In my mind I remember "Drinking in LA" as being everywhere in the summer of 97. I mean absolutely everywhere. Since it only got to number 36 in the UK top 40 charts this seems somewhat unlikely.
I'd just been kicked out of college, which had come as somewhat of a shock, and was stuck living in Germany - carless and with nary another person my own age around. It was a fantastically warm summer though. I was working days as a handyman and nights as a bar tender earning about DM 8, or about £2.66 (or $5.20) an hour. However beer was only DM 1 so, in typically convoluted logic, I figured if I drank 8 pints then that was the equivalent to about £16 an hour back in London. It wasn't like I had anything else to do and hell, if The Economist can use The Big Mac Index then I get to do what I want to.
So my summer was spent working and on my days and nights off either hanging round the pool or in someone's garden drinking cheap booze and listening to a lot of whatever music we could buy from over the border in Holland or from the American airbase nearby. There was a lot of Drum and Bass - particularly Aphrodite - and the Bran Van 3000 album which I'd bought on a whim and which had turned out to be much, much better than I'd thought it was going to be - I'd figured they'd be one hit poppy wonders but the album turned out to have far more depth and complexity than I'd expected.
So here's an ode to being in the sun and not achieving anything
and, in recognition of the fact that I just spent the last 6 months homeless,