Chris Bart-Williams was the Nineties incarnate.

And for all his gifts — his finesse, his football brain, his long sleeves and liquid hips — I can think of no greater tribute.

That was my decade. The clothes, the telly, the music. Pulp and Suede, Elastica and the Lemonheads; Saturday mornings with James Richardson, Saturday evenings with Jet. Collarless lime-green shirts, and a constant fug of Lynx. It was all those things, and a thousand other sights, sounds, and smells.

But standing astride them all, at a time when football was everything to me, were the small handful of Forest players I absolutely worshipped.

And Chris Bart-Williams was one of them.

I was watching an old Top of the Pops last week. The Beeb started showing them during the first lockdown, two episodes back-to-back every Friday night, beginning in about 1987. We’re up to 1995 now, my era. I was in the kitchen when ‘I Luv U Baby’ came on, and it yanked me back through time.

Not to the Black Orchid, mind, but to the City Ground. It’s 1997, 1998, and Forest are steamrollering everyone 3-0; Chris Bart-Williams has either just scored one or set one up, and that song is hammering over the PA. He’s sashaying with Pierre van Hooijdonk, Andy Johnson, probably Kevin Campbell, and everybody’s on their feet. Sometimes it was that, and sometimes it was ‘U Sure Do’, but the celebration was always the same. A languorous, beaming calypso, led by CBW.

He arrived as the coolest cat in the class of ’95, and he left seven years later as the warhorse who’d seen everything and played everywhere. He was still only twenty-seven, but it felt like he’d been around forever. He was here in my mid-teens; he was here when I went away to uni; he was here when I came back again. It wasn’t just the things he did in a Forest shirt — it was how he did them, and when he did them. Those years are pocked with memories of Chris Bart-Williams doing bits, and doing them in style.

And now, suddenly, preposterously, he’s gone. Just like that. The guy who’d been around forever isn’t here anymore.

As the rain teems down, I’m surprised by how many messages I’ve received about his passing. Fans of other teams — old friends. “Holy shit” seems a pretty common sentiment. “Fucking hell,” too.

They’re all fanned across the country now. But whenever we meet up, when the drinks start flowing, that’s when the names come. We can’t help it; just as my dad and his mate recite Monty Python sketches whenever they’re together, we love a niche Nineties footballer. Every meet-up turns into a cascade of half-forgotten players, each more obscure than the last. Your Nii Lampteys, your Klas Ingessons. Your Steve Harkness(es).

One time, my mate Tom — an Everton supporter — waited for a break in the conversation, and then blearily chopped out three words with a beermat.

“Chris. Bart. Williams.”

No laughter — just an appreciative hum that rose up over the table.

“Some player, that boy.”

“Glorious footballer.”

I loved him, of course, but it was nice to hear that one of our own still occupied a place in the hearts and minds of people who weren’t even Forest fans. It proved a certain pedigree.

Why bring up Barry Horne or Eddie McGoldrick on a night out? Because they’re ambassadors of a certain age, I suppose. They’re touchstones. As our lives diverge further and further, through kids and work and geography, it’s that one shared point of reference that we’ve all still got; the one thing we can continue to understand and laugh about together. Suddenly, we’re back at school again. We’re remembering the years that contained those players, that sweeter version of football, and we’re doing it through a different filter — through the undiluted, uncomplicated righteousness of youth.

And it feels good.

But then it cuts both ways. When you lose someone from that time — even if you only ever watched them, or read them, or listened to them — it’s shockingly personal. You don’t need to know them to feel like someone’s crossed out a bit of your past.

**

Chris Bart-Williams, though. ‘Some player’ indeed.

