Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emin's tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown's Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). Even the best and brightest political leaders appear to be untrustworthy as we see through the potted history of Tony Blair in the book. You will read more here about David Bailey and Michael Caine than Goldie and Tricky; the Beatles loom larger than club culture.

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. 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. That's delving a bit into the ~needed a better editor~ of it all and moving away from it not knowing what it was trying to be.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. Overall, it is something of a sprawling mess - but some funny quotes and the sheer volume of interviewees make it worthwhile. 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.

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. 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. And that also doesn't go into how aggressively everyone is wanking off about how amazing they all were, including the author!

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.

It was certainly a time of peace and prosperity, and fun, when lunches lasted for days and Britain, particularly London, led the world. New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written or edited over twenty books. 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. 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.Although Jones throws in a few sceptical voices, a quote from Blur’s Alex James captures the doggedly celebratory tone: ‘What a totally, utterly brilliant decade.