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 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). I turned 11 in 1995, so it's safe to say this book filled in the cultural context to the things I started devouring around this time. Jones ostensibly focuses on 1995 – each month is given its own chapter, and a different theme is examined in each of these – but a full third of the book covers the periods either side of that annus mirabilis and a great deal of backstory is crammed into the book too.

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.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.

indicate, one can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts. New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written or edited over twenty books. 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.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. 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. 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. 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. Additionally I don't think the overall view of the book was balanced, it is heavily focused around the interviews from the main cultural players of the 1990's and as a result it is a biased overview, the book would have benefited from some interviews with those who were not so successful.