I've been listening to Pulp's 'Different Class' on a loop since a friend was playing it on a night round at his. It's cliche, but I'd truly forgotten how much I love it.
And it's not just about the music (which I still think is great), it's the way it brought back a whole moment of my teens with a glorious technicolour thump. I can still taste the cheap lager (Skol); still smell my old perfume (United Colours of Benetton); still see the floppy blonde hair of the boy I was going to love forever; and still feel the crunchy oldness of my old Wrangler jacket and the too-tightness of my armful of friendship bands.
The summer of 1995. A summer of tearful school goodbyes; first holidays abroad without grownups; freedom from exam worry and Arnold Rimmer revision timetable procrastination; week long parties at any house in Yorkshire where parents with groaning drinks cabinets were absent; squashing as many people as possible into a Nova and coppering up for milkshakes at McDonalds on the ring road in the middle of the night; and, anxious excitement at the prospect of university and moving away.
I saw Pulp that summer at the (then free) Heineken Beer Festival in Roundhay Park. I still have the Wrangler jacket I wore that summer, it still sort-of fits. The gazelles and youthful skin are long gone. (They smelled like a hedgehog had died in them towards the end. The shoes not my skin.)
I remember feeling happy and free; on the cusp of something great which was probably grown-upness. (Little did I know that I would be sat on the very same cusp some 15 years on.) I didn't know, when I was illegally pitching my tent that night (on a steep hill, oh the folly of youth), that I had fucked up my A'levels and things weren't going to be quite the dreamy, smooth sail that I thought. I didn't know then that my stubborn, 18 year old self was taking a lot of wrong turns that would take over a decade and half to begin to correct.
It's all about Disco 2000. I still think it'll be strange when I'm all fully grown. When will this be exactly?
gin-nurtered time waster.