JP's Back to the 90s. Thread #1 - 1990

top 3 albums - the la's (the la's) - pills n thrills & bellyaches (happy mondays) - reading, writing & arithmetic (the sundays)
favourite song of the year - god's cop (happy mondays)
favourite film of the year - total recall (home alone is damn close behind)
listening/watching that year - michael jackson (bad/thriller) - only fools & horses/eastenders/corrie/citv programmes(knightmare)
megabass mix tape was always on me walkman (still love these)

memories of the year went to scotland (constantly rained & the camera messed up our photo's)
great junior school fete that year (i got me face painted)
getting beat by palace in the fa cup semi final (watched it in a pub with a load of palace fans)
ranking the year 9 outta 10

Thanks for the contribution Eddie. Great to see the thread off to a flying start.

Just realised I didn't mention Italia 90 in my post which seems ridiculous.

I'd imagine a huge cultural landmark in most of our lives and for me my earliest footballing memory. I had a t-shirt with Gazza crying on and would wear it with pride.

Your Top 3 albums of the year:
Public Enemy- Fear of a Black Planet
Happy Mondays- Pills, Thrills n Bellyaches
A Tribe Called Quest- People's Instinctive Travels & The Paths of Rhythm


Your favourite song of the year:
Public Enemy- Fight the Power (frankly, anyone that doesn't have this is not doing it right. Arguably the greatest hip hop track of all time)

Your favourite film of the year:
It's hard to argue with Goodfellas, but for the sake of variety I'll pick Miller's Crossing, which is also immense.

What were you actually listening to/watching at the time: Back end of Madchester and lots of Hip Hop


Your memories of the year: Moving from TCOTU to Cumbria. A pair of hair curtains that made me fit the northern Madchester scene beautifully. Meeting a bunch of great life long friends. Being introduced to LSD, Speed and Ecstacy. Going to a Biology Rave in a warehouse somewhere off the M25 (to this day I don't know where. Record shops used to have little fliers with a phone number on. You called the number from a payphone [LOL], made your way to a service station- in this case South Mimms- and then got on a bus to the middle of nowhere).

Your overall ranking of the year: 4. At the time I was miserable as fuck leaving TCOTU as a 16yr old to live up North, but looking back I wouldn't swap it. Mainly due to the mates I made.

It's a good point. To this day it's my favourite World Cup. Partly because of Gazza, Lineker and Waddle. Partly because it was the first World Cup that I was old enough to have a pint and just because it was an amazing world cup. Also, some of the football fashion then was superb- I had one of these No Alla Violenza t-shirts and a pair of Puma States, which were essential wear at the time.

nostanding13.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/burro-no-alla-violenza-t-shirts/


Good thread by the way. We need more lists.

Should have named it Tied to the 90s in tribute to the 90s Travis Smash hit.

I shall contribute to this thread & I shall contribute hard. I'm going top 20s, I'm going in depth into the mind of the young Mahoney.

I'm so glad this thread has been a smash hit. The plan is to do the 00s as for many of us who aren't ancient like Titch, it was our formative clubbing/gigging years and the landfill indie period of the time is always fun to look back on. Hoping for some decent stories of goomas getting fingered during those early 00s years too before the soapy studs all settled down.

I was 6-7 during 1990:

What I was watching: I need to factor in the fact that things took AGES to come to VHS in those days. I never actually saw a film at the cinema until the following year. I was already by this point watching stuff that wasn't appropriate. Favourites would have been Robocop (which the killing of Murphy actually disturbed me), Predator, the first 3 Rambo's, Back to the Future (not sure if I'd have seen 2 by this point).
I remember seeing the 2nd or 3rd Rambo on a pirate VHS around my dad's friend's house, his name was Rupert, he lived in Shooters hill and had a bunch of kids, the youngest boy who I was good friends with. Rupert had a really long garden & would have his friends round and we'd use rifles & shoot at bottles of water & old toys. Was fucking mental, I remember he had a baby crawling around the floor whilst kids were allowed to fire all sorts of weapons down his garden. My dad would always tell me never to let my Mum know about this Fast forward a few years and it turned out Rupert had been beating his kids and wife really badly and my dad cut all ties with him The bloke was called fucking Rupert, surely that was enough!
Other than that it was just a lot of cheap straight to VHS action rentals, anything with Ninja's or Chuck Norris was a regular rental.
Oh and of course Karate Kid! Every fucking child around that time kids loved karate. I went to a lesson once and thought it was fucking boring and that was that.

