Last year Finneas O’Connell, the brother and creative partner of Billie Eilish, released a poignant song called ‘The 90s’, which fixated on a decade ‘when the future was a testament/To something beautiful and shiny’. O’Connell was born in 1997, so this wasn’t personal nostalgia; rather it was a latecomer’s envious longing for a time when, at least if you were young and living in the West, history seemed to be on your side. Some of his elders would agree. In former GQ editor Dylan Jones’s oral history Faster Than a Cannonball, Nick Hornby describes the Nineties as ‘the last time the [UK] was happy’, while Noel Gallagher mourns it as ‘the last great decade where we were free, because the internet had not enslaved us all’. Those were the days, my friend.
