subscribe
/ Sign Out

Five albums that turn 30 this year to make you feel really f**king old

HAVE you popped on Modern Life Is Rubbish thinking it’s a fairly recent release? You’re very wrong. Here are some other albums that will make you feel ancient:

Blur: Modern Life Is Rubbish

This sounded so fresh and exciting when it came out, and still does, so you’re convinced it was released nine years ago at the most. Until you see a photo of the newly reformed Blur, and they’ve become portly, craggy 55-year-olds. How the f**k has that happened? You daren’t look in the mirror, in case it’s happened to you too.

Nirvana: In Utero

As a Gen-Xer, Nirvana is the band that most represents your generation, and they’re still incredibly relevant today. Contemporary even. You mention how much you love this album to your Gen Z child who gives you a withering look and sarcastically replies ‘OK, Boomer’, which crushes your spirit completely.

Take That: Everything Changes

When this came out you sneered at your parents for listening to old-fashioned shit from 30 years ago, like Paul McCartney and Wings. Now you’re the one pining for your lost youth, and, to adult insult to injury, you’ve realised that Band On The Run wasn’t actually that bad, whereas Pray has aged pretty badly, just like your adolescent crush Mark Owen.

Haddaway: The Album

You know for a fact that this album isn’t that long in the tooth, because they play What Is Love at the club you go to once a month with your mates from school. It’s such a banger, it can’t be from the olden days. However, taking a closer look at your friend’s once youthful face, and the way it has collapsed, sagged and wrinkled, you begin to realise why the club night is advertised as spinning ‘ultra-vintage classics’.

Snoop Doggy Dogg: Doggystyle

Nope, it’s not possible that this came out 30 years ago. You know because you used to listen to it while you smoked massive blunts, ate Quavers and played video games until 3am every night. You’re still doing that now, and there’s no way you’ve wasted three decades of your life. Is there? Oh f**k.

There were no speed cameras and every kid had a knife: A Boomer explains how safe it was in their day

By Roy Hobbs

THIS country is a dangerous cesspit nowadays. You can barely walk down the street without something terrible happening. Not like it was in my youth, when Britain was a safer and better place.

When I was a lad we carried a knife with us at all times. There was no namby-pamby fussing that we might hurt ourselves, and we used them for whittling sticks, cutting fishing line and threatening kids from the next town. If you did accidentally slice your hand, you rubbed a dock leaf on it and crossed your fingers you didn’t get tetanus. Happy times.

Speed cameras weren’t invented. You could go as fast as you liked, because we didn’t have an authoritarian nanny state telling us how to drive our cars. Now I’m much more likely to crash because I have to keep looking at the speed limit signs all the time. OK, so the number of road deaths was around four times higher than it is now, but is that worse than not being allowed to choose how fast you go? Hard to say.

We didn’t have DNA testing either. No need. We were a tight knit bunch so everyone knew who the neighbourhood wrong ‘un was without fiddling around with science. If any kids went missing we’d all get together and attack the weird bloke on the street who wore glasses and lived with his mum. If we were wrong, no matter. He still deserved it for being a bit different. That’s what being part of a community is all about.

Anyway, the kids always turned up. They’d usually just been hanging around smoking super strength cigarettes, smashing bottles and climbing down wells at the derelict mill up the road. That’s how safe it was. It’s tragic that those halcyon days have gone for good.

Next story ›