Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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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 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. No retrospective critique of boosterism is more revealing than this 1997 prediction in Wired magazine: ‘We’re facing twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. 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. 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.

This may be a personal gripe as it is something which I have never liked about most of the popular music magazines as I felt they attempt to use language as a barrier to gatekeep listenership/readership by over intellectualising articles and sneering at anything they deem uncool and this book has that general vibe. As much as the 90s seem like a last hurrah to a certain way of things, it is also a caustic still seeping through society even now, but I'd have to agree that Britpop didn't cause Brexit. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the book as I actually found some of those chapters more interesting than the music ones such as the chapter focusing on politics and the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour. 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. 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!Towards the end director Steve McQueen makes a comment that the rise of BritPop and Cool Britannia etc was still overwhelmingly white and didn't address the reality of POC in Britain at all and therefore wasn't something he was particularly drawn to but there's literally no other delving into a comment that was probably the most revealing in the chapter! 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. 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). 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. 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.

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. 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. 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’. Overall, it is something of a sprawling mess - but some funny quotes and the sheer volume of interviewees make it worthwhile.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. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

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. 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). 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. 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. 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.Dylan Jones' delicious, hilarious new book has given me more insight into the British psyche than Henry James.