It wasn’t all Britpop and Cool Britannia – the 90s had a dark (and very weird) side too

There’s a show at the Tate celebrating 1990s fashion and art, Jesus Jones just released a new album, eyebrows are becoming decidedly skinny again and Marks & Spencer are bringing back St Michael. Is it just because culture works in cycles and the 90s are getting their turn, or is the nostalgia for this era justified? 

There was so much optimism in Britain in the 90s. Tony Blair was yet to do his worst, the cold war was over, rave culture was uniting classes and ethnicities in hilarious forms of dancing, while voguing was keeping the gay clubs at the pinnacle of fabulousness. Democracy was taken for granted and even peace in Northern Ireland was on its way.

The Tate show says it is looking back at a decade that was “characterised by its bold creativity and rebellious spirit.” The press release says: “A sense of opportunity resulted in art, design, fashion and photography fusing into one potent cultural force, signalling an audacious renewal of British spirit.”

Who would have suspected back then that Kate Moss, the star of all the marketing for the show, would end up not just advertising Diet Coke, but actually being named the product’s creative director? Not very rock n roll!

But I’m here to talk about a different side of the ‘90s.

For me, the decade began in a particularly exciting way because I was on the cover of the 10th anniversary issue of i-D magazine, with my twin sister, wearing matching Pam Hogg catsuits, winking into Nick Knight’s camera in the middle of Hyde Park. We’d been spotted in a nightclub and thrown into the spotlight.

What a time to be alive!

All this excitement and optimism for the future is what made the friction between the rush of newness and the jarring ambushes of casual racism and sexual assault so many of us witnessed and experienced genuinely confusing.

There was no social media to vent on, no website with useful tips. When I think of the 90s, my first impression is always of this nightmare of subterfuge, this knowing that there were secret rules to a game I had unwittingly stumbled into.

Nowadays the Epstein files and #MeToo are part of our everyday conversations. Back then, it was all swept under a very ordinary carpet by a lot of straight white men with smug looks on their faces: smug because they were in on the joke.

My experience of said joke began when I signed a record deal shortly after i-D flyposted most of London with the anniversary cover. Of course it felt like a dream. I was put in a studio with dance music producers who had had No 1 hits at a time when there was still an official chart rundown on a Sunday afternoon as well as the possibility of appearing on Top of the Pops. I was going out every night, and by day – well I wasn’t exactly sure what to do apart from a bit of songwriting, shopping for aggressively fashionable clothes, and a whole lot of networking. I’d moved to London to study French at UCL but that soon fell by the wayside. 

I actually started out believing that senior music industry executives wanted to befriend a blonde, teenage-looking tomboy fresh off the train from Bromsgrove because I was an interesting conversationalist. I was game. I was up for understanding and embracing this giddy new world. I wanted to know everything.

And “everything” included quite a lot of anecdotes about trips to Amsterdam, cocaine, pornography and “hilarious” stories about trans hookers and people almost getting caught by their wives. 

A lot of this was beautifully documented by John Niven in his fictional account of the era, Kill Your Friends.

Anyway, I felt bemused but somehow flattered to be trusted. I was in the inner circle where what happens on tour stays on tour and all that. 

At the time, I had a close friend who was working in the fashion industry and once got chatting to a major model while they were in the back of a limo on their way to a shoot. They straight-up asked: “So, with these big photographers, do you have to sleep with them to get the campaigns?” They reported that she shrugged nonchalantly and replied: “Well you kinda have to give them a blow job.”

These sorts of things would always be reported as though they were somehow a joke, which really added to the confusion. If it was true, this nonchalance was pretty wild to me. I was nowhere near that state of understanding or acceptance. I was in denial – not even anger or bargaining, just a strange, pure, dissociated denial.

