I was seventeen, I think. I'd recently just left a rather embarrassing childhood of being dreadfully obsessed with boy-band Take That. Yes, I had all their cassettes (at the time did not have the extravagance of a CD player, thank you very much) and all of their posters. My room was plastered with them. Well, the walls that weren't actually plastered. Mum wouldn't let stick anything on the plastered walls for fear the paint would peel off. So this left me with the one and only brick wall, my laminated wardrobe, and the back of my door. And yes, they were all completely covered. Totally.

Friends from school knew of my Take That obsession and would give me the posters and interviews from magazines such as Dolly, Video Hits and Smash Hits. As my pocket money was dismal at best I simply couldn't purchase every magazine every month, so I needed desperately the generosity of my friends. It did work both ways, however. They'd give me the Take That stuff and I'd give them the River Phoenix posters or Johnny Depp or whoever else was famous with young teens at the time.

Yet in 1995 I was in Germany and the news spread to me in a very convoluted way that Robbie Williams had left Take That. Convoluted because the story broke on the radio, to which I heard the words 'Take That' and demanded to know what they were talking about. So my aunty, who was Italian but living in Germany translated the german from the radio to italian for my mother (my aunt couldn't speak english) then my mother translated it to me.

I was more devastated than you could ever imagine. I didn't like to admit it, but Robbie Williams was my favourite. Of course, I told everyone it was Gary Barlow because he wasn't the good-looking one, and even back then I had set my standards very low, thinking that, seeing as though I was not pretty, I should get used to the fact that the good-looking guys would never in a million years fancy me. (Important note: Mr Angela; very good-looking. Not sure how I managed that one, but there you go. Now I set my standards high, positive thinking and all that, and I got myself a winner). So yes, was quite sad that Robbie Williams had left and was emotionally distressed over the whole thing. Almost ruined my holiday.

Six months after returning to Australia Take That toured and it was shit. Don't even think they were on stage for an hour. Bitterly disappointed. Then they broke up, and I found that I was over them. Kind of like when you're dating this fantastic bloke and some way along the line you realise it's the idea of him that you like and not actually the person himself. You find you're annoyed about various little things. His clothes, his voice, the way he bounces up and down when he walks… and when it fizzles out like all teenage relationships do you find that you're not sad and upset like you should be but actually… relieved. That's what I was like when Take That ended. Relieved enough to poke fun out of 'How Deep is Your Love' and Gary Barlow's ridiculous straightened hair.

Shortly before this period of the Take That break-up I had watched the Brit Awards. It was 1995 and the awards were televised on free-to-air TV in Australia for the one and only time. I had taped it and tuned in for Take That, mostly because I felt obligated to (yes, was very much in the awkward-this-relationship-is-ending phase). Yet it wasn't Take That that caught my eye that night. It was two fresh, completely different bands from the whole boy-band thing that caught me. Blur, who performed wearing adidas track suits and falling-in-the-eye fringes, and Oasis, who seemed to have lost every award that night to their prettier counterparts. 

A seed was planted. By the time Take That had broken up I had matured and found another obsession. Blur and Oasis. The obsession with Oasis still stands today, and though I don't pay nearly as much attention to them as they probably deserve, I still quite fancy listening to Blur every now and again.

By 1997, I was in my final year of high school, and taking on my role as the "different" girl in my grade. Not because I was goth (emo's had yet to be invented in 1997)  - goth's and emo's think they're being different and not conforming when in fact they are conforming to a 'group' that is reinvented every generation for teens who want to be 'different' but need to do so in large groups as who really wants to be singled out? No, I was different because I liked The Beatles and Oasis and Blur, not Nirvana or Pearl Jam or other such hard-rock American groups. It was all about America, see. Only a loser would look upon England as an amazing creative place. Let me just point out that these same people were the ones who were all getting off to the UK after two years of university because, well, that's what you do when you're a twenty-something Australian.

So you might say I had a role to play. I had to champion my cause. I had to support Brit Pop and the wonderful world that it had created. I couldn't be into girly bands, or anything that didn't involve band-members throwing televisions out of hotel windows. I had to at least pretend I was cool, after all.

But then on a rare Saturday morning when I wasn't working I was watching Video Hits and saw this ridiculous video clip showing these ridiculous girls running about the place, dancing pathetically and being stupid. Five girls it was, dressed ridiculously except for the posh one who didn't seem to sing at all. Yes, like everyone during that year I had discovered the Spice Girls.

Pathetic, they were. Found out that this song was number one. How could it be so? Oasis were much better than this lot! At least they had proper songs with proper music - you know, drums, guitars etc, etc. What did these girls do? They couldn't even sing properly and they certainly couldn't play instruments.

Then, if it couldn't get much worse, another song was released. I had thought they were one-hit wonders. This new Say You'll Be There will be crap, that's for certain. No one will like it at all. But then… well. The video clip was quite good, actually. And well, it was, ah, fun…

I remember that year being a brilliant year because I was in Year 12, which meant final year of high school, which meant being able to get food from the canteen even when it wasn't lunch or recess, and for being able to boss around Year 8 students. Me and a girl called Melanie, who also despised the Spice Girls as much as I did would walk to class, come across some poor, unsuspecting Year 8 student and high-kick the air in front of their face and scream 'girl power!' in a really sarcastic way. This went on for a few weeks before after accosting some poor child who I think may have cried, we turned to each other and announced, in shock and embarrassed tones, 'well, actually, I kind of like the Spice Girls.'

And for that walk down memory lane my friends, check out the video below and remember what was happening in your life when you first saw it.