Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Smashing Pumpkins, Primal Scream, Blur, Elastica, Beck, Hole, Fiona Apple, Garbage, Radiohead. The 1990s saw a strange parade of noisy, confrontational and downright weird bands and singers topping the charts and rocking the stadiums. But was this a mass-media revolt, or an old-fashioned sellout? In this six-part radio series, written and produced for ABC Radio National in 2014, Author and broadcaster Craig Schuftan invites us to look back on this exciting and confusing period in rock history, as he traces the rise and fall of Alternative rock in Britain and America in Love in the '90s.



Love in the 90s on ABC Radio National

An educational segment, written and performed by Sam Simmons, about where things come from and how they began. Wheat, hands, sport, girls, moths, sound – we take all these for granted, but their origins and true nature have always been shrouded in mystery – until now. Look out for guest appearances from Tom Ballard and Alex Dyson (‘Hands’), Home and Hosed’s Dom Alessio (‘Wheat’), Tom Tilley, Kate O’Toole, Zan Rowe, and House Party’s Nina Las Vegas – who also co-produced ‘Girls’ and ‘Food’.

Ducks

If you think about British music back in the very early 90s, you’ll probably call to mind names like The Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays and Primal Scream, or maybe even some of the more obscure hits of that time: songs by Jesus Jones or The Soupdragons or Lush. If you cast your mind back to what was going on in the wider world, you’ll find yourself thinking of the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Union, or the resignation of Margaret Thatcher, or the first Gulf War. But have you ever thought about what the connection between the music and the times might have been? We’ve gotten used to seeing, say the politics of the 60s and 70s reflected in genres like folk music or disco. What, if anything, does the early 90s rock-dance crossover sound have to tell us about what was going on in the early 90s?

In this first episode of Love in the '90s, we go back to a time when borders of every kind seemed to be collapsing all around, from the line that divided the east from the west on the world stage, to whatever rule it was that said indie bands couldn’t make dance music or appear on Top of the Pops.

Written, presented and produced by Craig Schuftan for ABC Radio National. Executive producer: Cathy Peters

Love in the 90s Episode 1: Go Where You're Going

Some days, you look at pop music, the music in the charts and on the radio, and think: what is this? Who are these people, and how did they end up with recording contracts? Of course, today, we just follow the links or make a new playlist, we have countless ways to avoid the mainstream when it fails to offer us what we’d like to hear. But back in the early 90s, it was much harder to do this. In those dark, pre-internet days, music fans were limited to what was being played on the radio or being stocked in the music stores wherever they happened to live, and their frustration with what was on offer threatened to boil over into a kind of consumer revolt.

This second episode of Love in the '90s takes us back to the moment when it seemed as though things were finally turning around - radio and MTV playlists made room for underground and alternative rock, and pop consumers at last had a real choice outside the mainstream. We'll meet some of the instigators of this musical revolt - artists like the Pixies, Jane’s Addiction and Sonic Youth, and others who benefited from it, like Nirvana, and Faith No More, and the LA punk band L7.

Written, presented and produced by Craig Schuftan for ABC Radio National. Executive producer: Cathy Peters

Love in the 90s Episode 2: When You're A Star, I Know That You'lll Fix Everything

Something very strange happens to people when they hear the music they grew up with in a foreign country. People who would never, in normal life, think of describing themselves as ‘patriotic’ can get unexpectedly passionate and sentimental about their place of birth. Music, it seems, is connected to our idea of who we are and what our place in the world is. And the more globalised and homogenous pop culture becomes, the more important it is to find and hold onto those things, those sounds and songs, that seem uniquely ours, whatever that might be to us. This is the key to understanding one of the most misunderstood music happenings in rock history: Britpop.

In the third episode of Love in the '90s, we'll learn how the outbreak of union-jack-waving that accompanied the arrival of Blur, Oasis, Suede and Elastica in the mid-90s reflected a sense of deep anxiety about the effects of globalisation on pop culture in general, and on rock music in particular. Along the way, we'll consider what the self-consciously retro style of Britpop has to tell us about the relationship between Gen-X artists and the music of their parents‘ generation, and shed some new light on 20-year-old hits like ‘Parklife’, ‘Girls and Boys’, ‘Roll With It’, and ‘Connection’.

