1990: You Can’t Touch This year for music, movies and memories

Mango Groove, meanwhile, followed their hugely successful debut with Hometalk, featuring Island Boy – another reminder of just how distinctive the South African pop landscape had become.

Internationally, dance music was beginning to muscle its way into the mainstream. Dub Be Good To Me by Beats International is a great example – a glorious musical patchwork produced by former Housemartins bassist Norman Cook. It combined elements of the SOS Band’s Just Be Good To Me with the bassline from The Clash’s The Guns of Brixton. Cook would reinvent himself several more times before becoming globally famous under another name: Fatboy Slim.

The year’s cinema and music were crossing paths too. Julia Roberts became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in Pretty Woman, and its soundtrack included not one but two songs heard on this week’s Classic Countdown: Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love and Go West’s King of Wishful Thinking. Elsewhere, audiences queued for Ghost, Home Alone, Dances with Wolves, Total Recall and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ghost, Home Alone and Pretty Woman would finish as the year’s three biggest films worldwide.

Television was changing too. Twin Peaks turned a murder mystery into a pop-culture phenomenon, while The Simpsons was beginning its first full year on television. Kids were swapping Nintendo Game Boy cartridges, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seemed to be everywhere, and MC Hammer’s distinctive trousers became almost as famous as U Can’t Touch This.

Did You Know?

One of 1990’s strangest hits effectively arrived without an artist. When Enigma’s Sadeness (Part I) was released, mastermind Michael Cretu deliberately hid his identity. The mysterious combination of Gregorian chant, electronic beats and whispered French became a sensation before many listeners even knew who had made it. It eventually topped charts in 23 countries and sold more than five million copies. The mystery was ultimately undone partly by disputes over the recordings sampled on the project.

And while we were buying CDs, cassettes and records, another revolution was happening almost unnoticed. By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first web server and website working at CERN. Nobody was scrolling social media or Googling anything yet – but the technology that would transform the way we consume music, news, movies and almost everything else was taking its first steps.

From Mandela’s walk to freedom to Pretty Woman, Hubble, Home Alone, Fatboy Slim before he was Fatboy Slim and Gregorian chants unexpectedly filling dancefloors, 1990 was already showing us that the new decade wasn’t going to sound – or look – much like the one we’d just left behind.