Now that’s what I call nostalgia (or not quite 100 reasons why I love Now!)
Number 16 was my first. I borrowed it from my brother and asked for my own at Christmas.
Rumours where I grew up said Mark Field, a boy years above me at school, had number 6. No one had seen it but just the idea of possessing such a rarity was enough to give him legendary status.
For birthdays and Christmases throughout my young adult life, Now! compilations — or Now That’s What I Call Music to give it its full Smashie-and-Nicey title — were a staple gift. Their glorious double-sided, double-cassette box chunkiness and lurid cover art a perfect Kinder Egg combination.
Later this week Now 100 will be released. It looks a little different to my 1989 Now 16: no one will be buying it from Woolworths and you can get it on download as well as double disc. The titles on its track listing will mostly be available to stream elsewhere yet every UK & Ireland Now from the first to number 99 has gone at least platinum. The 2000 release of Now 47 did so six-times over, fuelled by the masterful combination of Who Let The Dogs Out and double helpings of the Millennial dream team, Kylie and Robbie (one of the Now canon’s most featured artists).
My fondness for the early Nows has a lot to do with the music. I was introduced to powerful female vocalists (Debbie Harry, Belinda Carlisle, Tina Turner); guitars, feedback and fuzz (Tears for Fears, Queen and Radiohead); and rap, R&B and neosoul (SWV, Neneh Cherry, De La Soul). Alongside the one-hit wonders and popstars of the hour were gateways into new genres, and pathways back into the best of my parents’ music and what was yet to come.
I listened to Now cassettes like they were homework. I studied the sleeves and learned the artists’ biographies by heart, squeezing every last drop of information out of this encyclopedia of music.
On those earlier compilations, there was a pattern: Tape 1, Side A had your more well-known chart toppers; by the time you got to Tape 2, Side B you’d gone through the looking glass. I loved the shameless genre-switching. I didn’t have to pick my tribe, I could get away with knowing enough about the songs everyone was talking about and revel in the outlier tracks buried deep within the B sides.
But to a young me, the Nows meant even more than music. By having a number they appealed to my childhood love of collecting and ordering. Better still, your earliest Now was a playground byword for how much you knew about music and the adult world.
The back-to-back delights of Salt ’N’ Pepa’s Let’s Talk about Sex and Color Me Badd’s I Wanna Sex You Up on Now 20 — released the week before my eighth birthday — were an excruciating listen on family car journeys even if I didn’t yet know why. Analysing the sleeve notes, I discovered that TLC accessorised their clothes with condoms. I had no real idea at this age of what these were but if it was worthy of note according to Now, that was good enough for me. I ferreted this information away for later use and adult conversations. Little did I know these songs and artists were changing the conversation about sex and sexual health at the time. For me, just learning the language of adults was good enough.
Looking back, many of the old compilations capture a zeitgeist that I was too young to understand at the time. Now 21, released in March 1992, featured Queen in tribute to Freddie Mercury who had died at the end of 1991, and the Temptations’ My Girl referencing Macaulay Culkin’s film of the same name that had left teenagers everywhere in floods. Even if it began with adults buying them for me, this was a slice of the contemporary, a guide to what was good right now and a way into music that wasn’t part of a generational hand-me-down.
I’m not alone in my nostalgic adoration — my friends of the same age all have a favourite Now or a number that immediately transports them back to being a kid or teenager, experimenting with music and finding out a little about who they were.
My mate Alice remembers Now 29, a gift from a “cool aunt and uncle” as the first time she’d been exposed to contemporary pop music having been raised on opera and The Beatles.
My friend Simon’s sister had Now 18 but wouldn’t let him borrow it: “She let me record it tape-to-tape and we discovered that The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody sounded like it was sung by Alvin, Simon and Theodore when it was on high speed dubbing. Its beat was perfect and didn’t just sound sped up.”
For my friend Pamela, Now 34 was a chance to show her school classmates another side to her studious self. Her last-minute introduction of Underworld’s Born Slippy as the backing track for a dance at that year’s talent show did not go down well. They were meant to be dancing to Gina G from the same album; she wanted something edgier: “All the cool kids berated me for not taking the class seriously and ruining their chances of winning. Still love that album though.”
Other friends recall sleepovers where Now albums were burnt out on repeat or working in record shops and serving those first in line on release day, trying to keep their collections up-to-date.
My friend Lucy should be the envy of those die hard fans: she recently snapped up a box of the first 50 Now cassettes on Ebay. Other than the bargain bin price of £69, I asked her to explain her Now devotion. Turns out it’s eerily similar to my own:
“My first Now was Now 11, which my sister and I still argue over whether it was bought for me or we were expected to share it. I liked it because it had I Should Be So Lucky on it, and Kylie didn’t have her own album out until ages later.
“For some reason, I would never skip songs on a Now tape. I listened to everything in order even the songs I didn’t like. The upshot of this is some of my favourite songs are really obscure Now one-hit wonders or difficult second singles (such as Who Found Who by Jellybean) that no one else knows but I’ll sneak on at 3am when we have people over and bang on about the amazing sax solo in it.
“I love how nostalgic and evocative it is and it’s been lovely to play people’s first Now albums for them on the clunky tape player from my mother’s French language lab. I’ve tried to listen to them out of order on people’s whims and continue to not skip songs. Although this means you have to aurally eat up a shitload of Robbie Williams.”
There’s that name again. Robbie makes it onto Now 100 as part of a classics section where most of the tracks are far too recent to evoke the golden age of Now but the same patented formula of kitsch and cool is on display.
I don’t know when I stopped buying them or getting them as presents. It might have been when I finally started to have favourites or the pocket money to back them and buy individual albums. It might have been when Eiffel 65 and Crazy Frog took one-hit wonders to a somewhere I didn’t want to follow.
So while I may break the no skipping rule for number 100, thanks Now for the memories and everyone who shared their magic number with me. I’m off to put this one on shuffle and repeat.
I published this for fun but you can commission me for reporting and writing projects too. Here’s my website.