Written, presented and produced by Craig Schuftan for ABC Radio National. Executive producer: Cathy Peters

Love in the 90s Episode 3: Britain Coming Back

When people used the phrase ‘Alternative rock’ in the 80s, it stood for a kind of rock music being made outside of the mainstream, without major labels or the support of commercial radio. But after the popular and commercial success of Alternative bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, ‘Alternative’ had to be redefined. For some, it meant sticking to your principles - refusing the major label deals and MTV spots, no matter how much you’d like the money. But for others, Alternative came to mean something like ‘being yourself’, or ‘doing whatever you want’, a definition which easily allowed its adherents to become rock superstars while still calling themselves ‘alternative’. And so, by the mid-90s, the stage was set for a clash between the music’s underground stalwarts and its new-fangled rock stars.

In the fourth episode of Love in the '90s, we’ll see how it panned out, as we meet some of the decade’s most notorious iconoclasts and innovators - people like PJ Harvey, Kim Deal, Steve Albini, Billy Corgan and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, and learn how the back-room politics of the underground shaped some of the most popular songs and albums of the mid-90s.


Love in the 90s Episode 4: Alternative To Alternative

Music-lovers are a curious lot. When we find something we really like, we can’t wait to tell everyone about it, and often complain about the fact that the artists we love are not so well-known as we would like. But the only thing that annoys us more than a favourite artist or album going unloved and unnoticed by the masses, is that same artist being suddenly noticed and loved by the masses. We feel somehow that our privacy has been invaded, that the special relationship we used to enjoy with that artist has been stretched too far among too many people, and the artists themselves often feel the same way. Imagine this process going on, on an industrial scale, a hundred or more beloved underground sensations at a time suddenly finding that they are selling their CDs to the kind of people who only buy two albums a year, and you’ve got some idea of what it was like to be into, or to be making alternative rock music in the mid-to-late 90s.

In the fifth episode of Love in the '90s, find out how alternative rock artists like Beck, Green Day, Garbage and Courtney Love reacted to this ‘wider audience’, how their shock at coming face to face with the masses pushed their art into curious shapes, and led them to create some of the most ambitious and enduring music of the decade.

Love in the 90s Episode 5: The Smell Of Commerce In The Morning

'Real’, and ‘authentic’ were the two adjectives most often used by bands and fans in the 90s to describe the kind of music they made and admired. In fact, many people today still talk about the decade's alternative music in these terms, that the music made by bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins in the US, or groups like Blur and Oasis in the UK, was somehow more genuine, more sincere than a lot of mainstream rock music today.

In this final episode of Love in the '90s, we’ll learn how this pre-occupation with ‘realness’ played itself out in the last few years of the decade, how these artists tried to reconcile their mandate to keep it real with the demands of the inherently phony world of entertainment. For some, it meant going deeper and further into self-expression, giving their audience ever-more extreme displays of personal feeling. For others, the only option was to give up the reality game altogether, to admit that they were faking it, and thereby become the realest of them all.

Written, presented and produced by Craig Schuftan for ABC Radio National. Executive producer: Cathy Peters

Love in the 90s Episode 6: Time To Move On

Excerpt from the radio series Love in the Nineties: An Alternative History of Alternative Rock, broadcast nationally by ABC Radio in 2014. Presented and produced by Craig Schuftan.

Craig Schuftan's Love In The Nineties: A Record for Everybody

Excerpt from Love in the Nineties: An Alternative History of Alternative Rock, presented and produced by Craig Schuftan. Broadcast nationally by ABC Radio in 2014.

Craig Schuftan's Love In The Nineties: Indie Rock Bullshit

Excerpt from radio interview with FBI's Ash Berdebes, broadcast April 2015.

