Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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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. 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. A former columnist for the Guardian and the Independent, he is a Trustee of the Hay Festival, and a peripatetic television producer. 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.

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. Before reading I thought the book was primarily focused on the music industry (and the blurb seems to mainly point to this being the case) but instead it is heavily focused on multiple aspects of 90's culture such as politics, art, drugs, journalism and football. However, should the estimated publication date change for whatever reason, we will notify you within a reasonable period of time. 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. 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.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. I’m glad he had a wonderful time, but even as someone who was twenty-one then (and whose retrospective essay about 1995 is quoted in the foreword), I grew weary of being told what bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. The year 1995, you could argue, was more about consolidation than innovation, with hungry outsiders becoming the new status quo. 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.

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. In a book that was partially centred around the Britpop cultural movement there was a very heavy bias towards Oasis with comparatively little mention of Blur, most likely this was due to Alan McGee and Noel Gallagher being two of the main interviewees featuring in the book. And that also doesn't go into how aggressively everyone is wanking off about how amazing they all were, including the author!I had looked forward to reading the book and was pleased when it recently appeared as a 99p daily deal but I quickly realised I wasn't enjoying it. 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. 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. However, it becomes boring and repetitive real quick and everyone is like chatting about how the 90s was wonderful and constant comparison to the 60s. 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.

uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited.Just like there's no reflection of Kate Moss's rise to supermodel status with one commenter even goes on to say how tired he was of the eighties supermodels and their unattainable physique while in the same breathe praising Kate Moss's waifishness like. 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. 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. There were also hundreds of interesting anecdotes and opinion pieces from many of the main players of the various 90's scenes such as Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Tony Blair and Tracey Emin and these were my favourite part of the book.