Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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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… Yeah!

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. The passages about visiting Yoko Ono and Lennon's home in New York years after his death was strangely emotional. While those who lived through it tend to celebrate its explosive confidence, younger critics on the Left damn it for the complacency it induced and argue that we are now living with the crises – political, economic, technological – that the Nineties seeded. As Brooke-Smith observes, it was the ‘mini epoch’ before the mid-1990s economic boom that gave us rave, grunge, Britpop, the YBAs, the supermodels and the indie cinema revolution. Both interpretations are somewhat true, but you won’t find much ambivalence or (that essential Nineties quality) irony in Faster Than a Cannonball.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. 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. by Black Grape, Exit Planet Dust by the Chemical Brothers, I Should Coco by Supergrass, Elastica by Elastica, Pure Phase by Spiritualized, . 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. Dylan Jones' books (at least the Bowie and New Romantic ones - as well as this) are over-long and under-edited - but I really enjoyed the nostalgia, which brought back good memories of what was a fun decade.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Center, the two events that bookend the 1990s, give an illusion of coherence to a chaotic and paradoxical decade.Faster Than A Cannonball starts out by aiming to focus on the year 1995 arguing that the central point of any decade is it's defining feature, the point where all that has come before it accumulates at it's peak. 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. uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited.

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. But then the chapter would be devoted to a particular topic that focused more on the decade at large than the isolated year. 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.The sections on Lounge and the Beatles were quite mystifying to me - they had no bearing on my 90s at all. You can address the cocaine issue without having thirty three goddamn pages devoted entirely to people just saying how much cocaine was around. 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.

But without the chronological propellant that might dramatise the cultural acceleration, this book feels rather too much like an annotated list of stuff that happened. 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. The year 1995, you could argue, was more about consolidation than innovation, with hungry outsiders becoming the new status quo. Even the best and brightest political leaders appear to be untrustworthy as we see through the potted history of Tony Blair in 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.Every chapter was far longer than it needed to be with people repeating the same thoughts as others within the chapter. 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. 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.