Snap back in time at Islington Academy

Unless you're a music journalist, the likelihood is that you have a music age. This is the era that the overwhelming majority of the CDs in your collection date from, often harking back to your early clubbing days. For me, this is the mid-Nineties, the time of Britpop and Cool Britannia, Noel and Liam, Damon and Alex, when my friends and I unleashed ourselves on the clubbing scene for the first time.

We were still underage in 1996, so a night on the tiles back then involved the sort of impeccable planning and subterfuge normally employed by the SAS in a hostile environment.

Wearing far too much make-up and not enough clothing we would slither out of my bedroom window and pad along the side of my house in stockinged feet, for fear that our clunky platform shoes would give us away. It wasn't until we were past the front gate that we could truly relax, knowing that even if my parents did find the beds stuffed with pillows, we were far enough away - at Bagley's in King's Cross, or the Mean Fiddler in Charing Cross Road - that we wouldn't have to deal with their wrath until the morning.

So when I heard about a twicemonthly Nineties night at the Islington Academy, I was sold. The thrill of breaking the rules and getting away with it was the sort of excitement that I hoped to recapture at the I Love The 90s night - a tall order, particularly when I left my house rather anticlimactically through the front door.

The Islington Academy is split into two parts, a large venue with a stage downstairs and a smaller bar above. The I Love The 90s night happens upstairs and when I arrived at 11.30pm with a group of old friends who loved the era as much as I did, the place was already packed. Having paid our £5 entry we were instantly treated to the sight of a group of "mad fer it" boys dressed in tracksuits and hoodies, their greasy, unshorn locks curling over their foreheads.

It was hard to tell whether this was a costume or whether they were just unstylish slobs, so we stepped gingerly around them just in case and headed to the bar as Suede's Trash blasted out. "I used to love this song!" I bellowed. "I always played it on my Walkman on the way to school."

My drink of choice back in the Nineties was either Archers and lemonade or Malibu and Coke but I wasn't sure that I could face either of those, so I ordered a glass of white wine instead. Then another and another in quite rapid succession. At this point I started thinking that one particular young man bore a strong resemblance to a young Damon Albarn. I sidled off to have a closer look.

The dance floor was filling up now and I could see some strange moves being made. I love places where people aren't afraid to let it all hang out and I bounded into the mêlée like an over-excited labrador. "Can I dance with you guys?" I asked a group of boys by the stage, before realising, scornfully, that they were about half my age, and that the only time they could possibly have heard this music the first time round was watching Top Of The Pops on their babysitters' laps.

Suddenly I felt old. One of them moved closer to me in a slightly leering manner and I retreated terrified to the bar to continue stalking the Damon Albarn-alike. "Anna, can you take a picture of me with the one who looks like Damon?" I asked my friend winningly. It's always good to be able to look back at your crushes to check the accuracy of your beer goggles.

Fortunately for the boy, my friends manage to hustle me out of the club shortly before 3am. With no fear of waking my parents or being grounded, we headed home and back to 2008. We all agreed that being a grown-up has its advantages, but they don't make tunes like they used to, do they?