Mixtapes Were Everything & I Feel Sorry For Generation Spotify
By: Em Unravelling
Tags: Memories, Nostalgia, Self, 90s, Music

The year was 1996. I was 15 and my boyfriend Danny was 18. I thought I’d won the lottery when he first found me hiding, conspicuously underage, at the back of a sticky-floored bar and bought me a violently fluorescent half-pint of snakebite and black.

He had red hair to his shoulders and wore Silverchair T-shirts day and night. His skin was an unearthly blue-white, nearly transparent, and he had maybe a 22-inch waist. He made me feel like a German hausfrau beside him with my soft hips, my breasts, my long blonde hair, my freckles.

It didn’t matter. We looked ridiculous side by side but we adored each other. I still have one photo of us together and I can’t help laughing whenever I see it because we just look so baffled and happy to have found each other. Two little weirdos in one big town.

The momentous three-year age gap between us meant that he was way more experienced in the art of relationships. (That is to say, he had had one serious girlfriend before me, and I had nothing at all to go on.)

He knew that having a girlfriend involved being visibly caring, so when I had period cramps one time he played the Twin Peaks instrumental soundtrack very quietly and made me hot chocolate.

He thought we should go on real dates although we were both broke, so we went to the cinema to see Trainspotting and I held my breath as he paid for our tickets because I knew I wasn’t old enough to see that film and then he held my hand tight in the dark.

And he made me a mixtape. No one had bothered to do that before. I’d had kisses at parties and fumbles in fields but no one had sat, in daylight, and thought about me while they carefully recorded song after song onto a cassette tape.

No one before had written a list of song titles in spiky cursive on a box insert and wrapped the tape into a satisfying rectangular parcel, easy for me to slip into my handbag later on when we met to drink more snakebite and black.

It was the best present I had ever been given. I felt like a queen.

I don’t have the tape anymore. I wish I knew what happened to it. Sometimes, though, I hear one of the songs (Wasted Time by Skid Row, perhaps, or For All The Cows by the Foo Fighters) and I’m back in Danny’s little bedroom, tucked into the eaves with Nirvana and Pearl Jam posters covering every inch of the sloped wooden ceiling.

I’m lying on a faded black-and-grey duvet cover, wearing a dark green embroidered cheesecloth smock minidress with striped tights and Doc Marten boots. My lips are lined in aubergine and filled in with pale Sugar Plum gloss from Boots. Eyeliner thick and black; hair so long I could sit on it if I just leaned back a tiny bit.

There’s incense in the air or maybe it’s dope and we’re going to the pub soon with all his older friends and their sophistication and their battered paperback copies of The Bell Jar or L’Etranger. I’m still so impressed by this ridiculous shit. I feel invincible. I feel loved. The future has so many possibilities in it, still.

Yeah. Don’t be trying to tell me anyone’s getting any of that from a Spotify playlist. (Sorry, kids.)