Between the ages of 14 and 16 or thereabouts, the things I probably loved the most – or at least the most consistently – were horror (books and movies) and heavy metal.
These loves changed (and ended, for a long time) at around the same time as each other in a way that I’m sure is typical of adolescence, but which also seemed to reflect bigger changes in the world. Reading this excellent article that references the end of the 80s horror boom made me think; are these apparent beginnings and endings really mainly internal ones that we only perceive as seismic shifts because of how they relate to us? After all, Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert & co continued to have extremely successful careers after I stopped buying their books, and it’s not like horror movies or heavy metal ground to a halt either. But still; looking back, the turn of the 80s to the 90s still feels like a change of era and of culture in a way that not every decade does (unless you’re a teenager when it happens perhaps?) But why should 1989/90 be more different than say, 85/86? Although time is ‘organised’ in what feels like an arbitrary manner (the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun is something which I don’t think many of us experience instinctively or empirically as we do with night and day), decades do seem to develop their own identifiable ‘personalities’ somehow, or perhaps we simply sort/filter our memories of the period until they do so.
“The 80s” is a thing that means many different things to different people; but in the western world its iconography and soundtrack have been agreed on and packaged in a way that, if it doesn’t necessarily reflect your own experience, it at least feels familiar if you were there. What the 2010s will look like to posterity is hard to say; but the 2020s seem to have established themselves as something different almost from the start; whether they will end up as homogeneous to future generations as the 1920s seem to us now is impossible to say at this point; based on 2020 so far, hopefully not.
I sometimes feel like my adolescence began at around the age of 11 and ended some time around 25, but still, my taste in music, books, films etc went through a major change in the second half of my teens which was surely not coincidental. But even trying to look at it objectively, it really does seem like everything else was changing too. From the point of view of a teenager, the 80s came to a close in a way that few decades since have done; in world terms, the cold war – something that had always been in the background for my generation – came to an end. Though that was undoubtedly a euphoric moment, 80s pop culture – which had helped to define what ‘the west’ meant during the latter period of that war – seemed simultaneously to be running out of steam.
My generation grew up with a background of brainless action movies starring people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who suddenly seemed to be laughable and obsolete, teen comedies starring ‘teens’ like Andrew McCarthy and Robert Downey, Jr who were now uneasily in their 20s. We had both old fashioned ‘family entertainment’ like Little & Large and Cannon & Ball which was, on TV at least. in its dying throes; but then so was the ‘alternative comedy’ boom initiated by The Young Ones, as its stars became the new mainstream. The era-defining franchises we had grown up with – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Police Academy – seemed to be either finished or on their last legs. Comics, were (it seemed) suddenly¹ semi-respectable and re-branded as graphic novels, even if many of the comics themselves remained the same old pulpy nonsense in new, often painted covers. The international success of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in 1988 opened the gates for the manga and anime that would become part of international pop culture from the 90s onwards.
Those aforementioned things I loved the most in the late 80s, aged 14-15 – horror fiction and heavy metal music – were changing too. The age of the blockbuster horror novel wasn’t quite over, but its key figures; Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker², Shaun Hutson – all seemed to be losing interest in the straightforward horror-as-horror novel³, diversifying into more fantastical or subtle, atmospheric or ironic kinds of stories. In movies too, the classic 80s Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises – as definitively 80s as anything else the decade produced – began to flag in terms of both creativity and popularity. Somewhere between these two models of evolution and stagnation were the metal bands I liked best. These seemed to either be going through a particularly dull patch, with personnel issues (Iron Maiden, Anthrax) or morphing into something softer (Metallica) or funkier Suicidal Tendencies). As with the influence of Clive Barker in horror, so bands who were only partly connected with metal (Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers) began to shape the genre. All of which occurred as I began to be obsessed with music that had nothing to do with metal at all, whether contemporary (Pixies, Ride, Lush, the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jesus Jones – jesus, the Shamen etc) or older (The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Doors⁴, the Velvet Underground).
Still; not many people are into the same things at 18 as they were at 14; and it’s tempting to think that my feelings about the end of the decade had more to do with my age than the times themselves; but they were indeed a-changing, and a certain aspect of the new decade is reflected in editor Peter K. Hogan’s ‘Outro’ to the debut issue of the somewhat psychedelically-inclined comic Revolver (published July 1990):
Why Revolver?
Because what goes around comes around, and looking out my window it appears to be 1966 again (which means – with any luck – we should be in for a couple of good years ahead of us). Because maybe – just maybe – comics might now occupy the slot that rock music used to. Because everything is cyclical and nothing lasts forever (goodbye, Maggie). Because the 90s are the 60s upside down (and let’s do it right, this time). Because love is all and love is everything and this is not dying. Any more stupid questions?
