Kat Brown
My 12th birthday party a few weeks later was focused almost entirely around my new-found addiction to Germanic dance music. My friends and I borrowed my brother’s cassette recorder – he preferred side one, track two: Haddaway’s What Is Love – and created a live Mr Vain music video. Blue Peter would have applauded our ingenuity, if not our execution. Helen choreographed a matching dance routine for Sally and I, who wore our Forever Friends nightshirts and drew heart tattoos on our shoulders with Boots Silvermine lipstick. Isabel did strong work dimming and undimming the lights, so it looked like we were in a disco instead of my parents’ sitting room. Lizzie, as the prettiest one, sat on the floor and assumed her best bored supermodel expression while making complicated hand gestures. Seona didn’t have a Forever Friends nightshirt, but was even more addicted to Culture Beat than I was, and took centre stage wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses to perform the central rap.
After hours of practise, we proudly unleashed our routine on my parents. Mum and Dad were seasoned witnesses to my child dance endeavours and had the grace to avoid pissing themselves with laughter until well out of earshot. But we were thrilled with ourselves! In a pre-MTV world, we turned a provincial birthday party into a Teutonic discotheque. We could do anything. (Seona, Helen and I would go on to form a band based around singing along to the demos on the school Casio keyboard. It was not a success.)
I listened to side one of Smash Hits 1993 for weeks before discovering Suede’s Animal Nitrate on side four and so igniting my obsession with Britpop. But I can still remember, and will perform with gusto, the dance moves to Culture Beat’s only UK number one single.
