25 years ago | City centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK | 1st January, 1999

Twenty-five years ago, Helen and I went to Newcastle to see in the New Year with some of my friends from university – and it’s still one of the best New Year’s Eve nights out I can remember – because it had very little to do with it being New Year’s Eve…

Whisper it quietly but I had a far better time on this particular New Year’s Eve than I did the following year, for the Millennium itself. And that’s not because we didn’t enjoy Fatboy Slim, The Stereophonics and – I want to say Tom Jones – at the Liverpool Pier Head, but this was just a proper reunion/night out with pubs, clubs and laughs, which just happened to be taking place on the biggest night out of the year in one of my favourite places to sample the nightlife.

New Years’ celebrations are, by definition something of an odd creature. They’re the epitome of ‘organised fun’, the almost paradoxical idea that you can lose yourself in an evening of heady abandon but still stick to a rigid timetable. As a child, they always seemed to be held at home, with the telly on, a smattering of parents’ friends present. For a ‘celebration’, It was generally a bit tame but, sustained by the remnants of the Christmas Quality Street tin, we persevered on until midnight, not long after which, everyone dutifully went home.

In teenage years, the ability to acquire alcohol and socialise with your own friends disrupted the safe, cardigan-wearing home version but the weather, the expense and the odd diligent landlord could conspire to constrain this new-found route to fun.

At university, the night really went up a few notches. I was able to travel further afield, experience new towns and cities and a wider circle of friends-of-friends. I paid homage to the night at the Original Oak in Headingley, Leeds, one year and at a succession of house parties around South Shields the next. As students, we were experts in having a night out and the significance of the date didn’t really have any effect on us – it was just like most other nights, with just a countdown at midnight to interrupt the usual pattern.

And then, after a couple more years of ‘going out’ and ‘doing stuff’ on this night of nights, respectability took over. We bought a house in 1997, the expense of which meant that we were compelled to see in 1998 in bed, watching a tiny, grainy old portable television in a semi-habitable house with very little seasonal cheer visible.

A year later and our straits had become marginally less dire. Thankfully, our university cohort was the first to embrace email and it was much easier for us to stay in touch after we graduated than those even a few years older. Two of my mates from Lancaster were planning on having a New Year’s Eve night out in Newcastle. Were we interested?

Absolutely! We could afford a cheap hotel room and a night out. And the petrol to get there and back, obviously – although unlike today, I don’t remember the cost of fuel ever being a major consideration in these calculations. Any chance for a reunion should be taken and Newcastle was and is one of my all-time favourite places to visit.

I can’t tell you anything significant about the evening, the clock striking midnight or even the taxi ride back to the hotel, wherever it was, because like any other legendary night out, the details don’t really matter. I dimly remember pub after pub in the Bigg Market and some sort of neon-light-drenched bar/club place later on but the most important memory I have is that we all had a great time and didn’t care about anything else.

For that reason, it’s one of my favourite New Year’s Eve memories. Because, as Prince famously attested way back in 1982, partying “like it’s 1999″ can happen at any time.