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Everything was fresh. I had most of the rights conferred upon me by age, but few responsibilities. It was also probably the most fucked up part of my life.

I'm talking about that brief window between perhaps 18 and 25. I was born at the end of 1967, so that's the years between about 1986 and 1993.

What do we have there then?

Well, Rave, Grunge, Trance, Chill Out, etc. Hedonistic, drug fuelled, idealistic, naive, subversive.

Politically, there was a lot happening. I entered these years hard on the heels of CND's boom in the early '80's and the Miner's Strike. this overlapped with the rise of the Radical Left in Inner Cities across England, particularly in London and Liverpool. Then there were a whole host of other things. most notably the huge pre-internet social organisation that was the anti-poll tax movement. I suppose most people just think of the riots now, but what I remember is the posters in the windows, and the work those radical lefties were doing to provide a focus and an organisation for the discontent.

It struck me today that what I lived throught was effectively another Summer of Love. Except it went on a bit longer before it dissolved. At the time, I didn't really see it that way.

Perhaps people of every age feel this way. They could point to their own signposts from a few years either side and make pretty much the same post.

I think that in a few years, people in that roughly 18-25 window will be looking back on/getting into the stuff between Thomson Twins and Blair in pretty much the same way that I used to listen to Sergeant Pepper and Songs from a Room.

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