Don't Look Back in Anger : The Rise and Fall of Cool Britannia (9781409180739) by Rachel Daniel

Author:Rachel, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409180739
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA

SIMPLY EVERYONE’S

TAKING COCAINE

Drugs. Met Bar. Groucho Club

BRETT ANDERSON There’s only four drugs, really, and they go round and round and round. After rave and Ecstasy it happened to be the time of cocaine again. It’s the cyclical nature of fashion. You can draw parallels with how alternative music and the mainstream shifted with cocaine. Cocaine was seen as an ugly, greedy, eighties drug that was used by people with big mobile phones and ponytails and only available to the rich: the Yuppie drug; or in the seventies the rock-star drug. In the nineties cocaine penetrated working-class culture. Suddenly it became the plasterer’s drug, the electrician’s drug. It went across the social divide and became all pervasive. The pendulum had swung.

OLIVER PEYTON You had the Ecstasy thing first, which was for younger people for falling over in a field. Then it sort of changed into cocaine after everybody went, ‘We’ve done all of that.’ There was a natural gateway: cocaine just became part of the new culture.

DAVID KAMP I was reared in the cauldron of Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign and raised to believe that if you were taking Class A drugs you had a disease. I couldn’t believe it when I got to London and people were openly taking cocaine, unashamed of it and so incredibly full of themselves.

KEITH ALLEN The Stock Exchange pre-Thatcher was the domain of bowler-hatted gentlemen. Post-Thatcher it was just fucking kids, working-class traders who suddenly got access to an unregulated market. I knew loads of them who were on coke every day. Once you get a sizeable number of people in a given industry it will leak out. Soho was flooded.

MAT COLLISHAW There were a lot of wage accelerations, so more people were using it in the City and that demand made cocaine far more accessible and cheaper to get hold of. It went from being an exclusive drug that was used in Chelsea to being commonly available.

KEITH ALLEN It was the glue that combined everybody. London was afloat on a sea of second-rate cocaine. It was a natural progression from E, which was a classless drug. Historically, coke wasn’t a classless drug. It was for rich people. And suddenly, with the availability of it, it wasn’t an elitist drug. Criminals realised there was a market there too: you could sell cheap, cut cocaine on an estate as much as selling it to people in private members’ clubs. It’s Murray Lachlan Young’s poem, ‘Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine’.

WAHEED ALLI The cocaine-fuelled ‘me’ generation was the eighties. That was the City boys. It was a culture of selfishness. The nineties was an enjoyment of life in a much more selfless way. It was about sharing joy as opposed to preserving unto yourself.

LORENZO AGIUS It all felt like buddies together. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t doing drugs. It was commonplace.

BRETT ANDERSON Brian Harvey from East 17 came out and said, ‘Ecstasy makes you a better person’. He was jumped upon by the press and pilloried for saying it.

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