Inspired by a friend on facebook reminiscing about 1927 (the band, not the year) I’m remembering the late 80s and early 90s, which for me was the end of high school and the beginning of university. Remember when those stripey shirts looked cool. When we were only just beginning to hear murmurs about Nirvana. When REM’s Losing My Religion shifted them firmly into the mainstream. When you couldn’t listen to Triple J outside of the regions of capital cities. When I dyed my hair black and in the cold Toowoomba winter wore a black duffle coat (for some reason the term for this look favoured by arts students was “swampy”). When I really wanted, but couldn’t afford a pair of doc martens. When I was practising the piano for hours every day. When CDs were new and I paid 120 dollars for a huge and clunky hitachi cd player that could feed into my twin cassette stereo (which was huge and clunky in itself). When the only people I knew with desktop computers were those actually studying IT (and at that stage I’m not even sure if it was called IT. To do my music history assignments I had a fantastic electric typewriter with a very small amount of memory (like a line of text or something that you could see on a tiny little display). When we hadn’t heard of the internet (well maybe some people had but I was studying music so the most technical we got was the hifi record player in the music library which didn’t have any cds). But we did have to do a compulsory computing subject in our first year where among other things we learned to do very basic programming in DOS, and save things on those huge big floppy disks. When I wouldn’t miss The Late Show (with the D Generation), listened to Helen and Mikey’s breakfast every morning, and Roy and HG on the weekends. When my favourite shows were Northern Exposure and Seinfeld (and still are). When Cheers finished and I had to miss it because I had an orchestra rehearsal. When the Simpsons was new and I didn’t recognise it for the television icon it would become. Best of all, when pop music actually had some hooks and a mild amount of substance even in the one hit wonders.