The Nineties: What the F**k Was That All About?: The Music the Culture the People the Decade

by John Robb

The Swinging Sixties, the trashy Seventies, the money-grabbing Eighties... there is a neat bunch of clichés for every era. But the Nineties? What the f**k was that all about? The Nineties has been an ongoing pop war—a battle between nostalgia and experimentalism. It has been a decade where every shade of option has been stretched to the extreme. In this book, John Robb will be running with the zeitgeist and shooting from the hip, and writing from the middle of the maelstrom.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Author/Music Scribe/TV Presenter/Environmental Activist and Bass Player for perennial post-punk survivors The Membranes, John Robb is a man who cannot sit still. When he’s not touring with his band (they recently toured in Europe with The Stranglers, The Chameleons and Fields Of The Nephilim), he’s presenting, moderating or writing for his popular UK music site Louder Than War. John has previously written the best-selling books “Punk Rock : An Oral History” and “The North Will Rise Again : Manchester Music City 1976-1996”. His latest opus is the 550-page “The Art Of Darkness : The History of Goth”, an in-depth account that he feels presents the first major and comprehensive overview of Goth music and culture and its lasting legacy.

Starting with a night out in a Goth club, it then takes us on a deep-dive into the wider culture, exploring the social conditions that created ‘Goth’ in the post-punk period. It examines the fall of Rome, Lord Byron and the romantic poets, European folk tales, Gothic architecture and painters, the occult to modern-day Instagram influencers.

The book is built mainly around the 80s post-punk Goth period featuring interviews with Andrew Eldritch, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Banshees, The Damned, Einstürzende Neubauten, Johnny Marr, Trent Reznor, Adam Ant, Laibach, The Cure, Nick Cave and many others. …it looks at the music, style and the political and social conditions that spawned the culture and the great music, fashions and attitudes - clubs that defined it, and is also a first-hand account of being there at some of the legendary gigs and clubs that made the scene happen...

Reviews

[Grahaeme Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can you possibly capture the essence of an entire decade’s worth of music and pop culture twists and turns in a single coherent book? Possibly. Is this the book to successfully achieve such a gigantic task? Not really.

That’s not really the fault of John Robb who is a talented music journalist and cultural commentator. His book about the history of goth is excellent and is worth reading. This book is frustratingly not. How can you expect to capture a decade that includes grunge and superstar DJs with a cogent through line? Other than they are joined through an accident of time, this book fails to create a really detailed analysis for why things happened as they did. Apparently the book was written just at the end of the 90s, and it really does suffer from a lack of critical distance to be able to dig into things with any depth.

So what do you get? Well you get a series of essays that do a pretty decent job of summarising the main cultural touchstones of the 90s but doesn’t manage to dig into anything sufficiently to reveal anything of any genuine insight and surprise.

Oh well.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

John signed this book for me one drunken night in Wigan, in a pub upstairs somwhere, after a Goldblade gig. I can never remember the name of the pub. It must have been in '99 because that's when the book came out. Keep up the good work John.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't realize it was centered on the 90's in England. Although it was interesting to see how they dealt with the 90's across the pond, I wouldn't read again.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting perspective but nothing that gives the decade a life outside of basic information. The chapters on acid house was interesting but overall it's just a poor man's "Lipstick Traces."

[Jeni]

I love John Robb. End of.