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Underground > Radio & Music >

What were you listening to in 1996?

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21:59 / 10.09.03

Lets see... I was about 23, living destitute in a party flop house, denying my bi-sexuality, and rapidly destroying my acedemic career.

Lots of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. On acid. Also big were Doors, NIN, Tori, Future Sounds of London, that annoying Speed Racer techno mix, Portishead, and Oingo Boingo. And then there was the goth clubs, with favorites being Sisters of Mercy, Shriekback ([gloat]Barry Andrews of which I recently got to spend an evening drinking with as my fiends put him and his roady up for the night while he's on tour[/gloat]), Wumpscott, and a bunch of 80s crap I really don't remember much anymore cept if I'm drunk.

It was a time of utter poverty, madness, drugs, danger, and dirty sex. Aah, those were the days.

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:46 / 10.09.03

Ooh Gene! Love(d) Gene. Lovely Martin Rossiter was like the better, smarter, prettier, version2 Brett. Oh and managed to talk bisexuality without sounding like the biggest wanker on earth.

Oh, and the Tindersticks, of course. Another uni staple. Oddly enough. Overblon, dramatic, romantic, depressive. Did lots of red-wine drinking/spliff-smoking to this.

A bunch of others in the 'constant rotation' list at this point: Strawberry Switchblade, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualised, Spacemen3, The Pixies

Disco is My Class War

01:27 / 17.09.03

This is an excellent, excellent thread.

I turned 21 in '96. I was living in a sharehouse in the middle of the city, got pregnant for the first and only time, gave up boys, did massive amounts of soul-searching and learnt how to play with chakras. I had my first, shuddering, incredibly fucked up relationship with a girl in '96. I discovered Foucault: I fell in love with a dyke tutor who photocopied three pages from the History of Sexuality Volume One for me, wore tight white t-shirts and wrote something about 'exploiting the technologies of the academy to reinvent yourself' on a paper I wrote. '96 was a turning-point, intellectually, culturally, emotionally, sexually.

At the beginning of the year I was a complete stoner, doing doubletime on a gothic-hippie phase, and the crew I got stoned with used to go to this club called Collision. At which we would mosh to Nirvana, NIN, the Smiths, My Bloody Valentine, Hole, the Pixies, the Breeders et al. My girlfriend was obsessed with Eddie Vedder. This meant that I, too, went through a now-embarrassing Pearl Jam phase. What else? Patti Smith, Jeff Buckley, the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, Radiohead, REM, a short flirtation with They Might Be Giants. Complete obsession with a Melbourne surf-rock-stoner band called Magic Dirt, whose track 'Amoxycillin' is still one of my favourite songs. The Dirty Three, before anyone else in the world knew about them. 'Hyperballad' was on constant rotation.

By the end of the year I'd ejected myself from stoner passive-agressive hell, retired for a summer by the seaside, and my musical tastes has changed accordingly: Goldie, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, the soundtrack from 'Romeo + Juliet', Parliament/Funkadelic. Trance. Jon Spencer.

Mister Six, whom all the girls

01:53 / 26.09.03

The Fall, Pere Ubu, and Throbbing Gristle.

I

Was

So much

... fun.

18:04 / 26.09.03

I had turned fourteen in '96, was just about to enter high school (which was all boys [not that it mattered, because girls didn't like me, or talk to me, or anything like that, because I was a fat kid that liked "wierd" music], and Catholic), and starting to come out from under my older brother's influence on me (he got me into The Ramones, The Dead Milkmen [who were my favorite band then], Fugazi, the Buzzcocks, The Misfits, the Pixies, and a few others that I don't remember right now). Coming from the music that my brother showed to me I went off to find harder stuff and finding it in the likes of The Exploited, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Artistic Decline, Suicidal Tendencies etc. Also, at this time, I began reading Maximum Rock'n'Roll (yeah, I know it's lame, but I was a fat 14 year old punk rock kid), and from that started some sort of wierd obsession with "Oi!" music (most of which now I can't stand, but I gobbled that shit up like it was Cocacola bac then). That's also when I get into the Makers, and in the year or so following, really into garage rock. This is also when I started playing in bands, and all of them, at this point, were hardcore punk bands ripping off the Exploited and Minor Threat (I still proclaim, to this day, that my band, The Awful, is the punkest band ever [official slogan for us, back then: "You can't spell the Awful without 'FU'"]). I was basically and angry kid that listened to and played angry music.

Brigade du jour

20:41 / 27.09.03

Wow. This was the year that I bought more CD singles than in any other year of my life.

It's true, there's no such thing as coincidence ...

Brigade du jour

20:43 / 27.09.03

Oh, and thanks to BiP for mentioning Gene. I thought that first album was the most beautiful thing on earth for a whole year. It may even be partly why I moved to London.

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

15:28 / 02.10.03

Hmmmmmmm.... I was 21 in 1996 and was listening to a lot of industrial. Kmfdm, PWEI, Skinny Puppy, Camper Von Beethoven, NIN, Ministry, and the like. Pretty much anything darkwave or EBM I could get my hands on. It really wasn't any different than it is now or has ever been.

It was (and still is) a soundtrack for my life: A realization that things are really bodged up, yet hopeful about the future.

That was a particularly hard time in my life. I had just moved back to my hometown in ignominous defeat. I was attempting to pick up the pieces of what I viewed as my shattered life. My academic career was in shards, I was deep in debt, and had to move back in with my mother. I drank a lot in those days, as Discursive Mass can attest. I was the entertainment for all of my friends. They just filled me full of alcohol and stood back and watched me go, very much like a wind up toy.

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