Big in my world in 1990 was the NES, though of course nobody fucking called it that, it was just the Nintendo. I'd grown up with a spectrum which I loved dearly, but I remember going into comet or curry's and they had a NES set up with Mario 1 and that was that. I've a feeling I probably got that in Christmas 89. So I would have been playing Mario 1, Duck Hunt, Probotector (Europe's shit version of Contra) & the Turtles game which wasn't good at all, but it was the Turtles so of course I loved it.

Music: I was listening to GUNS N FUCKING ROSES and pretty much nothing else but Guns n Roses. Appetite for Destruction on repeat, probably had GNR LIES by then too. Would have also been force fed Bon Jovi as my mum was big into them at the time, I know pretty much all their early songs off by heart because of this & do have a soft spot for many of them though I usually like to keep this to myself. My dad was into buying old 50s rock n roll singles at the bootfair so I remember liking those (he fucking got rid of them all years ago) & I had a cassette player with a 2 tape best of 50s rock n roll set which I enjoyed. Though GUNS N ROSES was all that mattered.

The World Cup is the first one I can remember. We had a sweepstake to win some giant teddy at school to which I drew Cameroon. I've always loved them ever since. Pretty sure I cheered Cameroon on Vs England The school teacher I had at the time who's name I've forgotten was lovely. After that they were pretty much all cunts

Though the biggest thing in my world at this time was WRESTLING. My mum used to tape the NWA program off of ITV & I was obsessed with The Great Muta. That era had Sting, Flair, The Steiners, Sid Vicious, Butch Reed & Vader. This was all I knew about Wrestling at the time but my Dad brought home a VHS from work which he had taped off sky, it was Wrestlemania 6. Hogan VS Warrior & it blew my tiny little mind. Begged my dad to get sky straight after so we could watch WWF. The next few years that was all I could think about.

This was the year we left Erith, we lived on the 15th floor of a scummy flat. Lifts would stink of piss and be down most the time. Needles on the stairs. Wasn't allowed out on my own so I didn't really have friends outside of school hours. We moved to a new build council estate in Sidcup where loads of families with young kids were moved in so it was like a new world opening up. Great times jumping off peoples garden fences trying to do the Macho Man elbow drop and hurting myself every time. I do wonder if we had stayed in Erith how different I would have turned out. Was a big deal when we moved being allowed to just grow up around other kids and cause mischief.

Now, old man mahoney's favs:

Movies:

01: Trust - Hal Hartley
02: Wild at Heart - David Lynch
03: Home Alone - Chris Columbus
04: Goodfellas - Martin Scorsese
05: Total Recall - Paul Verhoeven
06: The Match Factory Girl - Aki Kaurismäki
07: Misery - Rob Reiner
08: Childs Play 2 - John Lafia
09: Gremlins 2: The New Batch - Joe Dante
10: Mo' Better Blues - Spike Lee
11: Millers Crossing - Joel Coen
12: Class of 1999 - Mark L. Lester
13: No Retreat, No Surrender 3: Blood Brothers - Lucas Lowe
14: Predator 2 - Stephen Hopkins
15: I Hired a Contract Killer - Aki Kaurismäki
16: Life is Sweet - Ken Loach
17: Die Hard 2 - Renny Harlin
18: Back to the Future 3 - Robert Zemeckis
19: La Femme Nikita - Luc Besson (unpopular opinion, I prefer the American remake)
20: Quick Change - Bill Murray / Howard Franklin (saw this for the first time a few weeks back)

Music:

Shout out to Bona Drag & those early Ride EPs, essential shit.

Albums:

The Good Son, The La's, Pills Thrills, Ragged Glory, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, Bossanova & Goo are probably my top tier records.
Shout out to the couple of Headcoats records from that year, Daniel Johnston's 1990, She Hangs Brightly, Nowhere, K-solo's Tell the World My Name & Heaven or Las Vegas,

Song-wise, well there is only one song from 1990 that matters and its name is Groove Is in the Heart.

