I loved making this playlist today.
I mean, every single track on it was fairly ubiquitous as some point in the UK between 1991-2001 (apart from maybe 'Max Don't Have Sex With Your Ex' which was referencing a 1995 plot line in a now cancelled British soap called Brookside, and is therefore an essential cultural artifact, like 'Charly' or 'Sesame's Treet'). I loved all of them at the moment of their Top 20 blitzkrieg. I was a collaborator, climbing into bed with the Eurodance invaders. I have never been a snob about this sort of stuff which is good because it meant I could easily locate the power or poetry or joy in it. I had the intellectual ballast of Simon Price championing this stuff in Melody Maker if I felt the need for moral support. But that was just back-up for something felt instinctively.
It was not jouissance. It was a beauty so obvious it could easily go undetected if you'd already trained yourself in the right (wrong) way. This music was as much the soundtrack to youth and the times as all of the other records I loved at the same moment. Now it's just another history of feeling and desire. Today I had my heart in my mouth for most of those 45 records, when I wasn't pissing myself laughing or prancing around the kitchen table. Between the towering camp crap of 'Max Don't Have Sex With Your Ex' and the Teutonic monument of 'Dreamer' is a wild, wide landscape of memory, emotion, passions and dreams.
Banger after banger.