While Triple J listeners are locked in a nostalgia frenzy, voting their favourite tracks of the last 20 years for a definitive Hottest 100, one of the nation's greatest frontmen Tim Rogers is nonchalantly detached from his past.

You Am I released their debut Sound As Ever in 1993, the same year Hottest 100 records began, and yet there are few signs of commemoration from the 43-year-old singer - aside from a re-packaged boxset of the band's first three albums and a national tour, of course.

Then: You Am I in 1996

You Am I failed to dent the Hottest 100 that year, but that's the least of Rogers' issues in gazing over their breakthrough era. He can't even remember recording Berlin Chair, the single that catapulted the alternative rock group towards the mainstream, so clouded was it by the death of his friend and mentor Goose (Stephen Gray), who fronted the band Box the Jesuit.

"I lost an incredibly important person to cancer who I still think about every day and that experience pretty much coloured the whole record," Rogers says.