This euphoric vision of the 90s was understandable (when Margaret Thatcher finally resigned in 1990 there was a generation of by now young adults who couldn’t remember any other Prime Minister) but it aged quickly. The ambiguity of the statement ‘the 90s are the 60s upside down’ is embodied in that disclaimer (and let’s do it right, this time) and turned out to be prophetic; within a month of the publication of Revolver issue1 the Gulf War had begun. Aspects of that lost version of the 90s lived on in rave culture, just as aspects of the summer of love lived on through the 70s in the work of Hawkwind and Gong, but to posterity the 90s definitely did not end up being the 60s vol.2. In the end, like the 80s, the 90s (like every decade?) is defined, depending on your age and point of view, on a series of apparently incompatible things; rave and grunge, Jurassic Park and Trainspotting, Riot Grrrl and the Spice Girls, New Labour and Saddam Hussein.
That tiny oasis of positivity in 1990 – between the Poll Tax Riots on 31st March and the declaration of the first Gulf War on the 2nd August is, looking back, even shorter than I remember, and some of the things I loved in that strange interregnum between adolescence and adulthood (which lasted much longer than those few months) – perhaps because they seemed grown up then – are in some ways more remote now than childhood itself. So… conclusions? I don’t know, the times change as we change and they change us as we change them; a bit too Revolver, a lot too neat. And just as we are something other than the sum of our parents, there’s some part of us too that seems to be independent of the times we happen to exist in. I’ll leave the last words to me, aged 18, not entirely basking in the spirit of peace and love that seemed to be ushered in by the new decade.
¹ in reality this was the result of a decade of quiet progress led by writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
² although 100% part of the 80s horror boom, Barker is perhaps more responsible than any other writer for the end of its pure horror phase
³ Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, though dating from earlier in the 80s, appeared in print with much fanfare in the UK in the late 80s and, along with the more sci-fi inflected The Tommyknockers and the somewhat postmodern The Dark Half seemed to signal a move away from the big, cinematic horror novels like Pet Sematary, Christine, Cujo et al. In fact, looking at his bibliography, there really doesn’t appear to be the big shift around the turn of the 90s that I remember, except that a couple of his new books around that time (Dark Tower III, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game for one reason or another didn’t have half the impact that It had on me. That’s probably the age thing). James Herbert, more clearly, abandoned the explicit gore of his earlier work for the more or less traditional ghost story Haunted (1988) and the semi-comic horror/thriller Creed (1990)– a misleadingly portentous title which always makes me think of that Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy types This is a story about Greed. Joe Greed lived in a small town in Colorado… Clive Barker, who had already diverged into dark fantasy with Weaveworld, veered further away from straightforward horror with The Great & Secret Show while reliably fun goremeister Shaun Hutson published the genuinely dark Nemesis, a book with little of the black humour – and only a fraction of the bodycount – of his earlier work. ⁴ the release of Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991 is as 90s as the 50s of La Bamba (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989) was 80s. Quite a statement.
A foolish name, you might think; and yet there have been no less than three different bands called Funeral Bitch. This is the first and best of the three, the one formed by Paul Speckmann in 1986-8 between different incarnations of the much better known Master. Funeral Bitch were much in the same vein; extremely fast and rough (though still anthemic) death/thrash, with Speckmann’s hoarse bellowing a bit too prominent in the thin mix. That said, the demos are imbued with a real raw vitality that could arguably have been lost with the kind of production favoured by the big-name thrash bands of the era. It’s a real time capsule of the more extreme end of the 80s thrash scene and there’s a fair amount of intentional silliness too; a key but often forgotten feature of era. Interestingly, the guitarist is Alex Olvera, better known for his tenure as bassist with mid-level speed metal band Znöwhite around the same time. Only essential for Master fans, but generally fun, even if the live tracks are (appropriately) ‘rough as guts’ as they say down under.
Kariti is a Russian-Italian singer of dark folk music and, after an extremely peculiar and archaic-sounding voices-only intro, Covered Mirrors becomes an album of moody semi-acoustic songs which are not especially folk-sounding, but are very pretty indeed. The guitar sound is crisp and almost tangible, and the vocals (mainly in English) are clear and mournful, as befits the album’s themes of ‘death and parting’. It’s a beautifully grave and austere record, with an intimate quality that (especially through headphones) brings the listener extremely close to the performance, while remaining emotionally remote and unreachable: a perfect album for a time of quarantine, if not one that will cheer anyone up.
Alternately really great and very silly indeed, the sci-fi theme/concept behind Space Goretex sometimes gets in the way of the music. At its best the marriage of the unusual (but mostly surprisingly low key) musical textures of 
Always a surprise to find that non-mainstream musicians still release singles, but that’s what Manes are doing; and, like their last album, the superb Slow Motion Death Sequence it’s black metal in feeling only; musically the title track is a kind of eccentric and brooding widescreen gothic rock (I guess; it reminded me a bit of the Planet Caravan type early Black Sabbath ballads and musically but definitely not vocally a little bit of Fields of the Nephilim; there’s no electronic element on this one). It’s beautifully recorded, the title track warm and limpid but with an undertone of unease that builds throughout. The B side (is that still what it is for a digital release?) is Mouth of the Volcano, an atmospheric doomy semi-electronic chug built around a strangely familiar spoken word section that can’t place and featuring Asgeir Hatlan (last heard in Manes on 2014’s Be All, End All) and some spooky Diamanda Galas-ish vocals from Anna Murphy (ex-Eluveitie) and Ana Carolina Skaret. An unsettling but very listenable pair of songs and so a single worth releasing; and with beautiful artwork too.
