

This means that when I hear groups like Cats on Fire, Decoration, The Siddeleys, My Teenage Stride, Shout Out Louds and countless others who are either reinterpreting – or just plain ripping off, depending on your view – this sort of sound I actually don’t hear a rip off.  I am hearing a good chunk of this music for the first time, despite it conjuring up a slightly disembodied sense of nostaligia, which is slightly odd because just about everyone my age over here is pretty familiar with this sound from the first time round.  There are patches of knowledge because we did have MTV and my cousin Steve used to send me mix tapes on my birthday, but for the most part my musical knowledge starts almost entirely from scratch in 1993, when I first moved to the UK to go to university.  I was seventeen.

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Soupdragons, The Wonderstuff and The Levellers were just fading from public approval and Britpop was about to take off.  My first year in Manchester was the year Definitely Maybe, His ‘n’ Hers and Parklife were released.  So I missed C86, despite the fact that I should just have been starting to develop an interest in music at the time.  I was the only person I knew who had heard of The Stone Roses.

This is why you will often hear me get all excited about groups almost anyone else my age would probably dismiss as a bland knock-off of stuff they heard years ago.  For me the first time that is likely to happen is when the 90s Revival kicks in and grunge comes back.

The Cure – Killing an Arab
The Smiths -  Shakespeare’s Sister
The Siddeleys – Sunshine Thuggery
My Teenage Stride – Terror Bends
The Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Levellers – Liberty Song
Pulp – Pink Glove
Blur – Tracy Jacks