Sod’s law, when he had his defining moment in a Forest shirt, the one that’ll be remembered forever, I wasn’t even there. It was the only home game I missed that season, because I was stuck up some piss-wet hill in the middle of Devon, on a geography field trip. There were three of us gathered around a portable transistor radio, listening to Radio 5 and not collecting arthropods, and every time the volume went up, whenever the commentator raised his voice, the signal would be swarmed by static. At 0-0, with two minutes to go, there was a sudden surge of noise that broke the thing completely. One of us reckoned he’d heard the word ‘goal’, but couldn’t be sure. It was another three hours until we found out what’d happened. It was another three days until I actually saw the goal.

But what a goal it was.

That touch. That turn. That shot, rifled low and emphatically across Scott Howie.

Nobody else was scoring that. Not even Pierre. It summed up CBW’s game, his talent, his poise. Even now, at that point in the match, it’s hard to understand how he found the presence of mind to do what he did. It reminds me of what Dennis Bergkamp once said, when he was trying to explain that goal at Newcastle: “When you’re great, your seconds just last longer.”

Granted, Chris Bart-Williams wasn’t Dennis Bergkamp. But he was absolutely good enough for us.

As his time here progressed, as the club fell progressively to pieces at the turn of the century, he assumed a talismanic kind of importance. You might have seen that video of Woan reflecting on the final game of his final season — a 2-2 draw at Stockport. He was on the bench that day, thinking to himself “this ain’t a Forest team”, and then he drove home, and he was done. Dumped. Eleven years, over and out. There was a lot of that back then — the shedding of the old-guard, the cutting of the cloth. But CBW didn’t just survive that transition; on the pitch, he was usually the one keeping the lights on. The final artisan, the last proper Forest-type player, as the club set about the business of dismantling itself.

“Stood tall when the club fell apart,” read one tweet last night. “A giant among men when we needed one,” read another. He was the exemplar of a fast-fading age, trying to corral the undistinguished pieces around him into something halfway Forest-y. He always seemed to play with a smile, even though those last two years couldn’t have been quite as much fun.

But still — he stuck it out. And he kept on shining.

I’d liked to have met him, Chris, just to shake his hand. To say ‘thank you’. Because it’s nice to know you’ve made a difference, isn’t it? Nobody ever gets bored of hearing that. I’ve met a few players from that era, and they always seem slightly surprised that you recognise them; that you even care, really. I bumped into Des Lyttle a while back, and the only thing I could think to say was: “fucking hell, you’re Des Lyttle.” Steve Chettle — I help coach a kids’ team, and there he was at prize-giving night, handing out medals. The boys didn’t have a clue who he was, but then there’s me, picturing that geometrically impossible header at the Olympiastadion, and there’s him, in his tracksuit, at the Concert Hall, with nothing better to do on a Sunday evening. Endlessly polite, and utterly normal.

Normal. They were, back then. They ate carbs and they went outside. You’d see them in supermarkets and Rock City. Everybody knew where Stuart Pearce lived. My best mate’s neighbour was Colin Cooper, and we once spent an hour watching him trying to assemble some lawn furniture. He gave up in the end, and kicked a piece of it into a hedge.

The blessed normality of it all.

That generation of players — they’ll do the rounds on podcasts and the after-dinner circuit, they’ll open soccer schools and pop up as pundits, but they’re light-years removed from the shining, sanctified species of footballers today. Chris Bart-Williams seemed altogether less remarkable, in an age when Forest being a Premier League club was a less novel and precarious thing. He was great, but then he had greatness all around him. You just assumed it’d be that way forever.

There’s something… absurd about all this. Nobody deserves it, not at forty-nine — but in a world full of worry, it’s not one of the things we thought we’d ever need to think about. Nothing’s off the table, I suppose. But it’s still wrong.

Ach.

Here’s to you, Bartman. A glass raised to the leader, the artist, the dancer, and — for any Forest fan of my age — the apotheosis of growing up in the 1990s.

“Total sunshine,” Paul McGregor said. “Never wasted a second of life.” As a great man once wished of his own legacy, at the very end of your days, you can only hope that somebody liked you.

And we liked you, Chris.

We luved u, baby.