There was one “executive” who liked to take me along to all his meetings. Even though I was signed to a different label, he’d drag me along to meet the bigwigs at other labels, which was amusing because I thought I was really getting the inside track on the industry. I didn’t really stop to question why the executive in question might do this. I guessed it was a way for him to make an impression, wheeling in a bit of a circus everywhere he went. I was a party to high-level discussions on how “black music” (which seemed to be its own genre, like “indie” or “rock”), couldn’t be marketed to black people because there was no money in it. The clever thing to do was find “crossover” acts who could sell to a white mainstream audience. No one felt the slightest bit of shame – in fact, they were as proud of these categorisations as executives today are of their corporate buzzwords.

There was one particular major label boss from America who obviously found my conversation particularly scintillating and invited me to a party in his hotel suite. It was at a very fancy hotel in Knightsbridge and he told me that Blur and Oasis and lots of the Britpop bands would be there (because Cool Britannia was all about this gang of mouthy white boys like the ones I’d never really fancied in sixth form). Knowing a few of this crowd already, I put on my favourite jeans and Etnies skate shoes and rocked up to the hotel alone and in good humour, expecting drinks and banter.

But the label boss, whom I will call Rover, for reasons soon to be revealed, was there with his young male assistant on a loud call to an extremely famous chatshow host, barking orders like “conference him in, I don’t care if he’s on the plane to Aspen”.

I felt like I needed to be doing way more “conferencing people in” to make it in this business.

But conferencing-in was so not the thing I needed to learn about. 

He finished the call, dismissed the assistant, showed me the floorplans to some mansion he was buying, and then brushing those aside, without any further ado, or dimming of the lights, or small talk about the day’s affairs, he proceeded to get down on all fours and pretend to be a dog. He was woofing and panting in front of me as I sat upright, knees together and frozen, on the sofa in front of him. Then he licked my face and tried to bite my neck. 

Now anyone who knows me knows that I am very much a cat person. And in all my time thinking I was pretty savvy in the workings of the music biz, I really had never come across anything like this. I laughed awkwardly, jumped up and asked when everyone else would be arriving. But he wasn’t finished with the dog routine. In spite of my reaction he still wanted to give it a go – which led me to conclude that this may actually have worked for him before, and possibly on more than one occasion. 

I ran to the window and pointed to a dog in the street below and said in what I hoped was a disarmingly cheeky way: “I think she might be more your type.”

And then he flipped. He started yelling at me about his stress and his stomach ulcer and being sick of his boss, and goddammit, if I wouldn’t get into something just to see what I might get out of it I was finished in this business – all while I was backing towards the door, wondering what else he was on apart from the Xanax and Quaaludes mentioned in this quite spectacular rant, because this was unhinged beyond anything I’d ever seen.

By the time I’d opened the heavy door to the suite and closed it behind me, I was physically shaking in the corridor. As I hurried into a black cab to get home, I was thinking, wow, I just learned a couple of the Actual Fucking Rules. 1. You’re supposed to get into something just to see what you might get out of it. There’s not even a guarantee. That felt important to know and made me desperately relieved I hadn’t got into anything. 2. You’re not a real person. You are there to be charmed one minute, harassed or assaulted the next, and finally screamed at and intimidated in an equally unbounded display of narcissism.

But of course this was the 90s, so – like offensive humour, lads’ mags and gender pay gaps – none of it was to be taken too seriously.

Well, do you know what? I didn’t make it in that business. And I thank my lucky stars I didn’t. Even though he told me my card was marked, I don’t think Rover even had to pull any strings. I was dropped by the big label, taught myself to play acoustic guitar, started an indie band and made the kind of music I wanted to, without the budget but also without the hidden rules and agendas of the “cocaine and Concorde” side of the industry. 

Earlier this year, there was an Instagram trend based on “What were you like in the 90s?”, so I finally digitised the VHS tape of my 90s pop video, set in a gorgeous mansion with a white horse and a flock of doves dyed all the colours of the rainbow – and when I watched it, I just thought: “Huh, I had no interest at all in looking at that for the past 33 years. Weird.”

Don’t look back in anger, I guess