
Remember when Lily Allen’s The Fear was playing in the city bars and beer cost about £2.70 a pint?
Well, welcome back to 2009 when in the February of that year Allen’s song from her It’s Not Me, It’s You album shot to number one – finally knocking Lady Gaga’s Just Dance from top slot – and stayed there for four weeks. Other music biggies of the month were Alesha Dixon’s single Breathe Slow and Bruce Springsteen’s number one album Working on a Dream.
And M.I.A’s Paper Planes was back in the charts too, thanks to the popularity of the Slumdog Millionaire movie which featured it and which was an ongoing hit at the cinema following its release the previous month. All that gives an idea of what would have been making up the backdrop at the time this week’s pick of archive photos were taken around Newcastle city centre and Bigg Market area.
Having originally appeared as part of the original Bigg Night Out series that ran in the Chronicle between from 1992 and 2012, the images will hopefully spark some happy memories for many Geordies 16 years on. That February in 2009, Slumdog Millionaire was to pick up eight Oscars, including one for best director for Danny Boyle who, as previously reported, was recently in the North East to shoot his new feature film 28 Years Later.
And 2009 was also the year that swine flu spread to the UK, with first cases being detected in April, while, locally, the late Queen came to Newcastle to reopen the former Hancock Museum as the Great North Museum: Hancock.
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