Faster Than A Cannonball

1995 and All That

By: Dylan Jones

Narrated by: Jessica Preddy, Kris Dyer, Leighton Pugh, Russell Bentley

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). 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. It was a period of huge cultural upheaval - in art, literature, publishing and drugs, and a period of almost unparalleled hedonism.

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, by artists including Radiohead, Teenage Fanclub, Tricky, Pulp, Blur, the Chemical Brothers, Supergrass, Elastica, Spiritualized, Aphex Twin and, of course, Oasis.

Critic reviews

Dylan Jones' delicious, hilarious new book has given me more insight into the British psyche than Henry James. And the writing is fire (Courtney Love)

Amazing achievement (Tracey Emin)

The best book on the nineties I have ever read. Dylan Jones is the best observer of the times we have. An absolutely brilliant book (Alan McGee)

Great book (Chris Salewicz)

Considering the hold that Britpop had on the nation's psyche in the nineties, it's amazing how short-loved the movement was. This book shines a light on just how toxic nineties lad culture could be for girls with guitars (Sarah Ditum)

A kind of stealth memoir. We see the decade's utopian promise smothered by money and cocaine rather than Nixon and Vietnam. One can read the decade as a period of brash, breathless momentum, especially in technology and the arts (Dorian Lynskey)

Fascinating

Dylan Jones's Faster Than a Cannonball captures the exuberance and spirit of the Nineties [and] sheds light on the wider cultural and economic environment (Henry Williams)

Fantastic (Matthew d'Ancona)