They were, to all intents and purposes, the  formative teenage years of my life.

Of course, there is that line. If you can remember, you weren't there. But there's more to it than that. Talk like that is bullshit. The fevered ramblings of idiots who believe that life should consist solely of getting pissed, getting ripped, and getting laid. Sure. Life is for the living. But when I was 19, I didn't want to get pissed, get ripped, and get laid. Sure, I wanted two of those things, and sometimes I did. But I wanted more than that. More then remembering getting laid and her name in the morning.

Even then I knew I wanted more. I wanted to survive. I wanted to break free. I didn't want to escape from reality. I wanted to make a new reality. So I paid attention to the world around me. Looked at the man in the mirror, tried to make a change.

Between 1992 and 1997 I was growing up in Britain. This was my world. And the world they now dissect is a world I didn't live in. This age is somehow now feted as the great Era of my youth, as important as London in the Sixties, Punk in the Seventies. Oasis. Blur. Supergrass. Smoke a fag. Put it out. It's alright.

When I was then, the real world was something that seemed to happen somewhere else. Britain wasn't exciting then : for those of us in the suburbs, we were still trampled down in the dirt. We were still on the sidelines, watching something else happen.

Every Wednesday, we stood in WH Smiths and read the NME and the Melody Maker, cover to cover. Sometimes unable to scrape together the change to afford it. I recognise that time : all the things they show now as historic artefacts, I too remember watching on television. The endless new coverage of the tedious Blur vs. Oasis fight. The dissected idiotic talking heads on the Live Forever documentary, empty mediaheads that were there, too coked up to realise that things were happening around them, that they weren't the centre of the world. And that sometimes the people who weren't there had far smarter things to say than the people who were.  

And Liam Gallagher being the type of guy who'd smack you in you looked at him funny, whilst Noel looks, as one person so memorably puts it, perpetually like Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, fed up with looking after his moronic retarded sibling.

And now here we are. A decade on. Parklife is now as quintessentially British, as historic, as Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and Oscar Wilde. But at the time, and now, I look back on it, and despite owning the records, having the gig tickets, parts of me cringes. Blur were bollocks : their knees-up cor-blimey guvnor we-love-The-Queen parody of whatever being English was all about. It typified everything about Britain that everyone in Britain hated : the tiny streets, the queues, the provincial little minds. Even if Damon was doing this as some kind of subtle parody, it was too subtle. I didn't get it. When one acts as a redneck, one becomes a redneck. And outside of Britain, people thought that that's the way it was. Better cut down on your porklife mate, get some exercise... Cuntlife!

I never understood what exactly was so great about Britain. Britain grated. It wasn't great. We queued in dole offices. We scrabbled around in the back pages of papers, looking for jobs on Thursdays. We had bad clothes, bad hair, bad bank accounts. We tried to make something good out of it. We tried to execute our own Great Escape.

But somewhere the world was happening. Everything we believed in, our lifeline, was suddenly no longer our secret. The whole world knew their name. The NME was no longer the password of the cool kids, those who felt somehow different, better than the rest. We weren't going out like that, we weren't going out like that. We weren't going to be like anyone else : day jobs, commuting, mortgages. They were for someone else. We were going to live a different way.

It was the greatest show on Earth : and then it was over. We had our time. The world changed around us. But we were still in a state of extended adolescence. But nothing lasts forever. Only Liam Gallagher, the near-autistic idiot-savage at the front of Oasis, knows not that fact. We became like everyone else. Everything becomes co-opted. Absorbed. Marketed like a demographic in time. You are a demographic. As I am too. And you are too. We are all target markets for someone.

So now, the chips'n'whipped ice cream video for Parklife, the arrogant posturing of Br*tpop, all these things were the last gasp of desperate clutching, a great escape from a Americanised, no future culture we had been fed under the Tories for 18 years. There were no jobs, and if we wanted to get on our bikes to get one, we had to steal a bike. Every corner shop, everything that was British, the small streets, the personality of this nation, was slowly being subsumed, absorbed by osmosis into a homogenous culture, where everything is mass produced, everything is the same, our choices have been reduced to Pepsi or Coke. McDonalds or Burger King. It's no good. We were getting The Fear.

The Fear that it wouldn't work. That this Holy Grail we had held up for 18 years, that someday everything would get better, everything would change, that there would be hope, maybe even a future. I stayed up all night in May 1997. I saw the election. I saw that poof, the no-hoper candidate in Michael Portillo's constituency, placed up against a deadcert Conservative candidate. And Stephen Twigg trounced him. And then I knew the world was changing.

We didn't know how or why. We just knew that it was. We didn't know if it was a good thing. We just knew it was. Everything gets absorbed into the mainstream in the end. Labour became everything it swore it would never be : The thing you hate the most. There is no alternative any more. There never was : just a fake placebo idea of some Third Way to keep the disposed satisfied. I can't get no satisfaction.

The more things change the more they stay the same. I didn't want to escape from reality. I wanted to make a new reality. You can change the world. One person at the time.

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