The records that made the journey

The song was playing somewhere, inevitably. Paris, 2002, a basement that had no business holding that many people, and a man who made a room feel like the centre of the known universe. Space Cowboy is what happens when joy refuses to be reasonable — when it insists on itself despite everything the decade has thrown at you. It danced across the tables. So did he.

California promised things it mostly didn't deliver — and knew it, and said so anyway, and you loved it for that. Four weeks in the back of a car, a city that runs entirely on myth and forward motion, and a song that understood both the seduction and the lie. It played on the radio. Of course it did.

She was three feet away and absolutely enormous — not in stature, in presence. The stage was barely a foot high and she performed like it cost her something real. It did. I Try is one of those songs that sounds like it's about a small thing and turns out to be about everything. Standing that close to it being made was one of the stranger privileges of an already strange few weeks.

London in the mid-nineties had a particular quality of beautiful desperation. Jarvis Cocker understood something about what it meant to want the life that seemed to be happening just slightly to the left of where you were standing — and about the precise flavour of its disappointment when you got there. A song about the gap. The gap was very real.

The fortnightly grind between London and Paris had a rhythm to it — the Eurostar, the same café at the Gare du Nord, a relationship that was already over conducting itself with considerable dignity across international borders. Around the World was the rhythm: simple, relentless, going nowhere specific at considerable speed. It asked for nothing. It got everything.

There is a particular flavour of sadness that belongs entirely to 1997 — not quite grief, not quite nostalgia, something operating in the territory between the two that had no name and no resolution. Richard Ashcroft walked into it and kept walking. The strings insisted on something. The city moved around you regardless. This was the sound of learning that the world was not going to rearrange itself on your behalf. Important information, delivered beautifully.

Paris at night has very little interest in your emotional state. It will be beautiful regardless. Lovefool played from somewhere across the street — a window, a passing car — and the city absorbed it entirely, the way it absorbs everything: without comment, without acknowledgment, with perfect Parisian indifference. The song is about surrender. Paris understood that. Sydney never quite did.

DCM was a club on Oxford Street that understood something the rest of Sydney was still working out — that the night had its own logic and you either surrendered to it or went home early. Most people went home early. This mix is what it sounded like from the inside: relentless, euphoric, slightly dangerous in the way that only Sydney in the nineties managed to be. The kind of music you didn't so much listen to as get carried along by.

Dream trance had a very specific address in the mid-nineties and it was somewhere between three in the morning and the first train home. Children was the song that made the floor slow down without stopping — that strange suspended moment when a club breathes instead of pounds. It was 1996, Oxford Street was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and this was the sound of the pause between one thing ending and whatever came next.

There is a version of the nineties that belonged entirely to Janet Jackson — not the spectacle of it, but the intimacy. Runaway is a road song that doesn't go anywhere in particular, which is the only honest kind. It has that quality her best work always had: enormous production that somehow felt personal, like she was singing it specifically for the drive you happened to be on. Sydney to the coast, windows down, the decade still young enough to believe in itself.

Sydney had a particular relationship with Dannii — not the exported version, but the local one, the girl who'd grown up on the same television everyone else had and then gone and done something with it. This Is It came out of 1993 with exactly the right amount of confidence for a city that was quietly deciding it mattered. It played on Oxford Street like an announcement. In hindsight, it was.