1990s

Oh My Word is a podcast I made with Michael Moruzzi a few years ago: sixteen episodes on Watford FC in the 1990s, a season at a time, with detours into matchdays, fanzines and the man who commentated on it all. It has sat on Spotify and Apple ever since, which is another way of saying it has been unsearchable.

That is what the new site is for. Previously: twenty hours of two people talking about Kevin Phillips and Graham Taylor’s return, and no way to find the bit you half-remember. Every episode now carries its full transcript on the page, each paragraph anchored to its timestamp, so you can send someone the exact minute instead of telling them it is somewhere in the 1996-97 one.

The transcripts were the hard bit. Speech recognition knows little about football and less about Watford: Vicarage Road came back as “Riccarton Road”, Roger ‘Harry’ Willis turned up twice in the same sentence (once was too many), and at one point my agency’s name leaked out of the transcription tool’s account settings and made a stadium announcer into “the Omne Tannoy”. A thousand-odd corrections later, they read… better.

What stayed in is the part I find more interesting. Michael gave Luther Blissett’s last goal as his 168th; the club record is 186. I read out Wimbledon’s scorers and say Robbie Keane, who never played for them, when I meant Robbie Earle. Both are on the tape exactly as written down. Fixing the transcription is the job. Fixing the speaker is somebody else’s.

Some details worth noting:

• Clicking a timestamp seeks the audio and docks a small player, so the transcript stays a transcript instead of turning into a second play button
• A #t-5326 link cues that moment on arrival without autoplaying
• Sixteen text files and one JSON file go in, seventeen pages come out, via a Python script. No framework, no build step
• The design is matchday programme by way of fanzine: Big Shoulders Display over Newsreader, printed on newsprint that is not there

The name is Mike Vince’s. He commentated on Watford for local radio for years and said “oh my word” whenever the afternoon called for it. Episode ten is the best part of an hour with him.

The hype around Astrid at the end of the nineties was enormous. The NME mentioned them every week but, unless you caught them live, you had little idea what they sounded like beyond the joyous write-ups. A power pop revival was underway, and Astrid crossed it with jangly C86 and Teenage Fanclub influences. No album could have lived up to the expectations—mine, anyway. But the single “It’s True” and its b-sides, “For Your Girlfriend” and “Boston”, are a high watermark of the post-Britpop years. Some bands put everything into a debut album and never get back there. Astrid did it a release earlier.

Nice piece remembering Glasgow’s 90s DIY scene. I never saw Urusei Yatsura play but I loved their records and enjoyed their progression from twee enjoyers of Japanese culture to something a little more muscular and cynical. Suspected I heard them first on a Peel session, perhaps the one mentioned here. I have a couple of their 7-inch records somewhere.

Leo Robson’s memoir of adolescent cinephilia. Six hundred films at the cinema in late-90s London, exercise books of star ratings, a filing cabinet of newspaper cuttings.

The making of West Germany’s 1990 World Cup shirt. Fair to call it ‘iconic’? I think so.

Twenty years later, 90s indie rock icons Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein reflect on the tumultuous times surrounding their ill-fated and short-lived major label record deal.

To mark the special Alan Partridge episode turning 30, Simon Bland chats to Armando Iannucci, Patrick Marber, Rebecca Front and more about the making of a Christmas classic