It reported culture but created its own culture, too, helping launch the careers of a generation of photographers, writers, stylists, editors and commentators including Juergen Teller, Steven Klein, Venetia Scott, Ekow Eshun, David Sims, Corinne Day, Katie Grand and Chris Heath. Like thousands of other people of a certain age, I had grown up outside London, using it as a monthly teleportation device into a world of glamour, cool and excitement that was not my parents’ sitting room. Better-looking, better-written, smart without being pretentious and often very funny. There were other titles covering similar territory - Sky, Q, Mixmag, Loaded, i-D - but the don was indisputably The Face. Published monthly and sold in newsagents for less than £2.50, these colourful and glossy objects were nice to look at and told you what was what, and who was who - and were consumed in their hundreds of thousands.
Before TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Reddit, Reels, Stories, YouTube, Facebook, influencers, Grailed and Hypebeast, if you were under 30 and had an interest in pop culture, the place you found out about it was in magazines. Because they are inseparable from my experience at The Face in that period, when I had a job at the magazine at the centre of the pop-culture universe. Why am I going on about drugs? I’m trying to remember myself… yes, that’s it. Later, Harvey ran himself over with his own car after, apparently, eating too many jacket potatoes and opening the driver’s door to be sick. Pop-dance band The Shamen went on Saturday morning kids’ telly with a song whose chorus literally went: “Es are good.” Brian Harvey, from the boy band East 17, told a radio interviewer that he’d recently taken a dozen Es, since ecstasy was a “safe drug”. But in popular culture in the 1990s, drugs were everywhere, all the time. They certainly don’t need to show off about them. “Suicide Tuesdays” were a legitimate excuse for being in a foul temper at work.ĭrugs haven’t gone anywhere, but I would suggest that today’s young people perhaps have a slightly more enlightened attitude about when and where to take them. Of Mondays when Radio 1 Breakfast Show DJs would talk nudge-nudgingly of overcooking it at the weekend. Popular T-shirts included Hysteric Glamour’s “Junkie’s Baddy Powder” - in the Johnson’s baby powder font - and “Techno” in the Tesco font.
Soft drinks were advertised with rave graphics. Of “superstar” DJs like Sasha and Danny Rampling. Of triple-mix CDs called things like Havin’ It Ibiza II Mixed Live by Alex P & Brandon Block. The era of superclubs like Cream in Liverpool and Renaissance in Mansfield.
History dictates that clubbing as we know it became a thing in this country with 1988’s “Summer of Love”, but it was the next decade when everyone worked out how to monetise and make it mainstream. But drugs run through the 1990s like the proverbial stick of Brighton rock. He entered rehab in 2009 and hasn’t touched drink or drugs since. Today, Norman Cook is a reformed character. On the back of a CD on his living-room table, he has laid out four lines of cocaine. We will visit a night called Mr Fabulous and Mr Mental Present: Fabulous and Mental!, among others.īut before we leave, Cook suggests a livener. The plan is that Cook will take me clubbing around Brighton as a backdrop to my profile of him. It is a Saturday afternoon in January 1998 and I have come to interview Cook for a magazine I’ve started working at, The Face. Cutting up bits of Dick Dale-style surf guitar with a thumping breakbeat and a looped sample (“Right about now, the funk soul brother/Check it out now, the funk soul brother”), the track is called “The Rockafeller Skank” and will soon become ubiquitous. In an upstairs back room, I’ve interrupted Cook tinkering away on a new song. “Whoever is DJing in Brighton invariably ends up here,” he says. Around the clubs of Brighton, the property is known as “The House of Love”, partly on account of its décor, and partly on account of its reputation as a place of hedonistic shenanigans. I can see that Cook manages his accounts on an outsized smiley calculator.
There are smiley teapots, smiley mugs and smiley clocks. “I’m a useless party fiend who’s not a role model for anyone and who’s got nothing intelligent to say apart from ‘Let’s ’ave it’,” as he puts it.Ĭook’s house is covered in yellow smiley faces, rave culture’s adopted symbol. Opening the door of his home on a minor terraced street in Brighton, Norman Cook, 35 years old, tall, balding, and who makes music under the name Fatboy Slim, introduces himself with the following question: “Are you a caner?”Ĭook means: do I take drugs? Just off the train from London and with a head still nipping from the night before, I laugh and say, “I guess I’d put myself in that camp, yes.”Ĭook, famously, is a card-carrying caner.