Friday evening: I’m at a jolly club called Don’t Stop Moving, above Canal 125, a bar on the Caledonian Road. Charley Stone is DJ-ing, and has asked me along.

The club is decorated with sweets and pop biographies lying on windowsills (one on Steps with a typically cagey interview with ‘H’, then closeted), and there’s pages from Smash Hits magazine on the walls. Interestingly, the issues tend to be from the early 90s, presumably reflecting the generation of the club’s organisers. Younger than me, but old enough to remember Cathy Dennis in her pop star phase. ‘Cathy’s Guide To Norwich!’ Pre-Alan Partridge, too.

It’s a kind of Smash Hits interregnum period: after the 80s, the magazine’s real heyday, but just before Take That hit their imperial stream of hits. From about 1993-1995, Smash Hits was effectively a Take That fan mag, with both group and magazine enjoying a symbiotic relationship, keeping the other one successful. After Robbie Williams’s departure, and a logical but curiously unsuccessful flirtation with the Britpop era (I was told that the worst selling issue was the one with the Bluetones on the cover), Smash Hits eventually turned into just another one of those teen mags, always packaged in a plastic bag with some free gift. It’s never a good sign when the words are not enough.

So the pages adorning this Kings Cross wall, being slightly off-vintage, hold a certain poignancy. They are from my post-teen period; a time where although I still loved pop music, it was no longer being made for me. Here’s a 90s interview with The Primitives, going for a comeback years after ‘Crash’ (quick glance at Wikipedia: this was for their single ‘You Are The Way’ – in at No 58, 1991).

Here’s Rob ‘Mary Whitehouse Experience’ Newman reviewing the singles. He favours St Etienne’s ‘Avenue’. Here’s Betty Boo with her second album. The Farm answering questions from the Biscuit Tin. Shampoo doing the same.

By a nice coincidence, I’d just been writing about Smash Hits in the introduction to my own lyrics collection. The magazine was my first exposure to the concept of publishing pop lyrics on their own: it was one of the many Smash Hits trademarks. Except they weren’t lyrics. They were ‘Songwords’.

These would be the words to all the chart hits of the moment, presented in colourful and attractive little boxes alongside the interviews and competitions. Readers were encouraged not just to learn and sing the verses and choruses of Wham, Culture Club and so on, but to actively cut out and affix the lyrics on their bedroom wall or school book, just like the posters. Words could be teenage pin-ups, too.

I was in Smash Hits a couple of times myself, in little photo features on Orlando circa 1996. The band may have failed, but little things on my life’s To Do list still managed to get ticked off. Get my band interviewed in Smash Hits – tick. Get played by John Peel – tick. Though that was the indie Fosca rather than the pop Orlando (did he play Shelley too?). Little flames of achievement, raging against the failures.

In fact, I’d nearly go as far as feeling sorry for the trendy new bands of today. That however successful they may get, they will never know what it’s like to be in Smash Hits, or to be played by John Peel, or both. But of course, such ancient benchmarks must be utterly meaningless to a 19-year-old now.

I wonder what the equivalent ambitions are today? Being played by Alex Zane? Appearing in the Observer Music Monthly? Having your lyrics on one of those non-specific online lyrics directories? Do today’s schoolchildren still adorn their bedrooms with the lyrics to their favourite songs, via print outs from the Net?

It’s very hard not to fall into the Grumpy Old Man cliché of saying it’s not the same. But really, it’s not the same.

At the club, I meet Andy Roberts’s daughter Sophie, first time since his funeral. She’s 19 now. I should have asked her what she made of it all. She’d have been about three when Rob Newman was reviewing the singles. I guess you’d have to call Rob Newman the Russell Brand of 1991.

Of the music played, Deacon Blue’s ‘Real Gone Kid’ is an unexpected pleasure. I very nearly said, a Guilty Pleasure. It’s the one where the singers make train noises.

Then one of the DJs plays Bucks Fizz’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’, which is surely from a time before her time, and I wonder how she became acquainted with it. There’s all kinds of questions I want to ask, but the music is at shouting-in-ear volume, and the fact I now mind about these things, when previously I didn’t, speaks, well, volumes.

Maybe it’s just as well. People are here to dance, not to discuss what it all means in connection with where they are on their own life paths. I think that may be my trouble. That and being so much older than those who now feel old.

An Orlando fan I’ve not seen for years, Ms S, chats to me at length. She tells me how she feels old these days (in her 20s), how she doesn’t go to gigs as much as she used to, except for the bands of her youth, like the Manics and Morrissey. It’s rather odd when people a whole ten years or so younger than you say they’re feeling old. It also reminds me why so many bands are suddenly reforming to play tours, from the Spice Girls to My Bloody Valentine. Never mind music. People want their youth back, or if they’re too young, they want the youth of their elders, the bands they missed out on. They will pay handsomely – plus booking fee – for the privilege. It’s music as Botox.

On the tube home, I pass a young man who points me out to his girlfriend.

‘Rhydian!’ he says. Third time, now. Dear God, please let my life be more than this. And soon. It’s all getting so old.

I want to stop and ask him, why Rhydian? Why not Max Headroom, as I had from a man on the Holloway Road a few years ago? It’s exactly the same hair. It’s them, not me. Except it is me.

The club was great, the music was great, the people were great: Ed, Alex S, Davina, Sarah PV, Charley, Ella G. I think my predicament might be that, contrary to the name of the club night, I have indeed stopped moving. I need to get on with whatever I’m meant to be doing next.

My hair’s catcalls help me keep time. If it’s Rhydian, it must be early 2008. Maybe it’ll be someone else next year.

I’ll be your pop culture mirror. Or rather, my hair will be. It’s about time my hair got its own BBC4 series.