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1970s or 1990s teenagers – who had it better?

There are few moments that are more evocative than those first forays into adult life
There are few moments that are more evocative than those first forays into adult life

Self-obsession. Questionable clothes choices. Mooning over wildly inappropriate people. Genuinely believing your parents know nothing. It doesn’t matter when you were a teenager, the symptoms are all the same. We know this from experience, of course, but it’s nice to be backed up by popular culture; it’s precisely why That ‘70s Show, detailing the lives of teenagers in the late 1970s, was such a hit, running for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006 (and making stars out of Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher in the process).

So it was little surprise that this winning formula has been repackaged, this time as That ‘90s Show, following the interactions of teenagers in a small Wisconsin town in the summer of 1995. Teenage years will always be mined in this way; there are few moments that are more evocative than those first forays into adult life. But which was the best decade to come of age in – the 1970s or the 1990s? 

‘As teenage girls, it never crossed our minds that anything might hold us back’

By Polly Dunbar 

Polly Dunbar: ‘We took photos on disposable cameras and rarely even saw the results, let alone filtered them until we resembled supermodels’ - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph
Polly Dunbar: ‘We took photos on disposable cameras and rarely even saw the results, let alone filtered them until we resembled supermodels’ - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph

If, like me, you were a teenager in the 1990s, you’ll remember the decade as having a particular smell. A blend of Lynx Africa and Impulse O2, hanging over double maths. The scent of Marlboro Lights lingering long after a trip to ‘smokers’ alley’. Sickly sweet alcopops, which proved, thrillingly, more alco than pop. If teen spirit had a smell, this heady brew was it, and even back then it was pretty disgusting. But it was also as brash, confident and full of optimism as the 1990s themselves.

It was Cool Britannia, when the music was great, fashion was fun and swagger was everywhere, from Liam Gallagher mouthing off in a parka to Geri Halliwell pinching Prince Charles’s bum. For teenagers, this irreverent, hedonistic national mood filtered down to make it feel, tantalisingly, like anything was possible.

I turned 13 in 1994, just as things were starting to look up after a recession-blighted start to the decade. One Friday evening, watching Top of the Pops, I saw Suede performing Stay Together and became instantly obsessed by the band’s grimy glamour. It was the start of Britpop, that all-too-brief period when Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Elastica dominated the music scene, and from that moment on, my friends and I devoted our energies to persuading our dads to drive us to grubby venues around Yorkshire to see them.

Polly Dunbar with a friend in the 1990s - Polly Dunbar
Polly Dunbar with a friend in the 1990s - Polly Dunbar

The gigs were an opportunity to wear the Adidas tops we’d hunted down in second-hand shops to prove our membership of the Britpop tribe, and Rimmel Fudge Brownie lipstick for a hint of sophistication.

Women like Sleeper’s Louise Wener, Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, the so-called ladettes – Sara Cox, Zoe Ball, Denise van Outen – and even the Spice Girls (deemed uncool by my cohort, even though we secretly loved their music) were claiming the right to have just as much fun as the boys, whether playing guitars, downing pints or generally running riot. As teenage girls, it never crossed our minds that anything might hold us back.

Gigs and festivals also gave us a chance to drink without anyone caring how old we were: in the 1990s, alcohol was everywhere. Kate Moss had the Met Bar, and teens in my hometown of Harrogate had a slightly less star-studded local, which seemed to cater exclusively to 15-year-olds pretending to be older, serving industrial quantities of WKD. We could have gone in school uniform and they probably wouldn’t have cared.

Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis epitomised the 1990s - Getty
Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis epitomised the 1990s - Getty

We were free to do whatever we wanted (as long as we could prevent our parents finding out), and, with no mobile phones or social media to capture our misdeeds, we (mostly) got away with them. Aside from my Sega Game Gear, mine was a tech-free youth. Instead of the internet, we had Encarta, and I didn’t send an email until I went to university in 1999. We took photos on disposable cameras and rarely even saw the results, let alone filtered them until we resembled supermodels. We were less self-conscious and our mental health was more robust as a result.

