Out of Time. Miranda Sawyer

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      We never found out how the fire had started, though we had our suspicions. It had begun in N’s room, and she favoured floaty curtains, also candles, also leaving the iron on. But we all smoked, so who knows? Her room was at the front, on the first floor, directly above the shop. The fire took hold there and raged upwards, the central staircase that spiralled up the building acting like a very efficient chimney. The blaze took out every single room. Except mine, right at the top at the back. I’d shut my door when I’d left. It was a bank holiday weekend and I’d gone to see my parents.

      N phoned me at my mum’s. She said: ‘I’ve got nothing left. It’s back to the brick in my room. We left your window open to let out the smell of smoke.’

      That night someone climbed in through my window and robbed the flat of what was left: Levi’s jeans, Technic decks, trainers. Also my tickets to see Prince. I told the police which seats they were for. I thought they would send someone to pick up the ticket-holders, arrest and question them about the robbery. Maybe an undercover officer in Nike Jordans and a Keith Haring T-shirt. They didn’t do anything.

      When I got back into the flat, I clambered up the floors, thinking I could salvage stuff. But everything was covered with soot so thick that it wouldn’t come off when you tried to clean it. It just streaked and striped, ingrained itself deeper. The water was cold, the electricity cut. In the bathroom, the disposable razors on the side of the bath had twisted in the heat, curled up like small orange snakes.

      I climbed the black stairs to my room and shut the door. Nothing much in there had changed. Some of the photos had fallen down, my trainers and tickets were gone. But otherwise it was exactly as I had left it. It felt like a dream. Around the top of the door, scorch marks stretched, pushing out from the frame and on to the wall. They looked like the black fingers of a monster, scrabbling to get in.

      After the fire, everything was different. We were uprooted, homeless. It felt liberating, rather than sad. That group of people split, some coupled up, some left London. I slept on mates’ floors. I left Smash Hits, for reasons I can’t remember now, and I bought a black London taxi. Its top speed was 55 m.p.h. I drove to France in it with N. We played the Stone Roses’ ‘One Love’ as we chugged, very slowly, into Paris.

      But we fell out over a bloke. So I drove around France by myself for a month, met up with friends of friends, slept wherever they were, or bedded down in the back of the taxi on the floor. I spent a lot of time on my own in it, rumbling along long, straight roads through tall, straight trees, winding across plains, over mountains. In the evenings, I would drive into the middle of towns, park up and go out to the local bars. Play pool. Talk to people. One time, when I woke, mucky and hungover and too hot, having parked in a lovely quiet square, a whole market had been put up around the cab.

      When I got back to London, I met someone who became my boyfriend. I stayed with him in a mate’s room, with all my mate’s stuff still in it. Our stuff made no impression; we didn’t have many possessions to add. When my dad came to visit, he cried.

      I sold my taxi to an NME photographer who drove it to the south of Spain and swapped it for a bag of Es. I had no job, nowhere proper to live. Everything was in flux.

      All around was fun, though. Raves in film studios that you got to at midnight, locked out until everyone stormed the doors and you were carried in on the tide of people. Gigs: small, drunk, violent events where the lead singer would throw himself off speaker stacks and roll around on the floor and the drummer turned his head to be sick offstage and wouldn’t miss a beat. Afternoons in Soho parks and pubs that would carry on into the evening and some do over east: grubby and empty then, apart from the beigel shops. A squat party at Brockwell Park lido where people were climbing over the walls to get in, sliding down the drainpipes in the corners. I saw a bloke on a bike ride straight into the swimming pool. And then try to carry on cycling along the pool floor.

      There were sudden blags – a mate passing an ID bracelet past the PR frontline over and over until we were all in backstage. Festivals where it didn’t rain and you nicked a pass so you could park backstage, with pop stars arriving in helicopters right next to your tent. And you lost all your mates and then you found one, at 6 a.m., trying to put on a top hat by placing it upside down on the ground and falling onto it head first.

      Everything kept getting swept aside. Acid house swept away rare groove. Madchester took over. Indie bands – shoegazing and baggy – were suddenly irrelevant when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out. Somehow everything was allowed, except poodle rock and bad pop. Dance music was mushrooming and morphing, taking in rock and hip-hop and ambient and prog and perfect pop and film scores and songs from children’s TV. It churned them all up and spat them out. The beats got faster, darker; the sounds became scary.

      Some time in the middle of the decade, Parklife and Definitely Maybe and then The Great Escape and (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory became a competition, and that side of stuff died, really. Britpop became Cool Britannia and was hijacked by the tabloids. Antics that seemed like a laugh when they happened in front of a small group of like-minded people were suddenly a national talking point. Jarvis jumping onstage during Michael Jackson’s performance to make fart signs came from the same instinct as sometime Pulp member Antony Genn streaking during Elastica’s gig at Glastonbury that same year. But it was different because more people were watching. People who didn’t think the same way.

      Still. At the beginning of the decade you would see the Roses and the Mondays on Top of the Pops and it would feel like victory. Or Jarvis would wipe the floor with everyone on Juke Box Jury and you would punch the air. Or the Chemical Brothers would get to Number 1, with a video where a girl became a saucer-eyed dancing devil … Something was changing. Someone as quixotic and wild and other as Tricky became a genuine pop star for a few moments.

      You couldn’t quite believe that the stuff that was brilliant – and it was patently brilliant – was pushing through into the centre, that the mainstream was taking notice, that bands you knew were amazing but off-beam and awkward were being adopted by everyone. But they were. And the feeling it brought was … correct. We knew we were right.

      There was a slow creep upwards during the 80s and early 90s until, whoosh, everything tipped over the edge. And we were rollercoastering, zooming down, arms in the air, our bodies whipped to the side and flung up so quick that we lost our stomachs as we flipped over and over.

      No one really had a proper job. Some people were not working much at all, doing the odd day helping out at a mate’s promotions company, or taking shifts at a record store. I was freelancing, writing for Smash Hits, and then other magazines: Q, Time Out, Select, The Face.

      Select, a magazine that wrote about alternative music in a pop way, was on the floor above Smash Hits. It was populated by young men, which was a change for me – Smash Hits was mostly women. The Select boys knew a lot about music in a trainspottery way. The only way to push past their knowledge, to be noticed at all, was to talk a lot and never sit down. So I did: I stood up for days and days, chatting, making jokes. I wrote at home, at night.

      Select, like Smash Hits before it, was a laugh. But unlike Smash Hits, which had a big circulation and a never-ending array of pop stars willing to be photographed with pineapples on their heads, Select had a limited star squad. The same people on rotation, really. Our job was to come up with interesting feature ideas, because there weren’t enough bands who’d talk to us. We did features on groupies and ecstasy, and how porn was taking over. I wrote pieces about bootleg T-shirts, about stars’ other halves. Once, an entire issue run of 60,000 copies had to be pulped because an article on legal highs included Feminax. The publishers thought a reader might overdose and die (on Feminax! Even if you snorted it, as my friend Gavin did, you only СКАЧАТЬ