They say that everything comes back into fashion eventually. Or at least my grandmother did – and since she spent most of her working life in clothes shops and lived to be 94, she would have known.

That doesn’t just apply to clothes. Music, politics, many other aspects of culture all make a comeback every so often. It seems to me that the cycle takes about 20 years.

It was during the 1980s, for example, that I acquired a taste for 1960s music. In among my parents’ collection of classical LPs there were also The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel and The Kinks.

Then I discovered The Jimi Hendrix Experience when a schoolfriend lent me a greatest hits album. And every time I walked through the sixth form common room I’d hear the dark, eerie organ solo from The Doors’ Light My Fire and asked someone what it was.

He lent me the tape – and I soon got to like the rest of their dark, eerie music. The Who, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and The Animals came shortly after.


Stephen Blease I wasn’t alone in my taste for 1960s’ music. There were a lot of fellow fans among the sixth form intelligentsia. It seemed to me that it was of far higher quality than anything else that passed for music at a time when the charts were dominated by anodyne bubblegum pop songs rolling off the Stock, Aitken and Waterman assembly line.

But it was in the 1990s that the 20-year pattern began to emerge. That was the decade when the 70s seemed to be making a comeback. Suddenly we were seeing the return of flared trousers, platform shoes and Labour governments.

True to the pattern, traces of the 1980s began to resurface in the decade that was irritatingly referred to as the noughties. Many of the electro-pop acts of the time reformed, announced tours or sought publicity by granting interviews to national newspapers.

America elected a president that was the same sort of intellectual heavyweight as the 1980s’ Ronald Reagan.

Shoulder pads and slim shirt collars came back. Skinny jeans took a little longer, but not much.

Does this mean that we should now be noticing a return of the 1990s? We’ve just seen a return of Chris Evans to TV. New varieties of Nike and Adidas trainers are appearing on the trendiest feet. Both of these were last seen in the 1990s.

The MPs’ expenses scandal carries strong echoes of that decade’s “sleaze”, best represented by Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken.

And hostility to the European Union was all the rage among some in the 1990s. UKIP was founded in 1993 and in the same year a group of Tory MPs voted against the Maastrict Treaty – and were condemned in unexpectedly colourful language by John Major. Those who are called “Brexiteers” now were called “Eurosceptics” then.

My guess is that 20 years from now we’ll see all the characteristics of this decade coming back. As I enter my 60s I’ll look forward to an increase in food banks, hipster beards and world leaders at international gatherings taking selfies.