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. indicate, one can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts. The pre-internet Sodom and Gomorrah in which the tabloids began to understand the power of celebrity news before turning it into a culture. A brightness of things happening’) but less so when it’s Piers Morgan, who makes this unimprovably Partridgesque claim: ‘Probably the best night of the nineties was the opening of Planet Hollywood in Soho in 1993. The Help album of 1995, which united stars in raising funds for children in war-torn places such as Bosnia, might have been a bridge to the world beyond the Groucho Club, but it only registers here because Kate Moss played tambourine on one track.

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.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.

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.Not only was the mid-Nineties perhaps the last time that rock stars, music journalists and pop consumers held onto a belief in rock’s mystical power, it was a period of huge cultural upheaval – in art, literature, publishing and drugs. This oral history of the nineties shows how the period was born and where and how it likely died with arguably remnants remaining to this day. There was an attempt at a critical evaluation towards the end of the book but it was a case of too little, too late in what was otherwise a one sided view. There's before and after and the 12 months of 1995 encapsulated through different areas and trends of the year that came to define the decade. As we reach another tipping point with the Tories, it seems unlikely it will create an upswell of creative activity in the same way with various algorithms simply offering more of what we think we want.

Therefore it would be fairer say this book focuses on the 20 year period surrounding 1995 with an additional heavy focus on the 1960's and the cultural parallels that can be drawn from that decade to the 1990's. Cinema inspires the book’s most delightfully surprising connections, with Brooke-Smith finding links between globalisation and Wong Kar-wai, between Francis Fukuyama and Point Break. In former GQ editor Dylan Jones’s oral history Faster Than a Cannonball, Nick Hornby describes the Nineties as ‘the last time the [UK] was happy’, while Noel Gallagher mourns it as ‘the last great decade where we were free, because the internet had not enslaved us all’. 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.This is a book that takes place before the feeding frenzies and corporatisation of seemingly every art form, where there existed freedom to cause a fuss and use that as a way to market yourself. The sections on Lounge and the Beatles were quite mystifying to me - they had no bearing on my 90s at all. 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. 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. Firstly, the layout, you have chapters in the way of months in 1995, with little bullet points at the beginning detailing what happened that month.

You can address the cocaine issue without having thirty three goddamn pages devoted entirely to people just saying how much cocaine was around. This may be a personal gripe as it is something which I have never liked about most of the popular music magazines as I felt they attempt to use language as a barrier to gatekeep listenership/readership by over intellectualising articles and sneering at anything they deem uncool and this book has that general vibe. 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.Faster Than a Cannonball is a cultural swipe of the decade from loungecore to the rise of New Labour, teasing all the relevant artistic strands through interviews with all the major protagonists and exhaustive re-evaluations of the important records of the year - The Bends by Radiohead, Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub, Maxinquaye by Tricky, Different Class by Pulp, The Great Escape by Blur, It's Great When You're Straight. Considering the hold that Britpop had on the nation's psyche in the nineties, it's amazing how short-loved the movement was. Every chapter was far longer than it needed to be with people repeating the same thoughts as others within the chapter. If Jones’s claim that ‘the nineties chimed with the sixties in being a decade that was almost uniquely British’ is questionable enough, then his ambit is more parochial still.