We know you’re a ’90s kid. After all, you were born in 1996 and you won’t stop telling everybody just how much of a ’90s kid you are. Damned if there’s a ’90s nostalgia page on Facebook that you haven’t already liked.

But for those of us who were actually there, it was a strange time, a simpler time, an awesome time. The shit hadn’t totally hit the fan just yet, economically speaking, and for a while there people still had a reason to feel optimistic about life.

The music was better, too, and we’re not just talking about the alternative scene. Even pop music hadn’t totally succumbed to catering towards the lowest common denominator and you could find some quality tunes on the charts.

In order to celebrate the tunes that many of us may have forgotten but can still recall every word to, News Corp recently caught up with some of Australia’s biggest ’90s hit-makers to get the stories behind the tunes.

So without further ado, here are the tales of how some of our biggest homegrown ’90s juggernauts made it to Video Hits for you to watch on Saturday morning…

Bachelor Girl – ‘Buses and Trains’ (1998)

One of the most unforgettable and frankly gruesome choruses of ’90s pop started as a tune written by member James Roche and Tania Doko, who was thereafter known as “that buses and trains girl”, didn’t actually contribute to the writing.

“I can’t take credit for the biggest hit we ever had,” she says. “[Roche] was in the shower, so I couldn’t have been there! It just wasn’t that sort of relationship!” The band were at the Continental Hotel in Melbourne ahead of an EP launch.

It’s a tune that came at the last minute. Roche wrote it just before a big EP launch where they were showcasing material at the Continental Hotel in Melbourne.

“I swear he did… or that’s how I justified it later. It would have been great to have been in the room when he came up with that inspired song but it’s okay because he was in the shower.”

However, Doko remembers the first time that her bandmate showed her the song. “I just thought, ‘What is this song?’ The choruses … they had something — like it or not, it had something. [You] couldn’t ignore it.”

Leonardo’s Bride – ‘Even When I’m Sleeping’ (1997)

We’re dead certain quite a few readers had their first Year 10 formal kiss to this song (we know a few members of the Tone Deaf crew certainly did), but it almost wasn’t released as a single.

You know the story, band writes a sweet little tune they all like, but don’t see as a single or even an album track. They eventually release it and it turns out to be their biggest hit.

The story is actually quite a sweet one too. According to frontwoman Abby Dobson, her bandmate and boyfriend at the time Dean Manning penned the song after the two had a “big fight”.

“I’d gone to bed and he’d stayed up. When I woke up in the morning to go to work, there were these notes pinned around the house — he was still asleep.”

“And there was a note above the bed saying, ‘I love you even when I’m sleeping’. And then there was a note on the front door as I was walking out saying, ‘I love you even when you’re leaving’ — and that was actually the note that really got me the most.”

“We nearly in fact didn’t record it on our album because it was just this sweet little song we didn’t know what to do with,” Dobson adds. “But none of us ever thought it would be a single or that anyone would like it.”

Savage Garden – ‘I Want You’ (1996)

What’s the most memorable line in ‘I Want You’ by Savage Garden? Go… if you said “the one about cherry cola” then congratulations, you’re just like 99.9% of everyone else who’s heard the song even once.

According to Darren Hayes, who wrote the lyrics to Savage Garden’s debut single, the track’s most memorable lyric came out of a trip to America during which Hayes was obsessed with trying Dr Pepper.

“I mistakenly thought the flavour was cherry — and it isn’t. “I went home to Brisbane and I wrote the lyrics, I wrote: ‘Sweet like a cherry cola’. I can’t remember why I decided to stutter the word cherry.”

“It’s essentially a wet dream. The lyrics to the song are about having a dream about someone you fall in love with. It’s always very surreal. Thank god for ‘chic-a-cherry cola’ — it was one of the lyrics that’s stuck in your head.”

Merril Bainbridge – ‘Mouth’ (1994)

While many mistake the song as being a straight-out sex jam, according to the woman behind the tune, Merril Bainbridge, it’s intentions are far more innocent and have more to do with relationship dynamics.

“Of course there was this sexuality to it because it’s that kind of… in your 20s you’re really experimenting with yourself and your identity in a relationship and who you are and who you want to be,” she tells News Corp.

“And I really just couldn’t stand all the stereotypes especially for women around that time. I wanted to challenge that a little bit I didn’t set out for it to be that way… it just happened to be part of it. It was a little piece of the song but it wasn’t the whole song.”

According to Brainbridge, the song is mainly about “just being open, about being OK with being a mess and trying to work it out”. The song was originally written in a small studio in Carlton, Melbourne.

“I started working in a really creative environment with a whole lot of people that were in the same boast as me — musicians, writers, programmers — and we’d just come in, we kind of lived at the studio, we hung around there, we worked on each others stuff and that’s kind of how Mouth got put down,” she says.

“So I had the ideas and then I started recording. I just had this rhythm section and I was working with my husband, Owen, who was my friend at the time, and we put it down and that was it. I couldn’t get a better vocal than that. We ended up keeping that vocal.”

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