Back to my dads 50s Rock n Roll 7" records. When we lived in the flats he had a fucking jukebox, I'm not sure what era it was from but you know, a full on one you'd find in a pub, probably from the 60s if I had to guess. Also, I don't remember it ever working, I think he probably saw it being thrown out somewhere and brought it home & never fixed it. Well, these flats we lived in were actually bigger than the house we moved into. My mum told him there was no room for it in the new house, but he refused to part with it. When we moved he bought a shed, then realised that the Jukebox would not actually fit through the shed door. So he built the fucking shed around the jukebox. So for the past 30+ years there has been a broken jukebox in the shed that won't be moved until when he dies then I'll have to rip the thing down and find a way of selling/dumping it.

TV: Saved by The Bell, The Crystal Maze (had to wiki to see if it had actually started), Fools n Horses, Eastenders, Danger Mouse, Eastenders, probably re-runs of the A-Team, Eastenders, Knightmare, Eastenders, Fun House (RIP Pat Sharp ), Eastenders, Chucklevision.

Probably my earliest Snooker memories too, Jimmy White getting beat by Hendry. 

Buster Douglas beating Tyson (not sure how we watched this or if I just saw clips on the news), though I do remember Eubank Vs Benn. My dad was working with Benn's uncle, putting scaffolding up in bellmarsh prison. He invited my dad to the victory party, which my dad said no to and it was cancelled anyway I just remember my dad swearing at Eubank a lot during the fight and my mum telling him to calm down  

Lovely stories Karl. Can we have a rating please. The ratings will determine the GREATEST year of the 90s at the end of the decades threads.

saw gremlins 2 at the cinema.

somehow fluked me way in (deffo didn't look 12 yrs old).

remember wanting a nintendo for xmas 1990.

my dad got me an atari 2600.

I think I still had a Spectrum at this point that my nan and grandad got me. It came with a terrible James Bond clay pigeon shooting game and gun that I wasn't all that bothered about. My real passion with gaming didn't start until the following year. All to be revealed in the 1991 thread!

3.5. stars

5 Stars for Rupert's Arsenal. 

Ffs, I thought this forum was dead, and there's a ton of posts in this thread in one afternoon!

I still love the 90s even though the Britpop star has faded a bit for me. Let's be honest apart from the lads, Pulp and The Verve a lot was actually forgettable, but then you've Polly Harvey and all those American acts who remain mega. So the 90s will always rule for music.

Was this thread posted due to the 90s programmes on C5 tonight? They had a documentary about Britpop and now the Barrowlands gig is now on. I know it was '01 but secondary thoughts on the gig:

1) Liam now at the stage of sounding like he had a constant cold but still sounds good
2) Gem always dressed like a 70s porn star
3) What the fuck are those trainers Alan White is wearing?
4) Gas Panic is definitely in the top 10 ever
5) Crowd was so pumped so still remains the best Oasis gig post-90s

There, I ended it with a 90s message, for now. I will catch up with it properly shortly!

Michael Jackson in Peter Schmeichel's body is so 90s too. Forever in tune.

edit: fucking hell thought it was the 90s overall not 1990 specifically, hahaha. Epic fail. I didn't read the thread though, yet!

1990, off the top of my head, errr. Bryan Robson? Pixies best band in the world? Bossanova is epic. Velouria, The Happening and Dig For Fire up there with anything by anybody.

How the fuck are you all remembering a specific year from so long ago? I was 5 in 1990, and have not got a clue what was going on. I have a lot of memories from the 90s overall, but to remember a specific year that was 33 years ago? Nah, I can't do it.

BUT, this is a great thread JP, and a splendid example of the type of premium content The Soapbox has to offer up in 2023. Spread the good word - The Soapbox is alive and kicking.

1990 was a weird year for me, I turned 10, lived in 3 countries, discovered soccer/calcio/futbol but music wasn’t quite on my radar as yet, so any ranking I do would be retroactive.

Obviously the big event for me was living in Rome during Italia ‘90 and being overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Rome. I’ve written about that before, but somehow simultaneously falling in love with maradona, the Dutch guys on Milan, and mancini/vialli on samp was an eye-opener and then the World Cup on top of it all. And then moving to Germany right in time for re-unification .
Wild teems, like.

Music-wise, my top 3 albums were/are….

Neil Young & Crazy horse - ragged glory
The La’s
And…Christ, there isn’t much else…
Bob Dylan - under the red sky.

Pretty shit year in music, pretty monumental in everything else.