‘It was an amazing explosion: photos from the epicentre of indie sleaze’ blazed the headline of the magazine article, forwarded to me by a friend enquiring, ‘OMG… is this you?’ Flicking through the gallery of images snapped by the producer Gordon Raphael in the early noughties, I was instantly transported back to my most thoroughly misspent youth.I spent my childhood as a music-obsessed loner in a variety of ever-more-depressing backwater towns and villages, until my mother decided I was a nonstarter and threw me out at the age of 16 to live with my father in London. On my first day in the city, I went straight to Camden and got a job in a store that sold latex dresses, hoping that, if I offered my dad some rent, he’d let me stay. Sadly, he was in the late stages of alcoholism, and after an argument, he chucked me out too. But no matter – a beautiful goth named Felicity, who I’d met at the fetish shop, told me of an ‘artistic squat’ on nearby Prince of Wales Road, and I moved in that evening.Within six months, I had fully immersed myself in the alternative music scene through a buffet of drugs, gigs and clubs. I followed in Felicity’s footsteps, got a job at Stringfellows, and was able to rent a damp Victorian basement flat in Kentish Town, primarily chosen for its ten-minute walking distance to my stomping ground: Camden. The grimy streets (which always looked so great in the rain, like a lo-fi music video) catered to the subcultures of goth, indie, punk and alternative and were a hotbed for the grassroots music scene. I found my bandmates on the sticky dance floors of the Camden Palace and Electric Ballroom. In these clubs you’d find lots of beautiful displaced youth gathered in their black PVC trousers, smudged eye-liner and glitter, dancing and romancing to the likes of Placebo and Nine Inch Nails, which was musically and aesthetically my vibe. However, the goth/emo scene seemed to be on its way out and was being replaced with something altogether more… back to