Craig Schuftan Plays Steve Reich On FBI's Out Of The Box

From 'Not a People Person' by Sam Simmons. Produced by Craig Schuftan, music by Ducks! (Lani Bagley and Craig Schuftan)

Big Thoughts

Tiger

Featuring the voices of Kim Deal, Black Francis, Kathleen Hanna, Thurston Moore, Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Eddie Vedder. Mix by Schuftronics. Excerpt from 'Play Loud / Play Quiet' https://soundcloud.com/schuftronics/give-it-away-sound-quality-mix

She wrote 'Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit'

This is the first series of The Culture Club, which went to air in 2007. It’s mostly based on the stories and ideas from the book of the same name, so if you want to know more about any of this stuff, that’s probably a good place to start. The random yelling at the start of the intro is from Artaud’s ‘To Have Done With the Judgemnent of god’.

Does that make me crazy

I spent most of 2010 and 2011 researching and writing a book about Alternative music in the 90s. I listened to hundreds of songs and albums, and hours and hours of interviews, taken from radio archives or sourced from fan communities online. Most of these found their way into the book in some form. But at the same time as I was writing, I started to plan a listenable version of the same story, more impressionistic than factual, where some of the more oblique connections between certain pieces of music, certain phrases and ideas used by artists in interviews might be teased out in a way that the written word can’t quite manage. I imagined a cross between a DJ mixtape and a radio documentary, where the listener is transported back to a time and place by fragments of old songs, and then brought into a closer relationship with those songs by hearing the people who created them, telling their stories in their own words. The result is this mix, part one of four, which deals with the early 90s, from the optimism of the Madchester moment in England, through the rise of Grunge and Alternative Rock in America, and the growing disillusionment with this music following its mainstream success, in both England and America.
0.00: Cool Rock Tunes (Intro) Featuring Kim Deal and Black Francis.
0.22: Doing What We Want. 
Featuring Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) and Ian Brown (Stone Roses). Contains elements of: Primal Scream, ‘Higher Than The Sun’, ‘Loaded’, ‘Inner Flight’, Ultramagnetic MCs ‘Ego Trippin’, Stone Roses ‘Fools Gold’, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, Blur ‘There’s No Other Way’, The Soup Dragons ‘I’m Free’, Soul II Soul ‘Back to Life’, A Tribe Called Quest ‘Rap Promoter’
2.45: Fool’s Gold (Stone Roses)
6.56: Double Serious. 
Featuring Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addction). Contains elements of: Jane’s Addiction ‘Been Caught Stealing’, Happy Mondays ‘Rave On’ (Club Mix), ‘Denis and Lois’, ‘Step On’, Stone Roses ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘Shoot You Down’, EMF ‘Unbelievable’ (Ralph Jezzard Mix), ‘Children’, Jesus Jones ‘International Bright Thing’, ‘Right Here Right Now’, KLF ‘Rock Radio Into The Nineties’, Soup Dragons ‘I’m Free’, Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Pretty Little Ditty’.
11.20: Stormy Weather. 
Contains elements of: The Breeders ‘Glorious’, ‘When I was a Painter’, Dinosaur Jr ‘Thumb’, The Pixies ‘Stormy Weather’, Sonic Youth ‘Kool Thing’, ‘My Friend Goo’, Faith No More ‘War Pigs’, ‘Woodpecker from Mars’, Mudhoney ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’, Primal Scream ‘Higher Than The Sun’, Ministry ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’.
14.10: Smells Like Teen Spirit (Tori Amos)
16.00: Play Loud, Play Quiet. 
Featuring Black Francis and Kim Deal (The Pixies) Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl (Nirvana), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill), Donita Sparks (L7), Damon Albarn (Blur). Contains elements of: The Kingsmen ‘Louie Louie’, Sonic Youth ‘Kool Thing’, The Pixies ‘Debaser’, Tori Amos ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Aerosmith ‘Dream On’, L7 ‘One More Thing’, Matthew Sweet ‘Girlfriend’, Pavement ‘Fame Throwa’, Rage Against the Machine ‘Know Your Enemy’, The Moog Cookbook ‘Buddy Holly’, Nirvana ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Pearl Jam ‘Why Go’, Kristin Hersh ‘Houdini Blues’, Blur ‘There’s No Other Way’, KLF ‘Brownsville Turnaround’, Boston ‘More than a Feeling’.
21.35: There’s No Other Way (Blur)
24.35: Corporate Oppression. 
Featuring Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana). Contains elements of: Tori Amos ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Sonic Youth ‘Kool Thing’, Led Zeppelin ‘When the Levee Breaks’, My Bloody Valentine ‘Only Shallow’, Faith No More, ‘Epic’, ‘From Out of Nowhere’, Primal Scream ‘Loaded’.
27.00: Epic (Faith No More)
31.00: A Giant Dildo Crushing the Sun. Contains elements of: Beck ‘Pay No Mind (Snoozer)’, Faith No More ‘Mid Life Crisis’, House of Pain ‘Jump Around’.
32.30: Mega Distribution. 
Featuring Donita Sparks and Dee Plakas (L7), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Mike Patton (Faith No More. Contains elements of: The Breeders ‘Safari’, L7 ‘Monster’, ‘One More Thing’, ‘Pretend We’re Dead’, Pavement ‘Fame Throwa’, Rage Against the Machine ‘Know Your Enemy’, Sonic Youth ‘100%’, Sinead O’Connor ‘Feels So Different’, Ultramagnetic MCs ‘Ego Trippin’, The Kingsmen ‘Louie Louie’.
37.00: None of Our Business. 
Featuring Steve Albini (Shellac) and Richard Kingsmill. Contains elements of: The Breeders ‘Lord of the Thighs’, Beck ‘Beercan’, The Jesus Lizard ‘Slave Ship’, Salt n’ Pepa ‘None of Your Business’, Sonic Youth ‘100%’.
38.30: Fuck and Run (Liz Phair)
41.00: In the Reflection (Silverfuckandrun). 
Featuring Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins). Contains elements of: Liz Phair ‘Fuck and Run’, Smashing Pumpkins ‘Silverfuck, Hole ‘Asking for It’, The Breeders ‘Roi (Reprise)’, Urge Overkill ‘Sister Havana’, Sinead O’Connor ‘Feels So Different’, Dinosaur Jr ‘Thumb’, Kristin Hersh ‘Houdini Blues’, Beck ‘Beercan’. 
45.00: Disarm (Smashing Pumpkins)
48.15: Don’t Stop Continue. 
Featuring Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction). Contains elements of Living Colour ‘Tag Team Partners’, Beastie Boys ‘Car Thief’, Primal Scream ‘Loaded (Terry Farley Mix), Sinead O’Connor ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’, Jane’s Addiction ‘Ain’t No Right’, Faith No More ‘Woodpacker from Mars’, Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Give It Away’.  

