Last night I jumped around and danced my, (quite) high heels off to the music of Nirvana performed by Novana, a tribute to Kurt et al, at ‘The Globe’ in Cardiff.

I was 16 again. My hair’s now a more muted red-brown not black and I may have been wearing heels not Doc Martins, but for a brief, glorious, fun-filled time, it was 1994 again.

A friend recently saw Spandau Ballet at the Motorpoint Arena and over a hearty breakfast in Victoria Tea Room giggled like a girl telling me about how fab the evening had been, how Tony Hadley’s voice was amazing and how the place inevitably erupted to ‘True’.

I promise, this isn’t about to turn into bemoaning modern music and making the case that music was, ‘so much better when I were a girl’.

There’s much that I like in the way of modern tunes, even if they do usually come to me via Radio Two rather than One these days.

No, what interested me was the way listening to this music from many moons ago, specifically the music from our formative teenage years, makes us feel and why.

I loved Take That, all five of them, before anyone got ideas about taking off; Nirvana I’ve covered; my University soundtrack was about Britpop, Pulp’s ‘A Different Class’ takes me back to instant mash and halls of residences; I danced to Funky house, Hip house and Handbag house and the R & B of Jodeci, Aaliyah, Brandy and Monica, all provided such soul to chill to.

There are other songs and other bands from other times that I love, that conjure special moments, people and places but none of it makes me feel quite the same as the late teenage tunes.

This was a time and an age when I believed the world was my oyster. It had a massive, sparkly pearl in it that was mine for the taking and turning into all manner of jewels.

I wasn’t a child, pottering between school, home, friends and family. I wasn’t yet an adult with a mortgage to pay, insurance renewal dates to keep track of and children to nurture, cook for, taxi around and nag about teeth cleaning.

Dancing away to Novana I was transported to a time when the word possibility seeped into every vein and swirled around me.

I know that there are always new and exciting opportunities and the joy of learning and discovering is precious at any and every age, but that sparkly, freshly minted, wide-eyed belief in the possibilities that life can present, stretches out never further into the distance and in such technicolour as it does in those heady late teenage years.

Now I know the predominant colour within the technicolour is probably rose as in, rose-tinted spectacles, but never mind (ha, I worked in a Nirvana album title), it is a special time and it calls for a special song, so altogether now, let’s sing along with Tony, 1,2,3...‘Gold!’