MUSIC has the infallible ability to flick the on-switch to the internal Time Machine which lives inside our heads, sending us tumbling back to the past. My switch was flicked the other night while I was watching the news. In between misery about war, poverty, hate and political corruption came a moment of unadulterated joy.

Shaun Ryder, the jangly joker of pre-millennial drug-fuelled hedonistic anarchy, is back with a new band. He and his dancing bear, the wondrously still-alive Bez, have teamed up with Oasis bassist Andy Bell to create Mantra of the Cosmos. And doesn’t that name evoke all the psychedelic euphoria the 1990s had to offer.

That internal time machine kicked in when I heard the opening bars to Ryder’s version of Step On by the Happy Mondays. The sparkly housey piano riff, that mad whistle at the beginning of the track, as if Ryder is calling everyone to the world’s wildest illegal rave. It twisted my melon, man.

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Memory whooshed me back to 1990. Step On opened the decade after all. The album it sprung from - Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, in March 1990 - represented the era’s soft, sticky core: that mix of wild hedonism and naive innocence.

I felt a great pang then for the 1990s. I’m in my early fifties now, so clearly I would. Who doesn’t suffer heart twinges when they think of their youth? But I wasn’t wallowing in nostalgia. The 1990s had their faults, shames and sins just like every decade. It took me some time to work out what my twinge was about.

After a while, I realised. It wasn’t lost youth, I was pining for; nor was it some phoney notion that I’d lived through "the greatest decade ever" as my parents’ generation endlessly called the Sixties. No, what I was pining for was today’s kids, and what they’ll never have.

For if the 1990s had anything, it was a sense of the past being put behind us, a sense of optimistic expectancy: a "looking-forwardness".

The hope we had seems hard to fathom now in a time of almost permanent despondency about the future. We opened that decade with the Cold War just over. Since kids 1945 grew up with an atomic Grim Reaper hovering over them. We had classes on "what to do in the event of nuclear war".

Throughout most of the 1980s, I was sure I was going to have to resort to cannibalism in the not-too-distant future, or suffer the fate of some slave in a military labour camp for radiation-sickness survivors. But 1989 brought it all to an end. East and West were now friends.

In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty meant we could move freely across Europe. Party in Berlin, fall in love in Madrid, work in Paris, live in Rome. An endless vista of peace seemed to stretch out forever.

A disgraced and superannuated Conservative government fell from power. Labour arrived, and came with pop music: Things Can Only Get Better. My God, the promise and the loss in that song still make it hard to listen to. Cool Britannia may have been a gauche PR stunt, but it summed up the youthful optimism alive back then.

Then came peace in Northern Ireland; my little bloodied spot on the map. One of the world’s most intractable conflicts had ended. No more murder. No more terrorism in Britain.

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It seemed like anything could happen. Old bigotries were pushed back against. Sexism, racism and homophobia were simply no longer acceptable. For which we can thank 1990s youth: kids who today would be sneered at as "woke", though back then were sneered at as "politically correct". Child poverty shrank.

But this isn’t a hymn to the 1990s. Maybe - to steal the title from another anthem of the decade - it’s more a Bittersweet Symphony. Any rose-tinted glasses sit on a very western face. Across the developing world, there was war and horror.

Society remained blighted by racism, sexism and homophobia, crucially on an institutional level. Inequality still rotted the nation. My generation’s hedonism was fuelled by an absurd addiction to credit which we would pay for dearly in our thirties and forties.

But yet, there was hope. That’s the undeniable truth about the 1990s. It was, indeed, "the Great Holiday from History". Some, laughably from today’s standpoint, talked of "the end of history’" Humanity, we believed, would only keep going forward on an ever upward, ever better trajectory.

And then … the 1990s ended. The decade contained within it the seeds of the horror to come. America - the Cold War’s great victor - had stoked such discontent in the Middle East that New York would soon burn. Our wild excesses imploded in a global financial crash caused by the greatest, most amoral hedonists on Earth: bankers. War bred war. War made refugees. Iraq shamed us. Terror returned like never before. Hate spiralled.

Things we should have valued, we squandered. Britain left Europe. We became smaller, nastier, poorer. That great invention of the 1990s - the internet - came to destroy us. The digital revolution’s promise of democratic utopia turned into an arena of cruelty where black was white, up down, and truth lies. Things we should have tended, we threw away. The climate, firstly. We could have brought Russia into the western fold. We blew it. Now Ukraine is butchered.

The darkest irony? Our heedless hedonism killed off innocence forever.

So what I pined for when I heard the opening bars of Step On - a song I once used to lose it to on the dance floor - wasn’t my youth. It was the impossibility of innocence for today’s youth.

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Just yesterday, a global survey of Gen Z attitudes - the under-20s - found all they want is power and money. It’s unpleasant, but who can blame them given the world we’ve created? They’ll never have that brief moment of being able to believe that things really can get better.

For someone who now sits on the cusp of grandparenthood, I can think of no greater pain. Truly, I’d give up all memory of my own youth if my grandchildren of tomorrow could discover a little of the innocence my generation once held.