Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and All That

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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. But then the chapter would be devoted to a particular topic that focused more on the decade at large than the isolated year. 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.

However overall I didn't enjoy this book, it had the potential to be really good but it fell flat for me and at 466 pages long it was far too long and often repetitive. indicate, one can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts. It's an illuminating volume equating the 90s to a retread of the swinging 60s, but a further three decades removed it appears as the last time young working class Britain made its voice properly heard, but I would certainly acknowledge it was a predominantly white led furore, but we were selling exciting ideas in a raw form that we can no longer do given the corporatisation of all facets of life and the squeaky clean sheen given to everything.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. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? 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. And that also doesn't go into how aggressively everyone is wanking off about how amazing they all were, including the author! 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’.

There's before and after and the 12 months of 1995 encapsulated through different areas and trends of the year that came to define the decade. uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited. 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. Overall, it is something of a sprawling mess - but some funny quotes and the sheer volume of interviewees make it worthwhile.

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. 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. In the 1980s, he was one of the first editors of i-D, before becoming a Contributing Editor of The Face and Editor of Arena. 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. 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.

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. 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. The comparison ultimately produces bathos, as we see the decade’s utopian promise smothered by money and cocaine rather than Nixon and Vietnam. 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!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! 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).