Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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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. That’s okay when an eyewitness is as eloquent as Tracey Emin (‘This whole new generation of colour is the only way I can explain it. 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.

New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written or edited over twenty books. 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.indicate, one can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts. p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice. The pre-internet Sodom and Gomorrah in which the tabloids began to understand the power of celebrity news before turning it into a culture.

And that also doesn't go into how aggressively everyone is wanking off about how amazing they all were, including the author! 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. Jones was a senior editor at the Sunday Times Magazine in 1995 and seems to have hung out with all of his interviewees, making the interstitial passages a kind of stealth memoir about his adventures with the glitterati. As it was focusing on multiple areas of British 1990's culture I would have liked it to have included a section on the 1990's UK comedy scene as I think that was an important part of culture in the UK at that time and it had hit it's peak in 1995 as a result of experiencing an overhaul in the late 80's and early 90's with the rise of the alternative comedy scene.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’. Whole chapters are devoted to such you-had-to-be-there ephemera as men’s magazines and the easy-listening revival, and no fewer than four to facets of Britpop. He brilliantly ties together The Matrix and You’ve Got Mail, seeing them as ‘relics of an era when it was still possible to see cyberspace and the real world as two separate domains of reality’.