Just in case you weren’t already feeling old today, allow me to share the news that the Lemonheads’ 1992 album It’s A Shame About Ray turns 30 this year. It’s being celebrated with an anniversary edition featuring extra tracks, demo versions, unseen photos and new liner notes.

The record is not just an iconic soundtrack of slacker culture, Gen X and alternative rock – it’s a love letter to Sydney in the early ’90s.

You can’t talk about It’s A Shame About Ray without talking about Sydney, in particular the inner-west. And even more particularly, a shop called Half A Cow. Back then, I lived in Glebe, a few blocks from where the store sat on Glebe Point Road.

I visited regularly, hanging out and dropping most of my grocery money on import records, comics and books. But the shop was more than that. It was a hub for like-minded people and a place to connect. Bands and fans co-mingled as they flicked through the racks. The suburb still had cheap rent, cheap restaurants and cafes where you could sit all day over a few cups of coffee, reading a book or trying to write the great Australian novel.

Evan Dando had come to Australia to tour in 1991 and hooked up with Nic Dalton, who ran Half A Cow as both a store and a record label, and played in indie rock trio The Plunderers, along with about 500 other bands. His store was a gateway to a significant slice of the Sydney scene at the time and soon enough Dando met Tom Morgan, Dalton’s buddy and the singer and songwriter with Smudge.

Morgan wrote effortlessly catchy tunes such as Don’t Want To Be Grant McLennan, which poked fun at his struggle to differentiate himself from his heroes, at the same time turning it into a statement of intent about making his own way. Or Divan, on the surface a song about giving someone a place to crash, but underneath, a song about the need for companionship – instead of getting all mushy about it, Morgan tells his friend to watch TV for as long as they like and to hang for as long as needed. I remember I was obsessed with Douglas Coupland’s Generation X at the time and these songs perfectly complemented that generational signifier of pretending not to give a damn, but really giving a damn.

When Dando met Morgan, something happened. They were kindred spirits. They bounced off each other. They hung around at Half A Cow swapping lyrics and tossing tunes to each other. Dando became enamoured with Sydney and the people in the inner-city rock scene. Everything that was said and everything he experienced was fodder. Pretty soon he was scribbling song after song in his notebooks about the people he got to know. Many of them ended up on It’s a Shame About Ray. Nic Dalton ended up joining the band as bass player.

The album’s opening track, Rockin Stroll, was written from the point of view of a toddler – specifically Milo Holmes, son of two members of pioneering Sydney band The Hummingbirds – bass player Robyn St Clare and singer-guitarist Simon Holmes. Dando saw St Clare pushing Milo in a stroller down Glebe Point Road and got to wondering what it was like from the kid’s perspective, seeing “people’s knees and the trunks of trees smile at me”.