Chapter 1

I got asked to pick 8 songs that remind me of being a teenager and to write an accompanying paragraph for a piece of press.

Obvs I started writing a book. They will def have to cut this down so thought I would share the full version on here. I'm super nostalgic as you know and I'm really feeling it more with the change of the season. Doing this exercise has really brought up memoriiieeeezss.

If this brings anything up for you add it in the comments. What were your teenage tunes and what was your teenage brain thinking about and feeling? God I love music

P!nk - There you go 

I had just gotten my own bedroom. I shared bunkbeds with my younger sister growing up, I was scared of the dark whereas she couldn’t sleep if one single ray of light came through a crack in the door. The solution our mum came up with was having a small lamp on one night and off the next. We each complained and slept badly every other night. When my parents converted our garage into 2 small bedrooms and a utility room I was ecstatic to get my own room. I picked the paint for my walls, one dark purple, 2 lavender walls and 1 white. I got a bureau to do homework on and a purple office chair with wheels that I could spin around in and pump up and down with a lever. We went to Ikea and I got a silver heart shaped pillow for on top of my purple bed covers and to top it all off, for my 13th birthday I got a Sony Hifi system with a CD & tape deck & radio. My love for music began really young and was very much connected to my parents records and gigantic CD & record player that lived in the living room. I’d take their CDs off the rack and plug in big headphones that didn’t fit on my small head yet. I listened to Harry Nilsson ‘Without You’ on repeat, to Melanie and The Beatles. They soon bought my sisters & I a cheap tape player & a cd player. We bought singles from Virgin music at the weekend and spent hours recording our own radio shows. One of us would host, one called in and the 3rd pretended to be Mystic Meg, I remember once taping the first Spice Girls Album onto a tape for my friend as she didn’t have it. We all sat in the room shuffling about, trying to be quiet as possible and most definitely failing, as we recorded maybe the worst quality pirate version of Spice in it’s entirety for her. Getting my own room and my shiny silver Hifi system was almost like falling in love for the first time. I salivated over that Hifi, sometimes I would just sit on my purple chair and stare at it in disbelief that my life could be this great. I could sleep with the light on every single night and fill my very own cd rack, I loved the sleek buttons, hitting the eject button or pressing play gave me a thrill each time. I felt so grown up, so independent. I got my first phone, a Siemens S25 and started texting friends and boys in the evenings whilst I listened to music, signing off ‘tb’, (which means text back for anyone young enough to have missed this gloriously innocent & slow paced era of technology). My own Sony hifi system in my very own bedroom with purple and lavender walls is where I developed my own personal relationship with listening to music. I vividly remember sitting on my bed, looking through the plastic cd case, flicking through the booklet for lyrics and having P!NKS first album on repeat. ‘There you Go’ felt new and cool and slightly alt for some reason, I think P!nk has always felt like a pop artist who did her own thing. I couldn’t believe the audacity of her short hot pink hair. I went to the hairdressers on half term and got the same cut minus the pink. On the first day back at school Jake O’mara proclaimed loudly that I looked like a boy and I cried in assembly. This song came out when I was still very much a girl but I was being thrown tiny flickers of independence that felt massive to me. And actually I think they were massive for a 13 year old from North Harrow in the year 2000.