The latest update from John Higgs dropped into my inbox over the weekend, and near the end was an aside that took me back in time:
I had a deja-vu moment recently when I saw new copies of SchNEWS in the pub [in Brighton]. SchNEWS was a local grassroots radical newsletter from the 1990s and 2000s, so it was not something I expected to find now. It stopped printing and went online around 2014, where it gradually became invisible to all except those intentionally looking for it.
Finding a new edition in a pub was a reminder of just how much more impactful a physical issue is, and how it can reach random people in a different way to digital content.
What you need to understand here is that, as an even slightly alternative sort of young person living in Portsmouth in the mid- and late-Nineties, you desperately wished that you lived in Brighton, because Portsmouth was a grimly conservative navy town where getting the shit beaten out of you for looking a bit weird was less a rite of passage than a weekly hazard, and because Brighton had long before acquired a kind of countercultural gravity that drew the oddballs of Britain from far and wide.
Brighton, more simply, was where the wild things were.
SchNEWS was and still is for me a Proustian biscuit with regard to not just those times but that place: rolling straight off the Saturday morning train from Pompey, turn left out of the station and down the hill, then sharp right into the Lanes, and in particular to the Kensington, a well-known and (to me) almost legendary haunt of crusties, ravers and anarchists, where the latest SchNEWS would be picked up, along with various other mind-altering necessities for the weekend ahead…
What’s really amazing isn’t just that SchNEWS used to put out hundreds of photocopied dupes all over the city every week, for free, but that they also used to do printed annuals1. These two, from 1999 and 2000, are still in my library today, though I hadn’t looked at them for maybe two decades until John’s email came in on Sunday:

I was young, stupid, and addled by substances—as were many of us back in those days—but, flicking through these books, I’m reminded that we were at least on the right side of history, fighting and protesting (albeit often ineffectually) many of the issues that have become mainstream political concerns today: climate change, amok capitalism, wars and profiteering.
And, well—“the noise we thought would never stop / died a death as the punks grew up”, to borrow from one of Brighton’s defining bands of that era. It can be easy to feel that those were years of naivete and failure—and they were, in the ways that the lives of young people trying to swim against the current tend always to be.
But behind the futility and malnutrition and compound sartorial error, there was a normalisation of the objections and concerns that exercised us most: we didn’t do much damage, but we had identified the enemy correctly, even as they steamrollered us with rising rents and legislation against parties and squats and all the rest. The “repetitive beats” were never the real issue; it was the culture that those beats soundtracked that had to be squelched. And it kind of was… but also kind of wasn’t.
I very vaguely remember watching Terry Gilliam’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas at Glastonbury at the start of the last summer of the C20th, I guess a year or so after its initial release—I say vaguely because, well, I was of an age and a disposition that meant the only way to watch a movie like that was to be as wrecked as you could afford to be, if not slightly more so.
As such, I missed the historical implications of the justly famed passage, just as I’d missed it when I first read the book, because I’d been too young when the whole thing had started a dozen years before:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson
If I had thought, later that night, to look down the slope from the stone circle to the Greenfield—if I’d been able to focus that far!—perhaps I would have my own era’s high-water mark, which had been left a good few years before.
Nostalgia aside, the return of SchNEWS in print does feel a little like a weak signal. Only yesterday I was talking to someone who told me that a struggling radical-satirical organ here in Malmö is putting together its first physical issue in ages, because it’s so easy to disappear into the statistical noise on the internet.
Ironic really, given the internet in the era of SchNEWS was seemingly so full of countercultural stuff, almost to exclusion of anything “straight”… DisInfo! Barbelith! So many others! But it’s just, I suppose, another example of enantiodromia—the sense that we may be on the cusp of a fairly sudden and strong cultural inversion, a hard turn away from the digital and back to the analog.
I’m not going to prophecy that “the Nineties are back!”, because I’m not A Trends Guy, and I don’t believe that cultural repetition works in such simple ways, if it ever did. But flicking through these old SchNEWS annuals, I’m reminded of another time when global events and socioeconomic pressure were prompting what were even at the time admitted to be strange alliances, that cut across the old left/right axis in ways that confused the commentators and politicians alike; a time when conspiracy theory was commonplace; a time when people had become quite tired of a puritanical approach to politics; a time of protest and outrage and insurrection and fun.
The comparisons only go far: we are (from my perspective at least) depressingly devoid of good music, and while I’ve been away from the UK for close to five years now, nothing I hear from the old country makes me feel like “you could strike sparks anywhere”; all that energy still seems to be with the right-hand end of the spectrum.
But like I say, the point is not that “the Nineties are back”; in an atemporal world, that’s a stupid claim, unless you’re in the business of telling the fashion industry what sort of tatty shit they should be cranking out next season. The point is that I can see strong echoes of all the contradictions that energised and fuelled an era of very analog and very anti-authoritarian cultural activity… but I can’t yet see that activity itself.
Perhaps I never will; perhaps the other team managed to change the rules enough that there’s no toeholds from which to start scaling the fences. But we’re back to hope again, aren’t we? And so I’ll say the same damned thing I always say: hope is not sufficient to change, but it is necessary.
There may not be many sparks that I can see, but there sure is a whole lot of tinder.
- Admittedly, these were not given away for free like the weekly news-sheets were. But I acquired these by borrowing them from someone whose Brighton flat I crashed at once, and then never returning them. I couldn’t even tell you whose they were… though they were presumably of an anarchist bent, and therefore presumably fairly forgiving of my appropriation of their property, assuming they even remember it themselves. ↩︎
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