Play Loud, Play Quiet (Sound Quality Mix)

Girls

Sitting on things

Jazz

Problems in the world, problems in your life. Episode four of the worst documentary series ever, 'The Secret Life of Stuff'. Written and performed by Sam Simmons, produced by Craig Schuftan for triple j, 2008.

Problems

The Precise History of Moths, by Sam Simmons, produced by Craig Schuftan. Originally broadcast on triple j in 2007.

The History of Moths

Sport

Everybody talk about pop music

Part two of a five-part music documentary series created by Chris Taylor, Andrew Hansen and Craig Schuftan. Each half-hour episode tells the story of the making of a classic rock album – Lake Deuteronomy’s epic Spool in the Pits of Prometheus, The Fatcocks’ explosive punk masterpiece Corgi Scum, and legendary folk singer Egg Zagar’s tragically posthumous Whale Song.

Blow Parade, Episode 3, The Fatcocks

A radiophonic, time-travelling adventure, featuring music from TZU, Peaches, Prince, Kanye West, Cut Copy, Kraftwerk, The Human League, Daft Punk, Justice, Giorgio Moroder, Salt and Pepa, The Presets, Run DMC, Royksopp, Ladyhawke, La Roux, LL Cool J, Steinski, Yello, Hall and Oates, The Art of Noise, Calvin Harris, Kurtis Blow and many, many more. 

“Cultural theory you can dance to”.

(Zan Rowe, triple j)

Acceptable in the 80s - Schuftronic Stolen Plutonium 88mph megamix

Health issue

Radio producer, presenter and sound designer. Author of 'Entertain Us! The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties"

Schuftronics

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