When we weren’t misbehaving, we were obsessed with Mulder and Scully’s ambiguous relationship in Sci-Fi series The X-Files. The closest I got to the booming rave scene was watching the episode of Dawson's Creek where one character overdosed in a warehouse. I read London Fields by Martin Amis because Damon Albarn from Blur mentioned it, but I also devoured Sweet Valley High, Point Horror and More! magazine. I spent the money from my Saturday job in WHSmith (all £26 a day of it) on CDs, TopShop chokers, Body Shop Morello Cherry lip balm and earrings with yin yang symbols on them.

I don’t claim to have been cool. We were teenagers, and that’s the point. But what we were was hopeful. From what we could tell, things were getting better: the economy, our standard of living, the opportunities. We didn’t know what was ahead, but while it lasted, the party was brilliant.  

‘With punk came politics of all kinds: feminist, anti-racist, pro-gay rights, anti-apartheid...’

By Suzanne Moore

Suzanne Moore: ‘Music was everything and it still is’ - Rii Schroer for The Telegraph
Suzanne Moore: ‘Music was everything and it still is’ - Rii Schroer for The Telegraph

School days are not the best days of your life. Well, mine certainly weren’t. I barely went after I got to 14 and left at 16. I was a teenager in the 1970s so I had much better things to do. Of course, everyone thinks that the decade in which “to be young was very heaven”, but the 1970s were brilliant and that’s even before punk came along.

All kinds of freedoms opened up. We could get the pill easily, just as we could drink underage in any pub. Much sex was had – some good, some bad – and a rite of passage was a visit to ‘the clap clinic’.

Girls could look like boys and boys like girls – gender non-conformity was an actual thing, not just a Twitter bio. One dressed up as whoever one wanted to be and, of course, that would be Bowie or Bolan, which made boys – for me at least – interesting.

Music was everything and it still is. We had Roxy Music and Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. We had Bob Marley.

Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music in 1974 - Getty
Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music in 1974 - Getty

You could dance all night – speed was a great drug, but one that screwed up more people in my experience than acid ever did. You could sit on the floor and be all hippyish, but I was never interested in that. When I hitchhiked to London to see Black Sabbath I was shocked to find people lying around. Could they not hear that bassline and get up, for God's sake?

Hitchhiking was another kind of freedom. We went all round Europe and, yes, bad things did happen and our parents never knew where we were. To be frank, they hadn’t for years (though on her deathbed my mother told me she always knew).

Part of the creativity of the decade came from boredom. There was little worth watching on television. Anywhere was better than being at home, so a fantasy life was generated in small youth clubs or discos where girls wore fox furs and pillbox hats, because we had seen Roxy Music’s back-up singers.

Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols in 1978 - Getty
Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols in 1978 - Getty

Then, of course, punk made the old world spin on its axis; seemingly a safety pin could collapse civilisation. No one could afford the Westwood clothes The Pistols wore. It was all a homemade effort. We wore crimplene and synthetics and plastics, even if that meant a bin liner, and toothbrushes in your hair. For young girls, this was a time when you could play with being sexy and scary at the same time. “Here is your fantasy,” a lot of fetishy punk fashion said to men, “Here it is: twisted and ripped. How do you like it now?” How little it took to outrage the establishment. Footless tights and a tutu with a leather jacket was one of my favourite outfits and it was all just huge fun.

With punk came politics of all kinds: feminist, anti-racist, pro-gay rights, anti-apartheid and a burgeoning understanding of what ‘no future’ really meant. It meant creating your own. No one else would do that for you.

That attitude – that one might make a future from what was considered detritus – was a freedom I cherish. For a girl who left school at 16 from ‘a chaotic home’, I was considered detritus. Yet because I had been a teenager in the 1970s, I knew I could make of myself whatever I wanted. What more could you want from a decade?


That ‘90s Show is available on Netflix from Thursday January 19