Imagine for a moment that it was not an established (by me) fact that 1979 was the answer, and you were trying to decide what was the best year for popular music and 1991 would surely be one of the top contenders, even if a large part of the year saw Bryan Adams hogging the number one with (Everything I Do) I Do it For You.For a start, look at the albums released, many of which launched long careers or took existing bands to a whole new level: Out of Time by REM, Peggy Suicide by Julian Cope, Sailing the seas of Cheese by Primus, Woodface by Crowded House, The Mix by Kraftwerk, Ten by Pearl Jam, Use Your Illusion (1 and 2) from Guns N’ Roses, Blood Sugar Sex Magic by Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Nevermind by Nirvana, Chorus by Erasure, Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub, We Cant Dance by Genesis, Achtung Baby by U2, Mr. Lucky by John Lee Hooker and Metallica’s self-titled black album.

Just the Nirvana and Metallica albums alone would make 1991 a contender!

It was a really good year for me to finally get a CD player. My turntable had packed up so I needed a new stereo because it was an all-in-one thing, and it would have been silly not to get one with a CD player. Unfortunately I had just bought the John Lee Hooker and Metallica albums on cassette about a week before. They would have been good first discs to testthe new toy with. I ended up getting Supertramp’s greatest hits for that purpose as there ws nothing new out that I wanted and didn’t already have.

There were also albums of less global significance but of great personal significance to me, for example Famille Nombreuse by Les Negresses Vertes. I had been smitten by their first album and had seen them live in a brilliant show, but the lead singer, Helno, had died so I wondered if they would still have the same magic. It turned out that they had a slightly different magic, but were still brilliant. Famille Nombreuse was a more sedate record, though the live shows still had the same enormous energy. It was also one of those albums where I can remember exactly where and when I bought it, which was the Our Price in Waterloo Station while I was waiting for a blind date with somebody who would eventually (and unfortunately as it turned out) be the second Mrs. Skudder.

1991 also saw the first album by MC Solaar and the start of my fondness for French rap music, which I still like to dip into on Spotify.

With the new relationship I had there was bit of compromise going on with music because our tastes did not have a huge amount of overlap. As a black girl from Croydon, she was very into artists like CeCe Peniston and Boyz II Men, had a large collection of Eastenders-related singles, and (this should have been a huge red flag) was a massive fan of Kenny bloody G. She was not a fan of rock or reggae. This worked out well in the end because there was very little fighting over the record collection when we split up.

Eventually we started to get into some parts of each other’s record collections, but an early overlap was Prince. His album in this year was Diamonds and Pearls and it was actually the first Prince album I bought, if you dont count the Batman soundtrack. I can’t explain why I didn’t have any of the earlier albums because I really liked all the singles. It is often overlooked now, maybe because it is lighter on the funky side. But it did have some funky parts and the single Gett Off was one of them.

There is no doubt that Smells Like Teen Spirit is better and more influential than Gett Off. It changed the world, woke everybody up and is still exciting to hear, but Prince evokes the year more for me personally and so that is what I put on the playlist for 1991.