Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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by Black Grape, Exit Planet Dust by the Chemical Brothers, I Should Coco by Supergrass, Elastica by Elastica, Pure Phase by Spiritualized, … I Care Because You Do by Aphex Twin and of course (What’s the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis, the most iconic album of the decade. There's a chapter on the emergence of lad culture and lad magazines but there's no sort of self reflection on the deeper misogyny of it all. There were also hundreds of interesting anecdotes and opinion pieces from many of the main players of the various 90's scenes such as Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Tony Blair and Tracey Emin and these were my favourite part of the book.

A surplus of hindsight also gets in the way: Brooke-Smith tracks the consequences of the upheavals of the Nineties more effectively than he conveys how it felt to live through them.The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.

It was the year of The Bends, the year Danny Boyle started filming Trainspotting, the year Richey Edwards went missing, the year Alex Garland wrote The Beach, the year Blair changed Clause IV after a controversial vote at the Labour Conference. It's enthralling but sometimes repetitive and I felt very much lost in the easy listening chapter as it meant next to nothing to me in a book that is altogether London centric. Faster Than a Cannonball lacks the polyphonic vitality of the best oral histories, leaning too hard on long quotes from big names, including Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst and Tony Blair. For anyone interested in what the Nineties signified beyond the M25, Brooke-Smith’s attempt to sum up the ‘pre-post-everything decade’ is refreshingly ambitious. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the book as I actually found some of those chapters more interesting than the music ones such as the chapter focusing on politics and the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour.

If the defining narrative of Nineties culture was the journey from tremendous optimism and underdog creativity to excess and disappointment, then neither book completes the picture: Brooke-Smith downplays the good times while Jones minimises the crash.

I did read a review that describes this book as a “circle jerk” and whilst I don’t agree, there is a boys club insider vibe to this book at times but the author freely acknowledges that the white English male rock culture did come to dominate the 90s narrative. The content overall had moments of being very interesting but I felt that the book could have been half as long and still contained the same amount of information, this was partly due to the writing style which I really didn't like. From the YBAs to Britpop to Football, politics, easy listening and The Beatles we discovered what made the 90s tick (besides copious amounts of cocaine) and stick in our collective conscience. It was the year of The Bends, the year Danny Boyle started filming Trainspotting, the year Richey Edwards went missing, the year Alex Garland wrote The Beach, the year Blair changed Clause IV after a controversial vote at the Labour C onference.You will read more here about David Bailey and Michael Caine than Goldie and Tricky; the Beatles loom larger than club culture. indicate, one can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts.

Every chapter was far longer than it needed to be with people repeating the same thoughts as others within the chapter.However overall I didn't enjoy this book, it had the potential to be really good but it fell flat for me and at 466 pages long it was far too long and often repetitive. Still, one can’t help but share Finneas’s yearning for a decade when it was reasonable to feel that today is brilliant and tomorrow will be even better. Each chapter starts with a few bullet points about what happened in that month, but then you get like an interview style breakdown focusing solely on one thing. Jones is broadly happy to repackage the glittering myth of Cool Britannia, but in presenting his thesis that the Nineties was as exciting and creatively fertile as the Sixties – Swinging London redux – he ends up underselling the more recent decade.