More solemn, downbeat but mostly very pretty music. I had never heard Midwife (the solo project of Madeline Johnston) before; on this album at least, it’s a bare, guitar-based sound with some ambient electronic elements, sort of shoegaze-y but not. The nearest comparison I can think of (not that anyone asked for one) is Codeine circa Frigid Stars. Forever was inspired by the unexpected loss of a friend and the music is as fragile and mournful as you’d expect. The sound is warm, clear and intimate-sounding – aside from the vocals, which are distanced by a strange spacey, reverb effect; perhaps for the best as the raw emotion is rendered slightly remote and universal, rather than immediate and personal. It’s clearly not an album for all moods: although the closing track S.W.I.M. speeds up to a Jesus and Mary Chain-esque plod, Forever is consistently slow and elegiac and nothing really lifts it out of its furrow of sadness: but beautiful for all that.
More black metal, this time from Iceland. Pretty standard (in a good way), polished but not symphonic black metal, modern but very much influenced by the classic Scandinavian bands (maybe more the second-and-a-half wave, like Kampfar than the classic Mayhem-Darkthrone-Burzum axis) it’s all very well put together and has plenty of muscle and melody. Two things save it from just being yet more (and there is a lot of it) proficient ‘grim & frostbitten’ black metal – firstly, some strange and very Icelandic anthemic moments; I say very Icelandic only because those moments remind me a bit of some of the epic, windswept bits in Solstafir’s music. Although recommended by the label for fans of fellow Icelanders Misþyrming, Nyrst, though inhabiting more or less the same kind of sub-genre, definitely have their own sound and style. (I highly recommend Misþyrming’s 
And another one-woman folk project. Ols (Polish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna Maria Oskierko) is very different from Kariti though, and Widma is a primitive, ritualistic sounding album with none of Covered Mirrors‘s accessible, almost pop sheen. Widma does sound traditional, but it’s more akin to Wardruna and the archaeological end of pagan folk music than the glossy Clannad-ish kind recently heard on the latest Myrkur album. This is, by contrast, pleasantly droning and primal (and in that respect reminds me of an album I bought via MySpace many years ago by 
A contrast to everything else here, Norwegian collective Weserbergland’s second album consists of one 42 minute track, but it’s not the krautrock–influenced prog of their Can/Tangerine Dream-flavoured debut. Instead, it’s a chaotic but weirdly coherent kind of collage which consists of performances on conventional-ish instruments: guitar/strings/sax/turntables, cut up, messed about with and reassembled into a kind of melancholy, cinematic symphony. The strange, unpredictable stuttering percussion seems like it should disrupt the flow of the piece, but somehow the jerkiness becomes part of the mood and it all flows perfectly, if not in a straight line. It’s really not like anything else I’ve heard, but reminds me a little of Masahiko Satoh and the Soundbreakers’ 1971 classic avant-garde jazz-prog-whatever album Amalgamation in its sheer ear-defeating unclassifiable-ness. I’m sure it won’t go down in history as such, but this may be a definitively 2020 release.
I just finished reading the newest edition* of Jon Savage’s brilliant England’s Dreaming which is as good as any music-related book I’ve ever read and made me realise how many parallels there are between now and the political situation in mid-70s Britain. Up to a point, that is. It would be hard, even I think for a conservative person, to see the victory of Johnson’s Tories as a return to some kind of sensible order in the way that deluded right wingers saw Thatcher’s victory – which did, it has to be said, render somewhat pointless the extreme right wing groups like the National Front & British Movement that had been growing in strength and influence throughout the decade. As with Johnson/the ERG and their wooing of the UKIP/nazi fanbase though, the reassurance that comes from seeing extremist groups losing popularity is soured (to put it mildly) by having people in charge who appeal to that demographic.
Sounding something like The Birthday Party playing noisy free jazz, the Massaker are a brutal guitar-bass-drums (with minimalist vocals) trio; heavy on feedback, tense dynamics and churning distortion, but sometimes almost groovy and (very) occasionally kind of pretty. Home was their fifth album and it’s pretty similar to the only other one of their albums that I know, The Tribe, from 1987. Squally, angular and dark but with insistent percussion, it’s a great palate-cleanser for your ears after too much pop music.
This Austrian black metal project has a very specific local (Tyrolean) focus, but judging by its Facebook page is the brainchild of Italian ex-pat Fabio D’Amore of symphonic power metal band Serenity; which makes sense – for all its atmospheric/folkish elements (there are some very nice jangly clean parts), this is a theatrical, musicianly album which feels epic and polished rather than dark and brutal. The band’s name refers to a pagan goddess, and throughout the album an odd, witchy narrator pops up declaiming or whispering, who I assume is the woman in the artwork, who the promotional material refers to as “the front woman [who] will sermonize, face-painted in historical black garb with embroidered belt and cast-iron broom …”
